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July 1 - July 7, 2025
Yusuf Diya said soberly that whatever the merits of Zionism, the “brutal force of circumstances had to be taken into account.” The most important of them were that “Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.”
Herzl employed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists at all times and in all places and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit the indigenous people of Palestine.
Herzl alludes to the desire recorded in his diary to “spirit” the country’s poor population “discreetly” across the borders.13 It is clear from this chilling quotation that Herzl grasped the importance of “disappearing” the native population of Palestine in order for Zionism to succeed.
Although Herzl stressed in his writings that his project was based on “the highest tolerance” with full rights for all,15 what was meant was no more than toleration of any minorities that might remain after the rest had been moved elsewhere.
Herzl’s thinking and his reply to Yusuf Diya appear to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine. This condescending attitude toward the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population of Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionist, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day.
the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.
The Jewish state, Herzl wrote, would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
(to help them fight the Palestinians in the late 1930s, Britain had armed and trained the Jewish settlers it allowed to enter the country)
the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917 onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age,
Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States.
Focused as most observers were on the appalling casualties on the Western Front, few realized that the Ottoman Empire overall was dealt the heaviest wartime losses of any major combatant power, with over three million dead, 15 percent of the total population.
All of these profound material shocks heightened the impact of the wrenching postwar political changes, which obliged people to rethink long-standing senses of identity. By the end of the fighting, people in Palestine and in much of the Arab world found themselves under occupation by European armies. After four hundred years, they were confronted by the disconcerting prospect of alien rule and the swift disappearance of Ottoman control, which had been the only system of government known for over twenty generations.
They were described in terms of what they were not, and certainly not as a nation or a people—the words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration. This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority—6 percent—of the country’s inhabitants.
Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine. Nor did it.25 For Zionists, their enterprise was now backed by an indispensable “iron wall” of British military might,
The dissolution of the Romanov, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires—transnational dynastic states—was also in large measure a function of the spread of nationalism and its intensification during and after the war.
Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors fueling Zionism.
the Zionist movement’s leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy,”
There were people there, certainly, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored. The roots of what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of the Palestinian people are on full display in the Mandate’s preamble.
The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.
In sum, the Mandate essentially allowed for the creation of a Zionist administration parallel to that of the British mandatory government, which was tasked with fostering and supporting it.
Article 22 (“provisionally”) recognized their “existence as independent nations.” The background to this article in relation to the Middle East involved repeated British promises of independence to all the Arabs of the Ottoman domains during World War I in return for their support against the Ottomans, as well as the self-determination proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson.
Hitler’s ascendancy proved to be one of the most important events in the modern histories of both Palestine and Zionism.
Of all the services Britain provided to the Zionist movement before 1939, perhaps the most valuable was the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of the revolt.
In a cover letter to Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”
in the words of George Orwell, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield,”
expressions of deep Palestinian dissatisfaction, in the form of protests and disturbances, caused British administrators on the spot and in London to recommend modifications in policy. However, Palestine was not a crown colony or any other form of colonial possession where the British government was free to act as it pleased.
its overarching obligations to the Zionists.85 Thanks to Britain’s faithfulness to these obligations, by the end of the 1930s it was too late to reverse the transformation of the country or to change the lopsided balance of forces that had developed between the two sides.
In any case, they had very few good choices in the face of the powerful triad of Britain, the Zionist movement, and the League of Nations Mandate.
The end of the world war brought a new phase of the colonial assault on Palestine, launched by the arrival in the Middle East of two great powers that had previously played small regional roles: the United States and the USSR.
Starting in 1942, American ships, troops, and bases arrived in North Africa, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They have not left the Middle East since.
After President Harry Truman endorsed the goal of a Jewish state in a majority Arab land in the post-war years, Zionism, once a colonial project backed by the declining British Empire, became part and parcel of the emerging American hegemony in the Middle East.
Britain no longer had the decisive voice in Palestine, and that it was the United States that would become the predominant external actor there and eventually in the rest of the Middle East.
The basic weakness of the mufti was that he thought that the merit of the cause he was working for, namely setting up an independent Palestine, saving Palestine from takeover by the Zionists, was enough in itself. Because it was a just cause, he did not build a fighting force in the modern sense.…
However much Arab leaders may have wished to demonstrate their postwar independence, the poor, backward states they led were entangled in a thick web of dependency, based on unequal treaties, continued foreign military occupation, and external control of their natural and other resources.
The British soon found themselves unable to master the armed opposition of virtually the entire yishuv, whose potent military and intelligence organizations they had themselves reinforced during the Great Revolt and World War II. Reeling from deep postwar economic and financial problems and the unwinding of the centuries-old Indian Raj, Great Britain finally capitulated in Palestine.
This first stage saw a bitterly fought campaign that culminated in a country-wide Zionist offensive dubbed Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948.33 Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.
In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war.
the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel).
This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel.
the Arab countries, which had been struggling to throw off the chains of poverty, dependency, foreign occupation, and indirect control, now had to confront both daunting new internal challenges and other problems caused by their powerful and aggressive new neighbor, Israel.
the United States had always been seen as a tolerant refuge for persecuted Jews fleeing from Eastern Europe, 90 percent of whom migrated there.
The revelations of the horrors of the Holocaust were decisive in confirming the validity of the Zionists’ call for a Jewish state and in discomfiting and silencing their opponents,
After Israel’s stunning military victories, many bureaucrats and military officers, and with them the US oil industry, quickly came to appreciate the possible utility of the Jewish state for US interests in the region.
Rather than being allies of the Palestinians in their resistance to the low-level war being waged on them, the Arab governments hindered their efforts, and sometimes were complicit with the Palestinians’ enemies.
Given the precedent of 1948 and the civilian massacres at Dayr Yasin and at least twenty other locations,82 as well as the high civilian casualties in the raids of the early 1950s, such as that at Qibya, the gruesome events in the Gaza Strip were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern of behavior by the Israeli military.
It is not surprising that the Gaza Strip should have been the target in this way: it was the crucible of the resistance of Palestinians to their dispossession after 1948.
its forces were much stronger than the Arab armies in 1967, and the country was never in any danger of losing a war, even if the Arabs had struck first.5 Yet the myth prevails: in 1967, a tiny, vulnerable country faced constant, existential peril, and it continues to do so.6 This fiction has served to justify blanket support of Israeli policies,
the armored spearheads on the ground were Israeli, while the diplomatic cover was American.
Repeated United Nations condemnations of these moves, unsupported by even a hint of sanctions or any genuine pressure on Israel, have over time amounted to tacit international acceptance of them.
In the words of one seasoned observer: “A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.”
