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December 23 - December 26, 2024
The indigenous population was further diminished by the crushing repression of the Great 1936–39 Arab Revolt against British rule, during which 14 to 17 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled,17 as the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to master Palestinian resistance.
Such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements.
As this book will argue, 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.
They also always claim that they will leave the native population better off as a result of their rule; the “civilizing” and “progressive” nature of their colonial projects serves to justify whatever enormities are perpetrated against the indigenous people to fulfill their objectives.
Thus Herzl’s letter to Yusuf Diya referred to Palestinian Arabs, then roughly 95 percent of the country’s inhabitants, as its “non-Jewish population.”
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued by a British cabinet and committing Britain to the creation of a national Jewish homeland, never mentioned the Palestinians, the great majority of the country’s population at the time, even as it set the course for Palestine for the subsequent century.
This war has continued since then, waged sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, but invariably with the tacit or overt approval, and often the direct involvement, of the leading powers of the day and the sanction of the international bodies they dominated, the League of Nations and the United Nations.
A long series of wrenching wars and upheavals stretching for nearly a decade started with the Libyan war in 1911–12, followed by the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and then the extraordinary dislocations of World War I, which led to the empire’s disappearance.
Just like Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century circumstances, not eternal and immutable.
The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.
Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921.59
“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.”
Compared with the sophisticated grasp the Zionist leadership had of European and other Western societies, of which most of them were natives or citizens, Arab leaders had at best a limited understanding of the politics, societies, and cultures of the countries of Europe, to say nothing of the nascent superpowers.
It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country—into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority.40 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.
Palestinians were never considered for Lebanese citizenship because this would have upset the country’s precarious sectarian balance, engineered by the French mandatory authorities to allow the Maronite Christians to dominate.
Living in the Arab Gulf countries did not bring with it citizenship or permanent residency: the ability of Palestinians to stay in these places was dependent on employment, even if they had been there most of their lives.
This volatile dynamic along their borders resulted in the peculiar situation wherein Arab leaders often raised the question of Palestine because of popular pressure but refrained from actually doing anything about it, out of fear of Israel’s might and the disapproval of the great powers.
The formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization by the Arab League in 1964 at the behest of Egypt was a response to this burgeoning independent Palestinian activism and constituted the most significant attempt by Arab states to control it.
Only a few years after the Nakba, the shock and humiliation it had caused Palestinians gave way to a desire to resist the powers ranged against them, in spite of the formidable odds.
Despite their manifest weakness, the dispersed, defeated Palestinians, written out of history by the victors of 1948, largely ignored or muzzled by the Arab governments, and sacrificed on the altar of the great powers’ global ambitions, repeatedly managed to upset the regional status quo that was so unfavorable to them.
It struck me that while my family and many others were preoccupied with the fate of Palestine, lots of New Yorkers were just as worried about the outcome for Israel. They sincerely believed that the Jewish state was in danger of extinction, as did many Israelis, alarmed by the empty threats of certain Arab leaders.
The shift, which had been underway for some time, was mainly due to global factors, notably the impact of the Cold War and the Vietnam War on the region and on US policy, but also to significant personal and political considerations in Washington, DC.
By contrast, Kennedy, the worldly and wealthy son of an ambassador, had visited Palestine in the early summer of 1939, when he was a twenty-two-year-old Harvard student, and sent his father a letter in which he demonstrated a reasonably good grasp of the facts and a skeptical assessment of the main arguments of both sides in the conflict. This skepticism made Kennedy less susceptible than most American politicians to the pressures applied by Israel’s supporters.15
This was the beginning of what became the classical period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, lasting until the end of the Cold War, during which the United States and Israel developed a unique full-scale (albeit informal) alliance, based essentially on Israel showing itself in 1967 as a reliable partner against perceived Soviet proxies in the Middle East.
Only two years later, in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” and that they never had existed.24 She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.
“A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.”
They include, for example, extensive exchanges on PLO efforts to free American hostages held in the embassy in Tehran (a number of whom were apparently released at least in part because of Palestinian intercession with the Iranian revolutionary regime).
Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, while the siege constituted the most serious attack by a regular army on an Arab capital since World War II. It was not to be equaled until the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003.
The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.
Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38
Ross’s bias was apparent at another point in the talks, when in my hearing he threatened that if the Palestinian delegation did not accept a contentious point being pressed on them by Israel, Washington would get their “friends in the Gulf” to lean on them.
A retired American general described the Israeli bombardment—used to pound one Gaza neighborhood for over twenty-four hours, along with tank fire and attacks from the air—as “absolutely disproportionate.”32
Yet there was little mention of the Dahiya doctrine in statements by US politicians or in the reporting on the war by most of the mainstream American media, even though it is in fact less of a strategic approach than a blueprint for collective punishment, which entails probable war crimes.
The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 specifies that American-supplied weapons must be used “for legitimate self-defense.”36 Given this provision, the line offered by US officials from the president down—describing Israel’s operations in Gaza as self-defense—may be the product of legal advice to avoid liability and potential prosecution for war crimes, alongside the Israeli officials who issued the orders and the soldiers who dropped the bombs.
