Forty Years On

International Affairs, 2017

Palestine: Past and Present, 2019

Palestine has had a long and tumultuous history. Recent years have seen a number of anniversaries marking inauspicious events that would have profound impacts on the future of the land long-known as Palestine. Central among these included the centenary of the First World War, which raged from 1914-1918. While most accounts of the Great War tend to focus on Europe, the war had profoundly devasting effects in the Middle East and set in chain a number of processes that continue to shape the region until the present day – and, perhaps, none more so than in the case of Palestine. Throughout the course of the war, a number of momentous events transpired which laid the genesis for the ongoing conflict in Palestine, including, but not limited to, the 1915-16 McMahon-Husayn Correspondence, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and the November 1917 capture of Jerusalem by British forces followed by the subsequent conquest of the rest of Palestine. After the war, the newly-formed League of Nations bequeathed Britain the Mandate of Palestine – a thinly-veiled façade for European colonialism in the Middle East – which endured until 1947-48. During most of the inter-war period, Zionist immigration exponentially increased under British patronage allowing the Zionist movement a firm foothold in the Holy Land. 15 May 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of al-Nakba (The Catastrophe), the Palestinian day of mourning commemorating the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians from their traditional homeland, a product of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Israelis celebrate the same events as Independence Day, the culmination of the unlikely success of the Zionist movement - a settler colonial movement aimed at creating an independent state for Jews in the lands of British Mandate Palestine in the face of widespread anti-Semitism in Europe. The diametrically opposed interpretations of 1947-48 lay at the heart of the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. The introduction examines the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict until 1967 in order to contextualises the chapters that follows.

American Journal of International Law, 1993

In 1897 Zionism emerged as a European-wide political move ment with the first World Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzer land, where Theodor Herzl, an editor of the influential Viennese paper, Neue Freie Presse, had emerged as a leader. Herzl's 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) had called for a Jewish state in Palestine, and its publication in Vienna made a great impact. Not surprisingly, Zionism had its strongest following in Russia, but even there it was only one of several nationalist currents in Jewry.2 Despite the difficult circumstances of life, most Jews remained in Eastern Europe and of those leaving most still preferred the United States. 3 In Palestine, an Arab-populated country under the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, Zionist immigrants set up agricultural settlements on pur chased land. "From the very beginning," wrote Ariel Hecht, an Israeli analyst of land tenure in Palestine, "it was clear to the leaders of the Zionist movement that the acquisition of land was a sine qua non towards the realisation of their dream."4 Land was not acquired in a random fashion. The effort, wrote Israeli General Yigal Allon, was "to establish a chain of villages on one continuous area of Jewish land.'0 The Arabs, soon realizing that the immigrant's aim was to establish a Jewish state, began to oppose Zionism.6 As early as 1891 Zionist leader, Ahad Ha'am, wrote that the Arabs "understand very well what we are doing and what we are aiming at."7 In 1 90 1 the World Zionist Organization formed a company, the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund), to buy land for Jewish settlers.8 According to its charter, the Fund would buy land in "Pal estine, Syria, and other parts of Turkey in Asia and the Peninsula of Sinai."9 The aim of the Fund was "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people."10 Fund director, Abra ham Granovsky, called "land redemption" the "most vital operation in establishing Jewish Palestine."11 The Fund's land could not be sold to anyone and could be leased only to a Jew, an "unincorporated body of Jews," or a Jewish company that promoted Jewish settlement. A lessee was forbidden to sublease.12 Herzl considered land acquisition under a tenure system that kept it in Jewish hands as the key to establishing Zionism in Palestine. "Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us," he wrote, "selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are The British Connection 5 not going to sell them anything back."13 The Fund thus kept land as a kind of trustee for a future state.14 The Fund purchased large tracts owned by absentee landowners. Most of this land was tilled by farmers whose families had held it for generations with possessory rights recognized by customary law. Re grettably for many of these families, in the late nineteenth century Turkey had instituted a land registration system that led to wealthy absentees gaining legal title to land, often by questionable means. After this occurred, the family farmers continued in possessionas tenantsand considered themselves to retain their customary right to the land, although that was no longer legally the case.15 At the turn of the century the better farmland in Palestine was being cultivated. In 1882 a British traveler, Laurence Oliphant, reported that the Plain of Esdraelon in northern Palestine, an area in which the Fund purchased land, was "a huge green lake of waving wheat."16 This meant that the Fund could not acquire land without displacing Arab farmers. A delegate to a 1905 Zionist congress, Yitzhak Epstein, warned: "Can it be that the dispossessed will keep silent and calmly accept what is being done to them? Will they not ultimately arise to regain, with physical force, that which they were deprived of through the power of gold? Will they not seek justice from the strangers that placed themselves over their land?"17 An element of the Zionist concept of "land redemption" was that the land should be worked by Jews. This meant that Arabs should not be hired as farm laborers. While this policy was not uniformly implemented, it gained adherence. In 191 3 Ha'am objected to it. "I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people ... if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve power?"18 But Herzl viewed the taking of land and expulsion of Arabs as complementary aspects of Zionism. It would be necessary, he thought, to get the Arabs out of Palestine. "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.. .. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."19 Some Zion ist leaders advocated moving Palestine Arabs to neighboring coun Israel as a Fact 89 draw its support for Israel's membership in the United Nations and warned against any further idf offensives.20 Under that pressure Ben-Gurion withdrew the idf from Egyptian territory and canceled plans to take Gaza and the Sinai.21 At the same time Ben-Gurion withdrew the idf from southern Lebanon, where it had penetrated. The Litani River, an important water source, flowed through southern Lebanon. General Yigal Allon criticized Ben-Gurion's decision to withdraw, complaining that the Index Aaland Islands, Abdiilhamid II (sultan of the Ottoman Empire), 7 Abdullah (emir of Transjordan, King of

World war 3, 2023

, 2011. xii + 251 pages. Notes to p. 307. Bibliography to p. 335. Index to p. 343. n.p.

Originally, the “Israeli experience” was born from the womb of the Holy Land, even when the “children of Israel” lived in diaspora; the “Land” is everything for all Israelis, as it represents the homeland, religion and history, the Promise of the Lord, the people’s dream, Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall, and other holy sites. Therefore, to the Jews, there is nothing comparable to the “Holy Land or Eretz Ysrael”. Similarly, as history supports, several peoples have populated the land of Palestine, not just Arabs and Jews. Moreover, they used to live together, intermix, intermarry, and merge, and so on. Geo-politically the land of “Palestine/Eretz Israel” was known as “Greater Syria” before being divided by the then “Great Powers” into four countries, two small cantons, and five nationalities. On today’s world map, these are known as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. However, this study aims to argue the development of this land from a historical and geopolitical point of view up until 1947; the names and borders, the holiness of the land to the Palestinians and Israelis, the land without a state that was waiting for the Lord’s promise for the people without a homeland. Moreover, this study concludes that on the modern map, one would have great difficulty finding a country labeled “Palestine.” It is not until 1922 that the name Palestine emerged with any “official” status, so what is all this talk about Palestine? Furthermore, whereas the Israelis could easily prove their historical and religious right to the holy or sacred land, it would be very hard for the Palestinians to do so. Finally, there are reasonable doubts about certain facts, and, so far, nobody has been able to provide a logical answer to such questions as, who is fighting who exactly? These facts are discussed from a historical and geopolitical perspective in the “Israeli Experience”.

The Palestinian national movement reached a dead end and came close to disintegration at the beginning of the present century. This critical analysis of internal Palestinian politics in the West Bank traces the re-emergence of the Palestinian Authority's established elite in the aftermath of the failed unity government and examines the main security and economic agendas pursued by them during that period. Based on extensive field research interviews and participant observation undertaken across several sites in Nablus and the surrounding area, it provides a bottom-up interpretation of the Palestinian Authority's agenda and challenges the popular interpretation that its governance represents the only realistic path to Palestinian independence. As the first major account of the Palestinian Authority's political agenda since the collapse of the unity government this book offers a unique explanation for the failure to bring a Palestinian state into being and challenges assumptions within the existing literature by addressing the apparent incoherence between mainstream debates on Palestine and the reality of conditions there. This book is a key addition to students and scholars interested in Politics, Middle-Eastern Studies, and International Relations.

T^estinians have done to Zionists. The almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index of these completely asymmetrical records of destruction. What is much worse, in. my opinion, is the hypocrisy of Western (and certainly liberal Zionist) journalism and intellectual discourse, which have barely had anything to say about Zionist terror. ' Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric of outrage used in reporting "Arab" terror against "Israeli civilians" or "towns" and "villages" or "schoolchildren," and the rhetoric of neutrality employed to describe "Israeli" attacks against "Palestinian positions," by which no one could know that Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named? mitigate the tragedies of waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality of a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question of Palestine. One of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies, Palestinians, with lives being led, small histories endured, aspirations felt, has only recently been conceded an existence. Yet all of a sudden, the Palestinian question now seeks an answer: World opinion has demanded that this hitherto xiv INTRODUCTION slighted crux of the Near East impasse be given its due. But, alas, the possibility of an adequate debate now, much less a cogent solution, is dim. The terms of debate are impoverished, for (as I said above) Palestinians hajv^_be£aJuia\vn_onlj^jisr efugees, or as extremists, or as terrorists. A sizeable corps of Middle East "experts'* has tended to rhbnopolize discussion, principally by using social science jargon and ideological chiches masked as knowledge. Most of all, I think, there is the entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient. This attitude, from which in its t urn Zionism drew for MTTT'iew of the Palestinians, dehumanized lis^re duced us to thê b'arely tolerated status of a nuisance. It would perhaps be too sweeping a statement to say that most academic political science studies of the Middle East and of the Palestinians continue this tradition. But it is true, I think, that they tend to. Insofar as most of them derive from and in most important ways unquestionably accept the framework that has legitimized Zionism as against Palestinian rights, they have very little to contribute to an understanding of the real situation in the Middle East. For it is a fact that almost every serious study of the modern Middle East produced in this country since World War II cannot prepare anyone for what has been taking place in the region: This is as patently true of the recent events in Iran as it is of the Lebanese civil war, of the Palestinian resistance, of the Arab performance during the 1973 war. I certainly do not intend this book as a polemic against what has rightly been called the ideological bent of social science work that pretends to scientific objectivity, particularly since the advent of the Cold War. But I do intend consciously to avoid its "value-free" pitfalls. Those include accounts of political reality that focus on superpower rivalry, that claim as desirable anything associated with the West and its modernizing mission in the Third World, that ignore popular movements while praising and valorizing a battery of undistinguished and oppressive client regimes, that dismiss as ahistorical anything that cannot be easily made to fit a particular telos or a particular methodology whose goals are I mention what is perhaps an obvious thing in order to underline the existential bedrock on which, I think, our experience as a people depends. We were on the land called Palestine; were our dispossession and our effacement, by indicating the peculiar loneliness of my undertaking in this book. I am grateful to Debbie Rogers, Asma Khauwly, and Paul Lipari for their help in preparing the manuscript. Over the years I have benefited from many discussions with fellow Palestinians who, like myself, have struggled to understand our situation as a people. Good friends in this country, in Israel, CHAPTER NOTES 253 29. The most cogent single analysis of U.S. policy during this period is to be found in Eqbal Ahmad, "What Washington Wants," in Middle East Crucible: Studies on the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973, ed. Naseer H. Aruri (Wilmette, III.: Medina Press, 1975), pp. 227-64. See also my study for the preceding period, "The United States and the Conflict of Powers in the

2019

See ResearchGate if this doesn't upload here. The volume traces the evolution of Palestine-Israel conflict through several historically-informed and roughly chronological, yet overlapping, investigations examining, inter alia: the effects of the First World War and the efforts of the Zionist movement culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from the territories therein in 1947-48; missed opportunities for peace from 1967 to 1990 by reference to official policy documents; the revitalisation of Palestinian nationalism through the PLO after the 1967 war and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994; the competing rise and evolution of Islamic nationalism in Palestine, predominantly embodied by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas; attempts at Palestinian institution-building contextualised by the profound influence of international donors and Israel; and the ongoing evolution of the relationship between Hamas and Israel. The final chapter canvases some of the rapidly evolving issues that have arisen over the last few years, including upheavals caused by the election of the Trump administration in the United States, and the periodic and ongoing conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and the general public wishing to understand the historical and present drivers of the conflict in the Holy Land.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016

Official Palestinian institutions and leaders have lost their moral legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian people who view them as ineffective or even co-opted by Israel. A new generation of grassroots activists is shifting the focus from the goal of Palestinian statehood to the pursuit of new tactics to resist the Israeli occupation. To improve the lives of Palestinians, this new moral vanguard will need to transform and revive existing Palestinian institutions or build new ones.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2003