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
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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;
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14.
LS
16,
HE SF
ie.
Lu,
20.
21;
22,
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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
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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
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