Full text of "Ten Myths About Israel By Ilan Pappe (2017)"

Full text of "Ten Myths About Israel By Ilan Pappe (2017)"

“Ilan Pappe is Israel's 

bravest, most principled, 

eae | most incisive historian” 

JOHN PILGER 

TEN MYTHS ABOUT ISRAEL 

llan Pappe 

First published by Verso 2017 

© Ilan Pappe 2017 

All rights reserved 

The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 

Verso 

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG 

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-019-3 

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-021-6 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-020-9 (UK EBK) 

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this 

book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- 

Publication Data Names: Pappe, Ilan, author. 

Title: Ten myths about Israel / Ilan Pappe. 

Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical 

references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2016044832 | ISBN 9781786630193 

Subjects: LCSH: Palestine—History. | 

Palestinian Arabs—Israel—History. | 

Arab-Israeli conflict. | Israel—Politics and government. 

Classification: LCC DS125 .P2985 2017| DDC 956.94—dc23 

LC record available at https://Iccn.loc.gov/2016044832 

Typeset in Electra by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the UK by CPI 

Mackays 

Contents 

Map 

Preface 

PART I. FALLACIES OF THE PAST 

1. Palestine Was an Empty Land 

2. The Jews Were a People Without a Land 

3. Zionism Is Judaism 

4. Zionism Is Not Colonialism 

5 

. The Palestinians Voluntarily Left Their Homeland 

in 1948 

6. The June 1967 War Was a War of “No Choice” 

PART II. FALLACIES OF THE PRESENT 

7. Israel Is the Only Democracy in the Middle East 

8. The Oslo Mythologies 

9. The ¢ 

3aza Mythologies 

PART III. LOOKING AHEAD 

10. The Two-States Solution Is the Only W 

jay Forward 

Conclusion: The Settler Colonial State of Israel in 

the Twenty-First Century 

Timeline 

Notes 

Index 

ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS ON 

THE WEST BANK 

p77, Palestinian territory de facto 

annexed by settlements and wall 

fi} Area remaining for Palestinian state 

Dad — San Kilometres 

/~ The Separation Barrier 10 20 30 40miles 

Preface 

History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased 

understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. 

The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will 

only sow disaster. As the example of the Israel-Palestine 

conflict shows, historical disinformation, even of the most 

recent past, can do tremendous harm. This willful 

misunderstanding of history can promote oppression and 

protect a regime of colonization and occupation. It is not 

Surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and 

distortion continue to the present and play an important 

part in perpetuating the conflict, leaving very little hope for 

the future. 

Constructed fallacies about the past and the present in 

Israel and Palestine hinder us from understanding the 

origins of the conflict. Meanwhile, the constant manipulation 

of the relevant facts works against the interests of all those 

victimized by the ongoing bloodshed and violence. What is 

to be done? 

The Zionist historical account of how the disputed land 

became the state of Israel is based on a cluster of myths 

that subtly cast doubt on the Palestinians’ moral right to the 

land. Often, the Western mainstream media and political 

elites accept this set of myths as a given truth, as well as 

the justification for Israeli actions across the last sixty or so 

years. More often than not, the tacit acceptance of these 

myths serves as an explanation for Western governments’ 

disinclination to interfere in any meaningful way in a conflict 

that has been going on since the nation’s foundation. 

This book challenges these myths, which appear in the 

public domain as indisputable truths. These statements are, 

to my eyes, distortions and fabrications that can—and must 

—be refuted through a closer examination of the historical 

record. The common thread that runs through this book is 

the juxtaposition of popular assumption and_ historical 

reality. By placing each myth side by side with the truth, 

each chapter exposes the weaknesses of the received 

wisdom through an examination of the latest historical 

research. 

The book covers ten foundational myths, or clusters of 

myths, which are common and recognizable to anyone 

engaged in one way or another with the Israel-Palestine 

question. The myths and the counter arguments follow a 

chronological order. 

The first chapter charts Palestine on the eve of the arrival 

of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. The myth is the 

depiction of Palestine as an empty, arid, almost desert-like 

land that was cultivated by the arriving Zionists. The 

counter- argument reveals a thriving pre-existing society 

undergoing accelerated processes of modernization and 

nationalization. 

The myth of Palestine being a land without people has its 

correlate in the famous myth of the people without a land, 

the subject of Chapter 2. Were the Jews indeed the original 

inhabitants of Palestine who deserved to be supported in 

every way possible in their “return” to their “homeland”? 

The myth insists that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the 

descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans around 70 

cE. The counterargument questions this genealogical 

connection. Quite a hefty scholarly effort has shown that the 

Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were first 

converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Who these Jews 

were is still an open question—maybe the Khazars who 

converted to Judaism in the ninth century; or maybe the 

mixture of races across a millennium precludes any answer 

to such a question. More importantly, | argue in this chapter 

that in the pre-Zionist period the connection between the 

Jewish communities in the world and Palestine was religious 

and spiritual, not political. Associating the return of the Jews 

with statehood, before the emergence of Zionism, was a 

Christian project until the sixteenth century, and thereafter 

a specifically Protestant one (in particular an Anglican one). 

Chapter 3 closely examines the myth that equates 

Zionism with Judaism (so that anti-Zionism can only be 

depicted as anti-Semitism). | try to refute this equation 

through an historical assessment of Jewish attitudes to 

Zionism and an analysis of the Zionist manipulation of 

Judaism for colonial and, later, strategic reasons. 

The fourth chapter engages with the claim that there is 

no connection between colonialism and Zionism. The myth 

is that Zionism is a liberal national liberation movement 

while the counterargument frames it as a colonialist, indeed 

a settler colonial, project similar to those seen in South 

Africa, the Americas, and Australia. The significance of this 

refutation is that it reflects how we think about the 

Palestinian resistance to Zionism and later to Israel. If Israel 

is just a democracy defending itself, then Palestinian bodies 

such as the PLO are purely terrorist outfits. However, if their 

struggle is against a colonialist project then they are an 

anticolonialist movement, and their international image will 

be very different from the one Israel and its supporters try 

to impose on world public opinion. 

Chapter 5 revisits the well-known mythologies of 1948, 

and in particular aims to remind readers why the claim of 

voluntary Palestinian flight has been successfully debunked 

by professional historiography. Other myths associated with 

the 1948 events are also discussed in this chapter. 

The final historical chapter questions whether the 1967 

war was forced on Israel and was therefore a “no choice” 

war. | claim that this was part of Israel’s desire to complete 

the takeover of Palestine that had almost been completed in 

the 1948 war. The planning for the occupation of the West 

Bank and the Gaza Strip began in 1948, and did not cease 

until the historical opportunity offered by aé_ reckless 

Egyptian decision in June 1967. | further argue that the 

Israeli policies immediately after the occupation prove that 

Israel anticipated the war rather than accidently staggered 

into it. 

The seventh chapter brings us into the present. Is Israel a 

democratic state, | ask, or is it a non-democratic entity? | 

make the case for the latter by examining the status of the 

Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied territories (who 

together make up almost half of the population ruled by 

Israel). 

Chapter 8 deals with the Oslo process. After nearly a 

quarter of a century since the signing of the accord, we 

have a good perspective on the fallacies connected to the 

process and can ask whether it was a peace accord that 

failed, or a successful Israeli ploy to deepen the occupation. 

A similar perspective can be now applied to the Gaza 

Strip and the still widely accepted myth that the misery of 

the people there is due to the terrorist nature of the Hamas. 

In the ninth chapter | choose to differ, and present another 

interpretation of what has happened in Gaza since the turn 

of the last century. 

Finally, in the tenth chapter | challenge the myth that the 

two-states solution is the only way forward. We have been 

blessed with excellent activist and scholarly works critiquing 

this formula and offering alternative solutions. They 

constitute a formidable challenge to this last myth. 

The book also includes a timeline as an appendix, which 

will help readers to further contextualize the arguments. 

My hope is that, whether the reader is a newcomer to the 

field, or a veteran student of it, the book will be a useful 

tool. It is directed primarily to anyone who finds themselves 

in a discussion on the evergreen topic of the Israel-Palestine 

question. This is not a balanced book; it is yet another 

attempt to redress the balance of power on behalf of the 

colonized, occupied, and oppressed Palestinians in the land 

of Israel and Palestine. It would be a real bonus if advocates 

of Zionism or loyal Supporters of Israel were also willing to 

engage with the arguments herein. After all, the book is 

written by an Israeli Jew who cares about his own society as 

much as he does about the Palestinian one. Refuting 

mythologies that sustain injustice should be of benefit to 

everyone living in the country or wishing to live there. It 

forms a basis on which all its inhabitants might enjoy the 

great achievements that only one privileged group currently 

has access to. 

Moreover, the book will hopefully prove a useful tool for 

activists who recognize that knowledge about Palestine is as 

necessary as commitment to the cause. It is not a substitute 

for the incredible work done by many scholars over the 

years, whose contributions have made a book like this 

possible; but it is an entry point into that world of 

knowledge. 

Students and scholars may tap into this book if they have 

cured themselves of the greatest malaise of the academic 

world in our time: the idea that commitment undermines 

excellence in scholarly research. The best undergraduate 

and postgraduate students | have had the pleasure to teach 

and supervise were the committed ones. This book is just 

one modest invitation to future scholars to leave their ivory 

towers and reconnect with the societies on whose behalf 

they conduct their research—whether they write about 

global warming, poverty, or Palestine, they should proudly 

wear their commitment on their academic sleeves. And if 

their universities are still not ready for this, they should be 

Savvy enough to play the game of “unbiased, objective 

academic research” on these contentious issues, while fully 

recognizing its false pretense. 

For the general public this book presents a simple version 

of a topic that can often seem to be extremely complicated 

(as indeed some of its aspects are); but it is one that can be 

easily explained and related to from the’ universal 

perspective of justice and human rights. 

Finally, my hope is that this book will clarify some of the 

deep misunderstandings at the heart of the Israel-Palestine 

problem, in the past and in the present. As long as these 

distortions and inherited assumptions are not questioned, 

they will continue to provide an immunity shield for the 

present inhuman regime in the land of Palestine. By 

examining these assumptions in light of the latest research, 

we can see how far they are from the historical truth and 

why setting the historical record straight might have an 

impact on the chances for peace and reconciliation in Israel 

and Palestine. 

PART | 

THE FALLACIES 

OF THE PAST 

Chapter 

: Palestine Was an Empty 

Land 

The geopolitical space today called Israel or Palestine has 

been a recognized country since Roman times. Its status 

and conditions in the distant past are topics for heated 

debate between those who believe that sources such as the 

Bible have no historical value and those who regard the holy 

book as a historical account. The significance of the 

country’s pre-Roman history will be treated in this book in 

the next few chapters. However, it seems there is a wide 

consensus among scholars that it was the Romans who 

granted the land the name “Palestina,” which predated all 

the other similar references to the land as Palestine. During 

the period of Roman, and later Byzantine, rule, it was an 

imperial province, and its fate depended very much on the 

fortunes of Rome and later Constantinople. 

From the mid-seventh century onwards, Palestine’s 

history was closely linked to the Arab and Muslim worlds 

(with a short interval in the medieval period when it was 

ceded to the Crusaders). Various Muslim empires and 

dynasties from the north, east and south of the country 

aspired to control it, since it was home to the second-holiest 

place in the Muslim religion after Mecca and Medina. It also 

had other attractions of course, due to its fertility and 

strategic location. The cultural richness of some of these 

past rulers can still be seen in parts of Israel and Palestine, 

although local archaeology gives precedence to Roman and 

Jewish heritages and hence the legacy of the Mamelukes 

and the Seljuk, those fertile and thriving medieval Islamic 

dynasties, has not yet been excavated. 

Even more relevant to an understanding of contemporary 

Israel and Palestine is the Ottoman period, commencing 

with their occupation of the land in 1517. The Ottomans 

remained there for 400 years and their legacy is still felt 

today in several respects. The legal system of Israel, the 

religious court records (the svji/), the land registry (the 

tapu), and a few architectural gems all testify to the 

significance of the Ottomans’ presence. When the Ottomans 

arrived, they found a society that was mostly Sunni Muslim 

and rural, but with small urban elites who spoke Arabic. Less 

than 5 percent of the population was Jewish and probably 10 

to 15 percent were Christian. As Yonatan Mendel comments: 

The exact percentage of Jews prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. 

However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 percent. According to Ottoman 

records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today 

Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 

43,659 (10 percent) were Christians and 15,011 (3 percent) were Jewish.+ 

The Jewish communities around the world regarded 

Palestine at that time as the holy land of the Bible. 

Pilgrimage in Judaism does not have the same role as it 

does in Christianity and Islam, but nonetheless, some Jews 

did see it as a duty and in small numbers visited the country 

as pilgrims. As one of the chapters in the book will show, 

before the emergence of Zionism it was mainly Christians 

who wished, for ecclesiastical reasons, to settle Jews in 

Palestine more permanently. 

You would not know this was Palestine in the 400 years of 

Ottoman rule from looking at the official website of the 

Israeli foreign ministry relating to the history of Palestine 

since the sixteenth century: 

Following the Ottoman Conquest in 1517, the Land was divided into four 

districts, attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled 

from Istanbul. At the outset of the Ottoman era, some 1,000 Jewish 

families lived in the country, mainly in Jerusalem, Nablus (Schechem), 

Hebron, Gaza, Safed (Tzfat) and the villages of the Galilee. The 

community was composed of descendants of Jews who had always lived in 

the Land as well as immigrants from North Africa and Europe. 

Orderly government, until the death (1566) of Sultan Suleiman the 

magnificent, brought improvements and stimulated Jewish immigration. 

Some newcomers settled in Jerusalem, but the majority went to Safed 

where, by the mid-16th century, the Jewish population had risen to about 

10,000, and the town had become a thriving textile center.? 

Sixteenth-century Palestine, it appears, was mainly Jewish, 

and the commercial lifeblood of the region was 

concentrated in the Jewish communities in these towns. 

What happened next? According to the foreign ministry 

website: 

With the gradual decline in the quality of Ottoman rule, the country 

suffered widespread neglect. By the end of the 18th century, much of the 

Land was owned by absentee landlords and leased to impoverished 

tenant farmers, and taxation was as crippling as it was capricious. The 

great forests of the Galilee and the Carmel mountain range were denuded 

of trees; swamp and desert encroached on agricultural land. 

In this story, by 1800 Palestine had become a desert, where 

farmers who did not belong there somehow cultivated 

parched land that was not theirs. The same land appeared 

to be an island, with a significant Jewish population, ruled 

from the outside by the Ottomans and suffering from 

intensive imperial projects that robbed the soil of its fertility. 

Every passing year the land became more. barren, 

deforestation increased, and farmland turned to desert. 

Promoted through an official state website this fabricated 

picture is unprecedented. 

It is a bitter irony that in composing this narrative the 

authors did not rely on Israeli scholarship. Most Israeli 

scholars would be quite hesitant about accepting the 

validity of these statements or sponsoring such a narrative. 

Quite a few of them, such as David Grossman (the 

demographer not the famous author), Amnon Cohen, and 

Yehoushua Ben-Arieh, have indeed successfully challenged 

it. Their research shows that, over the centuries, Palestine, 

rather than being a desert, was a thriving Arab society— 

mostly Muslim, predominantly rural, but with vibrant urban 

centers. 

Despite this contestation of the narrative, however, it is 

still propagated through the Israeli educational curriculum, 

as well as in the media, informed by scholars of a lesser 

prominence but with greater influence on the education 

system.? Outside of Israel, in particular in the United States, 

the assumption that the promised land was empty, 

desolate, and barren before the arrival of Zionism is still 

alive and kicking, and is therefore worth attending to. 

We need to examine the facts. The opposing historical 

narrative reveals a different story in which Palestine during 

the Ottoman period was a society like all the other Arab 

societies around it. It did not differ from the Eastern 

Mediterranean countries as a whole. Rather than encircled 

and isolated, the Palestinian people were readily exposed to 

interactions with other cultures, as part of the wider 

Ottoman empire. Secondly, being open to change and 

modernization, Palestine began to develop as a nation long 

before the arrival of the Zionist movement. In the hands of 

energetic local rulers such as Daher al-Umar (1690-1775), 

the towns of Haifa, Shefamr, Tiberias, and Acre were 

renovated and re-energized. The coastal network of ports 

and towns boomed through its trade connections with 

Europe, while the inner plains traded inland with nearby 

regions. The very opposite of a desert, Palestine was a 

flourishing part of Bilad al-Sham (the land of the north), or 

the Levant of its time. At the same time, a rich agricultural 

industry, small towns and historical cities served a 

population of half a million people on the eve of the Zionist 

arrival.* 

At the end of the nineteenth century this was a sizeable 

population, of which, as mentioned above, only a small 

percentage were Jewish. It is notable that this cohort were 

at the time resistant to the ideas promoted by the Zionist 

movement. Most Palestinians lived in the countryside in 

villages, which numbered almost 1,000. Meanwhile, a 

thriving urban elite made their home along the coast, on the 

inner plains and in the mountains. 

We now have a much better understanding of how the 

people who lived there defined themselves on the eve of the 

Zionist colonization of the country. As elsewhere in the 

Middle East and beyond, Palestinian society was introduced 

to the powerful defining concept of the nineteenth and 

twentieth centuries: the nation. There were local and 

external dynamics that prompted this new mode of self- 

reference, as happened elsewhere in the world. Nationalist 

ideas were imported into the Middle East in part by 

American missionaries, who arrived in the early nineteenth 

century both with the wish to proselytize but also with a 

desire to spread novel notions of self-determination. As 

Americans they felt they represented not only Christianity 

but also the newest independent state on the global map. 

The educated elite in Palestine joined others in the Arab 

world in digesting these ideas and formulating an authentic 

national doctrine, which led them to demand more 

autonomy within, and eventually independence from, the 

Ottoman Empire. 

In the mid to late nineteenth century the Ottoman 

intellectual and political elite adopted romantic nationalist 

ideas that equated Ottomanism with Turkishness. This trend 

contributed to the alienation of the non-Turkish subjects of 

Istanbul, most of them Arabs, from the Ottoman Empire. The 

nationalization process in Turkey itself was accompanied by 

secularization trends in the second half of the nineteenth 

century which diminished the importance of Istanbul as a 

religious authority and focus. 

In the Arab world, secularization was also part of the 

process of nationalization. Not surprisingly, it was mainly 

minorities, such as the Christians, that embraced warmly 

the idea of a secular national identity based on a shared 

territory, language, history, and culture. In Palestine, 

Christians who engaged with nationalism found eager allies 

among the Muslim elite, leading to a mushrooming of 

Muslim-Christian societies all over Palestine towards the end 

of World War I. In the Arab world, Jews joined these kind of 

alliances between activists from different religions. The 

Same would have happened in Palestine had not Zionism 

demanded total loyalty from the veteran Jewish community 

there. 

A thorough and comprehensive study of how Palestinian 

nationalism arose before the arrival of Zionism can be found 

in the works of Palestinian historians such as Muhammad 

Muslih and Rashid Khalidi.> They show clearly that both elite 

and non-elite sections of Palestinian society were involved in 

developing a national movement and sentiment before 

1882. Khalidi in particular shows how patriotic feelings, local 

loyalties, Arabism, religious sentiments, and higher levels of 

education and literacy were the main constituents of the 

new nationalism, and how it was only later that resistance 

to Zionism played an additional crucial role in defining 

Palestinian nationalism. 

Khalidi, among others, demonstrates how modernization, 

the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the greedy 

European quest for territories in the Middle East contributed 

to the solidification of Palestinian nationalism before 

Zionism made its mark in Palestine with the British promise 

of a Jewish homeland in 1917. One of the clearest 

manifestations of this new self-definition was the reference 

in the country to Palestine as geographical and cultural 

entity, and later as a political one. Despite there not being a 

Palestinian state, the cultural location of Palestine was very 

clear. There was a unifying sense of belonging. At the very 

beginning of the twentieth century, the newspaper Filastin 

reflected the way the people named their country.® 

Palestinians spoke their own dialect, had their own customs 

and rituals, and appeared on the maps of the world as living 

in a country called Palestine. 

During the nineteenth century, Palestine, like its 

neighboring regions, became more clearly defined as a 

geopolitical unit in the wake of administrative reforms 

initiated from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. 

As a consequence, the local Palestinian elite began to seek 

independence within a united Syria, or even a united Arab 

state (a bit like the United States of America). This pan- 

Arabist national drive was called in Arabic gawmiyya, and 

was popular in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world. 

Following the famous, or rather infamous, Sykes-Picot 

Agreement, signed in 1916 between Britain and France, the 

two colonial powers divided the area into new nation states. 

As the area was divided, a new sentiment developed: a 

more local variant of nationalism, named in Arabic 

wataniyya. As a result, Palestine began to see itself as an 

independent Arab state. Without the appearance of Zionism 

on its doorstep, Palestine would probably have gone the 

Same way as Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria and embraced a 

process of modernization and growth.’ This had, in fact, 

already started by 1916, as a result of Ottoman polices in 

the late nineteenth century. In 1872, when the Istanbul 

government founded the Sanjak (administrative province) of 

Jerusalem, they created a cohesive geopolitical space in 

Palestine. For a brief moment, the powers in Istanbul even 

toyed with the possibility of adding to the Sanjak, 

encompassing much of Palestine as we know it today, as 

well as the sub-provinces of Nablus and Acre. Had they done 

this, the Ottomans would have created a geographical unit, 

as happened in Egypt, in which a particular nationalism 

might have arisen even earlier.® 

However, even with its administrative division into north 

(ruled by Beirut) and south (ruled by Jerusalem), this shift 

raised Palestine as a whole above its previous peripheral 

status, when it had been divided into small regional sub- 

provinces. In 1918, with the onset of British rule, the north 

and the south divisions became one unit. In a similar way 

and in the same year the British established the basis for 

modern Iraq when they fused the three Ottoman provinces 

of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one modern nation state. 

In Palestine, unlike in Iraq, familial connections and 

geographical boundaries (the River Litani in the north, the 

River Jordan in the east, the Mediterranean in the west) 

worked together to weld the three sub-provinces of South 

Beirut, Nablus, and Jerusalem into one social and cultural 

unit. This geopolitical space had its own major dialect and 

its own customs, folklore, and traditions.9 

By 1918, Palestine was therefore more united than in the 

Ottoman period, but there were to be further changes. While 

waiting for final international approval of Palestine’s status 

in 1923, the British government renegotiated the borders of 

the land, creating a better-defined geographical space for 

the national movements to struggle over, and a clearer 

sense of belonging for the people living in it. It was now 

clear what Palestine was; what was not clear was who it 

belonged to: the native Palestinians or the new Jewish 

settlers? The final irony of this administrative regime was 

that the reshaping of the borders helped the Zionist 

movement to conceptualize geographically “Eretz Israel,” 

the Land of Israel where only Jews had the right to the land 

and its resources. 

Thus, Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a 

rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the 

nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization 

and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into 

bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering 

the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the 

benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by 

the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for 

the majority of the native people living there. 

Chapter 2 

The Jews Were a 

People Without a Land 

The claim in the previous chapter, that Palestine was a land 

without people, goes hand in hand with the claim that the 

Jews were a people without a land. 

But were the Jewish settlers a people? Recent scholarship 

has repeated doubts expressed many years ago about this 

as well. The common theme of this critical point of view is 

best summarized in Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the 

Jewish People.t Sand shows that the Christian world, in its 

own interest and at a given moment in modern history, 

Supported the idea of the Jews as a nation that must one 

day return to the holy land. In this account, this return 

would be part of the divine scheme for the end of time, 

along with the resurrection of the dead and the second 

coming of the Messiah. 

The theological and_ religious upheavals of the 

Reformation from the sixteenth century onwards produced a 

clear association, especially among Protestants, between 

the notion of the end of the millennium and the conversion 

of the Jews and their return to Palestine. Thomas Brightman, 

a sixteenth-century English clergyman, represented these 

notions when he wrote, “Shall they return to Jerusalem 

again? There is nothing more certain: the prophets do 

everywhere confirm it and beat about it.”* Brightman was 

not only hoping for a divine promise to be fulfilled; he also, 

like so many after him, wished the Jews either to convert to 

Christianity or to leave Europe all together. A hundred years 

later, Henry Oldenburg, a German theologian and natural 

philosopher, wrote: “If the occasion present itself amid 

changes to which human affairs are liable, [the Jews] may 

even raise their empire anew, and ... God may elect them a 

second time.”> Charles-Joseph of Lign, an Austro-Hungarian 

field marshal, stated in the second half of the eighteenth 

century: 

| believe that the Jew is not able to assimilate, and that he will constantly 

constitute a nation within a nation, wherever he may be. The simplest 

thing to do would in my opinion be returning to them their homeland, 

from which they were driven.* As is quite apparent from this last text, 

there was an obvious link between these formative ideas of Zionism and a 

more longstanding anti-Semitism. 

Francois-René de Chateaubriand, the famous French 

writer and politician, wrote around the same time that the 

Jews were “the legitimate masters of Judea.” He influenced 

Napoleon Bonaparte, who hoped to elicit the help of the 

Jewish community in Palestine, as well as other inhabitants 

of the land, in his attempt to occupy the Middle East at the 

beginning of the nineteenth century. He promised them a 

“return to Palestine” and the creation of a state.° Zionism, 

aS we can see, was therefore a Christian project of 

colonization before it became a Jewish one. 

The ominous signs of how these seemingly religious and 

mythical beliefs might turn into a real program of 

colonization and dispossession appeared in Victorian Britain 

as early as the 1820s. A powerful theological and imperial 

movement emerged that would put the return of the Jews to 

Palestine at the heart of a strategic plan to take over 

Palestine and turn it into a Christian entity. In the nineteenth 

century, this sentiment became ever more popular in Britain 

and affected the official imperial policy: “The soil of 

Palestine ... only awaits for the return of her banished 

children, and the application of industry, commensurate 

with agricultural capabilities, to burst once more _ into 

universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the 

days of Solomon.”© Thus wrote the Scottish peer and 

military commander John Lindsay. This sentiment was 

echoed by David Hartley, an English philosopher, who 

wrote: “It is probable that the Jews will be reinitiated in 

Palestine.”/ 

The process was not wholly successful before it received 

the support of the United States. Here, too, there was a 

history of endorsing the idea of a Jewish nation having the 

right to return to Palestine and build a Zion. At the same 

time as Protestants in Europe articulated these views, they 

appeared in a similar form across the Atlantic. The American 

president, John Adams (1735-1826), stated: “I really wish 

the Jews again in Judea as an independent nation.”® A 

simple history of ideas leads directly from the preaching 

fathers of this movement to those with the power to change 

the fate of Palestine. Foremost among them was Lord 

Shaftesbury (1801-85), a leading British politician and 

reformer, who campaigned actively for a Jewish homeland in 

Palestine. His arguments for a greater British presence in 

Palestine were both religious and strategic.” 

As | will presently show, this dangerous blend of religious 

fervor and reformist zeal would lead from Shaftesbury’s 

efforts in the middle of the nineteenth century to the Balfour 

Declaration in 1917. Shaftesbury realized that it would not 

be enough to support the return of the Jews, and they would 

have to be actively assisted by Britain in their initial 

colonization. Such an alliance should start, he asserted, by 

providing material help to the Jews to travel to Ottoman 

Palestine. He convinced the Anglican bishopric center and 

cathedral in Jerusalem to provide the early funding for this 

project. This would probably not have happened at all had 

Shaftesbury not succeeded in recruiting his father in law, 

Britain’s foreign minister and later prime minister, Lord 

Palmerston, to the cause. In his diary for August 1, 1838, 

Shaftesbury wrote: 

Dined with Palmerston. After dinner left alone with him. Propounded my 

schemes, which seems to strike his fancy. He asked questions and readily 

promised to consider it [the program to help the Jews to return to 

Palestine and take it over]. How singular is the order of Providence. 

Singular, if estimated by man’s ways. Palmerston had already been 

chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people, to do 

homage to their inheritance, and to recognize their rights without 

believing their destiny. It seems he will yet do more. Though the motive 

be kind, it is not sound. | am forced to argue politically, financially, 

commercially. He weeps not, like his Master, over Jerusalem, nor prays 

that now, at last, she may put on her beautiful garments. +° 

As a first step, Shaftesbury persuaded Palmerston to 

appoint his fellow restorationist (a believer in the restoration 

of Palestine to the Jews) William Young as the first British 

vice-consul in Jerusalem. He subsequently wrote in his diary: 

“What a wonderful event it is! The ancient City of the people 

of God is about to resume a place among the nations; and 

England is the first of the gentile kingdoms that ceases to 

‘tread her down.’”!! A year later, in 1839, Shaftesbury wrote 

a thirty-page article for The London Quarterly Review, 

entitled “State and Restauration (sic) of the Jews,” in which 

he predicted a new era for God’s chosen people. He insisted 

that 

the Jews must be encouraged to return in yet greater numbers and 

become once more the husbandman of Judea and Galilee ... though 

admittedly a_ stiff-necked, dark hearted people, and sunk in moral 

degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of the Gospel, [they are] not only 

worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity’s hope of salvation.?2 

Shaftesbury’s gentle lobbying of Palmerston proved 

successful. For political reasons, more than for religious 

ones, Palmerston too became an advocate for Jewish 

restoration. Among other factors that came into play in his 

deliberations was the “view that the Jews could be useful in 

buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to 

accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the 

area.”15 

Palmerston wrote to the British ambassador in Istanbul 

on August 11, 1840, concerning the mutual benefit to both 

the Ottomans and Britain of allowing Jews to return to 

Palestine. Ironically, the restoration of the Jews was seen as 

an important means of maintaining the status quo, and of 

avoiding the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. 

Palmerston wrote: 

There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a 

strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to 

Palestine ... It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage 

the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine because the wealth which 

they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan’s 

dominions; and the Jewish people, if returning under the sanction and 

protection and at the invitation of the Sultan, would be a check upon any 

future evil designs of Mohamet Ali or his successor ... | have to instruct 

Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the Turkish government] to hold 

out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to 

Palestine.14 

Mohamet Ali, more popularly Known as Muhammad Ali, was 

the governor of Egypt who ceded from the Ottoman Empire 

in the first half of the nineteenth century. When Palmerston 

wrote this letter to his ambassador in Istanbul, it was after a 

decade in which the Egyptian ruler had nearly toppled the 

sultan himself. The idea that Jewish wealth exported to 

Palestine would strengthen the Ottoman Empire from 

potential internal and external enemies underlines how 

Zionism was associated with anti-Semitism, British 

imperialism, and theology. 

A few days after Lord Palmerston sent his letter, a lead 

article in The Times called for a plan “to plant the Jewish 

people in the land of their fathers,” claiming this was under 

“serious political consideration” and commending the efforts 

of Shaftesbury as the author of the plan, which, it argued, 

was “practical and statesmanlike.”'> Lady Palmerston also 

Supported her husband's stance. She wrote to a friend: “We 

have on our side the fanatical and religious elements, and 

you know what a following they have in this country. They 

are absolutely determined that Jerusalem and the whole of 

Palestine shall be reserved for the Jews to return to; this is 

their only longing to restore the Jews.”!© Thus the Earl of 

Shaftesbury was described as: “The leading proponent of 

Christian Zionism in the nineteenth century and the first 

politician of stature to attempt to prepare the way for Jews 

to establish a homeland in Palestine.” +7 

This moment of British establishment enthusiasm for the 

idea of restoration should properly be described as proto- 

Zionism. While we _ should be careful about reading 

contemporary ideology into this nineteenth-century 

phenomenon, it nevertheless had all the ingredients that 

would turn these ideas into the future justification for 

erasing and denying the basic rights of the indigenous 

Palestinian population. There were of course churches and 

clergymen who did identify with the local Palestinians. 

Notable among them was George Francis Popham Blyth, a 

Church of England cleric who, along with some high church 

Anglican colleagues, developed strong sympathies for the 

Palestinians’ aspirations and rights. In 1887 Blyth founded 

St. George College, which is today probably still one of the 

best high schools in East Jerusalem (attended by the 

children of the local elite, who would play a crucial role in 

Palestinian politics in the first half of the twentieth century). 

The power, however, was with those who supported the 

Jewish cause, later to become the Zionist cause. 

The first British consulate in Jerusalem opened in 1838. 

Its brief included informally encouraging Jews to come to 

Palestine, promising to protect them, and in some cases 

attempting to convert them to Christianity. The most well- 

known of the early consuls was James Finn (1806-72), 

whose character and direct approach made it impossible to 

conceal the implications of this brief from the _ local 

Palestinians. He wrote openly, and was probably the first to 

do so, about the connection between returning the Jews to 

Palestine and the possible displacement of the Palestinians 

as a result.t® This connection would be at the heart of the 

Zionist settler colonial project in the following century. 

Finn was stationed in Jerusalem between 1845 and 1863. 

He has been lauded by later Israeli historians for helping 

Jews to settle in their ancestral land, and his memoirs have 

been translated into Hebrew. He is not the only historical 

figure to have appeared in one nation’s pantheon and in the 

rogues’ gallery of another. Finn detested Islam as a whole 

and the notables of Jerusalem in particular. He never 

learned to speak Arabic and communicated via an 

interpreter, which did nothing to smooth his relationship 

with the local Palestinian population. 

Finn was helped by the inauguration of the Anglican 

bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841, headed by Michael Solomon 

Alexander (a convert from Judaism), and by the inauguration 

of Christ Church, the first Anglican church, near Jaffa Gate, 

Jerusalem, in 1843. Although these _ institutions later 

developed a strong affinity with the Palestinian right of self- 

determination, at the time they supported Finn’s proto- 

Zionist aspirations. Finn worked more eagerly than any 

other European to establish a permanent Western presence 

in Jerusalem, organizing the purchase of lands and real 

estate for missionaries, commercial interests, and 

government bodies. 

An important link connecting these early, mainly British, 

Christian Zionist buds with Zionism was the German Temple 

Pietist movement (later known as the Templers), active in 

Palestine from the 1860s to the outbreak of World War |. The 

Pietist movement grew out of the Lutheran movement in 

Germany that spread all over the world, including to North 

America (where its influence on the early settler colonialism 

is felt to this very day). Its interest in Palestine evolved 

around the 1860s. Two German clergymen, Christoph 

Hoffman and Georg David Hardegg, founded the Temple 

Society in 1861. They had strong connections to the Pietist 

movement in Wurttemberg, Germany, but developed their 

own ideas on how best to push forward their version of 

Christianity. For them, the rebuilding of a Jewish temple in 

Jerusalem was an essential step in the divine scheme for 

redemption and absolution. More importantly, they were 

convinced that if they themselves settled in Palestine they 

would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah.?2 While 

not everyone in the respective churches and _ national 

organizations welcomed their particular way of translating 

Pietism into settler colonialism in Palestine, senior members 

of the Royal Prussian court and several Anglican theologians 

in Britain enthusiastically supported their dogma. 

As the Temple movement grew in prominence, it came to 

be persecuted by most of the established church in 

Germany. But they moved their ideas on to a more practical 

stage and settled in Palestine—fighting with each other 

along the way, as well as adding new members. They 

founded their first colony on Mount Carmel in Haifa in 1866 

and expanded into other parts of the country. The warming 

of the relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and the sultan 

at the very end of the nineteenth century further enhanced 

their settlement project. The Templers remained in Palestine 

under the British Mandate until 1948, when they were 

kicked out by the new Jewish state. 

The Templers’ colonies and methods of settlement were 

emulated by the early Zionists. While the German historian 

Alexander Scholch described the Templers’ colonization 

efforts as “The Quiet Crusade,” the early Zionist colonies 

established from 1882 onwards were anything but quiet.2° 

By the time the Templers settled in Palestine, Zionism had 

already become a notable political movement in Europe. 

Zionism was, in a nutshell, a movement asserting that the 

problems of the Jews of Europe would be solved by 

colonizing Palestine and creating a Jewish state there. These 

ideas germinated in the 1860s in several places in Europe, 

inspired by the Enlightenment, the 1848 “Spring of 

Nations,” and later on by _ socialism. Zionism was 

transformed from an intellectual and cultural exercise into a 

political project through the visions of Theodor Herzl, in 

response to a= particularly vile wave of anti-Jewish 

persecution in Russia in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and 

to the rise of anti-Semitic nationalism in the west of Europe 

(where the infamous Dreyfus trial revealed how deeply 

rooted anti-Semitism was in French and German society). 

Through Herzl’s efforts and those of like-minded Jewish 

leaders, Zionism became an_ internationally recognized 

movement. Independently at first, a group of Eastern 

European Jews developed similar notions about the solution 

for the Jewish question in Europe, and they did not wait for 

international recognition. They began to settle in Palestine 

in 1882, after preparing the ground by working in 

communes in their home countries. In the Zionist jargon 

they are called the First Aliyah—the first wave of Zionist 

immigration lasting to 1904. The second wave (1905-14) 

was' different, since it mainly’ included frustrated 

communists and socialists who now saw Zionism not only as 

a solution for the Jewish problem but also as spearheading 

communism and socialism through collective settlement in 

Palestine. In both waves, however, the majority preferred to 

settle in Palestinian towns, with only a smaller number 

attempting to cultivate land they bought from Palestinians 

and absentee Arab landowners, at first relying on Jewish 

industrialists in Europe to sustain them, before seeking a 

more independent economic existence. 

While the Zionist connection with Germany proved 

insignificant at the end of the day, the one with Britain 

became crucial. Indeed, the Zionist movement needed 

strong backing because the people of Palestine began to 

realize that this particular form of immigration did not bode 

well for their future in the country. Local leaders felt it would 

have a very negative effect on their society. One such figure 

was the mufti of Jerusalem, Tahir al-Hussayni II, who linked 

Jewish immigration into Jerusalem with a European 

challenge to the city’s Muslim sanctity. Some of his elders 

had already noted that it was James Finn’s idea to connect 

the arrival of the Jews with the restoration of Crusader glory. 

No wonder, then, that the mufti led the opposition to this 

immigration, with a special emphasis on the need to refrain 

from selling land to such projects. He recognized that 

possession of land vindicated claims of ownership, whereas 

immigration without settlement could be conceived as 

transient pilgrimage.? 

Thus, in many ways, the strategic imperial impulse of 

Britain to use the Jewish return to Palestine as a means of 

deepening London’s involvement in the “Holy Land” 

coincided with the emergence of new cultural and 

intellectual visions of Zionism in Europe. For both Christians 

and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen 

as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the 

two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the 

anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews 

from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at 

the expense of the native people of Palestine. This alliance 

became public knowledge with the proclamation of the 

Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917—a letter from the 

British foreign secretary to the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish 

community in effect promising them full support for the 

creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 

Thanks to the accessibility and efficient structure of the 

British archives, today we are blessed with many excellent 

scholarly works exploring the background to the declaration. 

Still among the best of them is an essay from 1970 by 

Mayer Verte, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.22 He 

showed in particular how British officials asserted wrongly 

that Jewish members in the Bolshevik movement had similar 

aspirations to the Zionists, and that therefore a pro-Zionist 

declaration would pave the way for good relations with the 

new political power in Russia. More to the point was the 

assumption of these policy makers that such a gesture 

would be welcomed by the American Jews, whom the British 

suspected of having a great influence in Washington. There 

was also a mixture of millenarianism and Islamophobia: 

David Lloyd George, the prime minister at the time and a 

devout Christian, favored the return of the Jews on a 

religious basis, and strategically both he and his colleagues 

preferred a Jewish colony to a Muslim one, as they saw the 

Palestinians, in the Holy Land. 

More recently we have had access to an even more 

comprehensive analysis, written in 1939, but lost for many 

years before it reappeared in 2013. This is the work of the 

British journalist, J. M. N Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality, 

which runs to more than 700 pages explaining what lay 

behind the Balfour Declaration.2> It reveals, through Jeffries’ 

personal connections and his access to a wide range of no- 

longer-extant documents, precisely who in the _ British 

admiralty, army and government was working for the 

declaration and why. It appears that the pro-Zionist 

Christians in his story were far more enthusiastic than the 

Zionists themselves about the idea of British sponsorship of 

the colonization process in Palestine. 

The bottom line of all the research hitherto conducted on 

the declaration is that the various decision makers in Britain 

saw the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as coinciding 

with British strategic interests in the area. Once Britain had 

occupied Palestine, this alliance allowed the Jews to build 

the infrastructure for a Jewish state under British auspices, 

while protected by His Majesty’s Government’s bayonets. 

But Palestine was not easily taken. The British campaign 

against the Turks lasted almost the whole of 1917. It began 

well, with the British forces storming through the Sinai 

Peninsula, but they were then held up by an attritional 

trench war in the lines between the Gaza Strip and Bir Saba. 

Once this stalemate was broken, it became easier—in fact, 

Jerusalem surrendered without a fight. The ensuing military 

occupation brought all three discrete processes—the 

emergence of Zionism, Protestant millenarianism, and 

British imperialism—to Palestinian shores as a powerful 

fusion of ideologies that destroyed the country and its 

people over the next thirty years. 

There are those who would like to question whether the 

Jews who settled in Palestine as Zionists in the aftermath of 

1918 were really the descendants of the Jews who had been 

exiled by Rome 2,000 years ago. It began with popular 

doubts cast by Arthur Koestler (1905-83), who wrote The 

Thirteenth Tribe (1976) in which he advanced the theory 

that the Jewish settlers were descended from the Khazars, a 

Turkish nation of the Caucasus that converted to Judaism in 

the eighth century and was later forced to move 

westward.2* Israeli scientists have ever since tried to prove 

that there is a genetic connection between the Jews of 

Roman Palestine and those of present-day Israel. 

Nevertheless, the debate continues today. 

More serious analysis came from biblical scholars who 

were not influenced by Zionism, such as Keith Whitelam, 

Thomas Thompson, and the (Israeli scholar, Israel 

Finkelstein, all of whom reject the Bible as a factual account 

of any significance.2? Whitelam and Thompson also doubt 

the existence of anything like a nation in biblical times and, 

like others, criticize what they call the “invention of modern 

Israel” as the work of pro-Zionist Christian theologians. The 

latest and most updated deconstruction of this idea came in 

Shlomo Sand’s two books, The Invention of the Jewish 

People and The Invention of the Land of Israel.2©° | respect 

and appreciate this scholarly effort. Politically, however, | 

think it is less significant than the assumption that denies 

the existence of the Palestinians (although it is the 

complement of that assumption). People are entitled to 

invent themselves, as so many national movements have 

done in their moment of inception. But the problem 

becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political 

projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression. 

In the particular case of the claims of nineteenth-century 

Zionism, it is not the historical accuracy of those claims that 

matters. What matters is not whether the present Jews in 

Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in 

the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence 

that it represents all the Jews in the world and that 

everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf. Until 

1967, this claim was very helpful for the state of Israel. Jews 

around the world, in particular in the United States, became 

its main supporters whenever its policies were questioned. 

In many respects, this is still the case in the United States 

today. However, even there, as well as in other Jewish 

communities, this clear association is nowadays challenged. 

Zionism, aS we Shall see in the next chapter, was 

Originally a minority opinion among Jews. In making the 

argument that the Jews were a nation belonging to Palestine 

and therefore should be helped to return to it, they had to 

rely on British officials and, later, military power. Jews and 

the world at large did not seem to be convinced that the 

Jews were a people without a land. Shaftesbury, Finn, 

Balfour, and Lloyd George liked the idea because it helped 

Britain gain a foothold in Palestine. This became immaterial 

after the British took Palestine by force and then had to 

decide from a new starting point whether the land was 

Jewish or Palestinian—a question it could never properly 

answer, and therefore had to leave to others to resolve after 

thirty years of frustrating rule. 

Chapter 3 

Zionism Is Judaism 

In order to examine properly the assumption that Zionism is 

the same as Judaism, one has to begin with the historical 

context in which it was born. Since its inception in the mid- 

nineteenth century, Zionism was only one, inessential, 

expression of Jewish cultural life. It was born out of two 

impulses among Jewish communities in Central and Eastern 

Europe. The first was a search for safety within a society 

that refused to integrate Jews as equals and_ that 

occasionally persecuted them, either through legislation or 

through riots organized or encouraged by the powers that 

be as a diversion from economic crises or _ political 

upheavals. The second impulse was a wish to emulate other 

new national movements mushrooming in Europe at the 

time, during what historians called the European Spring of 

Nations. Those Jews who sought to transform Judaism from a 

religion into a nation were not unique among the many 

ethnic and religious groups within the two crumbling 

empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—who 

wished to redefine themselves as nations. 

The roots of modern-day Zionism can be found already in 

the eighteenth century in what was called the Jewish 

enlightenment movement. This was a group of writers, 

poets, and rabbis who revived the Hebrew language and 

pushed the boundaries of traditional and religious Jewish 

education into the more universal study of science, 

literature, and philosophy. Across Central and Eastern 

Europe, Hebrew newspapers and journals began to 

proliferate. Out of this group there emerged a_ few 

individuals, Known in Zionist historiography as_ the 

“Harbingers of Zionism,” who showed greater nationalist 

tendencies and associated the revival of Hebrew with 

nationalism in their writings. They put forward two new 

ideas: the redefinition of Judaism as a national movement 

and the need to colonize Palestine in order to return the 

Jews to the ancient homeland from which they had been 

expelled by the Romans in 70 ce. They advocated for “the 

return” by way of what they defined as “agricultural 

colonies” (in many parts of Europe Jews were not allowed to 

own or cultivate land, hence the fascination with starting 

anew as a nation of farmers, not just as free citizens). 

These ideas became more popular after a brutal wave of 

pogroms in Russia in 1881, which transformed them into a 

political program propagated by a movement called “The 

Lovers of Zion,” who dispatched a few hundred enthusiastic 

young Jews to build the first new colonies in Palestine in 

1882. This first phase in the history of Zionism culminates 

with the works and actions of Theodor Herzl. Born in Pest in 

the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1860, but resident for most 

of his life in Vienna, Herzl began his career as a playwright 

interested in the status and problems of the modern Jew in 

his society, asserting at first that full assimilation into local 

society was the key to this predicament. In the 1890s he 

became a journalist and, according to his own version of his 

life, it was at this time that he realized how potent anti- 

Semitism was. He concluded that there was no hope for 

assimilation and opted instead for the foundation of a Jewish 

state in Palestine as the best solution to what he defined as 

the “Jewish Problem.” 

As these early Zionist ideas were aired among Jewish 

communities in countries such as Germany and the United 

States, prominent rabbis and leading figures in those 

communities rejected the new approach. Religious leaders 

dismissed Zionism as a form of secularization and 

modernization, while secular Jews feared that the new ideas 

would raise questions about the Jews’ loyalty to their own 

nation-states and would thus increase anti-Semitism. Both 

groups had different ideas about how to cope with the 

modern-day persecution of the Jews in Europe. Some 

believed that the further entrenchment of Jewish religion 

and tradition was the answer (as Islamic fundamentalists 

would do at the same time, when faced with European 

modernization), while others advocated for _ further 

assimilation into non-Jewish life. 

When Zionist ideas appeared in Europe and the United 

States between the 1840s and the 1880s, most Jews 

practiced Judaism in two different ways. One involved 

entrenchment: living within’ very tight _ religious 

communities, shunning new ideas such as nationalism, and 

indeed regarding modernization as such as an unwelcome 

threat to their way of life. The other way involved living a 

secular life, which differed from that of the non-Jewish 

communities in only very minimal ways—celebrating certain 

holidays, frequenting the synagogue on Fridays, and 

probably not eating in public during the fast of the day of 

atonement (Yom Kippur). Gershom Scholem, who was one 

such Jew, recalled in his memoirs Berlin to Jerusalem how, 

aS a member of a young Jewish group in Germany, he used 

to dine with his friends in the same restaurant in Berlin 

during Yom Kippur; on their arrival, the proprietor would 

inform them that “the special room for the _ fasting 

gentlemen in the restaurant was ready.”! Individuals and 

communities found themselves between these two poles of 

secularization on the one hand and Orthodox life on the 

other. But let us look more closely at the positions they 

adopted towards Zionism in the second half of the 

nineteenth century. 

Jewish secularism is a slightly bizarre concept of course, 

as is Christian secularism or Islamic secularism. Secular 

Jews as described above were people with various degrees 

of connection to religion (very much as a secular Christian in 

Britain celebrates Easter and Christmas, sends his children 

to Church of England schools, or attends Sunday mass 

occasionally or frequently). In the latter half of the 

nineteenth century, this modern form of practicing Judaism 

became a powerful movement known as the Reform 

movement, which looked for ways of adapting religion to 

modern life without succumbing to its anachronistic aspects. 

It was particularly popular in Germany and the United 

States. 

When the Reformists first encountered Zionism, they 

vehemently rejected the idea of redefining Judaism as 

nationalism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. 

However, their anti-Zionist stance shifted after the creation 

of the state of Israel in 1948. In the second half of the 

twentieth century, the majority among them created a new 

Reform movement in the United States, which became one 

of the strongest Jewish organizations in the country 

(although not until 1999 did the new movement officially 

vow allegiance to Israel and Zionism). However, a large 

number of Jews left the new movement and set up the 

American Council of Judaism (ACJ), which reminded the 

world in 1993 that Zionism was still a minority view among 

Jews, and which remained loyal to the old Reformist notions 

about Zionism.? 

Before that schism, the Reform movement in_ both 

Germany and the United States had provided a strong and 

unanimous case against Zionism. In Germany, they publicly 

rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and_ proclaimed 

themselves “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” One of the 

German Reformists’ early acts was to remove from their 

prayer rituals any references to a return to “Eretz Israel” or 

the rebuilding of a state there. Similarly, already in 1869, 

American Reformists stated in one of their first conventions 

that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the 

restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a 

second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children 

of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of 

all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification. 

In 1885, another Reformist conference stated: “We consider 

ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and 

we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a 

sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the 

restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.” 

One famous leader in this respect was Rabbi Kaufman 

Kohler, who repudiated the idea “that Judea is the home of 

the Jew—an idea which ‘unhomes’ [s/c] the Jew all over the 

wide earth.” Another leader of the movement at the end of 

the nineteenth century, Isaac Mayer Wise, often ridiculed 

Zionist leaders such as Herzl, comparing them to charlatan 

alchemists claiming to contribute to science. In Vienna, the 

city of Herzl, Adolf Jellinek argued that Zionism would 

endanger the position of Jews in Europe and claimed that 

most of them objected to the idea. “We are at home in 

Europe,” he declared. 

Apart from the Reformers, liberal Jews at that time 

rejected the claim that Zionism provided the only solution 

for anti-Semitism. As Walter Lacquer shows us in his book, 

The History of Zionism, liberal Jews regarded Zionism as a 

fanciful movement that provided no answer to the problems 

of the Jews in Europe. They argued for what they called a 

“regeneration” of the Jews, involving a display of total 

loyalty to their homelands and a willingness to be fully 

assimilated into them as citizens.2 They hoped that a more 

liberal world might solve the problems of persecution and 

anti-Semitism. History showed that liberalism had saved 

those Jews who moved to, or lived in, the UK and the USA. 

Those who believed it could happen in the rest of Europe 

were proven wrong. But even today, with hindsight, many 

liberal Jews do not see Zionism as the right answer then or 

now. 

Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their 

criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism 

became a more recognized political force very late in the 

decade, thanks to the diligent work of Herzl. Herzl 

understood contemporary politics and wrote utopian stories, 

political tracts, and newspaper reports summarizing the 

idea that it was in Europe’s interest to help build a modern 

Jewish state in Palestine. World leaders were not impressed; 

neither were the Ottomans, as the rulers of Palestine. 

Herzl’s greatest achievement was bringing all the activists 

together at one conference in 1897, and from there building 

up two basic organizations—a world congress promoting the 

ideas of Zionism globally, and local Zionist outfits on the 

ground expanding the Jewish colonization of Palestine. 

Thus, with the crystallization of Zionist ideas, the 

criticism of Jews opposed to Zionism also became clearer. 

Apart from the Reform movement, criticism came from the 

left, lay leaders of the various communities, and from 

Orthodox Jews. In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist 

conference was convened in Basel, a_ socialist Jewish 

movement was born in Russia: the Bund. It was both a 

political movement and a Jewish trade union. Bund 

members believed that a socialist, even a _ Bolshevik, 

revolution would be a far better solution to the problems of 

Jews in Europe than Zionism. They regarded the latter as a 

form of escapism. More importantly, when Nazism and 

Fascism were on the rise in Europe, Bundists felt that 

Zionism contributed to this brand of anti-Semitism by 

questioning the loyalty of Jews to their homelands. Even 

after the Holocaust, Bundists were convinced that Jews 

should seek a place in societies that cherish human and civil 

rights, and did not see a Jewish nation state as a panacea. 

This strong anti-Zionist conviction, however, slowly subsided 

from around the mid-1950s, and the remnants of this once- 

powerful movement eventually decided to support the state 

of Israel publicly (they even had a branch in the Jewish 

state).* 

The reaction of the Bund did not trouble Herzl as much as 

did the lukewarm response of the Jewish political and 

economic elites in places such as Britain and France. They 

Saw Herzl either as a charlatan whose ideas were far 

removed from reality, or worse aS someone who could 

undermine Jewish life in their own societies where, as in 

Britain, they had made immense progress in terms of 

emancipation and integration. The Victorian Jews were 

disturbed by his call for Jewish sovereignty in a foreign land 

with an equal status to other sovereign states in the world. 

For the more established sections of Central and Western 

European Jewry, Zionism was a provocative vision that 

called into question the loyalty of English, German, and 

French Jews to their own home nations. Thanks to their lack 

of support for Herzl, the Zionist movement failed to become 

a powerful actor before World War |. Only after Herzl’s death 

in 1904 did other leaders of the movement—in particular 

Chaim Weizmann, who immigrated to Britain in the year 

Herzl died and became aé_ leading scientist there, 

contributing to the British war effort in World War I—build a 

strong alliance with London that served Zionism well, as will 

be described later in this chapter.° 

The third critique on Zionism in its early days came from 

the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. To this day, many 

ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities vehemently oppose 

Zionism, although they are much smaller than they were in 

the late nineteenth century and some of them moved to 

Israel and are now part of its political system. Nonetheless, 

as in the past, they constitute yet another non-Zionist way 

of being Jewish. When Zionism made its first appearance in 

Europe, many traditional rabbis in fact forbade their 

followers from having anything to do with Zionist activists. 

They viewed Zionism as meddling with God’s will to retain 

the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They 

totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to 

end the “Exile.” Instead, they had to wait for God’s word on 

this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life. 

While individuals were allowed to visit and study in Palestine 

as pilgrims, this was not to be interpreted as permission for 

a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of 

Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said 

that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom 

and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an 

anthem).® 

Not all the leading rabbis opposed Zionism however. 

There was a small group of quite famous authoritative 

figures, such as the rabbis al-Qalay, Gutmacher, and 

Qalisher, who endorsed the Zionist program. They were a 

Small minority but in hindsight they were an important 

group as they laid the foundation for the national religious 

wing of Zionism. Their religious acrobatics were quite 

impressive. In Israeli historiography they are called the 

“Fathers of the Religious Zionism.” Religious Zionism is a 

very important movement in contemporary Israel, as the 

ideological home of the messianic settler movement, Gush 

Emunim, which colonized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 

from 1967 onwards. These rabbis not only called on Jews to 

leave Europe but also asserted that it was a religious duty, 

not just a nationalist one, for Jews to colonize Palestine 

through the cultivation of its land (not surprisingly the 

natives of the land do not feature in their writings). They 

claimed that such an act would not be meddling with God’s 

will; on the contrary, it would fulfill the prophecies of the 

Prophets and advance the full redemption of the Jewish 

people and the coming of the Messiah.’ 

Most of the leading lights in Orthodox Judaism rejected 

this plan and interpretation. They had another axe to grind 

with Zionism. The new movement not only wished to 

colonize Palestine; it also hoped to secularize the Jewish 

people, to invent the “new Jew” in antithesis to the religious 

Orthodox Jews of Europe. This culminated in the image of a 

new European Jew who could no longer live in Europe, 

because of its anti-Semitism, but had to live as a European 

outside the continent. Thus, like many movements during 

this period, Zionism redefined itself in national terms—but it 

was radically different because it chose a new land for this 

conversion. The Orthodox Jew was ridiculed by the Zionists 

and was viewed as someone who could only be redeemed 

through hard work in Palestine. This transformation is 

beautifully described in Herzl’s futuristic utopian novel, 

Altnueland, which tells the story of a German _ tourist 

expedition arriving in the Jewish state long after it had been 

established.® Before arriving in Palestine, one of the tourists 

had run into a young Orthodox Jewish beggar—he comes 

across him again in Palestine, now secular, educated, and 

extremely rich and content. 

The role of the Bible within Jewish life offered one further 

clear difference between Judaism and Zionism. In the pre- 

Zionist Jewish world, the Bible was not taught as a singular 

text that carried any political or even national connotation in 

the various Jewish educational centers in either Europe or 

the Arab world. The leading rabbis treated the political 

history contained in the Bible, and the idea of Jewish 

sovereignty over the land of Israel, as marginal topics in 

their spiritual world of learning. They were much more 

concerned, as indeed Judaism in general was, with the holy 

writings focusing on the relationship between believers, and 

in particular on their relations with God. 

From “The Lovers of Zion” in 1882 to the Zionist leaders 

on the eve of World War |, who appealed to Britain to 

Support the Jewish claim for Palestine, reference to the Bible 

was quite common. In pursuit of their own interests, Zionist 

leaders fundamentally challenged the traditional biblical 

interpretations. The Lovers of Zion, for instance, read the 

Bible as the story of a Jewish nation born on the land of 

Palestine aS an oppressed people under the yoke of a 

Canaanite regime. The latter exiled the Jewish people to 

Egypt, until they returned to the land and liberated it under 

Joshua’s leadership. The traditional interpretation, in 

contrast, focuses on Abraham and his family as a group of 

people discovering a monotheistic god rather than a nation 

and a homeland. Most readers will be familiar with this 

conventional narrative of the Abrahamites discovering God 

and through trials and tribulations finding themselves in 

Egypt?—hardly a story of an oppressed nation engaged in a 

liberation struggle. However, the latter was the preferred 

Zionist interpretation, which still holds water in Israel today. 

One of the most intriguing uses of the Bible in Zionism is 

that practiced by the socialist wing of the movement. The 

fusion of socialism with Zionism began in earnest after 

Herzl’s death in 1904, as the various socialist factions 

became the leading parties in the World Zionist movement 

and on the ground in Palestine. For the socialists, as one of 

them said, the Bible provided “the myth for our right over 

the land.”?° It was in the Bible that they read stories about 

Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars, which they 

appropriated as describing the ancient golden era of their 

nation’s birth. Returning to the land meant coming back to 

become farmers, shepherds, and kings. Thus, they found 

themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they 

wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as 

a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, 

though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless 

promised them Palestine. 

For many Zionist leaders, the reference in the Bible to 

the land of Palestine was just a means to their ends, and not 

the essence of Zionism. This was clear in particular in texts 

written by Theodor Herzl. In a famous article in The /ewish 

Chronicle (July 10, 1896) he based the Jewish demand for 

Palestine on the Bible, but expressed his wish that the future 

Jewish state be run according to the European political and 

moral philosophies of his time. Herzl was probably more 

secular than the group of leaders who replaced him. This 

prophet of the movement seriously considered alternatives 

to Palestine, such as Uganda, as the promised land of Zion. 

He also looked at other destinations in the north and south 

of America and in Azerbaijan.4! With Herzl’s death in 1904, 

and the rise of hiS successors, Zionism homed in on 

Palestine and the Bible became even more of an asset than 

before as proof of a divine Jewish right to the land. 

The new post-1904 fixation on Palestine as the only 

territory in which Zionism could be implemented was 

reinforced by the growing power of Christian Zionism in 

Britain and in Europe. Theologians who studied the Bible 

and evangelical archeologists who excavated “the Holy 

Land” welcomed the settlement of Jews as confirming their 

religious belief that the “Jewish return” would herald the 

unfolding of the divine promise for the end of time. The 

return of the Jews was the precursor of the return of the 

Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. The Zionist 

project of colonizing Palestine was well served by this 

esoteric religious belief.1? However, behind these religious 

visions lay classical anti-Semitic sentiments. For pushing 

Jewish communities in the direction of Palestine was not 

only a religious imperative; it also helped in the creation of a 

Europe without Jews. It therefore represented a double gain: 

getting rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time 

fulfilling the divine scheme in which the Second Coming was 

to be precipitated by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and 

their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting 

in Hell should they refuse). 

From that moment onwards, the Bible became both the 

justification and the route map for the Zionist colonization of 

Palestine. Historically, the Bible served Zionism well from its 

inception until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It 

played an important role in the dominant Israeli narrative— 

for both domestic and external purposes—claiming that 

Israel is the same land as was promised by God to Abraham 

in the Bible. “Israel” in this narrative existed until 70 ce, 

when the Romans demolished it and exiled its people. The 

religious Commemoration of that date, when the second 

Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, was a day of mourning. 

In Israel it has become a national day of mourning on which 

all leisure-industry businesses, including restaurants, are 

required to close from the evening before. 

The principal scholarly and secular proof for this 

narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of 

what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic 

concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by 

many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical 

text!3). After 70 ce, according to the narrative, the land was 

more or less empty until the Zionist return. However, 

leading Zionists knew that appealing to the authority of the 

Bible would not be enough. Colonizing the already inhabited 

Palestine would require a systematic policy of settlement, 

dispossession, and even ethnic cleansing. To this end, 

portraying the dispossession of Palestine as the fulfillment 

of a divine Christian scheme was priceless when it came to 

galvanizing global Christian support behind Zionism. 

As we have seen, once all other territorial options were 

ruled out and Zionism focused on the reclamation of 

Palestine, the leaders who took over from the early pioneers 

began to inject socialist, and even Marxist, ideology into the 

growing secular movement. The aim now was to establish 

(with the help of God) a secular, socialist, colonialist Jewish 

project in the Holy Land. As the colonized natives quickly 

learned, ultimately their fate was sealed regardless of 

whether the settlers brought with them the Bible, the 

writings of Marx, or the tracts of the [European 

Enlightenment. All that mattered was whether, or how, you 

were included in the settlers’ vision of the future. It is telling 

therefore that in the obsessive records kept by the early 

Zionist leaders and settlers, the natives featured as an 

obstacle, an alien and an enemy, regardless of who they 

were or of their own aspirations. /4 

The first anti-Arab entries in those records were written 

while the settlers were still being hosted by the Palestinians 

on the way to the old colonies, or in the towns. Their 

complaints stemmed from their formative experiences, 

searching for work and a means of subsistence. This 

predicament seemed to affect them universally, whether 

they went to the old colonies or whether they tried their luck 

in the towns. Wherever they were, in order to survive they 

had to work shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or 

workers. Through such intimate contact even the most 

ignorant and defiant settlers realized that Palestine was 

totally an Arab country in its human landscape. 

David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community 

during the Mandatory period and Israel's first prime 

minister, described the Palestinian workers and farmers as 

beit mihush (“an infested hotbed of pain”). Other settlers 

talked about the Palestinians as strangers and aliens. “The 

people here are stranger to us than the Russian or Polish 

peasant,” wrote one of them, adding, “We have nothing in 

common with the majority of the people living here.”+> They 

were surprised to find people in Palestine at all, having been 

told the land was empty. “I was disgusted to find out that in 

Hadera [an early Zionist colony built in 1882] part of the 

houses were occupied by Arabs,” reported one settler, while 

another reported back to Poland that he was appalled to see 

many Arab men, women, and children crossing through 

Rishon LeZion (another colony from 1882).1+°® 

Since the country was not empty, and you had to 

overcome the presence of the natives, it was good to have 

God on your side—even if you were an atheist. Both David 

Ben-Gurion and his close friend and colleague Yitzhak Ben- 

Zvi (who along with Ben-Gurion led the Zionist socialist 

factions in Palestine and later became the second president 

of Israel) used the biblical promise as the main justification 

for the colonization of Palestine. This remained the case for 

the ideologues who succeeded them in the Labor party into 

the mid-1970s, and up to the very shallow secular Bible-ism 

of the Likud party and its offshoots of recent years. 

The interpretation of the Bible as the divine justification 

for Zionism helped the socialists to reconcile their 

adherence to the universal values of solidarity and equality 

with the colonization project of dispossession. Indeed, since 

colonization was the main goal of Zionism, one has to ask 

what kind of socialism this was. After all, in the collective 

memory of many, the golden period of Zionism is associated 

with the collectivist, egalitarian life embodied in the 

establishment of the Kibbutz. This form of life lasted long 

after Israel was founded and it attracted young people from 

all over the world who came to volunteer and experience 

communism in its purest form. Very few of them realized, or 

could have known, that most of the Kibbutzim were built on 

destroyed Palestinian villages, whose populations had been 

expelled in 1948. In justification, the Zionists claimed that 

these villages were old Jewish places mentioned in the Bible, 

and hence that their appropriation was not an occupation 

but a liberation. A special committee of “biblical 

archeologists” would enter a deserted village and determine 

what its name was in biblical times. Energetic officials of the 

Jewish National Fund would then establish the settlement 

with its newly recovered name.!’ A similar method was used 

after 1967 by the then minister of labor, Yigal Alon, a 

secular socialist Jew, for building a new town near Hebron, 

since it “belonged” to the Jewish people, according to the 

Bible. 

Some critical Israeli scholars, most notable among them 

Gershon Shafir and Zeev Sternhell (as the well as the 

American scholar Zachary Lockman), have explained how 

the colonial appropriation of land tainted the supposed 

golden era of socialist Zionism. As these historians show, 

socialism within Zionism, as a praxis and way of life, was 

always a conditional and limited version of the universal 

ideology. The universal values and aspirations that 

characterized the various ideological movements of the 

Western left were very early on nationalized or Zionized in 

Palestine. No wonder then that socialism lost its 

attractiveness for the next generation of settlers.!® 

Yet religion remained an important aspect of the process 

even after the land had been taken from the Palestinians. In 

its name you could invoke and assert an ancient moral right 

to Palestine that challenged every other external claim to 

the land in those dying days of imperialism. This right also 

Superseded the moral claims of the native population. One 

of the most socialist and secular colonialist projects of the 

twentieth century demanded exclusivity in the name of a 

pure divine promise. The reliance on the sacred text proved 

highly profitable for the Zionist settlers and extremely costly 

to the local population. The late and brilliant Michael Prior’s 

last book, The Bible and Colonialism, showed how the same 

kinds of projects were pursued around the globe in ways 

that have much in common with the colonization § of 

Palestine.!9 

After Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 

1967, the Bible continued to be used to similar ends. | have 

already mentioned Yigal Alon, who used the Bible to justify 

building a Jewish town, Qiryat Arba, on land expropriated 

from the people of Hebron, the nearby Palestinian town. 

Qiryat Arba quickly became a hotbed for people who took 

the Bible even more seriously as a guide to action. They 

selectively chose those biblical chapters and phrases that in 

their eyes justified the dispossession of the Palestinians. As 

the years of the occupation continued, so too did the regime 

of brutality against the dispossessed. This process of 

drawing political legitimization from a sacred text can lead 

to fanaticism with dangerous consequences. The Bible, for 

instance, has references to genocide: the Amalekites were 

killed to the last by Joshua. Today there are those, thankfully 

for now only a fanatical minority, who refer not only to the 

Palestinians as Amalekites but also to those who are not 

Jewish enough in their eyes.2° 

Similar references to genocide in the name of God 

appear in the Jewish Haggadah for Pesach (Passover). The 

main tale, of the Passover Seder—where God sends Moses 

and the Israelites to a land inhabited by others, to possess it 

as they see fit—is of course not an imperative issue for the 

vast majority of Jews. It is a literary text, not a manual for 

war. However, it can be exploited by the new stream of 

Jewish messianic thinking, as was the case with the 

assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and, in the summer 

of 2015, the burning to death first of a teenager in one 

incident, and then of two parents and their baby in another. 

Israel’s new minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked, entertained 

similar ideas, so far only for Palestinians who have died in 

their attempts to resist Israel: their whole family, she said, 

Should “follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They 

Should go, as should the physical homes in which they 

raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be 

raised there.”2! For the time being, this is just a warning for 

the future. Since 1882, as we have seen, the Bible has been 

used as a justification for dispossession. However, in the 

early years of the state of Israel, 1948-67, reference to the 

Bible subsided and was only employed on the right-wing 

margins of the Zionist movement to justify their depiction of 

the Palestinians as subhuman and as the eternal enemies of 

the Jewish people. After the occupation of the West Bank 

and the Gaza Strip in 1967, these messianic and 

fundamentalist Jews, growing up in the Religious National 

Party, MAFDAL, seized the opportunity to transform their 

hallucinations into real action on the ground. They settled 

everywhere in the newly occupied territories, with or 

without the consent of the government. They created 

islands of Jewish life within Palestinian territory, and began 

to behave as if they owned all of it. 

The most militant factions of Gush Emunim, the post- 

1967 settlement movement, took advantage of the very 

particular circumstances created by the Israeli rule over the 

West Bank and the Gaza Strip to go wild in their license to 

dispossess and abuse in the name of the sacred texts. 

Israeli law did not apply in the occupied territories, which 

were ruled by military emergency regulations. However, this 

military legal regime did not apply to the settlers, who were 

in many ways immune from sanction in both legal systems. 

Their settling by force in the middle of Palestinian 

neighborhoods in Hebron and Jerusalem, uprooting of 

Palestinian olive trees, and setting fire to Palestinian fields 

were all justified as part of the divine duty to settle in “Eretz 

Israel.” 

But the settlers’ violent interpretation of the biblical 

message was not confined to the occupied territories. They 

began to push into the heart of the mixed Arab-Jewish towns 

in Israel, such as Acre, Jaffa and Ramleh, in order to disturb 

the delicate modus vivendi that had prevailed there for 

years. The movement of settlers into these sensitive spots 

inside the pre-1967 Israeli border had the potential of 

undermining, in the name of the Bible, the already strained 

relations between the Jewish state and its Palestinian 

minority. 

The final reason offered for the Zionist reclamation of the 

Holy Land, as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews 

around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the 

Holocaust. However, even if this was true, it might have 

been possible to find a solution that was not restricted to 

the biblical map and that did not dispossess the 

Palestinians. This position was voiced by a quite a few well- 

known personalities, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson 

Mandela. These commentators tried to suggest that the 

Palestinians should be asked to provide a safe haven for 

persecuted Jews alongside the native population, not in 

place of it. But the Zionist movement regarded such 

proposals as heresy. 

The difference between settling alongside the native 

people and simply displacing them was recognized by 

Mahatma Gandhi when he was asked by the Jewish 

philosopher, Martin Buber, to lend his support to the Zionist 

project. In 1938, Buber had been asked by Ben-Gurion to 

put pressure on several well-known moral figures to show 

their public support for Zionism. They felt that approval from 

Gandhi, as the leader of a nonviolent national struggle 

against imperialism, would be especially useful, and were 

prepared to leverage his respect for Buber in order to get it. 

Gandhi’s major statement on Palestine and the Jewish 

question appeared in his widely circulated editorial in the 

Harijan of November 11, 1938, in the middle of a major 

rebellion by the native Palestinians against the British 

government’s pro-Zionist policies. Gandhi began his piece 

by saying that all his sympathies lay with the Jews, who as a 

people had been subjected to inhuman treatment and 

persecution for centuries. But, he added, 

My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for 

the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The 

sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the 

Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, 

like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they 

are born and where they earn their livelinood?22 

Gandhi thus questioned the very foundational logic of 

political Zionism, rejecting the idea of a Jewish state in the 

promised land by pointing out that the “Palestine of the 

Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.” Thus, 

Gandhi disapproved of the Zionist project for both political 

and religious reasons. The endorsement of that project by 

the British government only alienated Gandhi even further. 

He had no doubts about who Palestine belonged to: 

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to 

the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the 

Jews on the Arabs ... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to 

reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews 

partly or wholly as their national home.?? 

Gandhi’s response to the Palestine question contains 

different layers of meaning, ranging from an ethical position 

to political realism. What is interesting is that, while firmly 

believing in the inseparability of religion and politics, he 

consistently and vehemently rejected the cultural and 

religious nationalism of Zionism. A religious justification for 

claiming a nation state did not appeal to him in any 

substantial sense. Buber responded to this article by trying 

to justify Zionism, but Gandhi had apparently had enough 

and the correspondence petered out. 

Indeed, the space the Zionist movement demanded for 

itself was not determined by the need to rescue persecuted 

Jews, but by the wish to take as much of Palestine as 

possible with as few inhabitants as was practical. Sober and 

secular Jewish scholars attempted to remain “scientific” in 

translating a hazy promise from an ancient past into a 

present fact. The project had been started already by the 

chief historian of the Jewish community in Mandatory 

Palestine, Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), and was continued 

intensively after the creation of the state in 1948. Its end 

product is represented by the quotation from the website of 

the Israeli foreign ministry reproduced in Chapter 1. Dinur’s 

task in the 1930s, like that of his successors ever since, was 

to prove scientifically that there had been a Jewish presence 

in Palestine ever since Roman times. 

Not that anyone doubted it. Despite the historical 

evidence that the Jews who lived in eighteenth-century 

Palestine rejected the notion of a Jewish state, as did the 

Orthodox Jews in the late nineteenth century, this was 

rejected out of hand in the twentieth century. Dinur and his 

colleagues used the statistic that Jews made up no more 

than 2 percent of the population of eighteenth-century 

Palestine to prove the validity of the biblical promise and of 

the modern Zionist demand for Palestine.2* This narrative 

has become the standard, accepted history. One of Britain’s 

most distinguished professors of history, Sir Martin Gilbert, 

produced many years ago the Atlas of the Arab-l/sraeli 

Conflict, published across several editions by Cambridge 

University Press.2°? The Atlas begins the history of the 

conflict in biblical times, taking it for granted that the 

territory was a Jewish kingdom to which the Jews returned 

after 2,000 years of exile. Its opening maps tell the whole 

Story: the first is of biblical Palestine; the second of Palestine 

under the Romans; the third of Palestine during the time of 

the crusaders; and the fourth, of Palestine in 1882. Thus, 

nothing of importance happened between the medieval era 

and the arrival of the first Zionists. Only when foreigners are 

in Palestine—Romans, Crusaders, Zionists—is it worth 

mentioning. 

Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same 

message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. 

According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 

to all schools in Israel: “the Bible provides the cultural 

infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land 

is anchored.”2© Bible studies are now a crucial and 

expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular 

focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that 

justifies the claim to the land. The biblical stories and the 

national lessons that can be learned from them are fused 

together with the study of the Holocaust and of the creation 

of the state of Israel in 1948. There is a direct line from this 

2014 letter back to the evidence given by David Ben-Gurion 

in 1937 to the Royal Peel Commission (the British inquiry set 

up to try to find a solution to the emerging conflict). In the 

public discussions on the future of Palestine, Ben-Gurion 

waved a copy of the Bible at the members of the 

committee, shouting: “This is our Qushan [the Ottoman land 

registry proof], our right to Palestine does not come from 

the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter.”2/ 

Historically, of course, it makes no sense to teach the 

Bible, what happened to the Jews of Europe, and the 1948 

war as one historical chapter. But ideologically the three 

items are linked together and indoctrinated as the basic 

justification for the Jewish state in our time. This discussion 

of the role of the Bible in modern-day Israel leads us to our 

next question: is Zionism a colonialist movement? 

Chapter 4 

Zionism Is Not Colonialism 

The land of Palestine was not empty when the first Zionist 

settlers arrived there in 1882. This fact was known to the 

Zionist leaders even before the first Jewish settlers arrived. 

A delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist 

organizations reported back to their colleagues: “the bride is 

beautiful but married to another man.”! Nevertheless, when 

they first arrived, the early settlers were surprised to 

encounter the locals whom they regarded as invaders and 

strangers. In their view, the native Palestinians had usurped 

their homeland. They were told by their leaders that the 

locals were not natives, that they had no rights to the land. 

Instead they were a problem that had to, and could, be 

resolved. 

This conundrum was not unique: Zionism was a settler 

colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans 

who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, 

and New Zealand. Settler colonialism differs from classical 

colonialism in three respects. The first is that settler 

colonies rely only initially and temporarily on the empire for 

their survival. In fact, in many cases, as in Palestine and 

South Africa, the settlers do not belong to the same nation 

as the imperial power that initially supports them. More 

often than not they ceded from the empire, redefining 

themselves as a new nation, sometimes through a liberation 

struggle against the very empire that supported them (as 

happened during the American Revolution for instance). The 

second difference is that settler colonialism is motivated by 

a desire to take over land in a foreign country, while 

classical colonialism covets the natural resources in its new 

geographical possessions. The third difference concerns the 

way they treat the new destination of settlement. Unlike 

conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an 

empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were 

refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. 

The problem was that the new “homelands” were already 

inhabited by other people. In response, the settler 

communities argued that the new land was theirs by divine 

or moral right, even if, in cases other than Zionism, they did 

not claim to have lived there thousands of years ago. In 

many cases, the accepted method for overcoming such 

obstacles was the genocide of the indigenous locals. 

One of the leading scholars on settler colonialism, Patrick 

Wolfe, argues that settler colonial projects were motivated 

by what he calls “the logic of elimination.” This meant that 

the settlers developed the necessary moral justifications 

and practical means to remove the natives. As Wolfe 

indicates, at times this logic entailed actual genocide, at 

other times, ethnic cleansing or an oppressive regime that 

denied the natives any rights.2 | would add that there was 

another logic permeating the logic of elimination: the logic 

of dehumanization. As a victim yourself of persecution in 

Europe, you needed first to dehumanize a whole native 

nation or society, before being willing to do the same, or 

worse, to fellow humans. 

As a result of these twin logics, whole nations and 

civilizations were wiped out by the settler colonialist 

movement in the Americas. Native Americans, south and 

north, were massacred, converted by force to Christianity, 

and finally confined to reservations. A similar fate awaited 

the aboriginals in Australia and to a lesser extent the Maoris 

in New Zealand. In South Africa, such processes ended with 

the imposition of the apartheid system upon the local 

people, while a more complex system was imposed on the 

Algerians for about a century. 

Zionism is therefore not sui generis but an example of a 

wider process. This is important not just for how we 

understand the machinations of the colonial project, but 

also for our interpretation of the Palestinian resistance to it. 

If one asserts that Palestine was a land without people 

waiting for the people without a land, then the Palestinians 

are robbed of any argument for protecting themselves. All 

their efforts to hold onto their land become baseless violent 

acts against the rightful owners. As such, it is difficult to 

separate the discussion of Zionism as colonialism from the 

question of the Palestinians as a colonized native people. 

The two are linked together in the same analysis. 

The official Israeli narrative or foundational mythology 

refuses to allow the Palestinians even a modicum of moral 

right to resist the Jewish colonization of their homeland that 

began in 1882. From the very beginning, Palestinian 

resistance was depicted as motivated by hate for Jews. It 

was accused of promoting a protean anti-Semitic campaign 

of terror that began when the first settlers arrived and 

continued until the creation of the state of Israel. The diaries 

of the early Zionists tell a different story. They are full of 

anecdotes revealing how the settlers were well received by 

the Palestinians, who offered them shelter and in many 

cases taught them how to cultivate the land.* Only when it 

became clear that the settlers had not come to live 

alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the 

Palestinian resistance begin. And when that resistance 

started, it quickly took the form of every’ other 

anticolonialist struggle. 

The idea that impoverished Jews were entitled to a safe 

haven was not objected to by the Palestinians and those 

Supporting them. However, this was not reciprocated by the 

Zionist leaders. While Palestinians offered shelter and 

employment to the early settlers, and did not object to 

working should to shoulder with them under whatever 

ownership, the Zionist ideologues were very clear about the 

need both to push the Palestinians out of the country’s labor 

market and to sanction those settlers who were still 

employing Palestinians or who worked alongside them. This 

was the idea of avoda aravit, (Hebrew Labor), which meant 

mainly the need to bring an end to avoda aravit, (Arab 

Labor). Gershon Shafir, in his seminal work on the Second 

Aliyah, the second wave of Zionist immigration (1904-14), 

explains well how this ideology developed and was 

practiced.° The leader of that wave, David Ben-Gurion (who 

became the leader of the community and then prime 

minister of Israel), constantly referred to Arab labor as an 

illness for which the only cure was Jewish labor. In his and 

other settlers’ letters, Hebrew workers are characterized as 

the healthy blood that will immunize the nation from 

rottenness and death. Ben-Gurion also remarked that 

employing “Arabs” reminded him of the old Jewish story of a 

stupid man who resuscitated a dead lion that then devoured 

him.°® 

The initial positive Palestinian reaction confused some of 

the settlers themselves throughout the period of British rule 

(1918-48). The colonialist impulse was to ignore the native 

population and create gated communities. However, life 

offered different opportunities. There is extensive evidence 

of coexistence and cooperation between the newly arrived 

Jews and the native population almost everywhere. Jewish 

settlers, particularly in the urban centers, could not survive 

without engaging, at least economically, with the 

Palestinians. Despite numerous attempts by the Zionist 

leadership to disrupt these interactions, hundreds of joint 

businesses were formed throughout those years, alongside 

trade-union cooperation and agricultural collaboration. But 

without political support from above this could not open the 

way for a different reality in Palestine.’ 

At the same time, the Palestinian political leaders grew 

more hostile to such joint initiatives as the Zionist 

movement became more aggressive. The slow realization 

among the Palestinian political, social, and cultural elite that 

Zionism was a colonialist project strengthened the common 

national identity in opposition to the settlers. And eventually 

there was also Palestinian pressure from above to cease the 

cooperation and _ interaction. The Palestinian political 

movement took time to emerge, developing out of a small 

group, the Muslim-Christian society, in several Palestinian 

towns. The guiding principles of the society were primarily 

modern and secular, added to the twofold concerns of the 

Arab world at large: a pan-Arab overview wedded to a local 

patriotism that became ever stronger following World War Il. 

The first eruption of pan-Arab nationalism had occurred 

in the second half of the nineteenth century. It brought with 

it the hope of transforming the Ottoman world into an 

independent Arab republic, a bit like the United States of 

America, or an Arab-Ottoman empire, like the Austro- 

Hungarian one. When it transpired that this impulse could 

not withstand the imperial interests of Britain and France, 

who wished to divide the Ottoman Middle East between 

themselves, a more local version of nationalism developed, 

adapting itself to the map created by the Ottoman 

administrative boundaries and the division of the area by 

the colonial powers. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the first 

Arab nationalist impulse is called gawmiyya, the later local 

version, Wataniyya. The Palestinian community played a role 

in both. Its intellectuals were engaged with, and were 

members of, the various organizations and movements 

seeking Arab unity, independence, and self-determination. 

At the same time, even before Britain defined, with the help 

of other European powers, the geopolitical space called 

Palestine, there was a particular Palestinian existence 

manifested in the customs of people, their Arabic dialect, 

and shared history. 

When the Zionists arrived in Palestine in the late 

nineteenth century, the two impulses were still at work 

among the Palestinian community. Many of its intellectuals 

and activists were dreaming of a united Arab republic. 

Others were taken with the idea of a Greater Syria—willing 

for Damascus to be the center of a new state with Palestine 

a part of it. When the British arrived and the international 

community, through the League of Nations, began 

discussing the future of Palestine, prominent Palestinians 

produced a journal called Southern Syria, and even 

considered establishing a party under this name.® In 1919, 

when US president Woodrow Wilson sent an inquiry, the 

King-Crane Commission, to discern the wishes of the 

Palestinians, the committee discovered that the majority 

wanted the territory to be independent. 

Whether they were pan-Arabists, or local patriots, or 

wanted to be part of Greater Syria, the Palestinians were 

united in their wish not to be part of a Jewish state. Their 

leaders objected to any political solution that would hand 

any part of the small country to the settler community. As 

they clearly declared in their negotiations with the British at 

the end of the 1920s, they were willing to share with those 

who had already arrived, but could accept no more.’ The 

collective voice of the Palestinians was crystallized in the 

executive body of the Palestinian National Conference that 

met every year for a decade, starting in 1919. This body 

represented the Palestinians in their negotiations with both 

the British government and the Zionist movement. 

However, before that happened, the British tried to advance 

an agreement of equality between the parties. In 1928, the 

Palestinian leadership, notwithstanding the wishes of the 

overall majority of their people, consented to allow the 

Jewish settlers equal representation in the future bodies of 

the state. The Zionist leadership was in favor of the idea 

only for as long as it suspected the Palestinians would reject 

it. Shared representation stood against everything Zionism 

was supposed to be. So, when the proposal was accepted by 

the Palestinian party, it was rejected by the Zionists. This 

led to the riots of 1929, which included the massacre of Jews 

in Hebron and a much higher death toll among the 

Palestinian community./9 But there were also other reasons 

for the wave of violence, the most serious since the 

beginning of the Mandate. It was triggered by the 

dispossession of Palestinian tenants from land owned by 

absentee landlords and local notables, which had been 

bought by the Jewish National Fund. The tenants had lived 

for centuries on the land but they were now forced into 

slums in the towns. In one such slum, northeast of Haifa, the 

exiled Syrian preacher, 1zz ad-Din al-Qassam, recruited his 

first followers for an Islamic holy war against the British and 

the Zionist movement in the early 1930s. His legacy was 

ensured when his name was adopted by the military wing of 

the Hamas movement. 

After 1930, the Palestinian leadership was 

institutionalized in the form of the Arab Higher Committee, a 

body that represented all the political parties and 

movements in the Palestinian community. Until 1937 it 

continued to attempt a compromise with the British 

government, but by then both the Zionists and the 

imperialists had ceased to care what the Palestinian point of 

view was, and went on unilaterally to determine the future 

of the territory. By this time the Palestinian national 

movement regarded Zionism as a colonialist project that 

had to be defeated. Yet even in 1947, when Britain decided 

to refer the question to the United Nations, the Palestinians 

suggested, with other Arab states, a unitary state in 

Palestine to replace the Mandate. The UN deliberated the 

fate of Palestine for seven months and had to decide 

between two options: the one suggested by the Palestinians 

of a unitary state that would absorb the existing Jewish 

settlers but would not allow any further Zionist colonization; 

the other suggesting a partition of the land into an Arab 

state and Jewish state. The UN preferred the latter option, 

and hence the message to Palestinians was: you cannot 

Share your life on the land with the settlers—all you can 

hope for is to salvage half of it and concede the other half to 

the settlers. 

Thus one can depict Zionism as a_ settler colonial 

movement and the Palestinian national movement as an 

anticolonialist one. In this context, we can understand the 

behavior and policies of the leader of the community, Hajj 

Amin al-Husayni, before and during World War Il in a 

different light than the narrative normally served up as 

historical fact. AS many readers will know, one of the 

common allegations propagated endlessly by the Israelis is 

that the Palestinian leader was a Nazi sympathizer. The 

mufti of Jerusalem was not an angel. At a very early age he 

was chosen by the notables of Palestine, and by the British, 

to hold the most important religious position in the 

community. The position, which al-Husayni held throughout 

the Mandatory period (1922-48), brought him political 

power and a high social standing. He attempted to lead the 

community in the face of the Zionist colonization, and when 

in the 1930s people such as |Izz ad-Din al-Qassam pushed 

for an armed struggle he was able to steer the majority 

away from this violent option. Nevertheless, when he 

endorsed the idea of strikes, demonstrations, and other 

ways of trying to change British policy, he became the 

empire’s enemy, and had to escape from Jerusalem in 

1938.1! In the circumstances he was forced into the arms of 

his enemy’s enemy, in this case Italy and Germany. While in 

political asylum in Germany for two years, he came under 

the influence of Nazi doctrine and confused the distinction 

between Judaism and Zionism. His willingness to serve as a 

radio commentator for the Nazis and to help recruit Muslims 

in the Balkans to the German war effort no doubt stains his 

career. But he did not act any differently from the Zionist 

leaders in the 1930s, who themselves sought an alliance 

with the Nazis against the British Empire, or from all the 

other anticolonialist movements who wanted rid of the 

Empire by way of alliances with its principal enemies. 

When the war ended in 1945, the Mufti returned to his 

senses and tried to organize the Palestinians on the eve of 

the Nakbah, but he was already powerless, and the world he 

belonged to, that of the Arab Ottoman urban notables, was 

gone. If he deserves criticism, it is not for his errors 

concerning Zionism. It is for his lack of sympathy with the 

plight of the peasants in Palestine, and _ for his 

disagreements with other notables, which weakened the 

anticolonialist movement. Nothing he did justifies his entry 

in the American-Zionist project The Encyclopedia of the 

Holocaust being the second longest after Hitler’s.+2 

Ultimately, neither his mistakes nor his achievements had 

much impact on the course of Palestinian history. He was 

absolved of being treated as a war criminal by the allies, 

and allowed to return to Egypt, but not Palestine, at the end 

of the war. 

With all his faults, before he escaped from Palestine in 

1938, and to a certain extent after that in exile, he led an 

anticolonialist liberation movement. The fact that he was 

Mufti—one who also believed that religion should be 

recruited in the struggle against a colonialist movement that 

coveted his homeland and threatened his people’s existence 

—is not relevant. Anticolonialist movements such as the FLN 

in Algeria had a strong connection to Islam, as did many 

liberation movements in the Arab world struggling for 

independence from Italy, Britain, and France after World War 

ll. Nor was the Mufti’s commitment to violence, or that of 

other leaders such as al-Qassam (killed by the British in 

1935 and buried near Haifa), unique in the history of 

anticolonialist struggles. The liberation movements in South 

America and Southeast Asia were not pacifist organizations, 

and they put their faith in the armed struggle as much as in 

the political process. Had the Mufti been able to return to 

Palestine he would have realized not only that Zionism was 

a successful settler colonial project, but more importantly 

that it was on the eve of its most crucial existential project. 

By 1945, Zionism had attracted more than half a million 

settlers to a country whose population was about 2 million. 

Some came with the permission of the Mandatory 

government, some without. The local native population was 

not consulted, nor was its objection to the project of turning 

Palestine into a Jewish state taken into account. The settlers 

managed to build a state within a state—constructing all the 

necessary infrastructure—but they failed in two respects. 

They managed to buy up only 7 percent of the land, which 

would not suffice for a future state. They were also still a 

minority—one third in a country in which they wanted to be 

the exclusive nation. 

As with all earlier settler colonial movements, the answer 

to these problems was the twin logic of annihilation and 

dehumanization. The settlers’ only way of expanding their 

hold on the land beyond the 7 percent, and of ensuring an 

exclusive demographic majority, was to remove the natives 

from their homeland. Zionism is thus a settler colonial 

project, and one that has not yet been completed. Palestine 

is not entirely Jewish demographically, and although Israel 

controls all of it politically by various means, the state of 

Israel is still colonizing—building new colonies in the Galilee, 

the Negev, and the West Bank for the sake of increasing the 

number of Jews there—dispossessing Palestinians, and 

denying the right of the natives to their homeland. 

Chapter 

: The Palestinians 

Voluntarily 

Left Their Homeland in 

1948 

There are two questions relating to this assumption and 

both will be examined here. First: was there was a will to 

expel the Palestinians? Second: on the eve of the 1948 war, 

were the Palestinians called upon to voluntarily leave their 

homes, as the Zionist mythology has it? 

The centrality of the transfer idea in Zionist thought was 

analyzed, to my mind very convincingly, in Nur Masalha’s 

book, Expulsion of the Palestinians. Here | will just add 

some quotations to emphasize the point that the Zionist 

leadership and ideologues could not envision a successful 

implementation of their project without getting rid of the 

native population, either through agreement or by force. 

More recently, after years of denial, Zionist historians such 

as Anita Shapira have accepted that their heroes, the 

leaders of the Zionist movement, seriously contemplated 

transferring the Palestinians. However, they hang on 

desperately to the fact there was a confusion between 

“compulsory” and “voluntary” transfer? It is true that in 

public meetings all the Zionist leaders and ideologues talked 

about transfer by agreement. But even those speeches 

reveal a bitter truth: there is no such a thing as voluntary 

transfer. It is semantics not practice. 

Berl Katznelson was probably one of the most important 

Zionist ideologues in the 1930s. He was known as the moral 

conscience of the movement. His support for transfer was 

unequivocal. At the twentieth Zionist conference, convened 

Shortly after the British made their first significant proposal 

for peace, he strongly voiced his support for the idea. He 

told the attendees, 

My conscience is completely clear. A distant neighbor is better than a 

close enemy. They will not lose by their transfer and we certainly will not. 

In the final analysis this is a political reform of benefit to both sides. For a 

long time | have been convinced that this is the best solution ... and this 

must happen one of these days.? 

When he heard that the British government was considering 

the possibility of moving the Palestinians within Palestine, 

he was greatly disappointed: “The transfer to ‘inside of 

Palestine’ would mean the area of Shechem (Nablus). | 

believe that their future lies in Syria and Iraq.” 

In those days, leaders like Katznelson hoped that the 

British would convince, or induce, the local population to 

leave. In an infamous letter from Ben-Gurion to his son 

Amos in October 1937, he already understood that it might 

be necessary to do it by force.° Publicly, that same year, 

Ben-Gurion supported Katznelson, saying, 

The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed 

Jewish state could give us something we never had, even when we stood 

on our own during the days of the first and second Temples ... We are 

given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest 

imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this 

is national consolidation in a free homeland.°® 

In a similarly clear way he told the Zionist assembly in 1937, 

“In many parts of the country it will not be possible to settle 

without transferring the Arab fellahin,” which he hoped 

would be done by the British.’ But, with or without the 

British, Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion 

in the future of the Zionist project in Palestine when he 

wrote that same year, “With compulsory transfer we would 

have a vast area for settlement ... | Support compulsory 

transfer. | don’t see anything immoral in it.”® 

In 2008, an Israeli journalist, reviewing these statements 

from the past, concluded that they were still acceptable to 

many Israelis seventy years later. Indeed, since 1937, the 

expulsion of the Palestinians has been part of the Zionist 

DNA of the modern Jewish state.? However, the process was 

not straightforward. Ben-Gurion and the other leaders were 

cautious about what to do should it prove impossible to 

convince the Palestinians to leave. Beyond that they were 

not inclined to articulate any policy. All Ben-Gurion was 

willing to say was that he did not object to forceful transfer 

but he did not deem it necessary at that historical juncture. 

This ambivalence was brought to Katznelson’s attention. 

At a public meeting in 1942, he was asked about it by some 

leftist Zionist leaders who thought that Ben-Gurion had 

renounced the idea of transfer of the Palestinians. He 

replied, “To the extent that | know Zionist ideology, this 

[transfer] is part of the realization of Zionism, the perception 

of this Zionism is the transfer of the people from country to 

country—a transfer by agreement.”!° In public, Ben-Gurion, 

the leader of the movement, and other ideologues such as 

Katznelson, were all in favor of what they called voluntary 

transfer. Ben-Gurion said, “The transfer of the Arabs is 

easier than any other transfer since there are Arab states in 

the area”; he added that it would be an improvement for the 

Palestinians to be transferred (he did not explain why). He 

suggested transferring them to Syria. He also kept talking 

about voluntary transfer.!+ 

This was not, however, an honest position, nor was it a 

possible one. In fact, colleagues of these leaders and 

ideologues could not see how a transfer could be anything 

but compulsory. At a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency 

Executive in June 1938 devoted to transfer, it seems the 

assembled members, including Ben-Gurion, Katznelson, 

Sharett, and Ussishkin, were all in favor of compulsory 

transfer. Katznelson tried to explain what he meant by 

compulsory: “What is meant by compulsory transfer? Is it 

transfer against the wishes of the Arab State? Against such 

wishes no force in the world could implement such a 

transfer.”"!2. He explained that compulsory meant 

overcoming the resistance of the Palestinians themselves: 

If you have to make a transfer agreement with each Arab village and 

every individual Arab, you will never resolve the problem. We are 

continually carrying out transfers of individual Arabs, but the question will 

be the transfer of large numbers of Arabs with the agreement of the Arab 

State.1> 

This was the trick. The talk was of voluntary transfer, and 

the strategy was incremental until the opportunity emerged 

for a massive transfer in 1948. Even if you accept Benny 

Morris’s thesis in his book, The Birth of the Palestinian 

Refugee Problem, that the transfer was in_ practice 

incremental and not massive, after a certain number has 

been reached, however incrementally, the result is still a 

massive ethnic cleansing—of which more will be said later. 

From the minutes of the June 1938 meeting we learn that 

the language of voluntary transfer actually meant 

compulsory. Ben-Gurion stated that carrying out a 

compulsory transfer, especially if the British did it, “would 

be the greatest achievement in the history of the Jewish 

settlement in Palestine.” He added, “I favor compulsory 

transfer; | see nothing unethical in it.” Menachem Ussishkin, 

a prominent leader and ideologue, added that “it was most 

ethical to transfer Arabs out of Palestine and resettle them 

in better conditions.” He hinted that this was probably the 

logic behind the Balfour Declaration. Moreover, no time was 

wasted in beginning a discussion about numbers and the 

means of achieving them. These matters would be finalized 

only in 1948, but the foundations were laid at this 1938 

meeting. A very small minority of those attending objected 

to compulsory transfer. Syria was the preferred destination 

and the hope was to be able to move at least 100,000 

Palestinians in the first wave. 1/4 

The discussion about transfer was put on a hold during 

World War II as the community focused on increasing the 

number of Jewish immigrants and the establishment of the 

future state. The conversation was reignited when it became 

clear that Britain was about to leave Palestine. The British 

decision was announced in February 1947, which is when 

we see an intensification of the discussion on forced 

transfer. In my book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, | 

examine the way these discussions from 1947 evolved into 

a master plan for the massive expulsion of the Palestinians 

in March 1948 (Plan D), to which | will return later in this 

chapter. The official Israeli line, however, has not changed 

for years: the Palestinians became refugees because their 

leaders, and the leaders of the Arab world, told them to 

leave Palestine before the Arab armies invaded and kicked 

out the Jews, after which they could then return. But there 

was no such call—it is a myth invented by the Israeli foreign 

ministry. The position of the Israeli foreign office on the very 

Short-lived UN attempt to bring peace in the immediate 

aftermath of the 1948 war was that the refugees ran away. 

However, that particular peace process (which lasted for a 

few months in the first half of 1949) was so brief that Israel 

was not asked to provide any evidence for this claim, and 

for many years the refugee problem was expunged from the 

international agenda. 

The need to provide proof emerged in the early 1960s, as 

we have learned recently thanks to the diligent work of Shay 

Hazkani, a freelance reporter working for Haaretz.!> 

According to his research, during the early days of the 

Kennedy administration in Washington, the US government 

began to exert pressure on Israel to allow the return of the 

1948 refugees to Israel. The official US position since 1948 

had been to support the Palestinian right of return. In fact, 

already in 1949, the Americans had exerted pressure on 

Israel to repatriate the refugees and imposed sanctions on 

the Jewish state for its refusal to comply. However, this was 

a short-term pressure, and as the Cold War intensified the 

Americans lost interest in the problem until John F. Kennedy 

came to power (he was also the last US president to refuse 

to provide Israel with vast military aid; after his 

assassination the faucet was fully open—a state of affairs 

that led Oliver Stone to allude to an Israeli connection to the 

president’s murder in his film /FkK). 

One of the first acts of the Kennedy administration on 

this front was to take an active part in a UN General 

Assembly discussion on the topic in the summer of 1961. 

Prime Minister Ben-Gurion panicked. He was convinced that, 

with American blessing, the UN might force Israel to 

repatriate the refugees. He wanted Israeli academics to 

conduct research that would prove that the Palestinians left 

voluntarily, and to this end approached the Shiloah Institute, 

the leading center for Middle Eastern studies in Israeli 

academia at the time. A junior researcher, Ronni Gabai, was 

entrusted with the task. With his permit to access classified 

documents, he reached the conclusion that expulsions, fear, 

and intimidation were the major causes of the Palestinian 

exodus. What he did not find was any evidence for a call 

from the Arab leadership for the Palestinians to leave so as 

to make way for the invading armies. However, there is a 

conundrum here. The conclusion just mentioned appeared 

in Gabai’s doctorate on the topic and is recalled by him as 

the one he sent to the foreign ministry.1© And yet in his 

research in the archives Hazkani found a letter from Gabai 

to the foreign ministry summarizing his research and citing 

the Arab call to leave as the main cause for the exodus. 

Hazkani interviewed Gabai, who even today is adamant 

that he did not write this letter, and that it did not reflect 

the research he had undertaken. Someone, we still do not 

know who, sent a different summary of the research. In any 

case, Ben-Gurion was not happy. He felt the summary—he 

did not read the whole research—was not poignant enough. 

He asked for a researcher he knew, Uri Lubrani, later one of 

Mossad’s experts on Iran, to undertake a second study. 

Lubrani passed the bucket to Moshe Maoz, today one of 

Israel’s leading orientalists. Maoz delivered the goods, and 

in September 1962 Ben-Gurion had what he_ himself 

described as our White Paper that proves beyond doubt that 

the Palestinians fled because they were told to do so. Moaz 

later went on to do a PhD in Oxford under the late Albert 

Hourani (on a non-related topic), but said in an interview 

that his research was affected less by the documents he had 

seen and more by the political assignment he received.’ 

The documents Gabai examined in early 1961 were 

declassified in the late 1980s, and several historians, among 

them Benny Morris and myself, saw for the first time clear 

evidence for what pushed the Palestinians out of Palestine. 

Although Morris and | have not agreed on how premeditated 

and planned the expulsion was, we concurred that there 

was no call from Arab and Palestinian leaders for people to 

leave. Our research, since described as the work of the “new 

historians,” reaffirmed Gabai’s conclusion that the 

Palestinians lost their homes and homeland mainly through 

expulsion, intimidation, and fear.+® 

Morris asserted that the onset of the fighting between 

Israel and the Arab armies that entered the country on the 

day the British Mandate ended, May 15, 1948, was the main 

reason for what he called the “Birth of the Palestinian 

refugee problem.” | have argued that it was not the war 

itself, since half of those who became refugees—hundreds 

of thousands of Palestinians—had been expelled before it 

had even commenced. Moreover, | claimed that the war was 

initiated by Israel in order to secure the _ historical 

opportunity to expel the Palestinians.!9 

The idea that the Palestinians left voluntarily is not the 

only false assumption associated with the 1948 war. There 

are three others that are often aired to explain away the 

events of that year. The first is that the Palestinians are to 

be blamed for what happened to them since they rejected 

the UN partition plan of November 1947. This allegation 

ignores the colonialist nature of the Zionist movement. 

What is clear is that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians 

can in no way be justified as a “punishment” for their 

rejecting a UN peace plan that was devised without any 

consultation with the Palestinians themselves. 

The two other assumptions associated with 1948 are that 

Israel was a David fighting an Arab Goliath, and that after 

the war Israel extended the hand of peace but the 

Palestinians and the wider Arab world rejected the gesture. 

Research on the first assumption has proved that the 

Palestinians had no military power whatsoever, and that the 

Arab states sent only a relatively small contingent of troops 

—smaller compared to the Jewish forces, and far less well 

equipped or trained. Moreover, these troops were sent into 

Palestine not as a reaction to the declaration of the founding 

of the state of Israel, but in response to Zionist operations 

that had already begun in February 1948, and in particular 

in the wake of the well-publicized massacre in the village of 

Der Yassin near Jerusalem in April 1948.29 

As for the third myth that the Israeli state extended a 

hand of peace in the aftermath of the conflict, the 

documents show the opposite. In fact, an intransigent Israeli 

leadership clearly refused to enter into negotiations over 

the future of post-Mandatory Palestine or consider the return 

of the people who had been expelled or had fled. While Arab 

governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to 

participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace 

initiative, the Israeli leadership turned a blind eye when in 

September 1948 Jewish terrorists assassinated the UN 

peace mediator, Count Bernadotte. They further rejected 

any new proposals for peace adopted by the body that 

replaced Bernadotte, the Palestine Conciliation Commission 

(PCC), as new negotiations commenced at the end of 1948. 

As a result, the same UN General Assembly that had voted 

by a two-thirds majority for the partition plan in November 

1947, voted with no objections for a new peace plan in 

December 1948. This was Resolution 194, adopted on 

December 11. It had three recommendations: renegotiation 

of the partition of Palestine in a way that would better fit the 

demographic realties on the ground; the full and 

unconditional return of all refugees; and_ the 

internationalization of Jerusalem.2! 

The Israeli intransigence would continue. As the historian 

Avi Shlaim has shown in his book The /ron Wall, contrary to 

the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity 

to refuse peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the 

offers that were on the table.22 It began with the rejection of 

a peace offer and fresh ideas for the refugee issue put 

forward by the Syrian ruler Husni al-Zaim in 1949, and 

continued with Ben-Gurion’s undermining of initial peace 

feelers sent out by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the early 1950s. 

Better known is the way Israel refused to show any flexibility 

in its negotiations with King Hussein in 1972 (mediated by 

Henry Kissinger over the West Bank), and its refusal to heed 

President Sadat of Egypt’s warning in 1971 that if they 

would not negotiate bilaterally over the Sinai he would be 

forced to go to war over it—which he did two years later, 

inflicting a traumatic blow to Israel’s sense of security and 

invincibility. 

All these myths surrounding 1948 fuse together in the 

image of a Jewish state fighting against all odds, offering 

succor to the Palestinians, encouraging them to stay and 

proposing peace, only to learn that there “is no partner” on 

the other side. The best way to counter this image is to 

redescribe, patiently and systematically, the events that 

took place in Palestine between 1946 and 1949. 

In 1946, the British government in London thought it 

could hold onto Palestine for some time to come. It began 

moving forces out of Egypt into the territory as the Egyptian 

national liberation struggle intensified that year. However, a 

harsh winter at the year’s end, rising tensions among the 

Zionist paramilitary groups who had begun to take action 

against the British forces, and, most importantly, the 

decision to leave India, brought about a dramatic shift in the 

British policy towards Palestine. In February 1947, Britain 

decided to leave the region. The two communities—settlers 

and natives—reacted very differently to the news. The 

Palestinian community and its leaders assumed that the 

process was to be similar to that in the neighboring Arab 

countries. The Mandatory administration would gradually 

transfer power to the local population, which would 

democratically decide the nature of the future state. The 

Zionists, however, were far better prepared for what came 

next. Immediately after London’s decision to withdraw, the 

Zionist leadership prepared’ itself on two _ fronts: 

diplomatically and militarily, making preparations for a 

future confrontation. 

At the outset the main focus was on diplomacy. This took 

the form of finding ways to defeat the well-argued 

Palestinian claim for a democratic decision about the future 

of the country. One particular way of doing this was by 

associating the Holocaust and the fate of Jews around the 

world with that of the settler Jewish community in Palestine. 

Thus the Zionist diplomats strove to persuade the 

international community that the question of who replaced 

Britain as the sovereign power in Palestine was associated 

with the fate of all the Jews in the world. Even more 

poignantly, this policy was associated with the need to 

compensate the Jewish people for their suffering during the 

Holocaust. 

The result was the UN Partition Resolution of November 

29, 1947. The document was prepared by a special 

committee, UNSCOP, made up of representatives who had 

little prior knowledge, if any, of the Palestine question. The 

idea that division of the territory was the best solution came 

from the Zionist movement itself. The committee members 

in fact obtained little feedback from the Palestinians 

themselves. The Arab Higher Committee, the political 

representative body of the Palestinians and the Arab 

League, decided to boycott UNSCOP. It was already clear 

that the right of the Palestinians to their homeland would 

not be respected in the same way it had been for the Iraqis 

and the Egyptians. In the immediate aftermath of World War 

|, the League of Nations had recognized the right of all the 

nations in the Middle East to self-determination. The 

decision in 1947 to exclude the Palestinians (likewise with 

the decision to the exclude the Kurdish nation) was a grave 

mistake that is one of the main causes of the ongoing 

conflict in the region. 

The Zionists suggested that 80 percent of Palestine 

should be a Jewish state, while the rest could either become 

an independent Arab Palestinian state or be annexed and 

handed to the Kingdom of Jordan. Jordan itself was 

ambivalent towards the UN efforts as a result: on the one 

hand, they were being offered a possible extension of their 

arid kingdom into parts of fertile Palestine; on the other 

hand, they did not wish to be seen as betraying the 

Palestinian cause. The dilemma became even more acute 

when the Jewish leadership offered the Hashemites in Jordan 

an agreement to this effect. In a way, at the end of the 1948 

war, Palestine was more or less divided in such a manner 

between the Zionist movement and Jordan.?? 

Nevertheless, there was no absolute Zionist control over 

UNSCOP. The committee, which deliberated on the solution 

between February and November 1947, revised the Zionists’ 

plans. It expanded the area allocated to the Palestinians and 

insisted that there would be two independent states. They 

implicitly hoped that the two states would form an economic 

union and a joint immigration policy, and that each 

community would have the option to vote in the other state, 

should they wish to do so. As the declassified documents 

reveal, the Zionist leadership accepted the new map and 

the terms offered by the UN because they knew about the 

rejection of the plan by the other side. They also knew that 

the final division of territory would be determined by action 

on the ground rather than negotiations in a committee 

room.2* The most important result was the international 

legitimization of the Jewish state, including the borders of 

the future state. In retrospect we can appreciate that from 

the perspective of the Zionist leadership in 1948, they had 

adopted the correct approach when it came to setting out 

the state without fixing the borders. 

This leadership was not idle between the partition plan 

and the end of the Mandate in May 1948. They had to be 

active. In the Arab world the pressure on governments to 

use force against the new Jewish state was growing. In the 

meantime, on the ground in Palestine, local paramilitary 

groups began to stage attacks, mainly on _ Jewish 

transportation and isolated colonies, trying to pre-empt the 

implementation of an international decision to turn their 

homeland into a Jewish state. These moments of resistance 

were quite limited and petered out in the weeks after the 

UN partition was announced. At the same time, the Zionist 

leadership was acting on three discrete fronts. The first 

involved preparing itself for the possibility of a military 

invasion by the Arab countries. This did happen and we now 

know that the Jewish military benefited from the Arab 

forces’ lack of real preparation, purpose, and coordination. 

The Arab political elites were still quite reluctant to interfere 

in Palestine. There was a tacit agreement with Jordan that it 

would take over parts of Palestine, later to become the West 

Bank, in return for a limited participation in the war effort. 

This proved a crucial factor in the balance of power. The 

Jordanian army was the best-trained army in the Arab world. 

On the diplomatic front, the months of February and 

March 1948 were a particularly tense time for the Zionist 

movement. The United States, through its envoys on the 

ground, realized that the UN partition plan of November 

1947 was flawed. Instead of bringing calm and hope to the 

country, the plan itself had been the main reason for the 

recent eruption of violence. There were already reports of 

Palestinians being forced out of their homes and of killings 

on both sides. Both sides attacked each other’s public 

transport, and skirmishes on the lines dividing Arab and 

Jewish neighborhoods in the mixed towns continued for few 

days. The US president, Harry Truman, agreed to rethink the 

idea of partition and suggested a new plan. Through his 

ambassador to the UN he _ proposed an_ international 

trusteeship over the whole of Palestine for five years, so as 

to give more time to the search for a solution. 

This move was abruptly halted by vested interests. It was 

the first time the Jewish lobby in the United States was used 

to change the position of the American administration. 

AIPAC did not exist yet, but the method was already in place 

to connect the domestic political scene in America with the 

interests of Zionism, and later of Israel, in Palestine. In any 

case, it worked, and the US administration returned to its 

support of the partition plan. Interestingly, the USSR was 

even more loyal to the Zionist position and had no second 

thoughts at all. With the help of members of the Palestine 

Communist Party (PCP) they facilitated the supply of arms 

from Czechoslovakia to the Jewish forces before and after 

May 1948. Readers today may raise an eyebrow at this, but 

the PCP’s support for the Zionist cause was possible for two 

reasons. First the Soviet Union believed the new Jewish state 

would be socialist and anti-British (and therefore more 

inclined towards the Eastern Bloc in the emerging Cold War). 

Secondly, the PCP believed that national liberation was a 

necessary phase on the way to their more complete social 

revolution, and they recognized both the Palestinians and 

the Zionists as national movements (this is why the party 

still today supports the two-states solution).2° 

While struggling to secure international approval, the 

Zionist leadership was busy preparing its community for 

war, imposing compulsory recruitment and_ taxation, 

intensifying military preparations, and escalating arms 

purchases. They were also quite efficient at gathering 

intelligence that exposed the lack of preparation in the rest 

of the Arab world. Working on two fronts—military and 

diplomatic—did not affect the Zionist strategy towards the 

most important issue troubling the movement’s leaders: 

how to create a state that was both democratic and Jewish 

located on however much of Palestine they might succeed in 

getting their hands on? Or, put a different way: what to do 

with the Palestinian population in the future Jewish state? 

The various deliberations on this question ended on 

March 10, 1948, when the high command produced the 

infamous Plan Dalet, Plan D, which gave an indication of the 

fate of the Palestinians who lived in the areas to be occupied 

by the Jewish forces. The debates were led by the leader of 

the Jewish community, David Ben-Gurion, who was 

determined to secure demographic exclusivity for the Jews 

in any future state. This was an obsession that not only 

informed his actions before 1948, but also long after the 

creation of the state of Israel. As we shall see, this led him 

in 1948 to orchestrate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and 

in 1967 to oppose the occupation of the West Bank. 

In the days after the Partition Resolution was adopted, 

Ben-Gurion told his colleagues in the leadership that a 

Jewish state in which Jews made up only 60 percent was not 

viable. However, he did not reveal what percentage of 

Palestinians would make the future state unviable. The 

message he conveyed to his generals, and through them to 

the troops on the ground, was nonetheless clear: the fewer 

Palestinians in a Jewish state the better. This is why, as 

Palestinian scholars such as Nur Masalha and Ahmad Sa’di 

have proved, he also tried to get rid of the Palestinians who 

were left within the Jewish state after the war (“the Arab 

minority”).2© 

Something else happened in the period between 

November 29, 1947 (when the UN Resolution was adopted) 

and May 15, 1948 (when the British Mandate ended) that 

helped the Zionist movement to better prepare for the days 

ahead. As the end of the Mandate approached, the British 

forces withdrew into the port of Haifa. Any territory they left, 

the military forces of the Jewish community took over, 

clearing out the local population even before the end of the 

Mandate. The process began in February 1948 with a few 

villages, and culminated in April with the cleansing of Haifa, 

Jaffa, Safad, Beisan, Acre, and Western Jerusalem. These last 

stages had already been systematically planned under the 

master plan, Plan D, prepared alongside the high command 

of the Haganah, the main military wing of the Jewish 

community. The plan included the following clear reference 

to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing 

the population: 

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in 

the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to 

control continuously ... 

Mounting search and control operations according to the following 

guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. 

In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the 

population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.?’ 

How could the small Israeli army engage in large-scale 

ethnic cleansing operations while, from May 15, also being 

confronted with regular forces from the Arab world? First of 

all, it is noteworthy that the urban population (apart from 

three towns: Lydd, Ramleh, and Bir Saba) had already been 

cleansed before the Arab armies arrived. Second, the rural 

Palestinian area was already under Israeli control, and the 

confrontations with the Arab armies occurred on borders of 

these rural areas not inside them. In one case where the 

Jordanians could have helped the Palestinians, in Lydd and 

Ramleh, the British commander of the Jordanian army, Sir 

John Glubb, decided to withdraw his forces and avoided 

confrontation with the Israeli army.2® Finally, the Arab 

military effort was woefully ineffective and short lived. After 

some success in the first three weeks, its presence in 

Palestine was a shambolic story of defeat and hasty 

withdrawal. After a short lull towards the end of 1948, the 

Israeli ethnic cleansing thus continued unabated. 

From our present vantage point, there is no escape from 

defining the Israeli actions in the Palestinian countryside as 

a war crime. Indeed, as a crime against humanity. If one 

ignores this hard fact one will never understand what lies 

behind Israel’s attitude towards Palestine and_ the 

Palestinians as a political system and a society. The crime 

committed by the leadership of the Zionist movement, 

which became the government of Israel, was that of ethnic 

cleansing. This is not mere rhetoric but an indictment with 

far-reaching political, legal, and moral implications. The 

definition of the crime was clarified in the aftermath of the 

1990s civil war in the Balkans: ethnic cleansing is any action 

by one ethnic group meant to drive out another ethnic 

group with the purpose of transforming a mixed ethnic 

region into a pure one. Such an action amounts to ethnic 

cleansing regardless of the means employed to obtain it— 

from persuasion and threats to expulsions and mass killings. 

Moreover, the act itself determines the definition; as 

such, certain policies have been regarded as_ ethnic 

cleansing by the international community, even when a 

master plan for their execution was not discovered or 

exposed. Consequently, the victims of ethnic cleansing 

include both people who have left their homes out of fear 

and those expelled forcefully as part on an ongoing 

operation. The relevant definitions and references can be 

found on the websites of the US State Department and the 

United Nations.22 These are the principal definitions that 

guide the international court in The Hague when it is tasked 

with judging those responsible for planning and executing 

such operations. 

A study of the writings and thoughts of the early Zionist 

leaders shows that by 1948 this crime was inevitable. The 

goal of Zionism had not changed: it was dedicated to taking 

over as much of Mandatory Palestine as possible and 

removing most of the Palestinian villages and urban 

neighborhoods from the space carved out for the future 

Jewish state. The execution was even more systematic and 

comprehensive than anticipated in the plan. In a matter of 

seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven 

urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was 

accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of 

males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over 

a year.20 

The political implication is that Israel is exclusively 

culpable for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, 

for which it bears the legal as well as moral responsibility. 

The legal implication is that even if there is a statute of 

limitations, after such a long period, for those who 

committed a deed understood as a crime against humanity, 

the deed itself is still a crime for which nobody was ever 

brought to justice. The moral implication is that the Jewish 

state was born out of sin—like many other states, of course 

—but the sin, or the crime, has never been admitted. Worse, 

among certain circles in Israel it is acknowledged, but in the 

same breath fully justified both in hindsight and as a future 

policy against the Palestinians, wherever they are. The 

crime is still committed today. 

All these implications were totally ignored by the Israeli 

political elite. Instead a very different lesson has been 

learned from the events of 1948: that one can, as a state, 

expel half of a country’s population and destroy half its 

villages with impunity. The consequences of such a lesson, 

immediately after 1948 and beyond, were inevitable—the 

continuation of the ethnic cleansing policy by other means. 

There have been well-known landmarks in this process: the 

expulsion of more villagers between 1948 and 1956 from 

Israel proper; the forced transfer of 300,000 Palestinians 

from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 war; 

and a very measured, but constant, cleansing of 

Palestinians from the Greater Jerusalem area, calculated as 

more than 250,000 by the year 2000.32 

After 1948, the policy of ethnic cleansing took many 

forms. In various parts of the occupied territories and inside 

Israel, the policy of expulsion was replaced by a prohibition 

on people leaving their villages or neighborhoods. 

Restricting Palestinians to where they lived served the same 

purpose as expelling them. When they are besieged in 

enclaves—such as areas A, B and C under the Oslo Accord in 

the West Bank, or in villages and neighborhoods in 

Jerusalem that are declared part of the West Bank, or in the 

Gaza Ghetto—they are not counted demographically in 

either official or informal censuses, which is what matters to 

the Israeli policy makers more than anything else. 

As long as the full implications of Israel’s past and 

present ethnic cleansing policies are not recognized and 

tackled by the international community, there will be no 

solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ignoring the issue 

of the Palestinian refugees will repeatedly undermine any 

attempt to reconcile the two conflicting parties. This is why 

it is So important to recognize the 1948 events as an ethnic 

cleansing operation, so as to ensure that a political solution 

will not evade the root of the conflict; namely, the expulsion 

of the Palestinians. Such evasions in the past are the main 

reason for the collapse of all previous peace accords. 

If the legal lessons are not learned, there will always 

remain retributive impulses and revengeful emotions on the 

Palestinian side. The legal recognition of the 1948 Nakbah 

as an act of ethnic cleansing would pave the way for some 

form of restitutive justice. This would be the same as the 

process that has taken place recently in South Africa. The 

acknowledgement of past evils is not done in order to bring 

criminals to justice, but rather to bring the crime itself to 

public attention and trial. The final ruling there will not be 

retributive—there will be no  punishment—but rather 

restitutive: the victims will be compensated. The most 

reasonable compensation for the particular case of the 

Palestinian refugees was stated clearly already in December 

1948 by the UN General Assembly in its Resolution 194: the 

unconditional return of the refugees and their families to 

their homeland (and homes where possible). Without some 

such restitution, the state of Israel will continue to exist as a 

hostile enclave at the heart of the Arab world, the last 

reminder of a colonialist past that complicates Israel’s 

relationship not only with the Palestinians, but with the Arab 

world as a whole. 

It is important to note, however, that there are Jews in 

Israel who have absorbed all these lessons. Not all Jews are 

indifferent to or ignorant about the Nakbah. Those who are 

not are currently a small minority, but one which makes its 

presence felt, demonstrating that at least some Jewish 

citizens are not deaf to the cries, pain, and devastation of 

those killed, raped, or wounded throughout 1948. They have 

heard of the thousands of Palestinian citizens arrested and 

imprisoned in the 1950s, and they acknowledge the Kafr 

Qasim massacre in 1956, when citizens of the state were 

murdered by the army just because they were Palestinians. 

They know about the war crimes committed throughout the 

1967 war and the callous bombing of the refugee camps in 

1982. They have not forgotten the physical abuse meted out 

to Palestinian youth in the occupied territories in the 1980s 

and afterwards. These Israeli Jews are not deaf and can still 

today hear the voices of the military officers ordering the 

execution of innocent people and the laughter of the 

soldiers standing by and watching. 

They are also not blind. They have seen the remains of 

the 531 destroyed villages and the ruined neighborhoods. 

They see what every Israeli can see, but for the most part 

chooses not to: the remnants of villages under the houses of 

the Kibbutzim and beneath the pine trees of the JNF (Jewish 

National Fund) forests. They have not forgotten what 

happened even when the rest of their society has. Perhaps 

because of that they understand fully the connection 

between the 1948 ethnic cleansing and the events that 

followed up to the present. They recognize the link between 

the heroes of Israel’s war of independence and those who 

commanded the cruel suppression of the two Intifadas. They 

never mistook Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon for peace 

heroes. They also refuse to ignore the obvious connection 

between the building of the wall and the wider policy of 

ethnic cleansing. The expulsions of 1948 and_ the 

imprisonment of people within walls today are the inevitable 

consequences of the same racist ethnic ideology. Nor can 

they fail to recognize the link between the inhumanity 

inflicted on Gaza since 2006 and these past policies and 

practices. Such inhumanity is not born in a vacuum; it has a 

history and an ideological infrastructure that justifies it. 

Since the Palestinian political leadership has neglected 

this aspect of the conflict, it is Palestinian civil society that is 

leading the effort to relocate the 1948 events at the center 

of the national agenda. Inside and outside Israel, Palestinian 

NGOs such as BADIL, ADRID, and Al-Awda, are coordinating 

their struggle to preserve the memory of 1948 and explain 

why it is crucial to engage with the events of that year for 

the sake of the future. 

Chapter 6 

The June 1967 War Was 

a War of “No Choice” 

In June 1982, following Israel’s assault on Lebanon, there 

was much debate concerning the official announcement that 

the nation had “no choice” but to follow the violent course 

of action it had taken. At that time, the Israeli public was 

divided between those who deemed the campaign 

necessary and justified and those who doubted its moral 

validity. In making their points both sides used the 1967 war 

aS a benchmark, identifying the earlier conflict as an 

unimpeachable example of a war of “no choice.” This is a 

myth.! 

According to this accepted narrative, the 1967 war forced 

Israel to occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and keep 

it in custody until the Arab world, or the Palestinians, were 

willing to make peace with the Jewish state. Consequently 

another myth emerges—which | will discuss in a separate 

chapter—namely that the Palestinian leaders’ are 

intransigent and that therefore peace is impossible. This 

argument thus generates the impression that the Israeli rule 

is temporary: the territories have to remain in custody 

pending a more “reasonable” Palestinian position. 

In order to re-evaluate the 1967 war we first need to go 

back to the war of 1948. The Israeli political and military 

elite regarded the latter as a missed opportunity: a historical 

moment in which Israel could, and should, have occupied 

the whole of historical Palestine from the River Jordan to the 

Mediterranean Sea. The only reason they did not do so was 

because of an agreement they had with neighboring Jordan. 

This collusion was negotiated during the last days of the 

British Mandate, and when finalized it limited the military 

participation of the Jordanian army in the general Arab war 

effort in 1948. In return, Jordan was allowed to annex areas 

of Palestine that became the West Bank. David Ben-Gurion, 

who kept the pre-1948 agreement intact, called the decision 

to allow Jordan to take the West Bank bechiya ledorot— 

which literally means that future generations would lament 

the decision. A more metaphorical translation might choose 

to translate it as “a fatal historical mistake.” 

Ever since 1948, important sections of the Jewish 

cultural, military, and political elites had been looking for an 

Opportunity to rectify this mistake. From the mid-1960s 

onwards, they carefully planned how to create a greater 

Israel that would include the West Bank.? There were 

several historical junctures in which they almost executed 

the plan only to draw back at the very last moment. The 

most famous are 1958 and 1960, when David Ben-Gurion 

aborted the execution of the plan due to fears of 

international reaction in the first instance and_ for 

demographic reasons in the second (calculating that Israel 

could not incorporate such a large number of Palestinians). 

The best opportunity came with the 1967 war. Later in this 

chapter | will explore the origins of that war, arguing that 

whatever the historical narrative of its causes, one has to 

look closely at Jordan’s role in it. Was it, for example, 

necessary to occupy and retain the West Bank in order to 

maintain the relatively good relationship Israel had had with 

Jordan since 1948? If the answer is no, as | think it is, then 

the question arises as to why Israel pursued this policy, and 

what it tells us about the likelihood of Israel ever giving up 

the West Bank in the future. Even if, as the official Israeli 

mythology has it, the West Bank was occupied in retaliation 

for the Jordanian aggression of June 5, 1967, the question 

remains as to why Israel remained in the West Bank after 

the threat had dissipated. After all, there are plenty of 

examples of aggressive military actions that did not end 

with a territorial expansion of the state of Israel. As | will 

attempt to show in this chapter, incorporating the West 

Bank and the Gaza Strip within Israel had been the plan 

since 1948, even if it was only implemented in 1967. 

Was the 1967 war inevitable? We can begin our answer 

in 1958—described in the scholarly literature on the modern 

Middle East as the revolutionary year. In that year, the 

progressive, radical ideas that brought the Egyptian Free 

Officers to power in Cairo began to make an impact all over 

the Arab world. This trend was supported by the Soviet 

Union and almost inevitably challenged by the United 

States. This “playing out” of the Cold War in the Middle East 

opened up opportunities for those in Israel looking for a 

pretext to correct the “fatal historical mistake” of 1948. It 

was driven by a= powerful lobby within the Israeli 

government and army, led by the war heroes of 1948, 

Moshe Dayan and Yigal Alon. When a consensus developed 

in the West that the “radicalism” emerging in Egypt might 

engulf other countries, including Jordan, the lobby 

recommended that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion approach 

NATO to promote the idea of a pre-emptive Israeli takeover 

of the West Bank.* 

This scenario became even more plausible after Iraq fell 

into the hands of progressive, even radical, officers. On July 

14, 1958, a group of Iragi officers staged a military coup 

that brought down the Hashemite dynasty. The Hashemites 

had been put in power by the British in 1921 to keep Iraq 

within the Western sphere of influence. Economic recession, 

nationalism, and strong connections to Egypt and the USSR 

triggered a protest movement that brought the officers to 

power. It was led by a group calling itself the Free Officers, 

headed by Abd al-Karim Qasim, which, emulating the group 

that had overthrown the monarchy in Egypt six years 

earlier, replaced the monarchy with the republic of Iraq. 

At the time, it was also feared in the West that Lebanon 

could be the next region be taken over by revolutionary 

forces. NATO decided to preempt this scenario by 

dispatching its own forces (US Marines to Lebanon and 

British Special Forces to Jordan). There was no need, and no 

wish, to involve Israel in this developing cold war in the Arab 

world.? When the Israeli idea of “saving” at least the West 

Bank was voiced, it was firmly rejected by Washington. It 

seems, however, that Ben-Gurion was quite happy to be 

warned off at this stage. He had no wish to undermine the 

demographic achievement of 1948—he did not want to 

change the balance between Jews and Arabs in a new 

“greater” Israel by incorporating the Palestinians living in 

the West Bank.® In his diary he reported that he had 

explained to his ministers that occupying the West Bank 

would constitute a grave demographic danger: “I told them 

about the danger of incorporating one million Arabs into a 

state that has a population of one and three quarter 

million.”’ For the same reason he pre-empted another 

attempt by the more hawkish lobby to exploit a new crisis 

two years later in 1960. As long as Ben-Gurion was in 

power, the lobby, so brilliantly described in Tom Segev’s 

book 1967, would not have its way. However, by 1960, it 

had become much more difficult to restrain the lobby. In 

fact, in that year, all the ingredients that would later mark 

the crisis of 1967 were in place and carried the same threat 

of erupting into a war. But war was averted, or at least 

delayed. 

In 1960, the first significant actor on the scene was the 

Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who conducted a 

dangerous policy of brinkmanship, as he would six years 

later. Nasser heightened the war rhetoric against Israel, 

threatening to move troops into the demilitarized Sinai 

Peninsula and to block the passage of ships into the 

southern city of Eilat. His motives for doing so were the 

same in 1960 as they were in 1967. He feared that Israel 

would attack Syria, which between 1958 and 1962 was ina 

formal union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic. 

Ever since Israel and Syria had concluded an armistice 

agreement in the summer of 1949, there had been quite a 

few issues unresolved. Among them were pieces of land, 

called “no-man’s land” by the UN, which both sides coveted. 

Every now and then, Israel encouraged members of the 

Kibbutzim and settlements adjacent to these lands to go 

and cultivate them, knowing full well that this would trigger 

a Syrian response from the Golan Heights above them. This 

is exactly what happened in 1960, and a predictable cycle of 

escalating tit for tat then followed: the Israeli air force were 

employed to gain some real battle experience and show 

their Supremacy over the Russian jets employed by the 

Syrian air force. Dogfights ensued, artillery was exchanged, 

complaints were submitted to the armistice committee, and 

an uneasy lull reigned until violence erupted once more.® 

A second source of friction between Israel and Syria 

concerned the Israeli construction of a national water carrier 

(this is the official Israeli name in English for a huge project 

that includes viaducts, pipelines, and canals) between the 

estuaries of the River Jordan and the south of the state. 

Work on the project began in 1953 and included siphoning 

off some of the water resources that were desperately 

needed both in Syria and in Lebanon. In response, the 

Syrian leaders succeeded in convincing their Egyptian allies 

in the UAR that Israel might launch an all-out military 

Campaign against Syria in order to secure the strategic 

Golan Heights, and the sources of the River Jordan. 

Nasser had another motive for tipping the precarious 

balance in and around historical Palestine. He wanted to 

break the diplomatic stasis of the period and challenge the 

global indifference to the Palestine question. As Avi Shlaim 

showed in his book The /ron Wall, Nasser had some hope of 

finding a way out of the deadlock when he negotiated with 

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s dovish foreign minister and, for a 

short while in the mid-1950s, its prime minister.? However, 

Nasser understood that power lay in the hands of Ben- 

Gurion, and once the latter returned to the prime minister’s 

office in 1955, there was little hope of advancing peace 

between the two states. 

While these negotiations took place, the two sides 

discussed the possibility of an Egyptian land passage in the 

Negev in return for ending the standoff. This was an early 

tentative idea on the agenda that was not developed 

further, and we have no way of knowing whether it would 

have led to a bilateral peace treaty. What we do know is that 

there was little chance of any bilateral peace agreement 

between Israel and Egypt as long as Ben-Gurion was Israel’s 

prime minister. Even out of power, Ben-Gurion used his 

connections with the army to convince its commanders to 

launch several provocative military operations against the 

Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip while these negotiations 

were taking place. The pretext for these operations was the 

infiltrations of Palestinian refugees from the Gaza Strip into 

Israel, which gradually became more militarized and 

eventually constituted a real guerilla warfare against the 

Jewish state. Israel reacted by destroying Egyptian bases 

and killing Egyptian troops.?° 

The peace efforts died for all intents and purposes once 

Ben-Gurion returned to power and joined Britain and France 

in a military alliance aimed at bringing down Nasser in 

1956. No wonder that, four years later, when contemplating 

a war against Israel, Nasser deemed his maneuvers a pre- 

emptive move to save his regime from a possible Anglo- 

French-lsraeli attack. Thus, in 1960, when the tension on the 

Israeli-Syrian border grew and there was no progress 

whatsoever on the diplomatic front, Nasser probed a new 

strategy, referred to earlier as “brinkmanship.” The purpose 

of this exercise was to constantly test the boundaries of 

possibility. In this case, to examine how far military 

preparations and threats can change the political reality, 

without actually going to war. The success of such 

brinkmanship depends not only on the person who initiates 

it but also on the unforeseeable responses of those against 

whom the policy is directed. And that is where it can go 

terribly wrong, as it did in 1967. 

Nasser implemented this strategy for the first time in 

1960, and repeated it in a similar way in 1967. He sent 

forces into the Sinai Peninsula—which was supposed to be a 

demilitarized zone according to the agreement that ended 

the 1956 war. The Israeli government and the UN acted very 

sensibly in 1960 in the face of this threat. The UN secretary- 

general, Dag Hammarskjold, took a firm position demanding 

the immediate withdrawal of the Egyptian forces. The Israeli 

government called up its reserves but sent a clear message 

it would not start a war.!! 

On the eve of 1967 war, all these factors played a role in 

the outbreak of violence. Two personalities, however, were 

no longer’ involved: David Ben-Gurion and _ Dag 

Hammarskjold. Ben-Gurion had left the political scene in 

1963. Ironically, it was only after his departure that the 

Greater Israel lobby was able to plan its next step. Until 

then, Ben-Gurion’s demographic obsession had prevented 

the takeover of the West Bank, but also produced the by 

now familiar military rule Israel had imposed on different 

Palestinian groups. The abolition of this regime in 1966 

allowed a ready-made apparatus to control both the West 

Bank and the Gaza Strip even before the June 1967 war 

erupted. The military rule Israel had imposed on the 

Palestinian minority in 1948 was based on British Mandatory 

emergency regulations that treated the civilian population 

as a potential alien group, hence robbing it of its basic 

human and civil rights. Military governors were installed 

across the Palestinian areas with executive, judicial, and 

legislative authority. This was a quite a well-oiled machinery 

by 1966, including hundreds of employees who would serve 

as the nucleus for a similar regime when it was imposed on 

the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

Thus, the military rule that was abolished in 1966 was 

imposed in 1967 on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; and 

all was in place for an invasion. Since 1963 a group of Israeli 

experts from the army, civil service, and academia had 

planned for the transition, putting together a detailed 

manual for how to run a Palestinian territory according to 

emergency regulations, should the opportunity rise.!? This 

gave absolute power to the army in every sphere of life. The 

opportunity for moving this apparatus from one Palestinian 

group (the Palestinian minority in Israel) to another (the 

Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) came in 

1967, when Nasser was encouraged in his brinkmanship by 

the Soviet leadership, who believed strongly that an Israeli 

attack on Syria was imminent in the last days of 1966.!3 In 

the summer of that year, a new group of officers and 

ideologues had staged a military coup and taken over the 

Syrian state (known as the new “Ba’ath”). One of the first 

acts of the new regime was to deal more firmly with the 

Israeli plans to exploit the waters of the River Jordan and its 

estuaries. They began building their own national carrier 

and diverted the river for their own needs. The Israeli army 

bombed the new project, which led to frequent and 

gradually more intensified dogfights between the two air 

forces. The new regime in Syria also looked favorably on the 

newly formed Palestinian national liberation movement. This 

in turn encouraged Fatah to stage a guerrilla war against 

Israel in the Golan Heights, using Lebanon as a launching 

pad for attacks. This only added to the tension between the 

two states. 

It seems that until April 1967 Nasser still hoped that his 

histrionics would be enough to force a change in the status 

quo, without recourse to war. He signed a defense alliance 

with Syria in November 1966, declaring his intention to 

come to the latter’s aid should Israel attack. Yet the 

deterioration on the Israeli-Syrian border hit a new low in 

April 1967. Israel staged a military attack on Syrian forces in 

the Golan Heights that was intended, according the then 

general chief of staff of the Israeli army, Yitzhak Rabin, “to 

humiliate Syria.”!* By this stage it seemed as if Israel was 

doing all it could to push the Arab world into war. It was only 

then that Nasser felt compelled to repeat his gambit of 1960 

—dispatching troops into the Sinai Peninsula and closing the 

Tiran straights, a narrow passage that connected the Gulf of 

Aqaba with the Red Sea and hence could stop, or hinder, 

maritime traffic into Israel’s most southern port, Eilat. As in 

1960, Nasser waited to see how the UN would react. Back in 

1960, Dag Hammarskjold was not impressed and had not 

withdrawn the UN troops who had been stationed there 

since 1956. The new secretary-general, U Thant, was less 

assertive and withdrew the UN forces when the Egyptian 

troops entered the Peninsula. This had the effect of 

escalating the tension further. 

However, the most important factor in the rush to war 

was the absence of any authoritative challenge to the 

warmongering within the Israeli leadership at the time. This 

might have offered some form of internal friction delaying 

the hawks’ pursuit of conflict, allowing the international 

community to look for a peaceful resolution. A diplomatic 

effort led by the United States was still in its early stages 

when Israel launched its attack on all its Arab neighbors on 

June 5, 1967. There was no intention in the Israeli cabinet of 

providing the necessary time to the peace brokers. This was 

a golden opportunity not to be missed. 

In crucial Israeli cabinet meetings before the war, Abba 

Eban naively asked the chiefs of staff and his colleagues 

what the difference was between the 1960 crisis and the 

1967 situation, as he thought the latter could have been 

resolved in the same way.!° It “is a matter of honor and 

deterrence” was the reply. Eban replied that losing young 

soldiers only for the sake of honor and deterrence was too 

high a human price to be paid. | suspect that other things 

were said to him that have not been recorded in the 

minutes, probably about his need to understand that this 

was a historical opportunity to correct the “fatal historical 

mistake” of not occupying the West Bank in 1948. 

The war began early in the morning of June 5 with an 

Israeli attack on the Egyptian air force, which nearly 

destroyed it. This was followed the same day with similar 

assaults on the air forces of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Israeli 

forces also invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula 

and in the next few days reached the Suez Canal, occupying 

the whole of the peninsula. The attack on the Jordanian air 

force triggered the Jordanian capture of a small UN zone 

between the two parts of Jerusalem. Within three days, after 

fierce fighting, the Israeli army had captured East Jerusalem 

(on June 7), and two days later they drove the Jordanian 

army out of the West Bank. 

On June 7, the Israeli government was still uncertain 

about opening a new front against the Syrians on the Golan 

Heights, but the remarkable successes on the other front 

convinced the politicians to allow the army to occupy the 

Golan Heights. By June 11, Israel had become a mini- 

empire, controlling the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the 

Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. In this chapter | will 

focus on the Israeli decision to occupy the West Bank. 

On the eve of the war, Jordan had entered into a military 

alliance with Egypt and Syria according to which, the 

moment Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan was obliged to enter 

the war. Notwithstanding this commitment, King Hussein 

sent clear messages to Israel that if war began he would 

have to do something, but that it would be short and would 

not entail a real war (this was very similar to his 

grandfather’s position in 1948). In practice, the Jordanian 

involvement was more than symbolic. It included a heavy 

bombardment of West Jerusalem and the eastern suburbs of 

Tel Aviv. However, it is important to note what Jordan was 

reacting to: its air force had been totally destroyed by Israel 

a couple of hours earlier, at noon on June 5. King Hussein 

thus felt obliged to react more forcefully than he probably 

intended. 

The problem was that the army was not under his 

control, but was commanded by an Egyptian general. The 

common narrative of these events is based on Hussein’s 

own memoirs and those of Dean Rusk, the American 

Secretary of State at the time. According to this narrative, 

Israel sent a conciliatory message to Hussein urging him to 

stay out of the war (even though it had destroyed the 

Jordanian air force). On the first day Israel was still willing 

not to go too far in its assault on Jordan, but the latter’s 

reaction to the destruction of its air force led Israel into a 

much wider operation on the second day. Hussein actually 

wrote in his memoirs that he hoped all the time someone 

would stop the madness as he could not disobey the 

Egyptians nor risk a war. On the second day he urged the 

Israelis to calm down and only then, according to this 

narrative, did Israel proceed to a larger operation.!®© 

There are two problems with this narrative. How can one 

reconcile the assault on the Jordanian air force with the 

sending of a reconciliatory message? More importantly, 

even if Israel was still hesitant about its policy towards 

Jordan on the first day, it is clear even from this narrative 

that by the second day it did not wish to give Jordan any 

respite. As Norman Finkelstein has rightly noted, if you 

wanted to destroy what was left of the Jordanian army and 

retain your relationship with the one Arab country most 

loyal to Israel, a short operation in the West Bank, without 

occupying it, would have sufficed.!’ The Israeli historian 

Moshe Shemesh has examined the Jordanian sources and 

concluded that, after Israel attacked the Palestinian village 

of Samua in November 1966, in an attempt to defeat the 

Palestinian guerrillas, the Jordanian high command was 

persuaded that Israel intended to occupy the West Bank by 

force.1® They were not wrong. 

This did not happen as feared in 1966, but a year later. 

The whole of Israeli society was galvanized around the 

messianic project of “liberating” the holy places of Judaism, 

with Jerusalem as the jewel in the new crown of Greater 

Israel. Left- and right-wing Zionists, and Israel’s supporters 

in the West, were also caught up in, and mesmerized by, 

this euphoric hysteria. In addition, there was no intention of 

leaving the West Bank and the Gaza Strip immediately after 

their occupation; in fact there was no desire to leave them 

at all. This should stand as further proof of Israeli 

responsibility for the final deterioration of the May 1967 

crisis into a full-blown war. 

How important this historical juncture was for Israel can 

be seen from the way the government withstood the strong 

international pressure to withdraw from all the territories 

occupied in 1967, as demanded in the famous UN Security 

Council Resolution 242 very shortly after the war ended. As 

readers probably know, a Security Council resolution is more 

binding than a resolution by the General Assembly. And this 

was one of the few Security Council resolutions criticizing 

Israel that was not vetoed by the United States. 

We now have access to the minutes of a meeting of the 

Israeli government in the immediate days after the 

occupation. This was the thirteenth government of Israel 

and its composition is very relevant to the argument | am 

making here. It was a unity government of a kind not seen 

before, or after, in Israel. Every shade of the Zionist and 

Jewish political spectrum was represented. Apart from the 

Communist Party, every other party had a representative in 

the government, from left to right and center. Socialist 

parties such as Mapam, right-wing parties like Menachem 

Begin’s Herut, the liberals, and the religious parties were all 

included. The sense you get from reading the minutes is 

that the ministers knew they represented a wide consensus 

in their own society. This conviction was further energized 

by the euphoric atmosphere that engulfed Israel after the 

triumphant blitzkrieg that lasted only six days. Against this 

background, we can better understand the decisions these 

ministers took in the immediate aftermath of the war. 

Moreover, many of these politicians had been waiting 

since 1948 for this moment. | would go even further and say 

that the takeover of the West Bank in particular, with its 

ancient biblical sites, was a Zionist aim even before 1948 

and it fitted the logic of the Zionist project as a whole. This 

logic can be summarized as the wish to take over as much 

of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. 

The consensus, the euphoria, and the historical context 

explain why none of the subsequent Israeli governments 

have ever deviated from the decisions these ministers took. 

The first decision they made was that Israel could not 

exist without the West Bank. Direct and indirect methods of 

controlling the region were offered by the minister of 

agriculture, Yigal Alon, when he distinguished between 

areas where Jewish settlements could be built and areas 

that were densely populated by Palestinians, which should 

be ruled indirectly.42 Alon changed his mind within a few 

years about the method of indirect rule. At first he hoped 

that the Jordanians would be tempted to help Israel rule 

parts of the West Bank (probably, although this was never 

spelled out, by maintaining Jordanian citizenships and laws 

in the “Arab areas” of the West Bank). However, a lukewarm 

Jordanian response to this plan tilted him towards 

Palestinian self-rule in those areas as the best way forward. 

The second decision was that the inhabitants of the West 

Bank and Gaza Strip would not be incorporated into the 

state of Israel as citizens. This did not include the 

Palestinians living in what Israel regarded at the time as the 

new “Greater Jerusalem” area. The definition of that area, 

and who in it was entitled to Israeli citizenship, changed 

whenever this space grew in size. The greater the Greater 

Jerusalem became, the larger the number of Palestinians in 

it. Today there are 200,000 Palestinians within what is 

defined as the Greater Jerusalem area. To ensure that not all 

of them are counted as Israeli citizens, quite a few of their 

neighborhoods were declared to be West Bank villages.2° It 

was clear to the government that denying citizenship on the 

one hand, and not allowing independence on the other, 

condemned the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza 

Strip to life without basic civil and human rights. 

The next question therefore was how long the Israeli 

army would occupy the Palestinian areas. It seems that for 

most ministers the answer was, and still is: for a very long 

time. For instance, Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense, 

on one occasion threw into the air a period of fifty years.2! 

We are now in the fiftieth year of the occupation. 

The third decision was associated with the peace 

process. As mentioned earlier, the international community 

expected Israel to return the territories it had occupied in 

exchange for peace. The Israeli government was willing to 

negotiate with Egypt over the future of the Sinai Peninsula 

and with Syria over the Golan Heights, but not over the 

West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In one brief press conference 

in 1967, the prime minister at the time, Levy Eshkol, said as 

much.22 But soon his colleagues understood that public 

declarations of this kind were unhelpful, to put it mildly. 

Therefore, this strategic position was never explicitly 

acknowledged again in the public domain. What we do have 

is clear statements from a few individuals, most prominent 

among them Dan Bavli, who were part of the senior team of 

officials charged with strategizing the policy towards the 

West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In retrospect, Bavli reports 

that the unwillingness to negotiate, especially over the West 

Bank, underlined the Israeli policy at the time (and | would 

add: and ever since).2? Bavli described this policy as an 

“addition to belligerence and short sightedness” that 

replaced any search for a solution: “The various Israeli 

governments talked a lot about peace but did very little to 

achieve it.”24* What the Israelis invented there and then is 

what Noam Chomsky has called a “complete farce.”2° They 

understood that talking about peace does not mean they 

cannot establish on the ground irreversible facts that will 

defeat the very idea of peace. 

Readers may ask, and rightly so, whether there was no 

peace camp or liberal Zionist position at the time that 

genuinely sought peace. Indeed there was, and perhaps 

there still is one today. However, from the very beginning it 

was marginal and had the support of only a small section of 

the electorate. Decisions are made in Israel by a core group 

of politicians, generals, and strategists who lay down policy, 

regardless of public debates. Moreover, the only way to 

judge, in hindsight at least, what the Israeli strategy might 

be is not through the discourse of the state’s policy makers 

but through their actions on the ground. For example, the 

policy declarations of the 1967 unity government might 

have differed from those of the Labor governments that 

ruled Israel until 1977, and from those voiced by the Likud 

governments that have ruled Israel intermittently up until 

today (with the exception of a few years in which the now 

extinct Kadima party led the Sharon and Olmert 

governments in the first decade of the twenty-first century). 

The actions of each regime, however, have been the same, 

remaining loyal to the three strategic decisions that became 

the catechism of Zionist dogma in post-1967 Israel. 

The most crucial action on the ground was the 

construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the 

Gaza Strip, along with the commitment to their expansion. 

The government located these settlements at first in less 

densely populated Palestinian areas in the West Bank (since 

1968) and Gaza (since 1969). However, as is so chillingly 

described in the brilliant book by Idith Zertal and Akiva 

Eldar, The Lords of the Land, the ministers and planners 

succumbed to pressure from the messianic settler 

movement, Gush Emunim, and also settled Jews at the heart 

of the Palestinian neighborhoods.?° 

Another way of judging what the real Israeli intentions 

have been since 1967 is to look at these policies from the 

point of view of the Palestinian victims. After the occupation, 

the new ruler confined the Palestinians of the West Bank 

and Gaza Strip in an impossible limbo: they were neither 

refugees nor citizens—they were, and still are, citizenless 

inhabitants. They were inmates, and in many respects still 

are, of a huge prison in which they have no civil and human 

rights and no impact on their future. The world tolerates this 

situation because Israel claims—and the claim was never 

challenged until recently—that the situation is temporary 

and will continue only until there is a proper Palestinian 

partner for peace. Not surprisingly, such a partner has not 

been found. At the time of writing, Israel is still incarcerating 

a third generation of Palestinians by various means and 

methods, and depicting these mega-prisons as temporary 

realities that will change once peace comes to Israel and 

Palestine. 

What can the Palestinians do? The Israeli message is very 

clear: If they comply with the expropriations of land, the 

severe restrictions on movement, the harsh bureaucracy of 

occupation, then they may reap a few benefits. These may 

be the right to work in Israel, to claim some autonomy, and, 

since 1993, even the right to call some of these autonomous 

regions a state. However, if they choose the path of 

resistance, as they have done occasionally, they will feel the 

full might of the Israeli army. The Palestinian activist Mazin 

Qumsiyeh has counted fourteen such uprisings that have 

attempted to escape this mega-prison—all were met with a 

brutal, and in the case of Gaza, even genocidal, response.?/ 

Thus we can see that the takeover of the West Bank and 

the Gaza Strip represents a completion of the job that began 

in 1948. Back then, the Zionist movement took over 80 

percent of the Palestine—in 1967 they completed the 

takeover. The demographic fear that haunted Ben-Gurion—a 

greater Israel with no Jewish majority—was_ cynically 

resolved by incarcerating the population of the occupied 

territories in a non-citizenship prison. This is not just a 

historical description; in many ways it is still the reality in 

2017. 

PART Il 

THE FALLACIES 

OF THE PRESENT 

Chapter 

: Israel Is the Only 

Democracy in the Middle 

East 

In the eyes of many Israelis and their supporters worldwide 

—even those who might criticize some of its policies—Israel 

is, at the end of the day, a benign democratic state, seeking 

peace with its neighbors, and guaranteeing equality to all its 

citizens. Those who do criticize Israel assume that if 

anything went wrong in this democracy then it was due to 

the 1967 war. In this view, the war corrupted an honest and 

hardworking society by offering easy money in the occupied 

territories, allowing messianic groups to enter Israeli 

politics, and above all else turning Israel into an occupying 

and oppressive entity in the new territories. 

The myth that a democratic Israel ran into trouble in 

1967 but still remained a democracy is propagated even by 

some notable Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars—but 

it has no historical foundation. Before 1967, Israel definitely 

could not have been depicted as a democracy. As we have 

seen in previous chapters, the state subjected one-fifth of 

its citizenship to military rule based on draconian British 

Mandatory emergency regulations that denied the 

Palestinians any basic human or civil rights. Local military 

governors were the absolute rulers of the lives of these 

citizens: they could devise special laws for them, destroy 

their houses and livelihoods, and send them to fail 

whenever they felt like it. Only in the late 1950s did a strong 

Jewish opposition to these abuses emerge, which eventually 

eased the pressure on the Palestinian citizens. 

For the Palestinians who lived in pre-war Israel and those 

who lived in the post-1967 West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 

this regime allowed even the lowest-ranking soldier in the 

IDF to rule, and ruin, their lives. They were helpless if such a 

solider, or his unit or commander, decided to demolish their 

homes, or hold them for hours at a checkpoint, or 

incarcerate them without trial. There was nothing they could 

do.! At every moment from 1948 until today, there had 

been some group of Palestinians undergoing such an 

experience. The first group to suffer under such a yoke was 

the Palestinian minority inside Israel. It began in the first 

two years of statehood when they were pushed _ into 

ghettoes, such as the Haifa Palestinian community living on 

the Carmel mountain, or expelled from the towns they had 

inhabited for decades, as such as Safad. In the case of 

Isdud, the whole population was expelled to the Gaza Strip. 

In the countryside, the situation was even worse. The 

various Kibbutz movements coveted Palestinian villages on 

fertile land. This included the socialist Kibbutzim, Hashomer 

Ha-Zair, which was allegedly committed to binational 

solidarity. Long after the fighting of 1948 had subsided, 

villagers in Ghabsiyyeh, lIqrit, Birim, Qaidta, Zaytun, and 

many others, were tricked into leaving their homes for a 

period of two weeks, the army claiming it needed their lands 

for training, only to find out on their return that their villages 

had been wiped out or handed to someone else.? 

This state of military terror is exemplified by the Kafr 

Qasim massacre of October 1956, when, on the eve of the 

Sinai operation, forty-nine Palestinian citizens were killed by 

the Israeli army. The authorities alleged that they were late 

returning home from work in the fields when a curfew had 

been imposed on the village. This was not the real reason, 

however. Later proofs show that Israel had_ seriously 

considered the expulsion of Palestinians from the whole area 

called the Wadi Ara and the Triangle in which the village sat. 

These two areas—the first a valley connecting Afula in the 

east and Hadera on the Mediterranean coast; the second 

expanding the eastern hinterland of Jerusalem—were 

annexed to Israel under the terms of the 1949 armistice 

agreement with Jordan. As we have seen, additional territory 

was always welcomed by Israel, but an increase in the 

Palestinian population was not. Thus, at every juncture, 

when the state of Israel expanded, it looked for ways of 

restricting the Palestinian population in the recently 

annexed areas. 

Operation “Hafarfert” (mole) was the codename of a set 

of proposals for the expulsion of Palestinians when a new 

war broke out with the Arab world. Many scholars today now 

think that the 1956 massacre was a practice run to see if 

the people in the area could be intimidated to leave. The 

perpetrators of the massacre were brought to trial thanks to 

the diligence and tenacity of two members of the Knesset: 

Tawfiq Tubi from the Communist Party and Latif Dori of the 

Left Zionist party Mapam. However, the commanders 

responsible for the area, and the unit itself that committed 

the crime, were let off very lightly, receiving merely small 

fines.* This was further proof that the army was allowed to 

get away with murder in the occupied territories. 

Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major 

event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be 

found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence. Palestinians 

in Israel still do not talk much about that pre-1967 period, 

and the documents of that time do not reveal the full 

picture. Surprisingly, it is in poetry that we find an indication 

of what it was like to live under military rule. Natan 

Alterman was one of the most famous and important poets 

of his generation. He had a weekly column, called “The 

Seventh Column,” in which he commented on events he had 

read or heard about. Sometimes he would omit details 

about the date or even the location of the event, but would 

give the reader just enough information to understand what 

he was referring to. He often expressed his attacks in poetic 

form: 

The news appeared briefly for two days, and disappeared. 

And no one seem to care, and no one seems to know. 

In the far away village of Um al-Fahem, 

Children—should | say citizens of the state—played in the mud 

And one of them seemed suspicious to one of our brave soldiers who 

shouted at him: Stop! 

An order is an order 

An order is an order, but the foolish boy did not stand, 

He ran away 

So our brave soldier shot, no wonder 

And hit and killed the boy. 

And no one talked about it.° 

On one occasion he wrote a poem about two Palestinian 

citizens who were shot in Wadi Ara. In another instance, he 

told the story of a very ill Palestinian woman who was 

expelled with her two children, aged three and six, with no 

explanation, and sent across the River Jordan. When she 

tried to return, she and her children were arrested and put 

into a Nazareth jail. Alterman hoped that his poem about 

the mother would move hearts and minds, or at least elicit 

some official response. However, he wrote a week later: 

And this writer assumed wrongly 

That either the story would be denied or explained 

But nothing, not a word.® 

There is further evidence that Israel was not a democracy 

prior to 1967. The state pursued a_ shoot-to-kill policy 

towards refugees trying to retrieve their land, crops, and 

husbandry, and staged a colonial war to topple Nasser’s 

regime in Egypt. Its security forces were also trigger-happy, 

killing more than fifty Palestinian citizens during the period 

1948-67. 

The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance 

it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In 

this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy. 

For example, after the new territorial gains several laws 

were passed ensuring a superior position for the majority: 

the laws governing citizenship, the laws concerning land 

ownership, and most important of all, the law of return. The 

latter grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, 

wherever he or she was born. This law in particular is a 

flagrantly undemocratic one, for it was accompanied by a 

total rejection of the Palestinian right of return—recognized 

internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 

of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian 

citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or 

with those who were expelled in 1948. Denying people the 

right of return to their homeland, and at the same time 

offering this right to others who have no connection to the 

land, is a model of undemocratic practice. 

Added to this was a further layering of denial of the 

rights of the Palestinian people. Almost every discrimination 

against the Palestinian citizens of Israel is justified by the 

fact that they do not serve in the army.’ The association 

between democratic rights and military duties is better 

understood if we revisit the formative years in which Israeli 

policy makers were trying to make up their minds about how 

to treat one-fifth of the population. Their assumption was 

that Palestinian citizens did not want to join the army 

anyway, and that assumed refusal, in turn, justified the 

discriminatory policy against them. This was put to the test 

in 1954 when the Israeli ministry of defense decided to call 

up those Palestinian citizens eligible for conscription to 

serve in the army. The secret service assured the 

government that there would be a widespread rejection of 

the call-up. To their great surprise, all those summoned 

went to the recruiting office, with the blessing of the 

Communist Party, the biggest and most important political 

force in the community at the time. The secret service later 

explained that the main reason was the teenagers’ boredom 

with life in the countryside and their desire for some action 

and adventure.® 

Notwithstanding this episode, the ministry of defense 

continued to peddle a narrative that depicted the Palestinian 

community as unwilling to serve in the military. Inevitably, 

in time, the Palestinians did indeed turn against the Israeli 

army, who had become their perpetual oppressors, but the 

government’s exploitation of this as a pretext for 

discrimination casts huge doubt on the state’s pretense to 

being a democracy. If you are a Palestinian citizen and you 

did not serve in the army your rights to government 

assistance as a worker, student, parent, or as part of a 

couple, are severely restricted. This affects housing in 

particular, as well as employment—where 70 percent of all 

Israeli industry is considered to be security-sensitive and 

therefore closed to these citizens as a place to find work.? 

The underlying assumption of the ministry of defense 

was not only that Palestinians do not wish to serve but that 

they are potentially an enemy within who cannot be trusted. 

The problem with this argument is that in all the major wars 

between Israel and the Arab world the Palestinian minority 

did not behave as expected. They did not form a fifth 

column or rise up against the regime. This, however, did not 

help them: to this day they are seen as a “demographic” 

problem that has to be solved. The only consolation is that 

still today most Israeli politicians do not believe that the 

way to solve “the problem” is by the transfer or expulsion of 

the Palestinians (at least not in peacetime). 

The claim to being a democracy is also questionable 

when one examines the budgetary policy surrounding the 

land question. Since 1948, Palestinian local councils and 

municipalities have received far less funding than their 

Jewish counterparts. The shortage of land, coupled with the 

scarcity of employment opportunities, creates an abnormal 

socioeconomic reality. For example, the most affluent 

Palestinian community, the village of Me’ilya in the upper 

Galilee, is still worse off than the poorest Jewish 

development town in the Negev. In 2011, the /erusalem Post 

reported that “average Jewish income was 40% to 60% 

higher than average Arab income between the years 1997 

to 2009.”1° 

Today more than 90 percent of the land is owned by the 

Jewish National Fund (JNF). Landowners are not allowed to 

engage in transactions with non-Jewish citizens and public 

land is prioritized for the use of national projects, which 

means that new Jewish settlements are being built while 

there are hardly any new Palestinian settlements. Thus, the 

biggest Palestinian city, Nazareth, despite the tripling of its 

population since 1948, has not expanded one square 

kilometer, whereas the development town built above it, 

Upper Nazareth, has tripled in size, on land expropriated 

from Palestinian landowners.+! 

Further examples of this policy can be found in 

Palestinian villages throughout Galilee, revealing the same 

story: how they have been downsized by 40 percent, 

sometimes even 60 percent, since 1948, and how new 

Jewish settlements have been built on expropriated land. 

Elsewhere this has_ initiated full-blown attempts at 

“Judaization.” After 1967, the Israeli government became 

concerned about the lack of Jews living in the north and 

south of the state and so planned to increase the population 

in those areas. Such a demographic change necessitated 

the confiscation of Palestinian land for the building of Jewish 

settlements. 

Worse was the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from 

these settlements. This blunt violation of a citizen’s right to 

live wherever he or she wishes continues today, and all 

efforts by human rights NGOs in Israel to challenge this 

apartheid have so far ended in total failure. The Supreme 

Court in Israel has only been able to question the legality of 

this policy in a few individual cases, but not in principle. 

Imagine if in the UK or the United States, Jewish citizens, or 

Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in 

certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns? 

How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of 

democracy? 

Thus, given its attitude towards two Palestinian groups— 

the refugees and the community in Israel—the Jewish state 

cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be assumed to be 

a democracy. But the most obvious challenge to that 

assumption is the ruthless Israeli attitude towards a third 

Palestinian group: those who have lived under its direct and 

indirect rule since 1967, in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, 

and the Gaza Strip. From the legal infrastructure put in place 

at the outset of the war, through the unquestioned absolute 

power of the military inside the West Bank and outside the 

Gaza Strip, to the humiliation of millions of Palestinians as a 

daily routine, the “only democracy” in the Middle East 

behaves as a dictatorship of the worst kind. 

The main Israeli response, diplomatic and academic, to 

the latter accusation is that all these measures are 

temporary—they will change if the Palestinians, wherever 

they are, behave “better.” But if one researches, not to 

mention lives in, the occupied territories, one will 

understand how ridiculous these arguments are. Israeli 

policy makers, as we have seen, are determined to keep the 

occupation alive for as long as the Jewish state remains 

intact. It is part of what the Israeli political system regards 

as the status quo, which is always better than any change. 

Israel will control most of Palestine and, since it will always 

include a substantial Palestinian population, this can only be 

done by non-democratic means. 

In addition, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the 

Israeli state claims that the occupation is an enlightened 

one. The myth here is that Israel came with good intentions 

to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a 

tougher attitude because of the Palestinian violence. In 

1967 the government treated the West Bank and the Gaza 

Strip as natural part of “Eretz Israel,” the land of Israel, and 

this attitude has continued ever since. When you look at the 

debate between the right-and left-wing parties in Israel on 

this issue, their disagreements have been about how to 

achieve this goal, not about its validity. 

Among the wider public, however, there was a genuine 

debate between what one might call the “redeemers” and 

the “custodians.” The “redeemers” believed Israel had 

recovered the ancient heart of its homeland and could not 

survive in the future without it. In contrast, the “custodians” 

argued that the territories should be exchanged for peace 

with Jordan, in the case of the West Bank, and Egypt in the 

case of the Gaza Strip. However, this public debate had 

little impact on the way the principal policy makers were 

figuring out how to rule the occupied territories. The worst 

part of this supposed “enlightened occupation” has been 

the government’s methods for managing the territories. At 

first the area was divided into “Arab” and potential “Jewish” 

spaces. Those areas densely populated with Palestinians 

became autonomous, run by local collaborators under a 

military rule. This regime was only replaced with a civil 

administration in 1981. The other areas, the “Jewish” 

Spaces, were colonized with Jewish settlements and military 

bases. This policy was intended to leave the population both 

in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in disconnected 

enclaves with neither green spaces nor any possibility for 

urban expansion. 

Things only got worse when, very soon after the 

occupation, Gush Emunim started settling in the West Bank 

and the Gaza Strip, claiming to be following a biblical map 

of colonization rather than the governmental one. As they 

penetrated the densely populated Palestinian areas, the 

space left for the locals was shrunk even further. 

What every colonization project primarily needs is land— 

in the occupied territories this was achieved only through 

the massive expropriation of land, deporting people from 

where they had lived for generations, and confining them in 

enclaves with difficult habitats. When you fly over the West 

Bank, you can see clearly the cartographic results of this 

policy: belts of settlements that divide the land and carve 

the Palestinian communities into small, isolated, and 

disconnected communities. The Judaization belts separate 

villages from villages, villages from towns, and sometime 

bisect a single village. This is what scholars call a geography 

of disaster, not least since these policies turned out to be an 

ecological disaster as well: drying up water sources and 

ruining some of the most beautiful parts of the Palestinian 

landscape. Moreover, the settlements became hotbeds in 

which Jewish extremism grew uncontrollably—the principal 

victims of which were the Palestinians. Thus, the settlement 

at Efrat has ruined the world heritage site of the Wallajah 

valley near Bethlehem, and the village of Jafneh near 

Ramallah, which was famous for its fresh water canals, lost 

its identity as a tourist attraction. These are just two small 

examples out of hundreds of similar cases. 

House demolition is not a new phenomenon in Palestine. 

As with many of the more barbaric methods of collective 

punishment used by Israel since 1948, it was first conceived 

and exercised by the British Mandatory government during 

the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39. This was the first 

Palestinian uprising against the pro-Zionist policy of the 

British Mandate, and it took the British army three years to 

quell it. In the process, they demolished around 2,000 

houses during the various collective punishments meted out 

to the local population.!? Israel demolished houses from 

almost the first day of its military occupation of the West 

Bank and the Gaza Strip. The army blew up hundreds of 

homes every year in response to various acts undertaken by 

individual family members.!* From minor violations of 

military rule to participation in violent acts against the 

occupation, the Israelis were quick to send in_ their 

bulldozers to wipe out not only a physical building but also a 

focus of life and existence. In the greater Jerusalem area (as 

inside Israel) demolition was also a punishment for the 

unlicensed extension of an existing house or the failure to 

pay bills. 

Another form of collective punishment that has recently 

returned to the Israeli repertoire is that of blocking up 

houses. Imagine that all the doors and windows in your 

house are blocked by cement, mortar, and stones, so you 

can’t get back in or retrieve anything you failed to take out 

in time. | have looked hard in my history books to find 

another example, but found no evidence of such a callous 

measure being practiced elsewhere. 

Finally, under the “enlightened occupation,” settlers have 

been allowed to form vigilante gangs to harass people and 

destroy their property. These gangs have changed their 

approach over the years. During the 1980s, they used 

actual terror—from wounding Palestinian leaders (one of 

them lost his legs in such an attack), to contemplating 

blowing up the mosques on Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. In 

this century, they have engaged in the daily harassment of 

Palestinians: uprooting their trees, destroying their yields, 

and shooting randomly at their homes and vehicles. Since 

2000, there have been at least 100 such attacks reported 

per month in some areas such as Hebron, where the 500 

settlers, with the silent collaboration of the Israeli army, 

harassed the locals living nearby in an even more brutal 

way.15 

From the very beginning of the occupation then, the 

Palestinians were given two options: accept the reality of 

permanent incarceration in a mega-prison for a very long 

time, or risk the might of the strongest army in the Middle 

East. When the Palestinians did resist—as they did in 1987, 

2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, and 2016—they were targeted as 

soldiers and units of a conventional army. Thus, villages and 

towns were bombed as if they were military bases and the 

unarmed civilian population was shot at as if it was an army 

on the battlefield. Today we know too much about life under 

occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the 

claim that non-resistance will ensure less oppression. The 

arrests without trial, as experienced by so many over the 

years; the demolition of thousands of houses; the killing and 

wounding of the innocent; the drainage of water wells— 

these are all testimony to one of the harshest contemporary 

regimes of our times. Amnesty International annually 

documents in a very comprehensive way the nature of the 

occupation. The following is from their 2015 report: 

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli forces committed 

unlawful killings of Palestinian civilians, including children, and detained 

thousands of Palestinians who protested against or otherwise opposed 

Israel’s continuing military occupation, holding hundreds in administrative 

detention. Torture and other ill-treatment remained rife and were 

committed with impunity. The authorities continued to promote illegal 

settlements in the West Bank, and severely restricted Palestinians’ 

freedom of movement, further tightening restrictions amid an escalation 

of violence from October, which included attacks on Israeli civilians by 

Palestinians and apparent extrajudicial executions by Israeli forces. Israeli 

settlers in the West Bank attacked Palestinians and their property with 

virtual impunity. The Gaza Strip remained under an Israeli military 

blockade that imposed collective punishment on its inhabitants. The 

authorities continued to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and 

inside Israel, particularly in Bedouin villages in the Negev/Nagab region, 

forcibly evicting their residents.+® 

Let’s take this in stages. Firstly, assassinations—what 

Amnesty’s report calls “unlawful killings”: about 15,000 

Palestinians have been killed “unlawfully” by Israel since 

1967. Among them were 2,000 children.’ Another feature 

of the “enlightened occupation” is imprisonment without 

trial. Every fifth Palestinian in the West Bank and the Gaza 

Strip has undergone such an experience.!® It is interesting 

to compare this Israeli practice with similar American 

policies in the past and the present, as critics of the Boycott, 

Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement claim that US 

practices are far worse. In fact, the worst American example 

was the imprisonment without trail of 100,000 Japanese 

citizens during World War Il, with 30,000 later detained 

under the so-called “war on terror.” Neither of these 

numbers comes even close to the number of Palestinians 

who have experienced such a process: including the very 

young, the old, as well as the long-term incarcerated.!? 

Arrest without trial is a traumatic experience. Not knowing 

the charges against you, having no contact with a lawyer 

and hardly any contact with your family are only some of 

the concerns that will affect you as a prisoner. More brutally, 

many of these arrests are used as means to pressure people 

into collaboration. Spreading rumors or shaming people for 

their alleged or real sexual orientation are also frequently 

used as methods for leveraging complicity. 

As for torture, the reliable website Middle East Monitor 

published a harrowing article describing the 200 methods 

used by the Israelis to torture Palestinians. The list is based 

on a UN report and a report from the Israeli human rights 

Organization B’Tselem.22 Among other methods it includes 

beatings, chaining prisoners to doors or chairs for hours, 

pouring cold and hot water on them, pulling fingers apart, 

and twisting testicles. 

What we must challenge here, therefore, is not only 

Israel’s claim to be maintaining an enlightened occupation 

but also its pretense to being a democracy. Such behavior 

towards millions of people under its rule gives the lie to 

such political chicanery. However, although large sections of 

civil societies throughout the world deny Israel its pretense 

to democracy, their political elites, for a variety of reasons, 

still treat it as a member of the exclusive club of democratic 

states. In many ways, the popularity of the BDS movement 

reflects the frustrations of those societies with their 

governments’ policies towards Israel. 

For most Israelis these counterarguments are irrelevant 

at best and malicious at worst. The Israeli state clings to the 

view that it is a benevolent occupier. The argument for 

“enlightened occupation” proposes that, according to the 

average Jewish citizen in Israel, the Palestinians are much 

better off under occupation and they have no reason in the 

world to resist it, let alone by force. If you are a non-critical 

supporter of Israel abroad, you accept these assumptions as 

well. 

There are, however, sections of Israeli society that do 

recognize the validity of some of the claims made here. In 

the 1990s, with various degrees of conviction, a significant 

number of Jewish academics, journalists, and artists voiced 

their doubts about the definition of Israel as a democracy. It 

takes some courage to challenge the foundational myths of 

one’s own society and state. This is why quite a few of them 

later retreated from this brave position and returned to 

toeing the general line. Nevertheless, for a while during the 

last decade of the last century, they produced works that 

challenged the assumption of a democratic Israel. They 

portrayed Israel as belonging to a different community: that 

of the non-democratic nations. One of them, the geographer 

Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as 

an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state 

with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over 

all the others.2! Others went further, labeling Israel an 

apartheid state or a settler colonial state.22 In short, 

whatever description these critical scholars offered, 

“democracy” was not among them. 

Chapter 8 

The Oslo Mythologies 

On September 13, 1993, Israel and the PLO signed a 

declaration of principles, known as the Oslo Accord, on the 

White House lawn under the auspices of President Bill 

Clinton. The PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, the Israeli prime 

minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Israeli foreign minister, 

Shimon Peres, would later receive a Nobel Peace prize for 

this Accord. It ended a long period of negotiations that had 

begun in 1992. Until that year, Israel had refused to 

negotiate directly with the PLO over the fate of the West 

Bank and the Gaza Strip, or about the Palestinian question 

in general. Successive Israeli governments preferred 

negotiating with Jordan, but since the mid-1980s they had 

allowed PLO representatives to join the Jordanian 

delegations. 

There were several reasons for the change in the Israeli 

position that enabled direct negotiations with the PLO. The 

first was the victory of the Labor party in the 1992 elections 

(for the first time since 1977) and the formation of a 

government that was more interested in a political solution 

than the previous Likud-led administrations. The new 

government understood that the attempts to negotiate 

directly with the local Palestinian leadership about 

autonomy were stalled because every Palestinian decision 

was referred back to the PLO headquarters in Tunis; thus, a 

direct line was more useful. 

The second reason concerned Israeli apprehensions 

arising from the Madrid peace _ initiative—an American 

enterprise to bring Israel, the Palestinians, and the rest of 

the Arab world together to agree on a solution in the 

aftermath of the first Gulf War. President George Bush Sr. 

and his secretary of state, William Baker, fathered this 

initiative in 1991. Both politicians asserted that Israel was 

an obstacle to peace and pressured the Israeli government 

to agree to a halt in settlement building so as to give the 

two-states solution a chance. Israeli-American relations at 

the time were at an unprecedented low. The new Israeli 

administration also initiated direct contact with the PLO 

themselves. The Madrid conference of 1991 and the peace 

efforts conducted under its auspices were probably the first 

genuine American effort to find a solution for the West Bank 

and the Gaza Strip based on Israeli withdrawal. The Israeli 

political elite wanted to thwart the move by nipping it in the 

bud. They preferred to initiate their own peace proposal and 

convince the Palestinians to accept it. Yasser Arafat was also 

unhappy with the Madrid initiative since in his eyes the local 

Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, headed by 

the Gazan leader, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, and Faysal al-Husseini 

from Jerusalem, threatened his leadership and popularity by 

taking the lead in the negotiations. 

Thus the PLO in Tunis and the Israeli foreign office in 

Jerusalem began behind-the-scenes negotiations while the 

Madrid peace effort continued. They found a_ willing 

mediator in Fafo, a Norwegian peace institute based in Oslo. 

The two teams eventually met in the open in August 1993 

and with American involvement finalized the Declaration of 

Principles (DOP). The DOP was hailed as the end of the 

conflict when it was signed, with a lot of histrionics on the 

White House lawn in September 1993. 

There are two myths associated with the Oslo process. 

The first is that it was a genuine peace process; the second 

that Yasser Arafat intentionally undermined it by instigating 

the Second Intifada as a terrorist operation against Israel. 

The first myth was born out the desire of both sides in 

1992 to reach a solution. However, when this failed, it 

quickly became a game of who to blame. Israeli hardliners 

pointed the finger at the Palestinian leadership. A more 

nuanced, liberal Zionist version of this assumption laid the 

blame on Yasser Arafat but also on the Israeli right, in 

particular Benjamin Netanyahu, for the impasse after the 

PLO leader’s death in 2004. In either scenario, the peace 

process is considered a real one, albeit a failure. However, 

the truth is more complex. The terms of the agreement were 

impossible to fulfill. The claim that Arafat refused to respect 

the Palestinian pledges made in the 1993 Accord does not 

bear scrutiny. He could not enforce pledges that were 

impossible to keep. For example, the Palestinian authorities 

were called upon to act as Israel’s security subcontractor 

inside the occupied territories and ensure that there would 

be no resistance activity. More implicitly, Arafat was 

expected to accept the Israeli interpretation of the final 

settlement emerging from the Accord without debate. The 

Israelis presented this fait accompli to the PLO leader in the 

summer of 2000 at the Camp David summit, where the 

Palestinian leader was negotiating the final agreement with 

the Israeli prime minister, Enud Barak, and the US President, 

Bill Clinton. 

Barak demanded a demilitarized Palestinian state, with a 

capital in a village near Jerusalem, Abu Dis, and without 

parts of the West Bank such as the Jordan Valley, the big 

Jewish settlement blocs, and areas in Greater Jerusalem. The 

future state would not have an independent economic and 

foreign policy and would be autonomous only in certain 

domestic aspects (Such as running the educational system, 

tax collection, municipalities, policing, and maintaining the 

infrastructures on the ground). The formalization of this 

arrangement was to signify the end of the conflict and 

terminate any Palestinian demands in the future (Such as 

the right of return for the 1948 Palestinian refugees). 

The peace process was a busted flush from the outset. To 

understand the failure of Oslo, one has to widen the analysis 

and relate the events to two principles that remained 

unanswered throughout the Accord. The first was the 

primacy of geographical or territorial partition as the 

exclusive foundation of peace; the second the denial of the 

Palestinian refugees’ right of return and its exclusion from 

the negotiating table. 

The proposition that the physical partition of the land 

was the best solution for the conflict appeared for the first 

time in 1937 as part of the British Royal Commission, the 

Peel Report. At that time the Zionist movement suggested 

that Jordan—Transjordan in those days—should annex the 

“Arab parts of Palestine,” but the idea was rejected by the 

Palestinians.’ It was later re-adopted as the best way 

forward in the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947. 

The UN appointed a special commission of inquiry (UNSCOP) 

to try to find a solution. The members of the committee 

came from countries that had very little interest in or 

knowledge about Palestine. The Palestinian representative 

body, the Arab Higher Committee, and the Arab League, 

boycotted UNSCOP and refused to cooperate with it. This 

left a vacuum that was filled by the Zionist diplomats and 

leadership, who fed UNSCOP with their ideas for a solution. 

They suggested the creation of a Jewish state over 80 

percent of Palestine; the Commission reduced it to 56 

percent.? Egypt and Jordan were willing to legitimize the 

Israelis’ takeover of Palestine in 1948 in return for bilateral 

agreements with them (which were eventually signed in 

1979 with Egypt and in 1994 with Jordan). 

The idea of partition then reappeared under different 

names and references in the efforts led by the Americans 

after 1967. It was implicit in the new discourse that 

emerged: that of “territories for peace,” which every peace 

negotiator treated as a _ sanctified formula—the more 

territory Israel withdrew from the more peace it would get. 

Now the territory that Israel could withdraw from was within 

the 20 percent it had not taken over in 1948. In essence 

then, the idea was to build peace on the basis of partitioning 

the remaining 20 percent between Israel and whomever it 

would legitimize as a partner for peace (the Jordanians until 

the late 1980s, and the Palestinians ever since). 

Unsurprisingly, therefore, this became the cornerstone of 

the logic that informed the opening discussions in Oslo. It 

was easily forgotten, however, that historically every time 

partition had been offered, it was followed by more 

bloodshed and failed to produce the desired peace. Indeed, 

the Palestinian leaders at no point ever demanded partition. 

It was always a Zionist and, later, an Israeli idea. In addition, 

the proportion of territory demanded by the Israelis grew as 

their power increased. Thus, as the idea of partition gained 

growing global support, it increasingly appeared to the 

Palestinians as an offensive strategy by other means. It was 

due only to the lack of alternatives that the Palestinian 

parties accepted this set of circumstances as a lesser evil 

within the terms of negotiation. In the early 1970s, Fatah 

acknowledged partition as a necessary means on the way to 

full liberation, but not as a final settlement by itself.? 

So, in truth, without the application of extreme pressure, 

there is no reason in the world why a native population 

would ever volunteer to partition its homeland with a settler 

population. And therefore we should acknowledge that the 

Oslo process was not a fair and equal pursuit of peace, but a 

compromise agreed to by a defeated, colonized people. As a 

result, the Palestinians were forced to seek solutions that 

went against their interests and endangered their very 

existence. 

The same argument can be made about the debates 

concerning the “two-states solution” that was offered in 

Oslo. This offer should be seen for what it is: partition under 

a different wording. Even in this scenario, although the 

terms of the debate appear different, Israel would not only 

decide how much territory it was going to concede but also 

what would happen in the territory it left behind. While the 

promise of statehood initially proved persuasive to the world 

and to some Palestinians, it soon came to sound hollow. 

Nonetheless, these two intertwined notions of territorial 

withdrawal and statehood were successfully packaged as 

parts of a peace deal in Oslo in 1993. Yet within weeks of 

the joint signature on the White House lawn, the writing was 

on the wall. By the end of September, the Accord’s vague 

principles had already been translated into a new 

geopolitical reality on the ground under the terms of what 

was Called the Oslo Il (or Taba*) agreement. This included 

not just partitioning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 

between “Jewish” and “Palestinian” zones, but partitioning 

further all the Palestinian areas into small cantons or 

Bantustans. The peace cartography of 1995 amounted to a 

bisected series of Palestinian zones that resembled, in the 

words of quite a few commentators, a Swiss cheese.° 

Once this program became clear, the decline of the 

negotiations was swift. Before the final summit meeting in 

the summer of 2000, Palestinian activists, academics, and 

politicians had realized that the process they supported did 

not involve an actual Israeli military withdrawal from the 

occupied territories, nor did it promise the creation of a real 

state. The charade was revealed and progress ground to a 

halt. The ensuing sense of despair contributed to the 

outburst of the second Palestinian uprising in the autumn of 

2000. 

The Oslo peace process did not fail simply due to its 

adherence to the principle of partition. In the original Accord 

there was an Israeli promise that the three issues that 

trouble the Palestinians most—the fate of Jerusalem, the 

refugees, and the Jewish colonies—would be negotiated 

when the interim period of five years came to a successful 

end. Within this interim period, the Palestinians had to prove 

they could serve” effectively as Israel’s security 

subcontractors, preventing any guerrilla or terror attacks 

against the Jewish state, its army, settlers, and citizens. 

Contrary to the promise made in the Oslo DOP, when the 

five years of the first stage were over, the second stage, in 

which the more substantial issues for the Palestinians were 

meant to be discussed, did not commence. The Netanyahu 

government claimed that it was unable to initiate this 

second phase because of Palestinian “misbehavior” (which 

included “incitement in schools” and weak condemnations 

of terror attacks against soldiers, settlers, and citizens). In 

truth, however, the process was stalled mainly by the 

assassination of the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 

November 1995. The murder was followed by the victory of 

the Likud party, headed by Netanyahu, in the 1996 national 

elections. The new prime minister’s overt objection to the 

Accord put the brake on the process. Even when the 

Americans forced him to restart negotiations, progress was 

extremely slow until the return to power of the Labor party, 

under Ehud Barak, in 1999. Barak was determined to 

complete the process with a final peace agreement, an 

impulse fully supported by the Clinton administration. 

Israel’s final offer, delivered during discussions at Camp 

David in the summer of 2000, proposed a small Palestinian 

state, with a capital in Abu Dis, but without significant 

dismantling of any settlements and no hope for return of the 

refugees. After the Palestinians rejected the offer, there was 

an informal attempt by the deputy Israeli foreign minister, 

Yossi Beilin, to offer a more reasonable deal. On the issue of 

refugees he now agreed to their return to a future 

Palestinian state and symbolic repatriation to Israel. But 

these informal terms were never ratified by the state. 

(Thanks to the leaking of key documents, known as the 

Palestine papers, we now have a better insight into the 

nature of the negotiations, and readers who wish to 

examine other aspects of the negotiations between 2001 

and 2007 are advised to consult this accessible source.°®) 

And yet, as negotiations collapsed, it was the Palestinian 

leadership, rather than the Israeli politicians, who were 

accused of being intransigent, leading to the collapse of 

Oslo. This does a disservice to those involved and to how 

seriously the prospects of partition were taken. 

The exclusion of the Palestinian right of return from the 

agenda is the second reason why the Oslo Accord was 

irrelevant aS a peace process. While the partition principle 

reduced “Palestine” to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 

the exclusion of the refugee issue, and of that of the 

Palestinian minority inside Israel, shrank the “Palestinian 

people” demographically to less than half of the Palestinian 

nation. This lack of attention to the refugee question was 

not new. Ever since the beginning of the peace efforts in 

post-Mandatory Palestine, the refugees have been exposed 

to a campaign of repression and negligence. Ever since the 

first peace conference on post-1948 Palestine, the Lausanne 

meeting of April 1949, the refugee problem has been 

excluded from the peace agenda and disassociated from the 

concept of “The Palestine Conflict.” Israel participated in 

that conference only because it was a precondition for its 

acceptance as a full member of the UN,’ who also 

demanded that Israel sign a protocol, called the May 

Protocol, committing itself to the terms of Resolution 194, 

which included an unconditional call for the Palestinian 

refugees to return to their homes or to be_ given 

compensation. A day after it was signed in May 1949, Israel 

was admitted to the UN and immediately retracted its 

commitment to the protocol. 

In the wake of the June 1967 war, the world at large 

accepted the Israeli claim that the conflict in Palestine 

began with that war and was essentially a struggle over the 

future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Several Arab 

regimes also accepted this notion, abandoning the refugee 

problem as an issue. However, the refugee camps soon 

became sites of intensive political, social, and cultural 

activity. It was there, for example, that the Palestinian 

liberation movement was reborn. Only the UN continued to 

mention in several of its resolutions the obligation of the 

international community to ensure the full and unconditional 

repatriation of the Palestinian refugees—the commitment 

first made in Resolution 194 in 1948. Still today the UN 

includes a body named “the committee for the inalienable 

rights of the Palestinian refugees,” but it has had little effect 

on the peace process. 

The Oslo Accord was no different. In this document, the 

refugee issue was buried in a subclause, almost invisible in 

the mass of words. The Palestinian partners to the Accord 

contributed to this obfuscation, probably out of negligence 

rather than intentionally, but the result was the same. The 

refugee problem—the heart of the Palestine conflict, a 

reality acknowledged by all Palestinians, wherever they are, 

and by anyone sympathizing with the Palestinian cause— 

was marginalized in the Oslo documents. Instead, the issue 

was handed to a short-lived multilateral group who were 

asked to focus on the 1967 refugees, the Palestinians who 

were expelled or left after the June war. The Oslo Accord in 

fact substituted for an embryonic attempt, born out of the 

1991 Madrid peace process, to form a multilateral group 

that would discuss the refugee issue on the basis of UN 

General Assembly Resolution 194. The group was led by the 

Canadians, who regarded the right of return as a myth, 

throughout 1994, and then it petered out. In any case, 

without any official announcement, the group stopped 

meeting and the fate of even the 1967 refugees (more than 

300,000 of them) was abandoned.® 

The implementation of the Accord after 1993 only made 

things worse. The rules of the agreement required the 

abandonment by the Palestinian leadership of the right of 

return. Thus only five years after the cantonization of “the 

Palestinian entity” and its transformation into a Bantustan, 

the Palestinian leadership was given permission to express 

its wish to deal with the refugee problem as part of the 

negotiations over the permanent settlement of the Palestine 

question. Nevertheless, the Israeli state was able to define 

the terms of discussion and so chose to _ distinguish 

between, on the one hand, the introduction of the “refugee 

problem” as a legitimate Palestinian grievance, and, on the 

other, the demand for the “right of return,” which it was 

able to describe as a Palestinian provocation. 

In the last ditch attempt to save the agreement at the 

Camp David summit in 2000, the refugee issue did not fare 

any better. In January 2000, the Barak government 

presented a paper, endorsed by the American negotiators, 

defining the parameters of the negotiations. This was an 

Israeli diktat, and until the summit was convened in the 

summer, the Palestinians failed to produce a 

counterproposal. The final “negotiations” were in essence a 

combined Israeli and American effort to get the Palestinians 

to accept the paper, which included, among other things, an 

absolute and categorical rejection of the Palestinian right of 

return. It left open for discussion the number of refugees 

that might be allowed to return to the territories controlled 

by the Palestinian Authority, although all involved 

understood that these crammed areas were unable to 

absorb more people, while there was plenty of space for 

repatriating refugees in the rest of Israel and Palestine. This 

part of the discussion was a meaningless gesture, 

introduced simply to silence any criticism without offering a 

real solution. 

The peace process of the 1990s was thus no such thing. 

The insistence on partition and the exclusion of the refugee 

issue from the agenda rendered the Oslo process at best a 

military redeployment and a rearrangement of Israeli control 

in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At worst, it 

inaugurated a new system of control that made life for the 

Palestinians in the occupied territories far worse than it was 

before. 

After 1995, the impact of the Oslo Accord as a factor that 

ruined Palestinian society, rather than bringing peace, 

became painfully clear. Following Rabin’s assassination and 

the election of Netanyahu in 1996, the Accord became a 

discourse of peace that had no relevance to the reality on 

the ground. During the period of the talks—between 1996 

and 1999—more settlements were built, and more collective 

punishments were inflicted on the Palestinians. Even if you 

believed in the two-states solution in 1999, a tour of either 

the West Bank or the Gaza Strip would have convinced you 

of the words of the Israeli scholar, Meron Benvenisti, who 

wrote that Israel had created irreversible facts on the 

ground: the two-states solution was killed by Israel.? Since 

the Oslo process was not a genuine peace process, the 

Palestinians’ participation in it, and their reluctance to 

continue it, was not a sign of their alleged intransigence and 

violent political culture, but a natural response to a 

diplomatic charade that solidified and deepened Israeli 

control over the occupied territories. 

This then leads on to the second myth concerning the 

Oslo process: that Arafat’s intransigence ensured the failure 

of the Camp David Summit in 2000. Two questions have to 

be answered here. Firstly, what happened in the summer of 

2000 at Camp David—who was responsible for the summit’s 

failure? Secondly, who was responsible for the violence of 

the Second Intifada? The two questions will help us engage 

directly with the common assumption that Arafat was a 

warmonger who came to Camp David to destroy the peace 

process and returned to Palestine with a determination to 

start a new Intifada. 

Before we answer these questions, we should remember 

the reality in the occupied territories on the day Arafat left 

for Camp David. My main argument here is that Arafat came 

to Camp David to change that reality while the Israelis and 

the Americans arrived there determined to maintain it. The 

Oslo process had transformed the occupied territories into a 

geography of disaster, which meant that the Palestinians’ 

quality of life was far worse after the Accord that it was 

before. Already in 1994, Rabin’s government forced Arafat 

to accept its interpretation of how the Accord would be 

implemented on the ground. The West Bank was divided to 

the infamous areas A, B, and C. Area C was directly 

controlled by Israel and constituted half of the West Bank. 

The movement between, and inside, these areas became 

nearly impossible, and the West Bank was cut off from the 

Gaza Strip. The Strip was also divided between Palestinians 

and Jewish settlers, who took over most of the water 

resources and lived in gated communities cordoned off with 

barbered wire. Thus the end result of this supposed peace 

process was a deterioration in the quality of Palestinian 

lives. 

This was Arafat’s reality in the summer of 2000 when he 

arrived at Camp David. He was being asked to sign off as a 

final settlement the irreversible facts on the ground that had 

turned the idea of a two-states solution into an arrangement 

that at best would allow the Palestinians two small 

Bantustans and at worst would allow Israel to annex more 

territory. The agreement would also force him to give up any 

future Palestinian demands or propose a way of alleviating 

some of the daily hardships most Palestinians suffered from. 

We have an authentic and reliable report of what 

happened at Camp David from the State Department’s 

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.!° Their detailed account 

appeared in the New York Review of Books and begins by 

dismissing the Israeli claim that Arafat ruined the summit. 

The article makes the point that Arafat’s main problem was 

that, in the years since Oslo, life for the Palestinians in the 

occupied territories had only got worse. Quite reasonably, 

according to these two American officials, he suggested that 

instead of rushing within two weeks “to end the conflict for 

once and for all,” Israel should agree to certain measures 

that might restore the Palestinians’ faith in the usefulness 

and benefits of the peace process. The period of two weeks, 

incidentally, was not an Israeli demand, but a foolish time 

frame insisted upon by Bill Clinton, who was considering his 

own legacy. 

There were two major proposals that Arafat signaled as 

potential areas of discussion, which, if accepted, might 

improve the reality on the ground. The first was to de- 

escalate the intensive colonization of the West Bank that 

had increased after Oslo. The second was to put an end to 

the daily brutalization of normal Palestinian life, manifested 

in severe restrictions of movement, frequent collective 

punishments, arrests without’ trial, and constant 

humiliations at the checkpoints. All these practices occurred 

in every area where there was a contact between the Israeli 

army or civil administration (the body running the 

territories) and the local population. 

According to the testimony of the American officials, 

Barak refused to change Israel’s policy towards the Jewish 

colonies or the daily abuse of the Palestinians. He took a 

tough position that left Arafat with no choice. Whatever 

Barak proposed as a final settlement did not mean much if 

he could not promise immediate changes in the reality on 

the ground. Predictably, Arafat was blamed by Israel and its 

allies for being a warmonger who, immediately after 

returning from Camp David, encouraged the Second 

Intifada. The myth here is that the Second Intifada was a 

terrorist attack sponsored and perhaps even planned by 

Yasser Arafat. The truth is, it was a mass demonstration of 

dissatisfaction at the betrayals of Oslo, compounded by the 

provocative actions of Ariel Sharon. In September 2000, 

Sharon ignited an explosion of protest when, as the leader 

of the opposition, he toured Haram al-Sharif, the Temple 

Mount, with a massive security and media presence. 

The initial Palestinian anger was expressed in non-violent 

demonstrations that were crushed with brutal force by 

Israel. This callous repression led to a more desperate 

response—the suicide bombers who appeared as the last 

resort in the face of the strongest military power in the 

region. There is telling evidence from Israeli newspaper 

correspondents of how their reports on the early stages of 

the Intifada—as a non-violent movement crushed by the 

Israeli army—were shelved by their editors so as to fit the 

narrative of the government. One of them was a deputy 

editor of Yeidot Ahronoth, the main daily in the state, who 

wrote a book about the misinformation produced by the 

Israeli media in the early days of the Second Intifada. 

Israeli propagandists claimed the Palestinians’ behavior only 

confirmed the famous saying of the veteran Israeli Super- 

diplomat, Abba Eban, that the Palestinians do not miss an 

opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. 

We have a better understanding today of what triggered 

the furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two 

senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, 

interview the Israeli general chief of staff and strategists in 

the ministry of defense, providing us with inside knowledge 

on the way these officials were thinking about the issue.!2 

Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the Israeli 

army was frustrated after its humiliating defeat at the hands 

of Hezbollah in Lebanon. There was a fear that this defeat 

made the army look weak, and so a show of force was 

needed. A reassertion of their dominance within the 

occupied territories was just the kind of display of sheer 

power the “invincible” Israeli army needed. It was ordered 

to respond with all its might, and so it did. When Israel 

retaliated against a terror attack on a hotel in the sea resort 

of Netanya in April 2002 (in which thirty people were killed), 

it was the first time the military had used airplanes to bomb 

the dense Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West 

Bank. Instead of hunting down the individuals who had 

carried out the attacks, the most lethal heavy weapons were 

brought to bear on innocent people. 

Another common reference in the blame game Israel and 

the United States played after the failure at Camp David 

was that of reminding public opinion that there was a 

chronic problem with Palestinian leaders, who at the 

moment of truth would expose their warmongering ways. 

The claim that “there is no one to talk to on the Palestinian 

side” resurfaced in that period as a common analysis from 

pundits and commentators in Israel, Europe, and the United 

States. Such allegations were particularly cynical. The Israeli 

government and army had tried by force to impose its own 

version of Oslo—one that was meant to perpetuate the 

occupation forever but with Palestinian consent—and even 

an enfeebled Arafat could not accept it. He and so many 

other leaders who could have led their people to 

reconciliation were targeted by the Israelis, and most of 

them, including probably Arafat himself, were assassinated. 

The targeted killing of Palestinian leaders, including 

moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. 

Israel began this policy in 1972 with the assassination of 

Ghassan Kanafani, a poet and writer who also could have 

led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was 

targeted, as a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the 

role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it later 

“regretted” not being there as partners for peace. 

In May 2001, President George Bush Jr. appointed 

Senator Robert Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle 

East. Mitchell produced a report about the causes of the 

Second Intifada, deciding, “We have no basis on which to 

conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to 

initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to 

conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the 

[Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.”!3 On 

the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest 

by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa 

mosque and the holy places of Islam. 

In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the 

Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any 

hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians 

to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only 

morally wrong in his eyes, but would also, as he was well 

aware, strengthen the hand of those who regarded the 

armed struggle against Israel as the only way to liberate 

Palestine. At any given moment, Israel could have stopped 

the Second Intifada, but the army needed a show of 

“success”; only when this was achieved through the 

barbaric operation of “Defensive Shield” in 2002 and the 

building of the infamous “apartheid wall” did they succeed 

temporarily in quelling the uprising. 

Chapter 9 

The Gaza Mythologies 

The issue of Palestine is closely associated in international 

public opinion with the Gaza Strip. Ever since the first Israeli 

assault on the Strip in 2006, and up to the recent 2014 

bombardment of the 1.8 million Palestinians living there, 

this part of the region epitomized the Palestine question for 

the world at large. | will present in this chapter three myths 

which mislead public opinion about the causes of the 

Ongoing violence in Gaza, and which explain’ the 

helplessness felt by anyone wishing to end the misery of the 

people crammed into one of the world’s most densely 

populated pieces of land. 

The first myth refers to one of the main actors on the 

ground in the Strip: the Hamas movement. Its name is the 

Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement,” and the 

word hamas also literally means “enthusiasm.” It grew out 

of a local branch of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, 

the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt in the second half of the 

1980s. It began as a charity and educational organization 

but was transformed into a political movement during the 

First Intifada in 1987. The following year it published a 

charter asserting that only the dogmas of political Islam had 

a chance of liberating Palestine. How these dogmas were to 

be implemented or what they really mean was never fully 

explained or demonstrated. From its inception up to the 

present, Hamas has been involved in an existential struggle 

against the West, Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and 

Egypt. 

When Hamas surfaced in the late 1980s, its main rival in 

the Gaza Strip was the Fatah movement, the main 

organization within, and founder of, the PLO. It lost some 

Support among the Palestinian people when it negotiated 

the Oslo Accord and founded the Palestinian Authority 

(hence the chair of the PLO is also the president of the PA 

and the head of Fatah). Fatah is a secular national 

movement, with strong left-wing elements, inspired by the 

Third World liberation ideologies of the 1950s and 1960s 

and in essence still committed to the creation in Palestine of 

a democratic and secular state for all. Strategically, 

however, Fatah has been committed to the two-states 

solution since the 1970s. Hamas, for its part, is willing to 

allow Israel to withdraw fully from all the occupied 

territories, with a ten-year armistice to follow before it will 

discuss any future solution. 

Hamas challenged Fatah’s pro-Oslo policy, its lack of 

attention to social and economic welfare, and its basic 

failure to end the occupation. The challenge became more 

significant when, in the mid-2000s, Hamas decided to run as 

a political party in municipal and national elections. 

Hamas’s popularity in both the West Bank and the Gaza 

Strip had grown thanks to the prominent role it played in the 

Second Intifada in 2000, in which its members were willing 

to become human bombs, or at least to take a more active 

role in resisting the occupation (one should point out that 

during that Intifada young members of Fatah also showed 

the same resilience and commitment, and Marwan 

Barghouti, one of their iconic leaders, is still in jail in Israel 

for his role in the uprising). 

Yasser Arafat’s death in November 2004 created a 

political vacuum in the leadership, and the Palestinian 

Authority, in accordance with its own constitution, had to 

conduct presidential elections. Hamas boycotted these 

elections, claiming that they would be too closely associated 

with the Oslo process and less so with democracy. It did, 

however, participate that same year, 2005, in municipal 

elections, in which it did very well, taking control of over 

one-third of the municipalities in the occupied territories. It 

did even better in the elections in 2006 to the parliament— 

the legislative assembly of the PA as it is called. It won a 

comfortable majority in the assembly and therefore had the 

right to form the government—which it did for a short while, 

before clashing with both Fatah and Israel. In the ensuing 

struggle, it was ousted from official political power in the 

West Bank, but took over the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s 

unwillingness to accept the Oslo Accord, its refusal to 

recognize Israel, and its commitment to armed struggle 

form the background to the first myth | examine here. 

Hamas is branded as a terrorist organization, both in the 

media and in legislation. | will claim that it is a liberation 

movement, and a legitimate one at that. 

The second myth | examine concerns the Israeli decision 

that created the vacuum in the Gaza Strip which enabled 

Hamas not only to win the elections in 2006 but also to oust 

Fatah by force in the same year. This was the 2005 

unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Strip after nearly forty 

years of occupation. The second myth is that this 

withdrawal was a gesture of peace or reconciliation, which 

was reciprocated by hostility and violence. It is crucial to 

debate, as | do in this chapter, the origins of the Israeli 

decision and to look closely at the impact it has had on Gaza 

ever since. In fact, | claim that the decision was part of a 

strategy intended to strengthen Israel’s hold over the West 

Bank and to turn the Gaza Strip into a mega-prison that 

could be guarded and monitored from the outside. Israel not 

only withdrew its army and secret service from the Strip but 

also pulled out, in a very painful process, the thousands of 

Jewish settlers the government had sent there since 1969. 

So, | will claim that viewing this decision as a peaceful 

gesture is a myth. It was more a strategic deployment of 

forces that enabled Israel to respond harshly to the Hamas 

victory, with disastrous consequences for the population of 

Gaza. 

And indeed, the third and last myth | will look at is 

Israel’s claim that its actions since 2006 have been part of a 

self-defensive war against terror. | will venture to call it, as | 

have done elsewhere, an incremental genocide of the 

people of Gaza. 

Hamas Is a Terrorist Organization 

The victory of Hamas in the 2006 general elections 

triggered a wave of Islamophobic reaction in Israel. From 

this moment on, the demonization of the Palestinians as 

abhorred “Arabs” was enhanced with the new label of 

“fanatical Muslims.” The language of hate was accompanied 

by new aggressive anti-Palestinian policies that aggravated 

the situation in the occupied territories beyond its already 

dismal and atrocious state. 

There have been other outbreaks of Islamophobia in 

Israel in the past. The first was in the late 1980s, when a 

very small number of Palestinian workers—forty people out 

of a community of 150,000—were involved in stabbing 

incidents against their Jewish employers and passersby. In 

the aftermath of the attacks Israeli academics, journalists, 

and politicians related the stabbing to Islam—religion and 

culture alike—without any reference to the occupation or 

the slavish labor market that developed on its margins.! A 

far more severe wave of Islamophobia broke out during the 

Second Intifada in October 2000. Since the militarized 

uprising was mainly carried out by Islamic groups— 

especially suicide bombers—it was easier for the Israeli 

political elite and media to demonize “Islam” in the eyes of 

many Israelis.2 A third wave began in 2006, in the wake of 

Hamas’s victory in the elections to the Palestinian 

parliament. The same characteristics of the previous two 

waves were apparent in this one as well. The most salient 

feature is the reductionist view of everything Muslim as 

being associated with violence, terror, and inhumanity. 

As | have shown in my book, The /dea of Israel,? between 

1948 and 1982 Palestinians were demonized by 

comparisons with the Nazis.* The same_ process of 

“Nazifying” the Palestinians is now applied to Islam in 

general, and to activists in its name in particular. This has 

continued for as long as Hamas and its sister organization, 

Islamic Jihad, have engaged in military, guerrilla, and terror 

activity. In effect, the rhetoric of extremism wiped out the 

rich history of political Islam in Palestine, as well as the 

wide-ranging social and cultural activities that Hamas has 

undertaken ever since its inception. 

A more neutral analysis shows how far-fetched the 

demonized image of Hamas as a group of ruthless and 

insane fanatics is.? Like other movements within political 

Islam, the movement reflected a complex local reaction to 

the harsh realities of occupation, and a response to the 

disorientated paths offered by secular and_ socialist 

Palestinian forces in the past. Those with a more engaged 

analysis of this situation were well prepared for the Hamas 

triumph in the 2006 elections, unlike the Israeli, American, 

and European governments. It is ironic that it was the 

pundits and orientalists, not to mention Israeli politicians 

and chiefs of intelligence, who were taken by surprise by the 

election results more than anyone else. What particularly 

dumbfounded the great experts on Islam in Israel was the 

democratic nature of the victory. In their collective reading, 

fanatical Muslims were meant to be neither democratic nor 

popular. These same _ experts displayed a_ similar 

misunderstanding of the past. Ever since the rise of political 

Islam in Iran and in the Arab world, the community of 

experts in Israel had behaved as if the impossible was 

unfolding in front of their eyes. 

Misunderstandings, and therefore false predictions, have 

characterized the Israeli assessment of the Palestinians for a 

long time, especially with regard to the political Islamic 

forces within Palestine. In 1976, the first Rabin government 

allowed municipal elections to take place in the West Bank 

and the Gaza Strip. They calculated, wrongly, that the old 

cadre of pro-Jordanian politicians would be elected in the 

West Bank and the pro-Egyptian ones in the Strip. The 

electorate voted overwhelmingly for PLO candidates.® This 

surprised the Israelis, but it should not have. After all, the 

expansion of the PLO’s power and popularity ran parallel to 

a concerted effort by Israel to curb, if not altogether 

eliminate, the secular and socialist movements within 

Palestinian society, whether in the refugee camps or inside 

the occupied territories. Indeed, Hamas became a 

Significant player on the ground in part thanks to the Israeli 

policy of encouraging the construction of an _ Islamic 

educational infrastructure in Gaza as a counterbalance to 

the grip of the secular Fatah movement on the local 

population. 

In 2009, Avner Cohen, who served in the Gaza Strip 

around the time Hamas began to gain power in the late 

1980s, and was responsible for religious affairs in the 

occupied territories, told the Wal/ Street Journal, “the 

Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”’ Cohen 

explains how Israel helped the charity al-Mujama al-lIslamiya 

(the “Islamic Society”), founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 

1979, to become a powerful political movement, out of 

which the Hamas movement emerged in 1987. Sheikh 

Yassin, a crippled, semi-blind Islamic cleric, founded Hamas 

and was its spiritual leader until his assassination in 2004. 

He was originally approached by Israel with an offer of help 

and the promise of a license to expand. The Israelis hoped 

that, through his charity and educational work, this 

charismatic leader would counterbalance the power of the 

secular Fatah in the Gaza Strip and beyond. It is noteworthy 

that in the late 1970s Israel, like the United States and 

Britain, saw secular national movements (whose absence 

today they lament) as the worst enemy of the West. 

In his book 7o Know the Hamas, the Israeli journalist 

Shlomi Eldar tells a similar story about the strong links 

between Yassin and Israel.® With Israel’s blessing and 

Support, the “Society” opened a university in 1979, an 

independent school system, and a network of clubs and 

mosques. In 2014, the Washington Post drew its own very 

similar conclusions about the close relationship between 

Israel and the “Society” until its transformation into Hamas 

in 1988.2 In 1993, Hamas became the main opposition to 

the Oslo Accord. While there was still Support for Oslo, it 

Saw a drop in its popularity; however, as Israel began to 

renege on almost all the pledges it had made during the 

negotiations, support for Hamas once again received a 

boost. Particularly important was Israel’s settlement policy 

and its excessive use of force against the civilian population 

in the territories. 

But Hamas’s popularity among the Palestinians did not 

depend solely on the success or failure of the Oslo Accord. It 

also captured the hearts and minds of many Muslims (who 

make up the majority in the occupied territories) due the 

failure of secular modernity to find solutions to the daily 

hardships of life under occupation. As with other political 

Islamic groups around the Arab world, the failure of secular 

movements to provide employment, welfare, and economic 

security drove many people back into religion, which offered 

solace as well as established charity and _ solidarity 

networks. In the Middle East as a whole, as in the world at 

large, modernization and secularization benefited the few 

but left many unhappy, poor, and bitter. Religion seemed a 

panacea—and at times even a political option. 

Hamas struggled hard to win a large share of public 

support while Arafat was still alive, but his death in 2004 

created a vacuum that it was not immediately able to fill. 

Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) did not 

enjoy the same legitimacy and respect as his predecessor. 

The fact that Arafat was delegitimized by Israel and the 

West, while Abu Mazen was accepted by them as Palestinian 

president, reduced his popularity among the younger 

generation, in the de-developed rural areas, and in the 

impoverished refugee camps. The new Israeli methods of 

oppression introduced during the Second _Intifada— 

particularly the building of the wall, the roadblocks, and the 

targeted assassinations—further diminished the support for 

the Palestinian Authority and increased the popularity and 

prestige of Hamas. It would be fair to conclude, then, that 

successive Israeli governments did all they could to leave 

the Palestinians with no option but to trust, and vote for, the 

one group prepared to resist an occupation described by the 

renowned American author Michael Chabon as “the most 

grievous injustice | have seen in my life.”+° 

The only explanation for the rise of Hamas offered by 

most Israeli “experts” on Palestinian affairs, inside and 

outside the establishment, involved appealing to Samuel 

Huntington’s neoconservative model of the “clash of 

civilizations” as a way of understanding how history works. 

Huntington divided the world into two cultures, rational and 

irrational, which inevitably came into conflict. By voting for 

Hamas the Palestinians were supposedly = proving 

themselves to be on the “irrational” side of history—an 

inevitable position given their religion and culture. Benjamin 

Netanyahu put it in even cruder terms when he talked about 

the cultural and moral abyss that separates the two 

peoples.!! 

The obvious failure of the Palestinian groups and 

individuals who had come to prominence on the promise of 

negotiations with Israel clearly made it seem as if there 

were very few alternatives. In this situation the apparent 

success of the Islamic militant groups in driving the Israelis 

out of the Gaza Strip offered some hope. However, there is 

more to it than this. Hamas is now deeply embedded in 

Palestinian society thanks to its genuine attempts to 

alleviate the suffering of ordinary people by providing 

schooling, medicine, and welfare. No less important, 

Hamas’s position on the 1948 refugees’ right of return, 

unlike the PA’s stance, was clear and unambiguous. Hamas 

openly endorsed this right, while the PA sent out ambiguous 

messages, including a speech by Abu Mazen in which he 

rescinded his own right to return to his hometown of Safad. 

The Israeli Disengagement Was an Act of Peace 

The Gaza Strip amounts to slightly more than 2 percent of 

the landmass of Palestine. This small detail is never 

mentioned whenever the Strip is in the news, nor was it 

mentioned in the Western media coverage of the dramatic 

events in Gaza in the summer of 2014. Indeed, it is such a 

Small part of the country that it has never existed as a 

separate region in the past. Before the Zionization of 

Palestine in 1948, Gaza’s history was not unique or different 

from the rest of Palestine, and it had always been connected 

administratively and politically to the rest of the country. As 

one of Palestine’s principal land and sea gates to the world, 

it tended to develop a more flexible and cosmopolitan way 

of life, not dissimilar to other gateway societies in the 

Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era. Its location on the 

coast and on the Via Maris from Egypt up to Lebanon 

brought with it prosperity and stability—until this was 

disrupted and nearly destroyed by the ethnic cleansing of 

Palestine in 1948. 

The Strip was created in the last days of the 1948 war. It 

was a zone into which the Israeli forces pushed hundreds of 

thousands of Palestinians from the city of Jaffa and its 

southern regions down into the town of Bir-Saba (Beersheba 

of today). Others were expelled to the zone from towns such 

as Majdal (Ashkelon) as late as 1950, in the final phases of 

the ethnic cleansing. Thus, a small pastoral part of Palestine 

became the biggest refugee camp on earth. It still like this 

today. Between 1948 and 1967, this huge refugee camp was 

delineated and severely restricted by the respective Israeli 

and Egyptian policies. Both states disallowed any movement 

out of the Strip, and as a result, living conditions became 

ever harsher as the number of inhabitants doubled. On the 

eve of the Israeli occupation in 1967, the catastrophic 

nature of this enforced demographic transformation was 

evident. Within two decades this once pastoral coastal part 

of southern Palestine became one of the world’s most 

densely inhabited areas, without the economic and 

occupational infrastructure to support it. 

During the first twenty years of occupation, Israel did 

allow some movement outside the area, which was 

cordoned off with a fence. Tens of thousands of Palestinians 

were permitted to join the Israeli labor market as unskilled 

and underpaid workers. The price Israel demanded for this 

was total surrender. When this was not complied with, the 

free movement for laborers was withdrawn. In the lead up to 

the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel attempted to fashion the 

Strip aS an enclave, which the peace camp hoped would 

become either autonomous or a part of Egypt. Meanwhile 

the nationalist, right-wing camp wished to include it in the 

“Eretz Israel” they dreamed of establishing in place of 

Palestine. 

The Oslo agreement enabled the Israelis to reaffirm the 

Strip’s status as a separate geopolitical entity—not just 

outside of Palestine as a whole, but also apart from the West 

Bank. Ostensibly, both were under Palestinian Authority 

control, but any human movement between them depended 

on Israel’s good will. This was a rare feature in the 

circumstances, and one that almost disappeared when 

Netanyahu came to power in 1996. At the same time, Israel 

controlled, as it still does today, the water and electricity 

infrastructure. Since 1993 it has used this control to ensure 

the well-being of the Jewish settler community on the one 

hand, and to blackmail the Palestinian population into 

submission on the other. Over the last fifty years, the people 

of the Strip have thus had to choose between being 

internees, hostages, or prisoners in an impossible human 

Space. 

It is in this historical context that we should view the 

violent clashes between Israel and Hamas since 2006. In 

light of that context, we must reject the description of Israeli 

actions as part of the “war against terror,” or as a “war of 

self-defense.” Nor should we accept the depiction of Hamas 

as an extension of al-Qaeda, as part of the Islamic State 

network, or aS a mere pawn in a seditious Iranian plot to 

control the region. If there is an ugly side to Hamas’s 

presence in Gaza, it lies in the group’s early actions against 

other Palestinian factions in the years 2005 to 2007. The 

main clash was with Fatah in the Gaza Strip, and both sides 

contributed to the friction that eventually erupted into an 

open civil war. The clash erupted after Hamas won the 

legislative elections in 2006 and formed the government, 

which included a Hamas minister responsible for the 

security forces. In an attempt to weaken Hamas, President 

Abbas transferred that responsibility to the head of the 

Palestinian secret service—a Fatah member. Hamas 

responded by setting up its own security forces in the Strip. 

In December 2006, a violent confrontation in the Rafah 

crossing between the Presidential Guard and the Hamas 

security forces triggered a confrontation that would last until 

the summer of 2007. The Presidential Guard was a Fatah 

military unit, 3,000 strong, consisting mostly of troops loyal 

to Abbas. It had been trained by American advisers in Egypt 

and Jordan (Washington had allocated almost 60 million 

dollars to its maintenance). The incident was triggered by 

Israel’s refusal to allow the Hamas prime minister, Ismail 

Haniyeh, to enter the Strip—he was carrying cash donations 

from the Arab world, reported to be tens of millions of 

dollars. The Hamas forces then stormed the border control, 

manned by the Presidential Guard, and fighting broke out.!2 

The situation deteriorated quickly thereafter. Haniyeh’s 

car was attacked after he crossed into the Strip. Hamas 

blamed Fatah for the attacks. Clashes broke out in the Strip 

and in the West Bank as well. In the same month, the 

Palestinian Authority decided to remove the Hamas-led 

government and replace it with an emergency cabinet. This 

sparked the most serious clashes between the two sides, 

which lasted until the end of May 2007, leaving dozens of 

dead and many wounded (it is estimated that 120 people 

died). The conflict only ended when the government of 

Palestine was split into two: one in Ramallah and one in 

Gaza.}3 

While both sides were responsible for the carnage, there 

was also (as we have learned from the Palestine papers, 

leaked to Al Jazeera in 2007) an external factor that pitted 

Fatah against Hamas. The idea of preempting a possible 

Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip, once the Israelis 

withdrew, was suggested to Fatah as early as 2004 by the 

British intelligence agency MI6, who drew up a security plan 

that was meant to “encourage and enable the Palestinian 

Authority to fully meet its security obligations ... by 

degrading the capabilities of the rejectionists (which later on 

the document names as the Hamas).”!* The British prime 

minister at the time, Tony Blair, had taken a special interest 

in the Palestine question, hoping to have an impact that 

would vindicate, or absolve, his disastrous adventure in Iraq. 

The Guardian summarized his involvement as that of 

encouraging Fatah to crack down on Hamas.!° Similar 

advice was given to Fatah by Israel and the United States, in 

a bid to keep Hamas from taking over the Gaza Strip. 

However, things got scrappy and the preemptive plan 

backfired in multiple ways. 

This was in part a struggle between politicians who were 

democratically elected and those who still found it hard to 

accept the verdict of the public. But that was hardly the 

whole story. What unfolded in Gaza was a battle between 

the United States’ and Israel’s local proxies—mainly Fatah 

and PA members, most of whom became _ proxies 

unintentionally, but nonetheless danced to Israel’s tune— 

and those who opposed them. The way Hamas acted 

against other factions was later reciprocated by the action 

the PA took against them in the West Bank. One would find 

it very hard to condone or cheer either action. Nevertheless, 

one can fully understand why secular Palestinians would 

oppose the creation of a theocracy, and, as in many other 

parts of the Middle East, the struggle over the role of 

religion and tradition in society will also continue in 

Palestine. However, for the time being, Hamas enjoys the 

Support, and in many ways the admiration, of many secular 

Palestinians for the vigor of its struggle against Israel. 

Indeed, that struggle is the real issue. According to the 

official narrative, Hamas is a terrorist organization engaging 

in vicious acts perpetrated against a peaceful Israel that has 

withdrawn from the Gaza Strip. But did Israel withdraw for 

the sake of peace? The answer is a resounding no. 

To get a better understanding of the issue we need to go 

back to April 18, 2004, the day after the Hamas leader 

Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi was assassinated. On that day, Yuval 

Steinitz, chairman of the foreign affairs and defense 

committee in the Knesset and a close aide to Benjamin 

Netanyahu, was interviewed on Israeli radio. Before 

becoming a politician, he had taught Western philosophy at 

the University of Haifa. Steinitz claimed that his worldview 

had been shaped by Descartes, but it seems that as a 

politician he was more influenced by romantic nationalists 

such as Gobineau and Fichte, who stressed purity of race as 

a precondition for national excellence.!® The translation of 

these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli 

context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked 

him about the government’s plans for the remaining 

Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as 

they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination 

or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the 

members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people. 

“lam so happy,” Steinitz said, “that the Americans have 

finally come to their senses and are fully supporting our 

policies.”!” On the same day, Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion 

University repeated his support for the ethnic cleansing of 

the Palestinians, claiming that this was the best way of 

solving the conflict.+® 

Opinions that used to be considered at best marginal, at 

worst lunatic, were now at the heart of the Israeli Jewish 

consensus, disseminated by establishment academics on 

prime-time television as the one and only truth. Israel in 

2004 was a paranoid society, determined to bring the 

conflict to an end by force and destruction, whatever the 

cost to its society or its potential victims. Often this elite 

was supported only by the US administration and the 

Western political elites, while the rest of the world’s more 

conscientious observers watched helpless and bewildered. 

Israel was like a plane flying on autopilot; the course was 

preplanned, the speed predetermined. The destination was 

the creation of a Greater Israel, which would include half the 

West Bank and a small part of the Gaza Strip (thus 

amounting to almost 90 percent of historical Palestine). A 

Greater Israel without a Palestinian presence, with high 

walls separating it from the indigenous population, who 

were to be crammed into two huge prison camps in Gaza 

and what was left of the West Bank. In this vision, the 

Palestinians in Israel could either join the millions of 

refugees languishing in the camps, or submit to an 

apartheid system of discrimination and abuse. 

That same year, 2004, the Americans supervised what 

they called the “Road Map” to peace. This was a ludicrous 

idea initially put forward in the summer of 2002 by President 

Bush, and even more far-fetched than the Oslo Accord. The 

idea was that the Palestinians would be offered an economic 

recovery plan, and a reduction in the Israeli military 

presence in parts of the occupied territories, for about three 

years. After that another summit would, somehow, bring the 

conflict to an end for once and for all. 

In many parts of the Western world, the media took the 

Road Map and the Israeli vision of a Greater Israel (including 

autonomous Palestinian enclaves) to be one and the same— 

presenting both as offering the only safe route to peace and 

Stability. The mission of making this vision a reality was 

entrusted to “the Quartet” (aka the Middle East Quartet, or 

occasionally the Madrid Quartet), set up in 2002 to allow the 

UN, the United States, Russia, and the EU to work together 

towards peace in Israel-Palestine. Essentially a coordinating 

body consisting of the foreign ministers of all four members, 

the Quartet became more active in 2007 when it appointed 

Tony Blair as its special envoy to the Middle East. Blair hired 

the whole new wing of the legendary American Colony hotel 

in Jerusalem as his headquarters. This, like Blair’s salary, 

was an expensive operation that produced nothing. 

The Quartet’s spokespersons employed a discourse of 

peace that included references to a full Israeli withdrawal, 

the end of Jewish settlements, and a two-states solution. 

This inspired hope among some observers who still believed 

that this course made sense. However, on the ground, the 

Road Map, like the Oslo Accord, allowed Israel to continue to 

implement its unilateral plan of creating the Greater Israel. 

The difference was that, this time, it was Ariel Sharon who 

was the architect, a far more focused and determined 

politician than Rabin, Peres, or Netanyahu. He had one 

Surprising gambit that very few predicted: offering to evict 

the Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip. Sharon threw 

this proposal into the air in 2003, and then pressured his 

colleagues to adopt it, which they did within a year and half. 

In 2005, the army was sent in to evict the reluctant settlers 

by force. What lay behind this decision? 

Successive Israeli governments had been very clear 

about the future of the West Bank, while not so sure about 

what should happen with the Gaza Strip.!9 The strategy for 

the West Bank was to ensure it remained under Israeli rule, 

direct or indirect. Most governments since 1967, including 

Sharon’s, hoped that this rule would be organized as part of 

a “peace process.” The West Bank could become a state in 

this vision—if it remained a Bantustan. This was the old idea 

of Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan from 1967; areas densely 

populated by Palestinians should be controlled from the 

outside. But things were different when it came to the Gaza 

Strip. Sharon had agreed with the original decision of the 

early governments, most of them Labor, to send settlers 

into the heart of the Gaza Strip, just as he supported the 

building of settlements in the Sinai Peninsula, which were 

evicted to the last under the bilateral peace agreement with 

Egypt. In the twenty-first century, he came to accept the 

pragmatic views of leading members of both the Likud and 

Labor parties on the possibility of leaving Gaza for the sake 

of keeping the West Bank.2° 

Prior to the Oslo process, the presence of Jewish settlers 

in the Strip did not complicate things, but once the new idea 

of a Palestinian Authority emerged, they became a liability 

to Israel rather than an asset. As a result, many Israeli 

policy makers, even those who did not immediately take to 

the idea of eviction, were looking for ways of pushing the 

Strip out of their minds and hearts. This became clear when, 

after the Accord was signed, the Strip was encircled with a 

barbed-wire fence and the movement of Gazan workers into 

Israel and the West Bank was_ severely restricted. 

Strategically, in the new setup, it was easier to control Gaza 

from the outside, but this was not entirely possible while the 

settler community remained inside. 

One solution was to divide the Strip into a Jewish area, 

with direct access to Israel, and a Palestinian area. This 

worked well until the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The 

road connecting the settlements’ sprawl, the Gush Qatif 

block as it was called, was an easy target for the uprising. 

The vulnerability of the settlers was exposed in full. During 

this conflict the Israeli army tactics included massive 

bombardments and destruction of rebellious Palestinian 

pockets, which in April 2002 led to the massacre of innocent 

Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp. These tactics were 

not easily implemented in the dense Gaza Strip due to the 

presence of the Jewish settlers. It was not surprising, then, 

that a year after the most brutal military assault on the 

West Bank, operation “Defensive Shield,” Sharon 

contemplated the removal of the Gaza settlers so as to 

facilitate a retaliation policy. In 2004, however, unable to 

force his political will on the Strip, he called instead for a 

series of assassinations of Hamas leaders. Sharon hoped to 

influence the future with the assassinations of the two chief 

leaders, Abdul al-Rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (killed on 

March 17, 2004). Even a sober source such as Haaretz 

assumed that after these assassinations, Hamas would lose 

its power base in the Gaza Strip and be reduced to an 

ineffective presence in Damascus, where, if need be, Israel 

would attack it too. The newspaper also was impressed by 

the US support for the assassinations (although both the 

paper and the Americans would be much less supportive of 

the policy later on).2! 

These killings took place before Hamas won the 2006 

elections and took over the Gaza Strip. In other words, the 

Israeli policy did not undermine Hamas; on the contrary, it 

enhanced its popularity and power. Sharon wanted the 

Palestinian Authority to take control of Gaza and treat it like 

Area A in the West Bank; but this outcome did not 

materialize. So Sharon had to deal with Gaza in one of two 

ways: either clear out the settlers so that he could retaliate 

against Hamas without the risk of hurting Israeli citizens; or 

depart altogether from the region in order to refocus his 

efforts on annexing the West Bank, or parts of it. In order to 

ensure that the second alternative was _ understood 

internationally, Sharon orchestrated a charade that 

everybody fell for. As he began to make noises about 

evicting the settlers from the Strip, Gush Emunim compared 

the action to the Holocaust and staged a real show for the 

television when they were physically evicted from their 

homes. It seemed as if there were a civil war in Israel 

between those who supported the settlers and those on the 

left, including formidable foes of Sharon in the past, who 

supported his plan for a peace initiative.?2 

Inside Israel this move weakened, and in some cases 

entirely wiped out, dissenting voices. Sharon proposed that 

with the withdrawal from Gaza and the ascendance of 

Hamas therein, there was no point in pushing forward grand 

ideas such as the Oslo Accord. He suggested, and his 

successor after his terminal illness in 2007, Ehud Olmert, 

agreed, that the status quo be maintained for the time 

being. There was a need to contain Hamas in Gaza, but 

there was no rush to find a solution to the West Bank. 

Olmert called this policy unilateralism: since there were be 

no significant negotiations in the near future with the 

Palestinians, Israel should unilaterally decide which parts of 

the West Bank it wanted to annex, and which parts could be 

run autonomously by the Palestinian Authority. There was a 

sense among Israeli policy makers that, if not in public 

declarations, then at least as a reality on the ground, this 

course of action would be acceptable to both the Quartet 

and the PA. Until now, it had seemed to work. 

With no strong international pressure and a feeble PA as 

a neighbor, most Israelis did not feel the strategy towards 

the West Bank to be an issue of great interest. As the 

election campaigns since 2005 have shown, Jewish society 

has preferred to debate socioeconomic issues, the role of 

religion in society, and the war against Hamas and 

Hezbollah. The main opposition party, the Labor Party, has 

more or less shared the vision of the coalition government, 

hence it has been both inside and outside government since 

2005. When it came to the West Bank, or the solution to the 

Palestine question, Israeli Jewish society appeared to have 

reached a consensus. What cemented that sense of 

consensus was the eviction of the Gaza settlers by Sharon’s 

right-wing administration. For those who considered 

themselves to the left of the Likud, Sharon’s move was a 

peace gesture, and a brave confrontation with the settlers. 

He became a hero of the left as well of the center and 

moderate right, like de Gaulle taking the pied noir out of 

Algeria for the sake of peace. The Palestinian reaction in the 

Gaza Strip and criticism from the PA of Israeli policies ever 

Since were seen as a proof of the absence of any sound or 

reliable Palestinian partner for peace. 

Apart from brave journalists such as Gideon Levy and 

Amira Hass at Haaretz, a few members of the small left 

Zionist party Meretz, and some anti-Zionist groups, Jewish 

society in Israel became effectively silent, giving 

governments since 2005 carte blanche to pursue any policy 

towards the Palestinians they deem fit. This was why, in the 

2011 protest movement that galvanized half a million 

Israelis (out of a population of 7 million) against the 

governments’ policies, the occupation and its horrors were 

not mentioned as part of the agenda. This absence of any 

public discourse or criticism had already allowed Sharon in 

his last year in power, 2005, to authorize more killings of 

unarmed Palestinians and, by way of curfews and long 

periods of closure, to starve the society under occupation. 

And when the Palestinians in the occupied territories 

occasionally rebelled, the government now had a license to 

react with even greater force and determination. 

Previous American governments had supported Israeli 

policies regardless of how they affected, or were perceived 

by, the Palestinians. This support, however, used to require 

negotiation and some give and take. Even after the 

outbreak of the Second Intifada in October 2000, some in 

Washington tried to distance the United States from Israel’s 

response to the uprising. For a while, Americans seemed 

uneasy about the fact that several Palestinians a day were 

being killed, and that a large number of the victims were 

children. There was also some discomfort about Israel’s use 

of collective punishments, house demolitions, and arrests 

without trial. But they got used to all this, and when the 

Israeli Jewish consensus sanctioned the assault on the West 

Bank in April 2002—an unprecedented episode of cruelty in 

the vicious history of the occupation—the US administration 

objected only to the unilateral acts of annexation and 

settlement that were expressly forbidden in the EU- 

American-sponsored Road Map. 

In 2004, Sharon asked for US and UK support for the 

colonialization in the West Bank in return for withdrawal 

from the Gaza Strip, and he got it. His plan, which passed in 

Israel for a consensual peace plan, was at first rejected by 

the Americans as unproductive (the rest of the world 

condemned it in stronger terms). The Israelis, however, 

hoped that the similarities between the American and 

British conduct in Iraq and Israel’s policies in Palestine 

would lead the United States to change its position, and 

they were right. It is noteworthy that, until the very last 

moment, Washington hesitated before giving Sharon the 

green light for the withdrawal from Gaza. On April 13, 2004, 

a bizarre scene unfolded on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion 

airport. The prime minister’s jet remained stationary for a 

few hours after its scheduled departure. Inside, Sharon had 

refused to allow it to take off for Washington until he got US 

approval for his new _ so-called disengagement plan. 

President Bush supported the disengagement per se. What 

his advisors found hard to digest was the letter Sharon had 

asked Bush to sign as part of the US endorsement. It 

included an American promise not to pressure Israel in the 

future about progress in the peace process, and to exclude 

the right of return from any future negotiations. Sharon 

convinced Bush’s aides that he would not be able to unite 

the Israeli public behind his disengagement program 

without American support.?? 

In the past, it had usually taken a while for US officials to 

submit to Israeli politicians’ need for a consensus. This time, 

it took only three hours. We now know that there was 

another reason for Sharon’s sense of urgency: he knew that 

he was being investigated by the police on serious charges 

of corruption, and he needed to persuade the Israeli public 

to trust him in the face of a pending court case. “The wider 

the investigation, the wider the disengagement,” said the 

left-wing member of Knesset Yossi Sarid, referring to the 

linkage between Sharon’s troubles in court and his 

commitment to the withdrawal.2* It ought to have taken the 

US administration much longer than it did to reach a 

decision. In essence, Sharon was asking President Bush to 

forgo almost every commitment the Americans had made 

over Palestine. The plan offered an Israeli withdrawal from 

Gaza and the closure of the handful of settlements there, as 

well as several others in the West Bank, in return for the 

annexation of the majority of the West Bank settlements to 

Israel. The Americans also knew all too well how another 

crucial piece fitted into this puzzle. For Sharon, the 

annexation of those parts of the West Bank he coveted 

could only be executed with the completion of the wall Israel 

had begun building in 2003, bisecting the Palestinian parts 

of the West Bank. He had not anticipated the international 

objection—the wall became the most iconic symbol of the 

occupation, to the extent that the international court of 

justice ruled that it constituted a human rights violation. 

Time will tell whether or not this was a meaningful 

landmark.2° 

As Sharon waited in his jet, Washington gave its support 

to a scheme that left most of the West Bank in Israeli hands 

and all of the refugees in exile—and gave its tacit 

agreement to the wall. Sharon chose the ideal US president 

as a potential ally for his new plans. President George W. 

Bush was heavily influenced by Christian Zionists, and 

maybe even shared their view that the presence of the Jews 

in the Holy Land was part of the fulfilment of a doomsday 

scenario that might inaugurate the Second Coming of 

Christ. Bush’s more secular neocon advisers had been 

impressed by the war against Hamas, which accompanied 

Israel’s promises of eviction and peace. The seemingly 

successful Israeli operations—mostly the targeted 

assassinations in 2004—were a proof by proxy that 

America’s own “war against terror” was bound to triumph. 

In truth, Israel’s “Success” was a cynical distortion of the 

facts on the ground. The relative decline in Palestinian 

guerrilla and terror activity was achieved by curfews and 

closures and by confining more than 2 million people in their 

homes without work or food for protracted periods of time. 

Even neoconservatives should have been able to grasp that 

this was not going to provide a long-term solution to the 

hostility and violence provoked by an occupying power, 

whether in Iraq or Palestine. 

Sharon’s plan was approved by Bush’s spin doctors, who 

were able to present it as another step towards peace and 

use it as a distraction from the growing debacle in Iraq. It 

was probably also acceptable to more even-handed 

advisers, who were so desperate to see some progress that 

they persuaded themselves that the plan offered a chance 

for peace and a better future. These people long ago forgot 

how to distinguish between the mesmerizing power of 

language and the reality it purports to describe. As long as 

the plan contained the magic term “withdrawal,” it was seen 

as essentially a good thing even by some usually cool- 

headed journalists in the United States, by the leaders of 

the Israeli Labor party (bent on joining Sharon’s government 

in the name of the sacred consensus), and by the newly 

elected leader of the Israeli left party, Meretz, Yossi Beilin.° 

By the end of 2004, Sharon knew he had no reason to 

fear outside pressure. The governments of Europe and the 

United States were unwilling or unable to stop the 

occupation and prevent the further destruction of the 

Palestinians. Those Israelis who were willing to take part in 

anti-occupation movements were outnumbered = and 

demoralized in the face of the new consensus. It is not 

Surprising that, around that time, civil societies in Europe 

and in the United States woke up to the possibility of playing 

a major role in the conflict and were galvanized around the 

idea of the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions movement. 

Quite a few organizations, unions, and individuals were 

committed to a new public effort, vowing to do all they 

could to make the Israelis understand that policies such as 

Sharon’s came at a price. 

Since then, from the academic boycott to economic 

sanctions, every possible means has been attempted in the 

West. The message at home was also clear: their 

governments were no less responsible than Israel for the 

past, present, and future catastrophes of the Palestinian 

people. The BDS movement demanded a new policy to 

counter Sharon’s unilateral strategy, not only for moral or 

historical reasons, but also for the sake of the West’s 

security and even survival. As the violence since the events 

of September 11, 2001 has so painfully shown, the Palestine 

conflict undermined the multicultural fabric of Western 

society, as it pushed the United States and the Muslim world 

further and further apart and into a nightmarish 

relationship. Putting pressure on Israel seemed a small price 

to pay for the sake of global peace, regional stability, and 

reconciliation in Palestine. 

Thus, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was not part of a 

peace plan. According to the official narrative it was a 

gesture of peace that the ungrateful Palestinians responded 

to first by electing Hamas, and then by launching missiles 

into Israel. Ergo, there was no point or wisdom in any further 

withdrawal from any occupied Palestinian territory. All Israel 

could do was defend itself. Moreover, the “trauma” that 

“nearly led to a civil war” was meant to persuade Israeli 

society that it is not an episode worth repeating. 

Was the War on Gaza a War of Self-Defense? 

Although | have coauthored a book (with Noam Chomsky) 

under the title The War on Gaza, | am not sure that “war” is 

the right term to describe what happened in the various 

Israeli assaults on the Strip, beginning in 2006. In fact, after 

the onset of Operation Cast Lead in 2009, | have opted to 

call the Israeli policy an incremental genocide. | hesitated 

before using this highly charged term, and yet cannot find 

another to accurately describe what happened. Since the 

responses | received, among others from some leading 

human rights activists, indicated that a certain unease 

accompanies such usage of the term, | was inclined to 

rethink it for a while, but came back to employing it recently 

with an even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate 

way of describing what the Israeli army has been doing in 

the Gaza Strip since 2006. 

On December 28, 2006, the Israeli Numan rights 

organization B’Tselem published its annual report on the 

atrocities in the occupied territories. In that year Israeli 

forces killed 660 citizens, more than triple that of the 

previous year when around 200 Palestinians were killed. 

According to B’Tselem, in 2006, 141 children were among 

the dead. Most of the casualties were from the Gaza Strip, 

where the Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and 

crushed entire families. This means that since 2000, almost 

4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, half of 

them children; more than 20,000 were wounded.2/ 

B'Tselem is a conservative organization, and the numbers 

of the dead and injured may be higher. However, the issue 

is not just about the escalating intentional killing, it is about 

the strategy behind such acts. Throughout the last decade, 

Israeli policy makers faced two very different realities in the 

West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they were 

closer than ever to completing the construction of their 

eastern border. The internal ideological debate was over, 

and the master plan for annexing half of the West Bank was 

being implemented at an escalating pace. The last phase 

was delayed due to the promises made by Israel, under the 

terms of the Road Map, not to build any new settlements. 

But the policy makers quickly found two ways of 

circumventing this alleged prohibition. First they redefined a 

third of the West Bank as part of Greater Jerusalem, which 

allowed them to build towns and community centers within 

this new annexed area. Secondly, they expanded old 

settlements to such proportions that there was no need to 

build new ones. 

Overall, the settlements, the army bases, the roads, and 

the wall put Israel into a position to officially annex almost 

half of the West Bank whenever it deemed it necessary. 

Within these territories there were a considerable number of 

Palestinians, against whom the Israeli authorities would 

continue to implement slow and creeping transfer policies. 

This was too boring a subject for the Western media to 

bother with, and too elusive for human rights organizations 

to make a general point about them. There was no rush as 

far as the Israelis were concerned—they had the upper 

hand: the daily abuse and dehumanization exercised by the 

dual mechanism of the army and the bureaucracy was as 

effective as ever in contributing to the dispossession 

process. 

Sharon’s strategic thinking was accepted by everyone 

who joined his last government, as well has his successor 

Ehud Olmert. Sharon even left the Likud and founded a 

centrist party, Kadima, that reflected this consensus on the 

policy towards the occupied territories.2® On the other hand, 

neither Sharon nor anyone who followed him could offer a 

clear Israeli strategy vis-a-vis the Gaza Strip. In the eyes of 

the Israelis, the Strip is a very different geopolitical entity to 

that of the West Bank. It remains in the hands of Hamas, 

while the Palestinian Authority seems to run the fragmented 

West Bank with Israeli and American blessing. There is no 

chunk of land in the Strip that Israel covets and there is no 

hinterland, like Jordan, into which it can expel the 

Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing as the means to a solution is 

ineffective here. 

The earliest strategy adopted in the Strip was the 

ghettoization of the Palestinians, but this was not working. 

The besieged community expressed its will to life by firing 

primitive missiles into Israel. The next attack on this 

community was often even more horrific and barbaric. On 

September 12, 2005, Israeli forces left the Gaza Strip. 

Simultaneously, the Israeli army invaded the town of Tul- 

Karim, made arrests on a massive scale, especially activists 

of the Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, and killed a few of its 

people. The organization launched nine missiles that killed 

no one. Israel responded with Operation “First Rain.”29 It is 

worth dwelling for a moment on the nature of that 

operation. Inspired by punitive measures adopted first by 

colonialist powers, then by dictatorships, against rebellious 

imprisoned or banished communities, “First Rain” began 

with supersonic jets flying over Gaza to terrorize the entire 

population. This was followed by the heavy bombardment of 

vast areas from sea, sky, and land. The logic, the Israeli 

army spokespersons explained, was to build up a pressure 

that would weaken the community’s support for the rocket 

launchers.2° As was to be expected, not least by the Israelis, 

the operation only increased the support for the fighters and 

gave extra impetus to their next attempt. The real purpose 

of that particular operation was experimental. The Israeli 

generals wanted to know how such operations might be 

received at home, in the region generally, and in the wider 

world. When the international condemnation proved to be 

very limited and short-lived, they were satisfied with the 

result. 

Since “First Rain” all Subsequent operations have 

followed a similar pattern. The difference has been in their 

escalation: more firepower, more causalities, and more 

collateral damage, and, as expected, more Qassam missiles 

in response. Another dimension was added after 2006 when 

the Israelis employed the more sinister means of imposing a 

tight siege on the people of the Strip through boycott and 

blockade. The capturing of the IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 

June 2006 did not change the balance of power between 

Hamas and Israel, but it nonetheless provided an 

opportunity for the Israelis to escalate even further their 

tactical and allegedly punitive missions. After all, there was 

no strategic clarity over what to do beyond continuing with 

the endless cycle of punitive actions. 

The Israelis also continued to give absurd, indeed 

sinister, names to their operations. “First Rain” was 

succeeded by “Summer Rains,” the name given to the 

punitive operations that began in June 2006. “Summer 

Rains” brought a novel component: a land invasion into 

parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens 

even more effectively and to present this as a consequence 

of heavy fighting within dense populated areas; that is, as 

an inevitable result of the circumstances rather than of 

Israeli policy. With the end of the summer came operation 

“Autumn Clouds,” which was even more efficient: on 

November 1, 2006, seventy civilians were killed in less than 

forty-eight hours. By the end of that month, almost 200 had 

been killed, half of them children and women. Some of this 

activity ran in parallel to the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, 

making it easier to complete these operations without much 

external attention, let alone criticism. 

From “First Rain” to “Autumn Clouds” one can see 

escalation in every area. Firstly, there was’ the 

disappearance of the distinction between “civilian” and 

“non-civilian” targets: the senseless killing had turned the 

population at large into the main target of the operation. 

Secondly, there was the escalation in the employment of 

every possible killing machine the Israeli army possesses. 

Thirdly, there was the conspicuous rise in the number of 

casualties. Finally, and most importantly, the operations 

gradually crystallized into a strategy, indicating the way 

Israel intends to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip in the 

future: through a measured genocidal policy. The people of 

the Strip, however, continued to resist. This led to further 

genocidal Israeli operations, but still today a failure to 

reoccupy the region. 

In 2008, the “Summer” and the “Autumn” operations 

were succeeded by operation “Hot Winter.” As anticipated, 

the new round of attacks caused even more civilian deaths, 

more than 100 in the Gaza Strip, which was bombarded 

once more from air, sea, and land, and also invaded. This 

time at least, it seemed for a moment that the international 

community was paying attention. The EU and the UN 

condemned Israel for its “disproportionate use of force,” and 

accused it of violating international law; the American 

criticism was “balanced.” However, it was enough to lead to 

a ceasefire, one of many, that would occasionally be 

violated by another Israeli attack.24 Hamas was willing to 

prolong the ceasefire, and authorized the strategy in 

religious terms, calling it tahadiah—meaning a lull in Arabic, 

and ideologically a very long period of peace. It also 

succeeded in convincing most factions to stop launching 

rockets into Israel. Mark Regev, the Israeli government 

spokesperson, admitted as much himself.22 

The success of the ceasefire might have been assured 

had there been a genuine easing of the Israeli siege. 

Practically this meant increasing the amount of goods 

allowed into the Strip and easing the movement of people in 

and out. Yet Israel did not comply with its promises in this 

regard. Israeli officials were very candid when they told their 

US counterparts that the plan was to keep the Gaza 

economy “on the brink of collapse.”22 There was a direct 

correlation between the intensity of the siege and the 

intensity of the rocket launches into Israel, as the 

accompanying diagram prepared by the Carter Peace 

Center illustrates so well. 

Import of Goods into Gaza-Rockets and Mortars Fired from Gaza 

16,000 Mecca Gaza take- Israeli attack: Ceasefire: Israeli attack: 00 

agreement: over: February 29th = June 19th November 4th 

@ February 8th June 15th | 

14,0004 ! 800 

‘ 

| | 

312,000, Aa | fe ae 

Hn ? ‘ry | 

\a cy a 

S ee ! ! 600 © 

~ 10,000 1 | | is 

5 1 | | = 

Ry i ! 500 9 

\ a 

2 8,000 | | & 

wu 1! | Hn 

° 1! 400 oO 

o 1 | rtd 

= 1 | af 

£ 6,000 | ! E 

xs | 

8 * e ! 300 

& 4,000 * ye | 

a’ 

| '» e 6 | «L200 

1 y\ r | 

‘\ @-0e-@ ‘ : ’ 

2,000 | er ‘e-e! ee? Vi 100 

: ‘ 

@ 

| = | tO 

Jan Mar May Jul Sep Nov Jan Mar May Jul Sep Nov 

07. OF OF O07 O07 07 08 08 08 O08 08 08 

== -@- =~ Total imports —@— Rockets/mortars fired 

Source: The Carter Center, “Gaza Timeline Analysis: Movement and Fatalities”, 

2009 

Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4, 2008, on the 

pretext that it had exposed a tunnel excavated by Hamas— 

planned, so they claimed, for another abduction operation. 

Hamas had been building tunnels out of the Gaza ghetto in 

order to bring in food, move people out, and indeed as part 

of its resistance strategy. Using a tunnel as a pretext for 

violating the ceasefire would be akin to a Hamas decision to 

violate it because Israel has military bases near the border. 

Hamas officials claimed that tunnel in question had been 

built for defensive reasons. They never shied away from 

boasting about a different function in other cases, so this 

might be true. The Irish Palestine solidarity group Sadaka 

published a very detailed report compiling evidence 

showing that Israeli officers knew there was no danger 

whatsoever from the tunnel. The government just needed a 

pretext for yet another attempt to destroy Hamas.2* 

Hamas responded to the Israeli assault with a barrage of 

missiles that injured no one and killed no one. Israel stopped 

its attack for a short period, demanding that Hamas agree 

to a ceasefire under its conditions. Hamas’s refusal led to 

the infamous “Cast Lead” operation at the end of 2008 (the 

code names were now changed to even more ominous 

ones). The preliminary bombardment this time was 

unprecedented—it reminded many of the carpet bombing of 

Iraq in 2003. The main target was the civilian infrastructure; 

nothing was spared—hospitals, schools, mosques— 

everything was hit and destroyed. Hamas responded by 

launching missiles into Israeli towns not targeted before, 

such as Beersheba and Ashdod. There were a few civilian 

casualties, but most of the Israelis killed, thirteen in total, 

were soldiers killed by friendly fire. In sharp contrast, 1,500 

Palestinians lost their lives in the operation.?° 

A new cynical dimension was now added: international 

and Arab donors promised aid running into the billions to 

rebuild what Israel would only destroy again in the future. 

Even the worst disaster can be profitable. 

The next round came in 2012 with two operations: 

“Returning Echo,” which was smaller in comparison to the 

previous attacks, and the more significant “Pillar of 

Defense” in July 2012, which brought an end to the social 

protest movement of that summer, with its potential to 

bring down the government for the failure of its economic 

and social policies. There is nothing like a war in the south 

to convince young Israelis to stop protesting and go out and 

defend the homeland. It had worked before, and it worked 

this time as well. 

In 2012, Hamas reached Tel Aviv for the first time—with 

missiles that caused litthe damage and no casualties. 

Meanwhile, with the familiar imbalance, 200 Palestinians 

were killed, including tens of children. This was not a bad 

year for Israel. The exhausted EU and US governments did 

not even condemn the 2012 attacks; in fact they repeatedly 

invoked “Israel’s right to defend itself.” No wonder that two 

years later the Israelis understood that they could go even 

further. Operation “Protective Edge,” in the summer of 

2014, had been in the planning for two years; the abduction 

and killing of three settlers in the West Bank provided the 

pretext for its execution, during which 2,200 Palestinians 

were killed. Israel itself was paralyzed for a while, as 

Hamas’s rockets even reached Ben-Gurion airport. 

For the first time, the Israeli army fought face to face 

with the Palestinian guerrillas in the Strip, and lost sixty-six 

soldiers in the process. In this battle between desperate 

Palestinians, their backs to their wall, enraged by a long and 

cruel siege, and the Israeli army, the former had the upper 

hand. The situation was like that of a police force entering a 

maximum security prison it had controlled mainly from 

outside, only to be faced with the desperation and resilience 

of prisoners who have been systematically starved and 

strangulated. It is frightening to think what Israel’s 

operational conclusions will be after this clash with brave 

Hamas fighters. 

The war in Syria and the resulting refugee crisis did not 

leave much space for international action or interest in 

Gaza. However, it seems everything is poised for yet 

another round of attacks against the people of the Strip. The 

UN has predicted that, at the current rate of destruction, by 

2020 the Strip will have become uninhabitable. This will be 

brought about not only by military force but also by what 

the UN calls “de-development”—a _ process whereby 

development is reversed: 

Three Israeli military operations in the past six years, in addition to eight 

years of economic blockade, have ravaged the already debilitated 

infrastructure of Gaza, shattered its productive base, left no time for 

meaningful reconstruction or economic recovery and impoverished the 

Palestinian population in Gaza, rendering their economic wellbeing worse 

than the level of two decades previous.7° 

This death sentence has become even more likely since the 

military coup in Egypt. The new regime there has now 

closed the only opening Gaza had outside of Israel. Since 

2010, civil society organizations have sent flotillas to show 

solidarity and break the siege. One of them was viciously 

attacked by Israeli commandoes, who killed nine of the 

passengers on board the Mavi Marmara and arrested the 

others. Other flotillas were treated better. However, the 

2020 prospect is still there, and it seems that to prevent this 

infliction of a slow death the people of Gaza will need more 

than peaceful flotillas to persuade the Israelis to relent. 

PART Ill 

LOOKING AHEAD 

Chapter 10 

The Two-States Solution 

Is the Only Way Forward 

This familiar myth is usually delivered in an affirmative voice 

claiming that there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian 

conflict, and that it is waiting for us just around the corner. 

However, the reality of the current colonization of vast parts 

of the West Bank by Israel renders any two-states solution 

an improbable vision. At best, the most one can hope for is 

a Palestinian Bantustan. But such a political arrangement 

would create a state with no proper sovereignty, divided 

into several cantons, with no means of protecting or 

sustaining itself independently of Israel. Any expectation of 

a more independent entity, should there be a miraculous 

change of mind on Israel’s part, does not turn the two-states 

solution into a final act in the conflict. It is unthinkable that 

a national struggle for liberation, now almost 150 years old, 

might end with conditional autonomous rule over just 20 

percent of the homeland. Moreover, no diplomatic accord or 

document could ever define who is and who is not part of 

the agreement. For example, it would be impossible to 

declare those who live in the West Bank Palestinians, but 

not those in the Gaza Strip. This would be the current 

situation, because both the Gaza Strip and many parts of 

Jerusalem seem to be excluded from negotiations and are 

not included in the envisaged state. 

The two-states solution, as noted earlier, is an Israeli 

invention that was meant to square a circle. It responds to 

the question of how to keep the West Bank under Israeli 

control without incorporating the population that lives there. 

Thus it was suggested that part of the West Bank would be 

autonomous, a quasi-state. In return, the Palestinians would 

have to give up all their hopes for return, for equal rights for 

Palestinians in Israel, for the fate of Jerusalem, and for 

leading a normal life as human beings in their homeland. 

Any criticism of this myth is often branded as anti- 

Semitism. However, in many ways the opposite is true: 

there is a connection between the new anti-Semitism and 

the myth itself. The two-states solution is based on the idea 

that a Jewish state is the best solution for the Jewish 

problem; that is, Jews should live in Palestine rather than 

anywhere else. This notion is also close to the hearts of anti- 

Semites. The two-states solution, indirectly one should say, 

is based on the assumption that Israel and Judaism are the 

same. Thus, Israel insists that what it does, it does in the 

name of Judaism, and when its actions are rejected by 

people around the world the criticism is not only directed 

toward Israel but also towards Judaism. The leader of the UK 

Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, attracted of a lot of criticism 

when he explained, to my mind correctly, that blaming 

Judaism for Netanyahu’s policies is like blaming Islam for the 

actions of the Islamic State. This is a valid comparison, even 

if it rattled some people’s sensitivities. + 

The two-states solution is like a corpse taken out in the 

morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely, and 

presented as a living thing. When it has been proven once 

more that there is no life left in it, it is returned to the 

morgue. In the future, the only thing that might change is 

the United Nations admitting Palestine as a full member. At 

the same time, we might also see the completion of the 

Israeli takeover of Area C (more than 50 percent of the West 

Bank). The tension between the two—the symbolic act in 

the UN Security Council and the reality on the ground—may 

be too much for the international community to bear. The 

best scenario imaginable might be that such circumstances 

force everyone to go back to the drawing board and rethink 

a solution to the conflict from first principles. 

The charade will end soon, peacefully or violently, but 

either way painfully. It seems that nothing is going to stop 

Israel now from completing its colonization of the West Bank 

and continuing its siege on Gaza. This might be achieved 

with international blessing, but there are quite enough 

politicians in Israel who seem willing to proceed without that 

blessing. In either case, Israel will need to use brutal force 

to implement its vision of a “solution”: annexing half of the 

West Bank, ghettoizing the other half as well as the Gaza 

Strip, and imposing an apartheid regime of a sort on its own 

Palestinian citizens. Such a_ situation will render any 

discourse on the two-states solution irrelevant and obsolete. 

In ancient times, the dead were buried with their beloved 

artifacts and belongings. This coming funeral will probably 

follow a similar ritual. The most important item to go six feet 

under is the dictionary of illusion and deception with its 

famous entries such as “the peace process,” “the only 

democracy in the Middle East,” “a peace-loving nation,” 

“parity and reciprocity,” and “a humane solution to the 

refugee problem.” A replacement dictionary has been in the 

making for many years, redefining Zionism as colonialism, 

Israel aS an apartheid state, and the Nakbah as ethnic 

cleansing. It will be much easier to put it into common use 

once the two-states solution has been pronounced dead. 

The maps of the dead solution will also be lying next to 

the body. The cartography that reduced Palestine to a tenth 

of its historical self, and which was presented as a map of 

peace, will hopefully be gone forever. There is no need to 

prepare an alternative map. Since 1967, the geography of 

the conflict has never changed in reality, even while it was 

constantly transformed in the discourse of liberal Zionist 

politicians, journalists, and academics. Palestine was always 

the land between the river and the sea. It still is. Its 

changing fortunes are characterized not by geography but 

by demography. The settler movement that arrived there in 

the late nineteenth century now accounts for half the 

population and controls the other half through a matrix of 

racist ideology and apartheid policies. Peace is not a matter 

of demographic change, nor a redrawing of maps: it is the 

elimination of these ideologies and policies. Who knows, it 

may be easier now than ever to do this. 

The funeral will expose the fallacy of the Israeli mass 

protest movement of 2012, while at the same time 

highlighting its positive potential. For seven weeks in that 

summer, middle-class Israeli Jews protested in huge 

numbers against their government’s social and economic 

policies. In order to ensure as big a protest as possible, its 

leaders and coordinators did not dare mention occupation, 

colonization, or apartheid. The source of every evil, they 

claimed, was the brutal capitalist policies of the 

government. On a certain level, they had a point. These 

policies prevented the master race of Israel from enjoying 

fully and equally the fruits of Palestine’s rape and 

dispossession. However, a fairer division of the spoils will 

not ensure a normal life for either Jews or Palestinians; only 

an end to the looting and pillaging will. And yet the 

demonstrators also expressed their skepticism and distrust 

concerning what their media and politicians tell them about 

the socioeconomic reality; this may open the way for a 

better understanding of the lies they have been fed about 

the “conflict” and their “national security” over so many 

years. 

The funeral should energize us all to follow the same 

distribution of labor as before. As urgently as ever, 

Palestinians need to solve the issue of representation. And 

the progressive Jewish forces in the world need to be more 

intensively recruited to the BDS and solidarity campaigns. In 

Palestine itself, the time has come to move the discourse of 

the one-state solution into political action, and maybe to 

adopt the new dictionary. Since the dispossession is 

everywhere, the repossession and reconciliation will have to 

occur everywhere. If the relationship between Jews and 

Palestinians is to be reframed on a just and democratic 

basis, then we can accept neither the old, buried map of the 

two-states solution nor its logic of partition. This also means 

that the sacred distinction between Jewish settlements in 

Israel (before 1967) and those in the West Bank (after 1967) 

Should be consigned to the grave as well. The distinction 

should instead be made between those Jews who are willing 

to discuss a reformulation of the relationship, a change of 

regime, and equal status, and those who are not, regardless 

of where they live now. 

There are some surprising phenomena in this respect if 

one studies the human and political fabric of contemporary 

Israel-Palestine: the willingness to enter into dialogue is 

sometimes more evident beyond the green line than inside 

it. The dialogues within about a change of regime, the 

question of representation, and the BDS campaign are all 

part and parcel of the same effort to bring justice and peace 

to Palestine. Once the two-states solution is buried, one 

major obstacle to a just peace in Israel and Palestine will 

have been removed. 

Conclusion: 

The Settler Colonial 

State of Israel in the 

Twenty-First Century 

In 2017, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the 

Gaza Strip will have lasted for fifty years. After such a long 

period, the term “occupation” becomes somewhat 

redundant and irrelevant. Two generations of Palestinians 

have already lived under this regime. Although they 

themselves will still call it occupation, what they are living 

through is rooted in something else much harder to defeat 

or change—colonization. The term colonization, as | noted in 

the opening chapters, is not easily applied to the present—it 

is more often than not associated with past events. This is 

why, with the help of recent and exciting research, scholars 

writing on Israel are more frequently using another term: 

settler colonialism. 

Colonialism can be described as the movement of 

Europeans to different parts of the world, creating new 

“white” nations where indigenous people had once had their 

own kingdoms. These nations could only be created if the 

settlers employed two logics: the logic of elimination— 

getting rid by all means possible of the indigenous people, 

including by genocide; and the logic of dehumanization— 

regarding the non-Europeans as inferior and thus as not 

deserving the same rights as the settlers. In South Africa 

these twin logics led to the creation of the Apartheid 

system, founded officially in 1948, the same year that the 

Zionist movement translated the same logics into an ethnic 

cleansing operation in Palestine. 

As this book attempts to show, from a settler colonial 

perspective events such as the occupation of the West Bank 

and the Gaza _ Strip, the Oslo Process, and_ the 

disengagement from Gaza in 2005 are all part of the same 

Israeli strategy of taking as much of Palestine as possible 

with as few Palestinians in it as possible. The means of 

achieving this goal have changed over time, and it remains 

uncompleted. However, it is the main fuel that feeds the fire 

of the conflict. 

In this manner, the horrific connection between the logics 

of dehumanization and elimination, so apparent in the 

spread of European settler colonialism throughout the world, 

first found its way into the authoritarian states of the Middle 

East. It was ruthlessly manifest, among a multitude of other 

examples, in the destruction of the Kurds by Saddam 

Hussein as well as in the punitive actions carried out by the 

Assad regime in 2012. It was then also employed by groups 

Opposing that regime: the worst example being the 

genocidal policies of the Islamic State. 

This barbarization of human relations in the Middle East 

can only be stopped by the people of the region themselves. 

However, they should be aided by the outside world. 

Together the region should return to its not so distant past, 

when the guiding principle was “live and let live.” No serious 

discussion about ending human rights abuses in the region 

as a whole can bypass a conversation about the 100 years 

of human rights abuses in Palestine. The two are intimately 

connected. The exceptionalism enjoyed by Israel, and 

before that by the Zionist movement, makes a mockery of 

any Western critique of human rights abuses in the Arab 

world. Any discussion of the abuse of the Palestinians’ 

human rights needs to include an understanding of the 

inevitable outcome of settler colonial projects such as 

Zionism. The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral 

part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. 

They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the 

constant oppression and _ dispossession of the_ local 

Palestinians. 

We have wasted years talking about the two-states 

solution as if it had any relevance to the issue described 

above. But we needed that time to persuade both Israeli 

Jews and the world at large that when you found a state— 

even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech 

industry, and a _ powerful military—on the basis of 

dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will 

always be questioned. Confining the question of legitimacy 

only to the territories Israel occupied in 1967 will never 

resolve the issue at the heart of the problem. Of course it 

will help if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, but there is 

a possibility that it will just monitor the region in the same 

way it has policed the Gaza Strip since 2006. This will not 

hasten an end to the conflict, it will just transform it into a 

conflict of a different kind. 

There are deep layers of history that will need to be 

addressed if a genuine attempt is to be made at a 

resolution. After World War Il, Zionism was allowed to 

become a colonialist project at a time when colonialism was 

being rejected by the civilized world because the creation of 

a Jewish state offered Europe, and West Germany in 

particular, an easy way out of the worst excesses of anti- 

Semitism ever seen. Israel was the first to declare its 

recognition of “a new Germany”—in return it received a lot 

of money, but also, far more importantly, a carte blanche to 

turn the whole of Palestine into Israel. Zionism offered itself 

as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main 

reason for its continued presence. The “deal” also failed to 

uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart 

of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and 

a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and 

xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since 

it is intimately connected to the Israel-Palestinian question, 

it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question 

is found. 

We all deserve a better ending to the story of the 

Holocaust. This could involve a= strong multicultural 

Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an 

American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of 

its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that 

expunges its barbarism and inhumanity ... 

Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into 

the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not 

empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was 

colonized, not “redeemed”; and _ its people were 

dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. 

Colonized people, even under the UN Charter, have the right 

to struggle for their liberation, even with an army, and the 

successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a 

democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants. A 

discussion of the future, liberated from the ten myths about 

Israel, will hopefully not only help to bring peace to Israel 

and Palestine, but will also help Europe reach a proper 

closure on the horrors of World War II and the dark era of 

colonialism. 

1881 

1882 

1897 

1898 

1899 

1901 

1904 

1908 

1909 

1915- 

16 

1916 

1917 

Timeline 

Waves of Russian pogroms lasting until 1884. The Zionist movement 

appears in Europe. 

First Aliyah (1882-1904). The foundation of Rishon LeZion, Zichron 

Yaacov, and Rosh Pina in Palestine. 

The First Zionist Congress in Basel. The establishment of the World 

Zionist Congress. 

The Second Zionist Congress. 

The Third Zionist Congress. 

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) founded. 

The Second Aliyah (1904-14). 

The Palestine Office is established (in 1929 it became the Jewish 

Agency). 

Degania, the first Kibbutz (Kvutzat Degania), is founded. The building 

of Tel Aviv. The Hashomer founded. 

The Hussein-McMahon correspondence. 

The Sykes-Picot agreement. 

The Balfour Declaration. Britain occupies Palestine and governs it 

1920 

1922 

1923 

1931 

1936 

1937 

1940 

1946 

1947 

1948 

1949 

1950 

1956 

1959 

1963 

1967 

through a military administration (until 1920). 

The Haganah is founded. The Histadrut is founded. The San Remo 

Conference grants Britain the Mandate over Palestine. 

Britain recognizes Transjordan as a separate political entity and Amir 

Abdullah as its ruler. The US Congress endorses the Balfour 

Declaration. 

The British Mandate over Palestine and Transjordan is authorized first 

by the League of Nations, then at the Treaty of Lausanne. 

The Irgun splits from the Haganah. 

Arab Revolt breaks out and would last until 1939. 

The Peel Royal Commission. 

“Lehi” (Stern gang) splits from the Irgun. The Village Files Project 

launched. 

The Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. 

Britain announces the end of the Mandate and transfers the question 

of Palestine to the UN. The UN forms a special committee, UNSCOP, 

which recommends partition. This is approved by the United Nations’ 

General Assembly (Resolution 181). 

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine: British Mandate ends, the State of 

Israel declared and recognized by the United States and the USSR. 

Israel at war with troops entering Palestine from neighboring Arab 

countries while completing the expulsion of half of Palestine’s 

population, demolishing half of its villages, and emptying and 

destroying eleven of its twelve towns. 

UNGA Resolution 194 (calling for the return of the Palestinian 

refugees). Armistice agreements between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, 

Lebanon, and Egypt. Military rule is imposed on the remaining 

Palestinian citizens inside Israel, which will remain in place until 1966. 

The immigration of Jews from Arab countries begins. 

Israel joins Britain and France in a war against Egypt’s Nasser, 

occupying the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The Kafr Qasim 

massacre. 

Wadi Salib riots (Mizrahi riots in Haifa protesting discrimination). 

The end of the Ben-Gurion era. 

The Six-Day War: Israel occupies the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, the 

Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. UNSC Resolution 

242 calls on Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories. Israeli 

settlement project in the West Bank and Gaza begins. 

1973 

1974 

1976 

1977 

1978 

1981 

1982 

1987 

1989 

1991 

1992 

1993 

1994 

1995 

1996 

1999 

2000 

2001 

2002 

The October War: Israel occupies part of Egypt proper and retains 

control of the Golan Heights after a bloody conflict that took the state 

by surprise. 

UN Security Council Resolution 338 reaffirms the rights of the 

Palestinians to self-determination and national independence. 

The Land Day Protests of the Palestinians in Israel against the 

Judaization of the Galilee. 

The Likud under Menachem Begin wins the national elections after 

thirty years of Labor rule. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt visits 

Jerusalem and begins bilateral talks with Israel. 

Peace treaty signed between Israel and Egypt. PLO attack on Tel Aviv 

reciprocated by Operation “Litani”—Israel occupies part of southern 

Lebanon. 

Annexation of the Golan Heights to Israel. 

Sinai returned to Egypt. Operation “Peace for the Galilee” in which 

Israel invades Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO. 

The First Palestinian Intifada. 

Collapse of the USSR and mass migration of Jews and non-Jews from 

across the Eastern Bloc to Israel. 

First Gulf War. US convenes international conference on Palestine in 

Madrid. 

Labor returns to power and Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister for 

the second time. 

The PLO and Israel sign the Oslo Declaration of Principles in the White 

House. 

The Palestinian National Authority is formed and Yasser Arafat, the PLO 

chairman, arrives in the occupied territories to become president of the 

PNA. Israel and Jordan sign peace treaty. 

Oslo II signed (interim agreement for Palestinian control of parts of the 

West Bank and Gaza Strip). Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated. 

Likud returns to power and the first Benjamin Netanyahu government 

is formed. 

Labor’s Ehud Barak elected as prime minister. 

Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon. The Second Intifada erupts. 

Ariel Sharon, head of the Likud, elected as prime minister. Later forms 

his own party (Kadima) and wins the 2005 elections. 

The West Bank Wall project is approved; implementation begins in 

2003. 

2005 

2006 

2006 

2008 

2009- 

13 

2011 

2012 

2013- 

15 

2014 

2015 

Sharon re-elected. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is 

launched. Israel evacuates from Gaza settlements and military bases. 

Hamas wins the elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council 

(PLC). Israel, the Middle East Quartet (United States, Russia, United 

Nations, and European Union), several Western states, and the Arab 

states impose sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, suspending all 

foreign aid. The siege on Gaza begins. Second Lebanon War and Israeli 

assault on the Gaza Strip. 

Ehud Olmert elected as prime minister (in February 2016 Olmert began 

a nineteen-month prison sentence for bribery and obstruction of 

justice). 

Gaza War—Operation “Cast Lead.” The UN and human rights 

organizations count more than 1,400 Palestinian deaths, of which 926 

were unarmed civilians. Three Israeli civilians were killed and six 

soldiers. 

Second Netanyahu Government. 

Social protest across Israel (The Tent Movement). 

Operation “Pillar of Cloud.” Four Israeli civilians and two soldiers were 

killed in Palestinian rocket attacks. According to the UN, 174 

Palestinians in total died, 107 of them civilians. 

Third Netanyahu Government. 

Operation “Protective Edge.” According to the main estimates, 

between 2,125 and 2,310 Gazans were killed (1,492 civilians, including 

551 children and 299 women), and between 10,626 and 10,895 were 

wounded (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left 

permanently disabled). Sixty-six Israeli soldiers, five Israeli civilians 

(including one child), and one Thai civilian were killed, and 469 IDF 

soldiers and 261 Israeli civilians were injured. Israel destroyed about 

17,000 homes, and partially destroyed 30,000. 

Fourth Netanyahu Government. 

| would like to thank my friend Marcelo Svirsky for compiling 

this timeline. 

Notes 

1 Palestine Was an Empty Land 

. Jonathan Mendel, The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Political and Security 

Considerations in the Making of Arabic Language Studies in Israel, London: 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 188. 

From the official website of the ministry of foreign affairs at mfa.gov.il. 

A good example of this is the current curriculum for high schools on the 

Ottoman History of Jerusalem, available at cms.education.gov.il. 

For a focused study of such trade connections see Beshara Doumani, 

Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700- 

1900, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National 

Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, and Muhammad 

Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, \|nstitute for Palestine Studies, 

1989. 

For more on the paper and its role in the national movement see Khalidi, 

Palestinian Identity. 

. The alternative possible modernization of Palestine is discussed brilliantly in 

the collection of articles by Salim Tamari, The Mountain Against the Sea: 

Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture, Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 2008. 

See Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Rise of the Sanjaq of Jerusalem in the 

Nineteenth Century,” in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question, 

London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 40-50. 

10, 

Ld 

12. 

pF 

14. 

1; 

16. 

Ae 

For a more detailed analysis see Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: 

One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 

14-60. 

2 The Jews Were a People Without a Land 

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, London and New York: 

Verso, 2010. 

. Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of St. John Illustrated with an Analysis 

and Scholions [sic], 4th edn, London, 1644, p. 544. 

From a letter he wrote to Spinoza on December 4, 1665, quoted in Franz 

Kobler, The Vision Was There: The History of the British Movement for the 

Restoration of the Jews to Palestine, London: Birt Am Publications, 1956, pp. 

25-6. 

Hagai Baruch, Le Sionisme Politique: Precurseurs et Militants: Le Prince De 

Linge, Paris: Beresnik, 1920, p. 20. 

Suja R. Sawafta, “Mapping the Middle East: From Bonaparte’s Egypt to 

Chateaubriand’s Palestine,” PhD thesis submitted to the University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013. 

. A. W. C. Crawford, Lord Lindsay, Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land, 

Vol. 2, London, 1847, p. 71. 

Quoted in Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism 

in England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 432. 

“Jews in America: President John Adams Embraces a Jewish Homeland” 

(1819), at jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 

Donald Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and 

Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2014, p. 380. 

Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, Diary entries as quoted by Edwin 

Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, London, 1886, 

Vol. 1, pp. 310-11; see also Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of 

Shaftesbury, London: Eyre Methuen, 1981, p. 114; The National Register 

Archives, London, Shaftesbury (Broadlands) MSS, SHA/PD/2, August 1, 1840. 

Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The People of the Book: Philosemitism in 

England, From Cromwell to Churchill, New York: Encounter Books, 2011, p. 

119. 

The London Quarterly Review, Vol. 64, pp. 104-5. 

Ibid. 

Ibid. 

The Times of London, August 17, 1840. 

Quoted in Geoffrey Lewis, Balfour and Weizmann: The Zionist, The Zealot 

and the Emergence of Israel, London: Continuum books, 2009, p. 19. 

Deborah J. Schmidle, “Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury,” 

in Hugh D. Hindman (ed.), The World of Child Labour: An Historical and 

Regional Survey, London and New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2009, p. 569. 

16, 

19. 

20. 

oli 

22, 

2a: 

24. 

oo; 

26. 

e 

| have developed this idea in Ilan Pappe, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian 

Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700-1948, London: Saqi Books, 2010, pp. 84, 117. 

Helmut Glenk, From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges: The History of the 

German Templers Settlement of Sarona in Palestine, Toronto: Trafford, 2005, 

is one of the few works in English. Most of the works on the Templars are in 

either German or Hebrew. 

Alexander Scholch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in 

Social, Economic, and Political Development, Washington: Institute of 

Palestine Studies, 2006. 

Pappe, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty, p. 115. 

Verte’s 1970 article was republished as “The Balfour Declaration and Its 

Makers” in N. Rose (ed.), From Palmerston to Balfour: Collected Essays of 

Mayer Verte, London: Frank Cass, 1992, pp. 1-38. 

J. M. N Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality, Washington: Institute of Palestine 

Studies, 2013. 

The book has been reprinted as Arthur Koestler, The Khazar Empire and its 

Heritage, New York: Random House, 1999. 

Keith Whitelam, in The Invention of Ancient Israel, London and New York: 

Routledge, 1999, and Thomas L. Thompson, in The Mythical Past: Biblical 

Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, London: Basic Books, 1999, created the 

Copenhagen School of biblical minimalism that pursues the main arguments 

and research on this issue. 

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, and The Invention of the 

Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland, London and New York: Verso, 

2014. 

3 Zionism Is Judaism 

Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Youth Memoirs, Jerusalem: Am 

Oved, 1982, p. 34 (Hebrew). 

. The following quotes from the Reformists are taken from an assessment of 

their position, critical and pro-Zionist but nonetheless very informative, 

which includes the documents in full. See Ami Isserof, “Opposition of Reform 

Judaism to Zionism: A History,” August 12, 2005, at zionism-israel.com. 

Walter Lacquer, The History of Zionism, New York: Tauris Park Paperback, 

2003, pp. 338-98. 

. The most recent work on the movement is Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in 

the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in Late 

Imperial Russia, London: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 

M. W. Weisgal and J. Carmichael (eds.), Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by 

Several Hands, New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. 

Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 70. 

Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the 

Jewish State, New York: Basic Books, 1981, pp. 187-209. 

You can now download the book for free at jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 

o, 

10; 

Li, 

12; 

AF 

14. 

162 F 

16. 

i 

18. 

19. 

ZU, 

Pale 

22; 

Za, 

24. 

Past 

26. 

See Eliezer Shweid, Homeland and the Promised Land, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 

1979, p. 218 (Hebrew). 

Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, “On Both Sides,” quoted in Asaf Sagiv, “The 

Fathers of Zionism and the Myth of the Birth of the Nation,” Techelt, 5 

(1998), p. 93 (Hebrew). 

A good discussion on these options can be found in Adam Rovner, /n the 

Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, New York: NYU Press, 2014. 

An excellent summary of this point with adequate references can be found 

in Stephen Sizer’s article “The Road to Balfour: The History of Christian 

Zionism,” at balfourproject.org. 

Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas Thompson (eds.), History, Archaeology and the 

Bible, Forty Years after “Historicity,” London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 

Ilan Pappe, “Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by 

Colonised Colonisers,” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1 (2012), pp. 39-58. 

Moshe Bellinson, “Rebelling Against Reality,” in The Book of the Second 

Aliya, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1947 (Hebrew), p. 48. This book is the largest 

published collection of Second Aliya diary entries, letters and articles. 

Yona Hurewitz, “From Kibush Ha-Avoda to Settlement,” in The Book of the 

Second Aliya, p. 210. 

llan Pappe, “The Bible in the Service of Zionism, 

History, Archaeology and the Bible, pp. 205-18. 

For a discussion of these works and the early introduction of the colonialist 

paradigm to the research on Zionism see Uri Ram, “The Colonisation 

Perspective in Israeli Sociology,” in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine 

Question, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 53-77. 

Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, London: 

Bloomsbury 1997. 

These themes are discussed at length in an excellent book that alas exists 

only in Hebrew: Sefi Rachlevski, The Messiah’s Donkey, Tel Aviv: Yeditot 

Achronot, 1998. 

This appeared on her official Facebook page on July 1, 2014, and was widely 

quoted in the Israeli press. 

Quoted in Jonathan K. Crane, “Faltering Dialogue? Religious Rhetoric of 

Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Buber,” Anaskati Darshan, 3:1 (2007), pp. 34- 

52. See also A. K. Ramakrishnan, “Mahatma Ghandi Rejected Zionism,” The 

Wisdom Fund, August 15, 2001, at twf.org. 

Quoted in Avner Falk, “Buber and Ghandi,” Ghandi Marg, 7th year, October 

1963, p. 2. There are several websites such as the Ghandi Archives that also 

have the full dialogue. 

Ben-Zion Dinaburg’s The People of Israel in their Land: From the Beginning 

of Israel to the Babylonian Exile was published in Hebrew in 1936 and a 

second volume, /srae/ in Exile, in 1946. 

Martin Gilbert, The Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1993. 

The letter appears on the official website, dated November 29, 2014. 

” 

in Hjelm and Thompson, 

ra 

10, 

i Be 

Le, 

Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, London: Abacus, 2001, p. 401. 

4 Zionism Is Not Colonialism 

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism 

and Israel, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992, p. 74. 

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Logic of Elimination of the 

Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), pp. 387-409. 

Ibid. 

See Pappe, “Shtetl Colonialism.” 

For a discussion of these works and the early introduction of the colonialist 

paradigm into the research on Zionism, see Ram, “The Colonisation 

Perspective in Israeli Sociology.” 

Natan Hofshi, “A Pact with the Land,” in The Book of the Second Aliya, p. 

239. 

| have examined these relationships in detail in A History of Modern 

Palestine, pp. 108-16. 

Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 239. 

See Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, pp. 109-16. 

See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld, 2006, 

pp. 29-39. 

See Pappe, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty, pp. 283-7. 

For an in-depth analysis see Ilan Pappe, The /dea of Israel: A History of 

Power and Knowledge, London and New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 153-78. 

5 The Palestinians Voluntarily Left Their Homeland in 1948 

1. 

Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in 

Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, Washington: Institute for Palestine 

Studies, 1992. 

See Anita Shapira, Land and Power, New York: Oxford University Press, 

1992, pp. 285-6. 

Quoted in David Ben-Gurion, The Roads of Our State, Am Oved: Tel Aviv, 

1938, pp. 179-180 (Hebrew). 

Ibid. 

See the letter in in translation at palestineremembered.com. 

. Yosef Gorny, The Arab Question and the Jewish Problem, Am Oved: Tel Aviv, 

1985, p. 433 (Hebrew). 

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 

1881-1999, New York: Random House, 2001, p. 142. 

Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 117. 

See report ty Eric Bender in Maariv, March 31, 2008. 

Berl Katznelson, Writings, Tel Aviv: Davar, 1947, Vol. 5, p. 112. 

A BE 

12; 

Ls; 

14. 

LS 

16, 

HE SF 

ie. 

Lu, 

20. 

21; 

22, 

Pe 

24. 

Fase 

26. 

nF 

28. 

29; 

30. 

Central Zionist Archives, Minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, May 7, 

1944, pp. 17-19. 

Central Zionist Archives, Minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, June 12, 

1938, pp. 31-2. 

Ibid. 

Ibid. 

Shay Hazkani, “Catastrophic Thinking: Did Ben-Gurion Try to Re-write 

History?,” Haaretz, May 16, 2013. 

Ibid. 

Ibid. 

The first person to refute these calls was the Irish journalist Erskine Childs 

in The Spectator, May 12, 1961. 

llan Pappe, “Why were they Expelled?: The History, Historiography and 

Relevance of the Refugee Problem,” in Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cortan 

(eds.), The Palestinian Exodus, 1948-1988, London: Ithaca 1999, pp. 37-63. 

See Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, London: Penguin, 2014. 

Ibid. 

Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist 

Movement and the Partition of Palestine, New York: Columbia University 

Press, 1988. 

This was quite convincingly proved by Simha Flapan in The Birth of Israel: 

Myths and Realities, New York: Pantheon, 1988. 

New and more profound material on this twist has now been exposed in a 

recent book by Irene Gendzier, Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and 

the Foundations of US Policy in the Middle East, New York: Columbia 

University Press, 2015. 

Ahmad Sa’di, “The Incorporation of the Palestinian Minority by the Israeli 

State, 1948-1970: On the Nature, Transformation and Constraints of 

Collaboration,” Socia/ Text, 21:2 (2003), pp. 75-94. 

Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” 

Journal of Palestine Studies, 18:1 (1988), pp. 4-33. 

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 426. 

US State Department, Special Report on Ethnic Cleansing, May 10, 1999. 

| detailed this in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 

6 The June 1967 War Was a War of “No Choice” 

Not everyone agrees with this. See Avi Shlaim, /srae/ and Palestine: 

Reprisals, Revisions, Refutations, New York and London: Verso, 2010. 

Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan. 

id 

10. 

bee 

Le, 

13: 

14. 

ths 

16. 

A 

16. 

13 

20. 

Zi; 

22, 

25; 

24. 

ee. 

Pans 

For more on this lobby and its work, see Tom Segev’s 1967: Israel and the 

War That Transformed the Middle East, New York: Holt and Company, 2008, 

and Ilan Pappe, “The Junior Partner: Israel’s Role in the 1958 Crisis,” in Roger 

Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), A Revolutionary Year: The Middle East in 1958, 

London and New York: I. B. Tauris 2002, pp. 245-74. 

Pappe, “The Junior Partner.” 

Ibid. 

Ibid. 

Ben-Gurion Archive, Ben-Gurion Dairy, August 19, 1958. 

For a very honest version of these events see David Shaham, /srae/: The 

First Forty Years, Tel Aviv: Am Oved 1991, pp. 239-47 (Hebrew). 

See Shalim, The Iron Wall, pp. 95-142. 

Pappe, “The Junior Partner,” pp. 251-2. 

Ami Gluska, The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War: 

Government, Armed Forces and Defence Policy, 1963-1967, London and 

New York: Routledge 2007, pp. 121-2. 

| have discussed this in detail in Ilan Pappe, “Revisiting 1967: The False 

Paradigm of Peace, Partition and Parity,” Settler Colonial Studies, 3:3-4 

(2013), pp. 341-51. 

In his typical way Norman Finkelstein takes the official narrative of Israel as 

presented by one of its best articulators, Abba Eban, and demolishes it. See 

his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, London and New York: 

Verso, 2003, pp. 135-45. 

From an interview given by Rabin on May 12, 1967 to the UPI news service 

in which he threatened in addition to topple the Syrian regime. See Jeremy 

Bowen, Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East, London: Simon 

and Schuster UK, 2004, pp. 32-3. 

Ibid. 

See Avi Shlaim, “Walking the Tight Rope,” in Avi Shlaim and Wm. Roger 

Louis (eds.), The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 114. 

Finkelstein, /mage and Reality, pp. 125-35. 

Moshe Shemesh, Arab Politics, Palestinian Nationalism and the Six Day War, 

Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008, p. 117. 

Israel State Archives, minutes of government meetings, June 11 and 18, 

1967. 

Valerie Zink, “A Quiet Transfer: The Judaization of Jerusalem,” Contemporary 

Arab Affairs, 2:1 (2009), pp. 122-33. 

Israel State Archives, minutes of government meeting, June 26, 1967. 

Haaretz, June 23, 1967. 

Dan Bavli, Dreams and Missed Opportunities, 1967-1973, Jerusalem: 

Carmel 2002 (Hebrew). 

Ibid, p. 16. 

Noam Chomsky “Chomsky: Why the Israel-Palestine ‘Negotiation’ are a 

Complete Farce,” Alternet.org, September 2, 2013. 

26. 

ere 

sal al 

rr 

10, 

d bel 

ee 

i Be 

14. 

tbs 

16. 

Lea 

18; 

Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, The Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s 

Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, New York: Nation Books, 

2009. 

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and 

Empowerment, London: Pluto Press, 2011. 

7 Israel Is the Only Democracy in the Middle East 

A detailed description of this life can be found in Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten 

Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, New Haven and London: 

Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 46-93. 

Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 471. 

See Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp. 181-7. 

Shira Robinson, “Local Struggle, National Struggle: Palestinian Responses to 

the Kafr Qasim Massacre and its Aftermath, 1956-66,” /nternational Journal 

of Middle East Studies, 35 (2003), pp. 393-416. 

Natan Alterman, “A Matter of No Importance,” Davar, September 7, 1951. 

Natan Alterman, “Two Security Measures,” The Seventh Column, Vol. 1, p. 

291 (Hebrew). 

| have listed these in The Forgotten Palestinians. 

See Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians, p. 65. 

See the report by Adalah, “An Anti-Human Rights Year for the Israeli 

Supreme Court,” December 10, 2015, at adalah.org. 

The Jerusalem Post, November 24, 2011. 

See Ilan Pappe, “In Upper Nazareth: Judaisation,” London Review of Books, 

September 10, 2009. 

See Amnon Sella, “Custodians and Redeemers: Israel’s Leaders’ Perceptions 

of Peace, 1967-1979,” Middle East Studies, 22:2 (1986), pp. 236-51. 

Motti Golani, Palestine Between Politics and Terror, 1945-1947, Brandeis: 

Brandeis University Press, 2013, p. 201. 

Horrific detailed descriptions of almost every such demolition can be found 

on the website of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, at 

ichad.org. 

See the report of the Israeli NGO Yesh Din, “Law Enforcement on Israeli 

Civilians in the West Bank,” at yesh-din.org. 

See “Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories,” at amnesty.org. 

The fatalities count is more accurate from 1987 onwards, but there are 

reliable sources for the period as a whole. See the reports of fatalities by 

B’Tselem and visit their statistics page at btselem.org. Other sources include 

IMEMC and UN OCHA reports. 

One of the more thorough reports on the numbers of prisoners can be found 

in Mohammad Ma’ri, “Israeli Forces Arrested 800,000 Palestinians since 

1967,” The Saudi Gazette, December 12, 2012. 

19. 

20, 

21; 

oe. 

LO), 

i 

12. 

i. 

See the document in the Harry Truman Library, “The War Relocation 

Authority and the Incarceration of the Japanese-Americans in the Second 

World War,” at trumanlibrary.org. 

See “Torture in _ Israeli Prisons,” October 29, 2014, at 

middleeastmonitor.com. 

Oren Yiftachel and As’ad Ghanem, “Towards a Theory of Ethnocratic 

Regimes: Learning from the Judaisation of Israel/Palestine,” in E. Kaufman 

(ed.), Rethinking Ethnicity, Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities, London 

and New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 179-97. 

See Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle from Within, 

London: Zed Books, 2004. 

8 The Oslo Mythologies 

Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 107. 

Walid Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution,” Journal of Palestine 

Studies, 27:1 (1997), pp. 5-21. 

The best account of the developments leading to the Oslo Accord is Hilde 

Henriksen Waage, “Postscript to Oslo: The Mystery of Norway’s Missing 

Files,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 38:1 (2008), pp. 54-65. 

See “1993 Oslo Interim Agreement,” at israelipalestinian.procon.org. 

See lan Black, “How the Oslo Accord Robbed the Palestinians,” Guardian, 

February 4, 2013. 

See “Meeting Minutes: Taba Summit—Plenary Session,” at 

thepalestinepapers.com. 

llan Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951, London and 

New York: I.B. Tauris, 1992, pp. 203-43. 

Robert Bowker, Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity and the Search for 

Peace, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003, p. 157. 

Meron Benvenisti, West Bank Data Project: A Survey of Israel’s Politics, 

Jerusalem: AEI Press, 1984. 

Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New 

York Review of Books, August 9, 2001. 

Daniel Dor, The Suppression of Guilt: The Israeli Media and the 

Reoccupation of the West Bank, London: Pluto Press, 2005. 

Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, Boomerang, Jerusalem: Keter, 2005 

(Hebrew) 

For the full text see “Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report: 

‘Mitchell Report’,” April 30, 2001, at eeas.europa.eu. 

9 The Gaza Mythologies 

ead 

ia al iad 

eS 

10; 

i Be 

if, 

1 

14. 

LS 

LG, 

Le 

16: 

19. 

20. 

ou 

Za, 

oa 

24. 

llan Pappe, “The Loner Desparado: Oppression, Nationalism and Islam in 

Occupied Palestine,” in Marco Demchiles (ed.), A Struggle to Define a Nation 

(forthcoming with Gorgias Press). 

Pappe, The Idea of Israel, pp. 27-47. 

Ibid, pp. 153-78. 

A refreshing view on Hamas can be found in Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil 

Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 2011. 

. Yehuda Lukacs, /srael, Jordan, and the Peace Process, Albany: Syracuse 

University Press, 1999, p. 141. 

Quoted in Andrew Higgins, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” Wal/ 

Street Journal, January 24, 2009. 

Shlomi Eldar, Jo Know the Hamas, Tel Aviv: Keter, 2012 (Hebrew). 

Ishaan Tharoor, “How Israel Helped to Create Hamas,” Washington Post, July 

30, 2014. 

Chabon in an interview with Haaretz, April 25, 2016. 

For a good analysis of how Netanyahu employs the “clash of civilizations” 

by a university student, see Joshua R. Fattal, “Israel vs. Hamas: A Clash of 

Civilizations?,” The World Post, August 22, 2014, at huffingtonpost.com. 

“Hamas Accuses Fatah over Attack,” Al Jazeera, December 15, 2006. 

Ibrahim Razzaqg, “Reporter’s Family was Caught in the Gunfire,” Boston 

Globe, May 17, 2007—one of many eyewitness accounts of those difficult 

days. 

“Palestine Papers: UK’s MI6 ‘tried to weaken Hamas,’” BBC News, January 

25, 2011, at bbc.co.uk. 

lan Black, “Palestine Papers Reveal MI6 Drew up Plan for Crackdown on 

Hamas,” Guardian, January 25, 2011. 

A taste of his views can be found in Yuval Steinitz, “How Palestinian Hate 

Prevents Peace,” New York Times, October 15, 2013. 

Reshet Bet, Israel Broadcast, April 18, 2004. 

Benny Morris, Channel One, April 18, 2004, and see Joel Beinin, “No More 

Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism,” MERIP, 230 

(Spring 2004). 

Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.” 

Ari Shavit, “PM Aide: Gaza Plan Aims to Freeze the Peace Process,” Haaretz, 

October 6, 2004. 

Haaretz, April 17, 2004. 

Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.” 

For an excellent analysis written on the day itself, see Ali Abunimah, “Why 

All the Fuss About the Bush-Sharon Meeting,” Electronic Intifada, April 14, 

2014. 

Quoted in Yediot Ahronoth, April 22, 2014. 

See “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied 

Palestinian Territory,” on the IC) website, icj-cij.org. 

25; 

26. 

Zi, 

28. 

29. 

30. 

a 

Jedi 

oe 5 

34. 

Gir 

At first, in March 2004, Beilin was against the disengagement, but from July 

2004 he openly supported it (Channel One interview, July 4, 2004). 

See the fatalities statistics on B’Iselem’s website, btselem.org. 

Leslie Susser, “The Rise and Fall of the Kadima Party,” /erusalem Post, 

August 8, 2012. 

John Dugard, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of the 

Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, 

UN Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, March 3, 2005. 

See the analysis by Roni Sofer in Ma’ariv, September 27, 2005. 

Anne Penketh, “US and Arab States Clash at the UN Security Council,” 

Independent, March 3, 2008. 

David Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire,” Sadaka, 2nd edition, March 

2010, at web.archive.org. 

“WikiLeaks: Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on the Brink of Collapse,” 

Reuters, January 5, 2011. 

Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire.” 

See the B’Tselem report “Fatalities during Operation Cast Lead,” at 

btselem.org. 

“Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in Less Than Five Years Due to Ongoing 

,. 

‘De-development’,” UN News Centre, September 1, 2015, at un.org. 

10 The Two-States Solution Is the Only Way Forward 

Daniel Clinton, “Jeremy Corbyn Appears to Compare Supporters of Israel 

with ISIS at Release of Anti-Semitism Report,” /erusa/em Post, June 30, 2016. 

On the dictionary see Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, On Palestine, London: 

Penguin, 2016. 

Index 

1967 (Segev), 71, 161n3 

Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen), 116-17, 119 

Abdel-Shafi, Haidar, 98 

Abu Dis, 99, 102 

Acre, 6, 9, 37, 62 

Adams, John, 13 

al-Husayni, Hajj Amin, 47 

al-Husseini, Faysal, 98 

al-Mujama al-Islamiya (Islamic Society), 115-16 

al-Qassam, Izz ad-Din, 46-7, 48 

al-Rantisi, Abul Aziz, 121, 124 

Alexander, Michael Solomon, 16 

Ali, Mohamet (Muhammad), 15 

Aliyahs, First and Second, 18 

Alon, Yigal, 34, 35, 70, 78, 123 

Alterman, Natan, 87 

Altnueland (Herzl), 30 

American Council of Judaism (ACJ), 26 

Americans, see United States 

Amnesty International, 94-5 

Apartheid (South Africa), 42, 146 

Arab Higher Committee, 46, 58, 100 

Arab League, 58, 100 

Arafat, Yasser, 97, 98-9, 106-7, 109, 112, 116-17 

Area A, 125 

Area C, 106, 142 

Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Gilbert), 39 

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 23, 44 

Balfour Declaration, 13, 19-20, 53 

Barak, Ehud, 99, 102, 107 

Bavli, Dan, 79 

Begin, Menachem, 78 

Beilin, Yossi, 102, 129 

Beirut, 9 

Ben-Gurion, David, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43-4, 51-2, 53, 55, 61-2, 69, 70-1, 72-3 

Ben-Gurion airport, 127, 136 

Benvenisiti, Meron, 105 

Berlin to Jerusalem (Scholem), 25 

The Bible and Colonialism (Prior), 35 

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Morris), 53 

Blair, Tony, 120, 123 

Blyth, George Francis Popham, 16 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12 

Boomerang (Shelah and Drucker), 108 

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, 95-6, 129, 144 

Brightman, Thomas, 11 

Britain, 8, 12, 13-14, 18-20, 28, 44-5, 53-4, 58 

B’Tselem, 95, 130-1 

Buber, Martin, 37 

Bundists, 27-8 

Bush, George H. W., 98 

Bush, George W., 109, 122, 127-9 

Camp David Summit (2000), 99, 102, 105, 106-8 

Carmel Mountain, 5, 17, 86 

Carter Peace Center, 134 

Chabon, Michael, 117 

Chateaubriand, Francois-René, 12 

Chomsky, Noam, 79, 130, 166n2 

Christian Zionism, 15, 17, 31, 128 

Church of England, 16, 25 

Clinton, Bill, 97, 99 

Cohen, Amnon, 5 

Cohen, Avner, 115 

Corbyn, Jeremy, 142 

Crusaders, 3, 19, 39 

Damascus, 4, 45, 124 

Dayan, Moshe, 70, 79, 123 

Dinur, Ben-Zion, 39 

Dzikover, Rabbi of, 29 

Eban, Abba, 75, 108, 162n13 

Egypt, 15, 30, 57, 58, 70-3, 75-6, 88, 100, 137 

Eilat, 71, 75 

England, see Britain 

Eretz Israel, 9, 26, 37, 92, 119 

Expulsion of the Palestinians (Masalha), 50 

Fafo, 98 

Fatah movement, 74, 101, 112-13, 119-21 

Filastin (newspaper), 8 

Finkelstein, Israel, 21 

Finkelstein, Norman, 77, 162n13 

Finn, James, 16, 19 

France, 8, 44, 72 

Free Officers, 70 

Gabai, Ronni, 55-6 

Galilee, 5, 90 

Gandhi, Mahatma, 37-8 

Gaza Strip, xii, 20, 29, 35-6, 64, 72, 75-81, 91-3, 105-6, 111-37, 147 

Germany, 17-18, 24-6, 47, 147 

Golan Heights, 71-2, 74, 76 

Great Arab Revolt, 93 

Gulf War (1991), 98 

Gush Emunim, 29, 36, 80, 92, 125 

Gush Qatif block, 124 

Haaretz (newspaper), 54, 124, 126 

Haifa, 17, 62, 86 

Hamas, 46, 111-17, 119-21, 124-26, 134-36 

Hammarskjold, Dag, 73, 75 

Haniyeh, Ismail, 120 

Haram al-Sharif, 94, 108 

Harbingers of Zionism, 24 

Hartley, David, 13 

Hashemite dynasty, 59, 70 

Hebron, 34, 35, 46, 94 

Herzl, Theodor, 18, 24, 26-8, 30, 31 

Hezbollah, 108, 126 

The History of Zionism (Lacquer), 27 

Holocaust, 28, 37, 39, 58, 147 

Hussein bin Talal, King, 57, 76 

The Idea of Israel (Pappe), 114 

Intifada, 66 

First, 111 

Second, 98, 106-10, 112, 114, 117 

The Invention of the Jewish People (Sand), 11, 21 

The Invention of the Land of Israel (Sand), 21 

Iran, 115, 119 

The Iron Wall (Shlaim), 57 

Islamic Jihad, 114, 132 

Islamic State, 146 

Israel Defense Force (IDF), 74, 86, 94, 108, 124, 132-3, 136 

Istanbul, 7, 8, 9 

Jaffa, 16, 37, 62, 118 

Jeffries, J. M. N., 20 

Jenin, 124 

Jerusalem, 5, 9, 15-17, 18, 57, 65, 75-6, 77, 93, 98-9, 141-2 

Greater, 64, 79, 131 

Jewish National Fund (JNF), 34, 46, 66, 90 

Jordan, 59-60, 63, 69-70, 75-8, 97, 100, 132 

River, 69, 72, 74 

Judea, 13, 14, 26 

Kadima, 80, 131 

Kafr Qasim Massacre, 66, 86 

Katznelson, Berl, 50-2 

Khalidi, Rashid, 7-8 

Khazar Empire, x, 20 

King-Crane Commission, 45 

Knesset, 87, 121, 128 

Koestler, Arthur, 20 

Labor Party (Israel), 34, 97, 102, 126, 129 

Lacquer, Walter, 27 

Lausanne Conference (1949), 103 

League of Nations, 45, 59 

Lebanon, 68, 70, 74, 108, 133 

Ligne, Charles-Joseph of 

Likud Party, 34, 80, 97, 102, 124 

Lindsay, John, 12 

The Lords of the Land (Zertal and Eldar), 80 

Lovers of Zion, 24, 30 

Madrid Conference (1991), 98 

MAFDAL (Religious National Party), 36 

Majdal, 118 

Maoz, Moshe, 55 

Mapam, 78, 87 

Masalha, Nur, 50, 62 

Mavi Marmara, 137 

Mediterranean Sea, 69 

Meretz, 126, 129 

MI6, 120 

Middle East Quartet (Madrid Quartet), 123, 125 

Mitchell, Robert, 109 

Morris, Benny, 53, 55, 122 

Muslih, Muhammad, 7 

Muslim Brotherhood, 111 

Nablus, 9, 51 

Nakbah (1948), 47, 65-6, 143 

Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 51, 71-5, 88 

Nazareth, 90 

Netanyahu, Benjamin, 99, 102, 105, 117, 119, 142 

Oldenburg, Henry, 12 

Olmert, Ehud, 80, 125, 131 

Oslo Il (Taba) Agreement, 101 

Oslo Accord, 65, 97-110 

Ottoman Empire, 4-9, 14-15, 27, 44-5 

Palestine 

Mandatory, 17, 33, 39-40, 46-7, 56-60, 62, 73, 93 

Roman, x, 3, 21, 39 

Palestine Communist Party (PCP), 61 

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), xi, 97-9, 112, 115 

Palestine: The Reality (Jeffries), 20 

Palestinian Authority (PA), 105, 112, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124-5, 132 

Palmerston, Lord, 13-15 

Peel Commission, 40, 100 

Plan Dalet (Plan D), 54, 61, 62 

Presidential Guard, 120 

Protestants, xi, 11, 20 

Qiryat Arba, 35 

Rabin, Yitzhak, 36, 66, 74, 97, 102, 115 

Rafah, 120 

Ramallah, 120 

Ramleh, 37, 63 

Reformists, 25-6 

Religious Zionism, 29 

Road Map to peace, 122, 123, 127, 131 

Russia, 19, 27 

Pogroms in, 18, 24 

Sadaka, 135 

Sa’di, Ahmad, 62 

Sand, Shlomo, 11, 21 

Sanjak, 9 

Sarid, Yossi, 128 

Scholch, Alexander, 17 

Scholem, Gershom, 25 

Segev, Tom, 71 

Shalit, Gilad, 133 

Shafir, Gershon, 34, 43 

Shaftesbury, Lord, 13-15 

Sharon, Ariel, 68, 80, 108, 109, 123-9, 131 

Sharett, Moshe, 52, 72 

Shefamr, 6 

Shiloah Institute, 55 

Shlaim, Avi, 57, 72 

Sinai Peninsula, 20, 57, 71, 73, 75, 79, 123 

Six-Day War (1967 war), 64, 68-81, 103 

Soviet Union, 61, 70, 74 

Steinitz, Yuval, 121-2 

Sykes-Picot Agreement, 8 

Syria, 8, 45, 51, 52-3, 71-6, 136 

Tel Aviv, 76, 136 

Temple Mount, see Haram al-Sharif 

Templers (German Temple Pietist movement), 17-18 

The Thirteenth Tribe (Koestler), 20 

Thompson, Thomas, 21 

Tiberias, 6 

The Times (London newspaper), 15 

To Know the Hamas (Eldar), 116 

Tul-Karim, 132 

Turkey, 7 

United Nations, 46, 54, 56, 68, 60, 73, 75, 103-4, 134, 136 

Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), 58, 59, 100 

Security Council, 77, 142 

United States, 7, 13, 19, 25-6, 42, 54, 60, 70, 76, 95, 98, 100, 102, 105-7, 121- 

2, 126-8, 134 

Ussishkin, Manachem, 52, 53 

Verte, Mayer, 19 

Via Maris, 118 

West Bank, vii, xi, 29, 57, 60, 64, 65, 69, 70-1, 75-8, 92, 94-5, 106, 107, 108, 

123-8, 131-2, 141-4 

Whitelam, Keith, 21 

Wolfe, Patrick, 42 

World War I, 7, 28, 59 

World War Il, 47, 53, 95, 148 

World Zionist movement, 31 

Yassin, Sheikh Ahmed, 115-16, 124 

Yiftachel, Oren, 96