Read for Refaat
length: 7 days
Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world are partaking in "Read for Refaat," a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about "Read for Refaat" on Publishers for Palestine's website.
Between January 15 and 21, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts on the "On Palestine" resources page on my website, which are available to download freely. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].
January 15, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussion of death
"If I Must Die" by Refaat Alareer, as translated into Spanish by D. P. Snyder
If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer as translated into Spanish by DP Snyder
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Si he de morir
Si he de morir,
tú debes vivir
para contar mi historia
para vender mis cosas
para comprar un trozo de tela
y unos cordeles,
(hazla blanca
con una larga cola)
para que un niño
en alguna parte de Gaza
al mirar al cielo
mientras espera a su padre
que partió en una llamarada—
y no se despidió de nadie
ni siquiera de su propia carne,
ni siquiera de sí mismo—
vea la cometa, la cometa
que me hiciste, volando
en lo alto
y piense
por un instante
que ahí está un ángel
devolviéndole el amor.
Si he de morir
deja que inspire esperanza,
deja que sea una historia.
content/trigger warnings: discussions of slavery, settler colonialism, genocide, death, murder, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and the use of an anti-Indigenous slur
Selection from "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" by Patrick Wolfe
Selection from the Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolfe
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As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black.
For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness.
Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are. So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning.
As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.
content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide
Selection from the Introduction of Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini
Selection from the Introduction of Settler Colonialism A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini
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“Colony” as a term can have two main different connotations. A colony is both a political body that is dominated by an exogenous agency, and an exogenous entity that reproduces itself in a given environment (in both cases, even if they refer to very different situations, “colony” implies the localised ascendancy of an external element—this is what brings the two meanings together). Settler colonialism as a concept encompasses this fundamental ambiguity. As its compounded designation suggests, it is inherently characterised by both traits. Since both the permanent movement and reproduction of communities and the dominance of an exogenous agency over an indigenous one are necessarily involved, settler colonial phenomena are intimately related to both colonialism and migration. And yet, not all migrations are settler migrations and not all colonialisms are settler colonial: this book argues that settler colonialism should be seen as structurally distinct from both.
Both migrants and settlers move across space and often end up permanently residing in a new locale. Settlers, however, are unique migrants, and, as Mahmood Mamdani has perceptively summarised, settlers “are made by conquest, not just by immigration”. Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary, migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted). Migrants can be individually co-opted within settler colonial political regimes, and indeed they often are. They do not, however, enjoy inherent rights and are characterised by a defining lack of sovereign entitlement. It is important that these categories are differentiated analytically: a very different sovereign charge is involved in their respective displacements; not only do settlers and migrants move in inherently different ways, they also move towards very different places. As New Zealand historian James Belich has noted, an “emigrant joined someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own”. Migrants, by definition, move to another country and lead diasporic lives, settlers, on the contrary, move (indeed, as I suggest below, “return”) to their country. A diaspora is not an ingathering.
Indeed, an analytical distinction could also be made between settler colonial and other resettlements. Imperial, national, and colonising (including internally colonising) states frequently promote “settlement” with the aim of permanently securing their hold on specific locales. On the contrary, the political traditions this book focuses on concentrate on autonomous collectives that claim both a special sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity. Settlers, unlike other migrants, “remove” to establish a better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organisation. Of course, even if I propose to see them as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism intertwine, interact, and overlap.
Ultimately, whereas migration operates in accordance with a register of difference, settler migration operates in accordance with a register of sameness, and one result of this dissimilarity is that policy in a settler colonial setting is crucially dedicated to enable settlers while neutralising migrants (real life, however, defies these attempts, with settlers recurrently failing to establish the regenerated communities they are supposed to create, and migrants radically transforming the body politic despite sustained efforts to contain and manage their difference). In this context, refugees—the most unwilling of migrants—can thus be seen as occupying the opposite end of a spectrum of possibilities ranging between a move that can be construed as entirely volitional—the settlers’—and a displacement that is premised on an absolute lack of choice (on a settler need to produce refugees as a way to assert their self-identity).
January 16, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, Zionism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide
Selection from "Chapter 7 - Purchase by Other Means - Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine" from Traces of History - Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe
Selection from Chapter 7 Purchase by Other Means Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine excerpted from Traces of History Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe
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To rehearse a dialectical truism, theory is a form of practice. In their local interplay, as in that between metropole and colony, theory and practice condition one another. Each case is different. Thus it is not enough simply to classify Israel as settler-colonial on the basis of its manifest instantiation of the logic of elimination. We also need to trace the distinctive ways in which this logic acquired life and form through practical hostilities conducted between invaders and Natives on the colonial ground in Palestine. Settler colonialism’s essential feature, its sustained institutional tendency to supplant the Indigenous population, reconciles a range of historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct. It is important to stress this multiplicity because the techniques of dispossession whereby settlers supplanted the Natives of Palestine differ significantly from the kindred sets of practices whereby settlers dispossessed the Natives of Australia and of North America. Nonetheless, the eliminatory outcome has remained constant, so the situation provides an opportunity to explore settler colonialism’s strategic versatility. To explain a settler-colonial invasion, it can never be enough simply to invoke the global potency of capital, mighty though that is. Rather, in each case, settler ascendancy rests on a particular contextual mobilisation of Europe’s preaccumulated colonial resources. We need to go behind the frontier to the historical preconditions that equipped the invaders for settlement before they set foot in Native country.
Two major differences have been held out as distinguishing the Zionist acquisition of Palestine from the settler colonisations of Australia and of the USA. In the first instance, Zionism originated as an international movement that consciously avoided confinement to a single metropolis in favour of a supportive transnational umbrella that Rodinson termed the ‘collective mother country’. Second, prior to the end of 1947, Zionism was conspicuous for its policy of purchasing Native land in at least notional conformity with the domestic laws of the current local power. In these two important respects, Zionist policy in Palestine differed strikingly from settler policies in Australia or the United States. On examination, however, Zionist policy in Palestine constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, earlier settler-colonial models.
In stark contrast to the Australian or US cases, for instance, Zionism rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation. In this and other ways that will be discussed below, Zionism constitutes a more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination than we encounter in the Australian and US examples. This conclusion only seems surprising if one concentrates on features that are extraneous to the Indigenous experience, as Zionist apologists understandably do. By way of correction, we will examine these two features that have frequently been cited as distinguishing Zionism from settler colonialism (the lack of a unitary metropole and the policy of purchase) not in isolation but in the wider historical context within which they were strategically conjoined. As will emerge, the two constitute integrated aspects of a uniquely developed programme of Indigenous dispossession.
The basic link between Zionism’s diffuse metropole and Jewish land purchases in Palestine consists in the fact that the former financed the latter. As we saw earlier, the frontier was led from behind, typically by speculators—speculators, moreover, who tended not to be limited by nationality. So far as the creation of transnational networks for exporting metropolitan capital in order to place and maintain settlers in Palestine is concerned, therefore, there is nothing exceptional about Zionism. Rather, Zionism’s peculiarity concerns the distinctive quality of the capital involved. This, in turn, reflects the fact that, in the case of Palestine, the Natives were already incorporated into—and to that extent, protected by—extensive (albeit moribund) colonial empires, first Ottoman then British, a factor that encouraged settler conformity to domestic property law.
In this context, the resources that Zionism was able to coordinate distinguished the capital transmitted to Palestine from the general run of speculative investment whereby capital was exported to other European colonies. With the possible (and early) exception of Baron Rothschild, the capital that Zionists garnered for investment in Palestine, as Barbara Smith has pointed out, was not conditional on the return of a financial profit.
In this crucial regard, donors who funded the world Zionist project differed from the speculators who had financed territorial expansion in Australia and North America. Unencumbered by the requirement to return a profit, subsidised Zionist settlers enjoyed the easiest of imported advantages in relation to the local population, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the finite Native stock.
For a sustained colonising programme that was to achieve such enormous successes, the Zionist plan for Palestine displays a consistent set of features whose effectiveness has not been hampered by its remarkable simplicity. Ostensibly operating within established imperial frameworks, but always with an eye to eventually supplanting them, Zionists have secured international support, both from regnant imperial powers and from private sources, for two overriding purposes: to convert an ever-expanding contiguous wedge of Palestine from Native ownership into an irreversibly Jewish endowment, and to procure the import from overseas of funding and Jewish personnel at a level sufficient to maintain the continued expansion of this ethnocratically consolidated zone by whatever means should prove available and viable. This strikingly simple plan has been pursued with a sleepless organisational tenacity that remains apparent in Israel’s ongoing disinclination to specify its borders.
January 17, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, forced displacement/expulsion, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism
Selection from "Chapter 1: Zionist Transfer Ideas and Proposals, 1882-1938" of Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 by Nur Masalha
The recording of this selection has been split into two parts. Part one follows below; part two continues below the transcript of part one.
Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 1
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Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s "civilizational barrenness" or "emptiness" against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for the newcomers. The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat. An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab probiem”—the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, "Hebrew Land" and "Hebrew Labor," and the removal of the native population. Thus, contemplating the transition from a "society of Jews" to statehood, he wrote on 12 June 1895:
"When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. 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. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us something far more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back."
Israel Zangwill was one of the strongest proponents of transferring the native population out of Palestine. In the same April 1905 talk in Manchester in which he outlined the demographic situation, he went on to draw an obvious conclusion. Given that Palestine was "already twice as thickly populated as the United states," and given that "not 25 percent of them [are] Jews,"
"[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us."
Zangwill held firm to this idea in the years that followed, couching his arguments for transfer in pragmatic and geopolitical terms. In a conversation during the summer of 1916 with Vladimir Jabotinsky (who later founded Revisionist Zionism, the forerunner of the present-day Likud), Zangwill argued that the removal of Arabs from Palestine to make room for the settlement of Europe's Jewish masses was a precondition for the fulfillment of Zionism. When Jabotinsky pointed out that the Arabs would never evacuate the land of their birth voluntarily, Zangwill replied that the Zionist enterprise should be part of a new world order in which there could be no place for sentimental argument.
While Zangwill was particularly frank in his calls for the removal of the Arab population, others expressed the same ideas in euphemistic, discreetly formulated terms, stressing the peaceful nature of the operation that would be initiated by Zionist land acquisition and economic incentives.
For example, Arthur Ruppin, a socialist whose pioneering role in promoting Jewish settlement and land acquisition makes him a pivotal figure in Zionism, proposed in a May 1911 memorandum to the Zionist Executive, the executive organ of the Zionist Organization, "a limited population transfer" of the Arab peasants from Palestine to the northern Syrian districts of Aleppo and Homs. Some years later, in 1930, after Ruppin had resigned from Brit Shalom in the wake of the intercommunal disturbances of 1929, he wrote that the dispossession and displacement of Arab farmers was inevitable because
"land is the most vital condition for our settlement in Palestine. But since there is hardly any land which is worth cultivating that is not already being cultivated, it is found that wherever we purchase land and settle it, by necessity its present cultivators are turned away... in the future it will be much more difficult to purchase land, as sparsely populated land hardly exists. What remains is densely [Arab] populated land."
Another socialist Zionist who supported the transfer idea was Nahman Syrkin, the ideological founder of Socialist Zionism and considered an important influence in the whole range of Yishuv Labor parties since the second decade of the twentieth century.
Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 2
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Syrkin’s proposal was included in an 1898 pamphlet entitled "The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State," in which he called for the liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule through cooperation with other rebelling nationalities of the Ottoman Empire and for the subsequent evacuation of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. "Palestine," he wrote, "thinly populated, in which the Jews constitute today 10 percent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews."
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 assuring Britain’s support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine dramatically improved Jewish prospects in Palestine, especially since by then it was virtually certain—given Britain's imminent military conquest of Palestine and the arrangements that already had been made to divide the Ottoman Empire among the Great Powers—that Palestine would become a British protectorate. Thus, whereas the transfer proposals up until then remained largely on the level of talk or wish, with the opportunities offered by the Balfour Declaration they began to take on a more pragmatic, less visionary turn.
This change became clear at the Paris Peace Conference, which opened in January 1919 to dispose of the territories captured from the defeated Hapsburgs and Ottomans during the war. Chaim Weizmann, leading the Zionist Commission that was to put forward Zionist claims, called for the imposition of a British Mandate over a Palestine extending north to the Litani River in what is now Lebanon and east to the Hijaz railway line, which is well east of the Jordan River. It was at that conference, too, that Weizmann called for a Palestine "as Jewish as England is English."
While the transfer or removal of the native population is implicit in such a vision, it remained unspoken in official deliberations at the conference. But another member of the Zionist Commission, Aaron Aaronsohn, did mention it in the corridors of the conference. Aaronsohn, an agronomist, was a member of the Zionist Executive and a director of the Palestine Land Development Company (in Hebrew, Hevrat Hachsharat Hayishuv). While working for British intelligence during the war, he had written in the secret intelligence weekly Arab Bulletin of the need to "remove forcibly" Arab tenant farmers from the lands to be purchased from Arab absentee landlords for Zionist colonization. Aaronsohn's friend, William K. Bullitt, a member of the U.S. mission to the Paris Peace Conference, later recalled:
"Many times during the Peace Conference in Paris I joined him [i.e., Aaronsohn] and Dr. Weizmann at a time while both were considering and assessing policies and plans. Aaronsohn’s proposal was the following: while Palestine must be made a Jewish state, the vast valley of Iraq, which is irrigated by the Euphrates and Tigris, should be restored, through the use of planned irrigation, to be the paradise of the world... and furthermore the Arabs of Palestine should be offered lands there... to which as many Arabs as possible should be persuaded to emigrate."
The euphoria caused by the issuance of the Balfour Declaration also emboldened certain Zionists to speak more forthrightly about transfer. Israel Zangwill, for example, began to campaign for it openly. In late 1918, he published an article in the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Zionist weekly, in which he stated that the emigration of the Palestinians to Arab countries would lessen their fears of displacement in Palestine. Writing in the League of Nations Journal in February 1919, he again insisted that the Palestinians "should be gradually transplanted" in Arab countries. Zangwill’s more public stance can be seen in the publication of his book, The Voice of Jerusalem, in 1920. There, he advocated an "Arab exodus" that would be based on "race redistribution" or a "trek like that of the Boers from Cape Colony," which he advocated as "literally the only 'way out' of the difficulty of creating a Jewish State in Palestine."
Exemplifying once again the recurrent theme in cer tain Zionist writings of Palestinian cultural "backwardness" as a justification for the population's removal, he continued:
"We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction... And therefore we must gently persuade them to 'trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles... There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometres. 'To fold their tents' and 'silently steal away' is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now."
But Zangwill’s public campaign was not without some mishaps. His remarks at a public meeting in 1919 about the Arabs of Palestine—"many are semi-nomad, they have given nothing to Palestine and are not entitled to the rules of democracy"—apparently angered Emir Faisal, who was visiting England at the time. Faisal, the military commander of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I and at the time the focus of Britain’s plans in the Arab world, referred to Zangwill's speech in a Jewish Chronicle interview on 3 October 1919, emphasizing that Palestine had a deeply-rooted Arab population and could not be transformed into a Jewish state. Zangwill’s remarks apparently embarrassed and angered Chaim Weizmann, who was involved at the time in sensitive negotiations aimed at a Zionist-Arab deal with the Sharifian Emir.
January 18, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
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The chronology of key events between February 1947 and May 1948 is worth recapping at this point. Hence, I will present an initial overview of the period I wish to focus on in detail in this chapter. First, in February 1947, the decision was made by the British Cabinet to pull out of Mandatory Palestine and leave it to the UN to solve the question of its future. The UN took nine months to deliberate the issue, and then adopted the idea of partitioning the country. This was accepted by the Zionist leadership who, after all, championed partition, but was rejected by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership, who instead suggested keeping Palestine a unitary state and who wanted to solve the situation through a much longer process of negotiation. The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centres that had been vandalised in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution during the first few days after its adoption. Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).
On 9 January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated Jewish settlements. Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations. Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. On 10 March 1948, Plan Dalet was adopted. The first targets were the urban centres of Palestine, which had all been occupied by the end of April. About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end.
The British left on 15 May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, officially recognised by the two superpowers of the day, the USA and the USSR. That same day, regular Arab forces entered Palestine.
By February 1948, the American administration had already concluded that the UN Partition Resolution, far from being a peace plan, was proving a recipe for continued bloodshed and hostility. Therefore, it twice offered alternative schemes to halt the escalation of the conflict: a trusteeship plan for five years, in February 1948, and a three-month cease-fire, on 12 May. The Zionist leadership rejected both peace proposals out of hand.
The official Zionist strategy was fed throughout this period by two impulses. The first consisted of ad-hoc reactions to two startling developments on the ground. One was the fragmentation, if not total disintegration, of the Palestinian political and military power systems, and the other the growing disarray and confusion within the Arab world in the face of the aggressive Jewish initiatives and the simultaneous international endorsement of the Zionist project and the future Jewish state.
The second impulse to propel Zionist strategic thinking was the drive to exploit to the full the unique historical opportunity they saw opening up to make their dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. As we saw in the previous chapters, this vision of a purely Jewish nation-state had been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century. By the mid 1930s, a handful of Zionist leaders recognised the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabisation of Palestine, i.e., making Palestine free of Arabs. By the end of November 1947, most of those in the inner circle of the leadership appeared to have grasped this nexus as well, and under Ben-Gurion’s guidance they now turned all their attention to the question of how to make the most of the opportunity that this connection appeared to have given them.
Before 1947, there had been other, more urgent, agendas: the primary mission had been to build a political, economic and cultural Zionist enclave within the country, and to ensure Jewish immigration to the area. As mentioned previously, ideas of how best to deal with the local Palestinian population had remained vague. But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurion’s keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.
Prior to March 1948, the activities the Zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile Palestinian or Arab actions. However, after March this was no longer the case: the Zionist leadership openly declared—two months before the end of the Mandate—it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force: Plan Dalet.
January 19, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Chapter 1 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh
Chapter 1 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 1
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Chapter 1 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 2
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Chapter 1 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 3
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The frenzied "Scramble for Africa" of the 1880's stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.
Under the influence of the credo of Nationalism then sweeping across Europe, some Jews had come to believe that the religious and alleged racial bonds among Jews constituted a Jewish "nationality" and endowed the so-called "Jewish nation" with normal national rights—including the right to separate existence in a territory of its own, and the right to create a Jewish state. If other European nations had successfully extended themselves into Asia and Africa, and had annexed to their imperial domains vast portions of those two continents, the "Jewish nation"—it was argued—was entitled and able to do the same thing for itself. By imitating the colonial ventures of the "Gentile nations" among whom Jews lived, the "Jewish nation" could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own state—not, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire "Jewish nation" would sooner or later converge from all over the world. "Jewish nationalism" would thus fulfill itself through the process of colonization, which other European nations had utilized for empire-building. For Zionism, then, colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the by-product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.
The improvised process of Jewish colonization in Palestine which ensued was hardly a spectacular success in spite of lavish financial subsidies from European Jewish financiers. By and large, Jews were more attracted by the new opportunities for migration to the United States or Argentina, than by the call for racial self-segregation as a prelude to state-building in Palestine. The objective of escape from anti-Jewish practices prevailing in some European societies could be attained just as well by emigration to America; the objective of nation-building—which alone could make the alternative solution of large-scale colonization in Palestine more attractive—was still far from widespread among European Jews in the late nineteenth century.
The failure of the first sporadic effort to implant a Zionist settler-community in Palestine during the first fifteen years of Zionist colonization (1882-1897) prompted serious reappraisal and radical revision of strategy. This was accomplished by the First Zionist Congress, held at Basle in August 1897 under the leadership of Theodor Herzl.
Haphazard colonization of Palestine, supported by wealthy Jewish financiers as a mixed philanthropic-colonial venture, was from then on to be eschewed. It was to be supplanted by a purely nationalistic program of organized colonization, with clear political goals and mass support. Hence the over-all objective of Zionism formulated by the Basle Congress: "The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." It is worth noting that, from the Basle Program of 1897 until the Biltmore Program of 1942, Zionists preferred the euphemism "home" to the clear term "state" which would have been certain to arouse opposition in many quarters. But in spite of public assurances to the contrary, Zionists were aiming from the outset at the creation of a settler-state in Palestine. At the conclusion of the Basle Congress, Herzl wrote in his diary: "If I were to sum up the Basle Congress in one word—which I shall not do openly—it would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this to-day, I would be met by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, every one will see it."
In addition to defining the ultimate objective of Zionism, the Basle Congress made a diagnosis of the special character and circumstances of Zionist colonization in Palestine, and formulated a practical program suited to those special conditions. Three essential features in particular differentiated Zionist colonization in Palestine from European colonization elsewhere in Asia and Africa, and called for Zionist innovations:
(1) Other European settlers who had gone (or were then going) to other parts of Africa and Asia had been animated either by economic or by politico-imperialist motives: they had gone either in order to accumulate fortunes by means of privileged and protected exploitation of immense natural resources, or in order to prepare the ground for (or else aid and abet) the annexation of those coveted territories by imperial European governments. The Zionist colonists, on the other hand, were animated by neither impulse. They were driven to the colonization of Palestine by the desire to attain nationhood for themselves, and to establish a Jewish state which would be independent of any existing government and subordinate to none, and which would in due course attract to its territories the Jews of the world.
(2) Other European settlers could coexist with the indigenous populations—whom they would exploit and dominate, but whose services they would nevertheless require, and whose continued existence in the coveted territory they would therefore tolerate. But the Zionist settlers could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants of Palestine. For Palestine was fully populated by Arabs, whose national consciousness had already been awakened, and who had already begun to nurse aspirations of independence and national fulfillment. Zionist colonization could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland; nor could the Zionist political aspirations of racial self-segregation and statehood be accomplished while the nationally-conscious Arab people of Palestine continued to exist in that country. Unlike European colonization elsewhere, therefore, Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the "native population" in the coveted country.
(3) Other European settlers could, without much difficulty, overcome the obstacles obstructing their settlement in their chosen target-territories: they could count on receiving adequate protection from their imperial sponsors. But the prospective Zionist colonizers of Palestine could count on no such facilities. For, in addition to the Arab people of Palestine, certain to resist any large-scale influx of settlers loudly proclaiming their objective of dispossessing the "natives," the Zionists were likely to encounter also the resistance of the Ottoman authorities, who could not view with favor the establishment, on an important segment of their Empire, of an alien community harboring political designs of independent statehood.
It was in order to counteract these peculiar factors of the situation that the Zionist Movement, while defining its ultimate objective at the First Zionist Congress, proceeded to formulate an appropriate practical program as well. This program called for action along three lines: organization, colonization, and negotiation.
(1) The organizational efforts were given supreme priority; for, lacking a state-structure in a homebase of its own to mastermind and supervise the process of overseas colonization, the Zionist Movement required a quasi-state apparatus to perform those functions. The World Zionist Organization—with its Federations of local societies, its Congress, its General Council, and its Central Executive—was established at Basle in order to play that role.
(2) The instruments of systematic colonization were also promptly readied. The "Jewish Colonial Trust" (1898), the "Colonization Commission" (1898), the "Jewish National Fund" (1901), the "Palestine Office" (1908), and the "Palestine Land Development Company" (1908), were among the first institutions established by the Zionist Organization. Their joint purpose was to plan, finance, and supervise the process of colonization, and to ensure that it would not meet the same fate which the earlier experiment of haphazard colonization had met.
(3) While the instruments of colonization were being laboriously created, diplomatic efforts were also being exerted to produce political conditions that would permit, facilitate, and protect large-scale colonization.
At the beginning, these efforts were focused mainly on the Ottoman Empire, then in control of the political fortunes of Palestine. Direct approaches to the Ottoman authorities were made; lucrative promises of financial grants and loans were dangled before the eyes of the Sultan and European Powers were urged to intercede at the Porte on behalf of the Zionist Organization, in order persuade the Sultan to grant the Organization a Charter for an autonomous Zionist settlement in Palestine. Other efforts were exerted to induce the German Emperor to endorse the creation of a Chartered Land Development Company, which would be operated by Zionists in Palestine under German protection. Still other attempts were made to obtain permission from the British Government to establish an autonomous Zionist settlement in the Sinai Peninsula, as a stepping-stone towards colonization in Palestine. But none of these efforts bore fruit.
By the end of the first decade following the inauguration of the new Zionist Movement in 1897, Zionism had made little progress towards putting its elaborate colonization apparatus to work, and had scored even less success in its political efforts to obtain governmental permission and facilities for colonization in Palestine.
Its hopes for de jure colonization shattered, Zionism shifted its strategy once more, and turned to de facto colonization—hoping to gain thereby some political leverage which would serve it in good stead when the time came for renewal of its attempts to secure political recognition. In 1907/1908, therefore, a new phase of Zionist colonization was inaugurated, without prior "legalization" or sponsorship by a European Power. It was more consciously nationalistic in impulse, more militantly segregationist in its attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs, and more concerned with strategic and political considerations in its selection of locations for its new settlements. But, for all its enhanced dynamism and sharpened ideological consciousness, the second wave of Zionist colonization was not appreciably more successful than the first, as far as its magnitude was concerned.
By the outbreak of the first World War, therefore, the Zionist colonization of Palestine had met with only modest success in over thirty years of action. In the first place, Zionists were still an infinitesimal minority of about 1% of the Jews of the world. Their activities had aroused the fear and opposition of other Jews, who sought the solution of the "Jewish Problem" in "assimilation" in Western Europe and the United States, not in "self-segregation" in Palestine. In the second place, Zionist colonization had proceeded very slowly. After thirty years of immigration to Palestine, Jews were still under 8% of the total population of the country, in possession of no more than 2 1/2% of the land. And, in the third place, Zionism had failed to obtain political endorsement from the Ottoman authorities controlling Palestine, or from any European Power.
The War, however, created new circumstances which were destined to improve considerably the fortunes of Zionist colonization in Palestine. For the War set the stage for an alliance—concluded in 1917—between British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, which, during the following thirty years, opened the gates of Palestine to Zionist colonizers, facilitated the establishment of a Zionist settler-community, and paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist settler-state in 1948.
Whereas unilateral Zionist colonization failed, in the thirty years preceding the First World War, to make much headway, the alliance of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism succeeded, during the thirty years following the First World War, in accomplishing the objectives of both parties.
Chapter 4 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh
Chapter 4 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 1
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Chapter 4 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 2
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Chapter 4 from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 3
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The response to the people of Palestine to the menace of Zionism has passed through five stages.
(1) At the outset—when Zionists were coming in relatively small numbers and emphasizing the religious or humanitarian motives of their enterprise, while concealing the political ideological and colonial racist character of their movement—the Arabs of Palestine believed the immigrants to be "pilgrims" animated by religious longing for the holy land, or else "refugees" fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and seeking safety in Palestine. Palestinian Arabs, therefore accorded the immigrants a hospitable welcome. Even Herzl noted the "friendly attitude of the population" to the first wave of Zionist colonists.
(2) When, after the inauguration of the new Zionist movement in 1897, the second wave of Zionist colonization began to roll onto the shores of Palestine (from 1907/1908 onward), Arab friendliness began to give way to suspicion of resentment. The methodical ouster of Arab farmers, laborers, and watchmen from the new Zionist colonies, and the systematic boycott of Arab produce, aroused Arab anger. But the larger political nationalist dimensions of the Zionist program remain concealed from Arab sight: it was the immediate impact of the Zionists' presence upon the Arabs directly affected by the Zionists' race-exclusivist and race-supremacist practices, that was causing Arab wrath. Inasmuch as Zionist colonization was still of modest proportions however, the hostility it provoked remained more or less local.
(3) The alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, concretely expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, and the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, at last opened Arab eyes to the true significance of what was happening, and brought home the realization that nothing less than dislodgment was in store for the Arabs, if Zionism was to be permitted to have its way. Palestinian masses instinctively recognized the events of the day as an occurrence of dire portent; and, for thirty years thereafter, Palestine was to be the scene of persistent and tireless Arab resistance to the Anglo-Zionist partnership. The period from 1917 to 1948 was the period of Arab resistance par excellence.
The disquiet which followed the publication or Balfour Declaration was momentarily calmed, however, by British assurances made during 1918. An official Declaration by the British Government (issued on 16 June 1918) assured the Arabs that, as far as the territories occupied by the Allied armies were concerned, "the future government of those territories should be based on the principle of the consent of the governed. This policy will always be that of His Majesty's Government." And, only four days before the Armistice, a widely-publicized joint Anglo-French Declaration (issued on 7 November 1918) notified the Arabs of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that it was the intention of the two Allies "to further and assist in the setting up of indigenous governments" and "to recognise them as soon as they are actually set up." These declarations—though they soon proved to be insincere and dishonest—served in the meantime to allay the fears of the people of Palestine.
As 1919 opened, all eyes were on Paris: the Peace Conference was hopefully expected to resolve the contradictions of Allied wartime promises and to inaugurate the long-awaited new era of world history, founded on the principle of national self-determination, of which President Wilson had made emphatic enunciation. But, as those hopes dwindled and the influx of Zionist colonists—interrupted during the War—was resumed, Arab fears were revived. And so was Arab resistance to the twin dangers of protracted British occupation and expanded Zionist colonization.
Palestinian Arab opposition to the Anglo-Zionist partnership was first expressed, in 1919, in diplomatic representations and in collective declarations of the general will of the people.
The American King-Crane Commission was left in no doubt about the true feelings of the people of Palestine. On 29 August 1919, the Commission reported that:
"...the non-Jewish population of Palestine—nearly nine-tenths of the whole—are emphatically against the entire Zionist program... There was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed than upon this..."
The findings of the Commission corroborated the decisions of the General Syrian Congress, consisting of elected representatives of the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A resolution, passed unanimously by the Congress on 2 July 1919, announced:
"We oppose the pretentions of the Zionists to create a Jewish Commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economical, and political points of view. Our Jewish compatriots shall enjoy our common rights and assume the common responsibilities."
Similar utterances of unqualified rejection of Zionism continued to be made by every Palestinian Arab gathering throughout the decades of British occupation of Palestine. Not once did a Palestinian Arab group or conference express acceptance—even partial or qualified—of Zionist colonization. And the feelings, so unequivocally expressed to the King-Crane Commission in 1919, continued thereafter to be expressed, with equal forcefulness, to the Mandatory Government and its countless Commissions, as well as to the League of Nations and the United Nations, by every Palestinian delegation that had a chance to appear before any of those bodies.
But declarations of opposition, however important as an expression of national will, were not the only means of resistance to which the people of Palestine had recourse.
In March 1920, armed hostilities broke out between Arab villagers and Zionist colonists in northern Palestine; and in April 1920, Arab-Zionist fighting took place in Jerusalem. These were followed by uprisings in 1921, 1929, and 1933, and by a country-wide rebellion in 1936 which was renewed in 1937 and lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. And, from December 1947 until the withdrawal of Britain and the simultaneous proclamation of the Zionist settler-state in May 1948, Palestinian Arabs were engaged in a life-and-death with the British garrison as well as with the Zionist colonists.
By their untiring reiteration of their rejection of Zionist Colonialism and by their unstinting sacrifice of life and limb in defense of the sanctity of the homeland over thirty years, Palestinians of all walks of life eloquently testified—by word as well as deed, in ink as well as blood—to their devotion to their national rights and their unqualified opposition to the Zionization of their country.
The range of means by which Palestinians chose to express their opposition to the partnership of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism, from 1917 to 1948, was not confined to declaration and rebellion. In more prosaic—and perhaps more difficult and more costly—methods, the unqualified "No!" of the Arabs of Palestine was addressed to empire-builders and to racist colonists alike.
At the height of the famous rebellion of 1936, the people of Palestine launched a devastating civil disobedience movement, coupled with a country-wide strike which lasted for 174 days (perhaps the longest national strike in history) and affected all businesses, communications, and government services run by Arabs. In spite of its high cost to themselves, the men and women of Palestine persisted in their strike, resisting all efforts of the Mandatory Power to break it, and did not call it off until the rulers of the neighboring Arab States intervened and promised to initiate collective Arab negotiations with the British Government with a view to remedying the causes of Palestinian Arab grievances.
More importantly, the Palestinian Arabs brought into their struggle against the Zionization of Palestine the only remaining weapon at their command: if they had no control over the immigration of Zionist colonists into Palestine, they did have some control over the sale of land to those colonists. This weapon they used unsparingly, throughout the period of the Mandate.
The record shows that, during thirty years of British occupation and active encouragement of Zionist colonization —while the Zionists were allowed by the Mandatory Power to multiply to twelve times their number in 1917, and while the ratio of the Zionists to the total population was allowed to rise to one-third—Zionist acquisition of land grew at a snail's pace, as a result of the Arabs' refusal to sell their land to the colonists. Statistics published by the British Government reveal that the total area acquired by Zionists from 1920, when land registries were opened, until the dislodgment of the Arabs, was under 4% of the total area of Palestine. Of this Zionist-acquired land, a part was sold by non-Palestinian absentee land-owners, and another part was transferred to the Zionist colonization funds by the British Government itself (public domain, over which the Mandatory Government was trustee for the Palestinian people). In fact, an official spokesman for the Jewish Agency disclosed to a British Commission that, "of the land purchased by the Jews relatively small areas not exceeding in all 10 percent were acquired from peasants."
(4) In 1948, the Palestinian Arab people was forcibly dispossessed. Most Palestinians were evicted from their country. Their unyielding resistance and their costly sacrifices over three decades had failed to avert the national catastrophe.
But those sacrifices were not in vain. For they safeguarded the Palestinian national rights and underscored the legitimacy of the Arabs' claim to their national heritage. Rights undefended are rights surrendered. Unopposed and acquiesced in, usurpation is legitimized by default. For forfeiture of its patrimony, the Palestinian generation of the inter-War era will never be indicted by the Palestinian generations to come. It lost indeed—but not without fighting. It was dislodged indeed—but not for want of the will to defend its heritage.
Nor has the people of Palestine retroactively bestowed undeserved legitimacy upon the Zionist colonization of Palestine by recognizing the fait accompli after the fact. Many have been the self-appointed counselors of "realism", urging upon Palestinians acknowledgement of the new status quo in Palestine and acceptance of their exile "in good grace"; and many have been the lucrative offers of economic aid for "resettlement" and "rehabilitation" outside Palestine. But the people which had remained for thirty years undaunted by the combined power of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, and which subsequently refused to allow the seizure of its land and the dispersal of its body to conquer its soul also, knew very well how to resist those siren-calls.
The Zionist settler-state, therefore, has remained a usurper, lacking even the semblance of legitimacy—because the people of Palestine has remained loyal to its heritage and faithful to its rights.
(5) The people of Palestine, notwithstanding all its travails and misfortunes, still has undiminished faith in its future.
And the people of Palestine knows that the pathway to that future is the liberation of its homeland.
It was in this belief that the Palestinian people—after sixteen years of dispersion and exile, during which it had reposed its faith in its return to its country in world conscience and international public opinion, in the United Nations, and/or in the Arab states—chose at least to seize the initiative. In 1964, it reasserted its corporate personality by creating the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Only in the liberation of Palestine, spearheaded by Palestinians prepared to pay the price, can the supreme sacrifices of past generations of Palestinians be vindicated, and the visions of hopes of living Palestinians be transformed into reality.
January 20, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from "The Morning After" by Edward Said
Also available to read on the London Review of Books website
Selection from The Morning After by Edward Said Part 1
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Selection from The Morning After by Edward Said Part 2
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Selection from The Morning After by Edward Said Part 3
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Selection from The Morning After by Edward Said Part 4
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Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli-PLO agreement with the required common sense. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavourably weighted than many had first supposed. The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.
So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. What makes it worse is that for at least the past fifteen years the PLO could have negotiated a better arrangement than this modified Allon Plan, one not requiring so many unilateral concessions to Israel. For reasons best known to the leadership it refused all previous overtures. To take one example of which I have personal knowledge: in the late Seventies, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asked me to persuade Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation (accepted by the US) to be added by the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous positions it took then, the PLO lost even more ground. The gains of the intifada were squandered, and today advocates of the new document say: ‘We had no alternative.’ The correct way of phrasing that is: ‘We had no alternative because we either lost or threw away a lot of others, leaving us only this one.’
In order to advance towards Palestinian self-determination—which has a meaning only if freedom, sovereignly and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel, are its goal—we need an honest acknowledgment of where we are, now that the interim agreement is about to be negotiated. What is particularly mystifying is how so many Palestinian leaders and their intellectuals can persist in speaking of the agreement as a ‘victory’. Nabil Shaath has called it one of ‘complete parity’ between Israelis and Palestinians. The fact is that Israel has conceded nothing, as former Secretary Of State James Baker said in a TV interview, except, blandly, the existence of ‘the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people’. Or as the Israeli ‘dove’ Amos Oz reportedly put it in the course of a BBC interview, ‘this is the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.’
By contrast Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist carries with it a whole series of renunciations: of the PLO Charter; of violence and terrorism; of all relevant UN resolutions, except 242 and 338, which do not have one word in them about the Palestinians, their rights or aspirations. By implication, the PLO set aside numerous other UN resolutions (which, with Israel and the US, it is now apparently undertaking to modify or rescind) that, since 1948, have given Palestinians refugee rights, including either compensation or repatriation. The Palestinians had won numerous international resolutions—passed by, among others, the EC, the non-aligned movement, the Islamic Conference and the Arab League, as well as the UN—which disallowed or censured Israeli settlements, annexations and crimes against the people under occupation.
It would therefore seem that the PLO has ended the intifada, which embodied not terrorism or violence but the Palestinian right to resist, even though Israel remains in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The primary consideration in the document is for Israel’s security, with none for the Palestinians’ security from Israel’s incursions. In his 13 September press conference Rabin was straightforward about Israels continuing control over sovereignty; in addition, he said, Israel would hold the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the settlements and the roads. There is little in the document to suggest that Israel will give up its violence against Palestinians or, as Iraq was required to do after it withdrew from Kuwait, compensate those who have been the victims of its policies over the past 45 years.
Neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners who met the Israelis in Oslo has ever seen an Israeli settlement. There are now over two hundred of them, principally on hills, promontories and strategic points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Many will probably shrivel and die, but the largest are designed for permanence. An independent system of roads connects them to Israel, and creates a disabling discontinuity between the main centres of Palestinian population. The actual land taken by these settlements, plus the land designated for expropriation, amounts—it is guessed—to over 55 percent of the total land area of the Occupied Territories. Greater Jerusalem alone, annexed by Israel, comprises a huge tranche of virtually stolen land, at least 25 percent of the total amount. In Gaza settlements in the north (three), the middle (two) and the south, along the coast from the Egyptian border past Khan Yunis (12), constitute at least 30 percent of the Strip. In addition, Israel has tapped into every aquifer on the West Bank, and now uses about 80 percent of the water there for the settlements and for Israel proper. (There are probably similar water installations in Israel’s Lebanese ‘security zone’.) So the domination (if not the outright theft) of land and water resources is either overlooked, in the case of water, or, in the case of land, postponed by the Oslo accord.
What makes matters worse is that all the information on settlements, land and water is held by Israel, which hasn’t shared most of these data with the Palestinians, any more than it has shared the revenues raised by the inordinately high taxes it has imposed on them for 26 years. All sorts of technical committees (in which non-resident Palestinians have participated) have been set up by the PLO in the territories to consider such questions, but there is little evidence that committee findings (if any) were made use of by the Palestinian side in Oslo. So the impression of a huge discrepancy between what Israel got and what the Palestinians conceded or overlooked remains unrectified.
I doubt that there was a single Palestinian who watched the White House ceremony who did not also feel that a century of sacrifice, dispossession and heroic struggle had finally come to nought. Indeed, what was most troubling is that Rabin in effect gave the Palestinian speech while Arafat pronounced words that had all the flair of a rental agreement. So far from being seen as the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians were characterised before the world as its now repentant assailants: as if the thousands killed by Israel’s bombing of refugee camps, hospitals and schools in Lebanon; Israel’s expulsion of 800,000 people in 1948 (whose descendants now number about three million, many of them stateless); the conquest of their land and property; the destruction of over four hundred Palestinian villages; the invasion of Lebanon; the ravages of 26 years of brutal military Occupation – it was as if these sufferings had been reduced to the status of terrorism and violence, to be renounced retrospectively or passed over in silence. Israel has always described Palestinian resistance as terrorism and violence, so even in the matter of wording it received a moral and historical gift.
In return for exactly what? Israel’s recognition of the PLO – undoubtedly a significant step forward. Beyond that, by accepting that questions of land and sovereignty are being postponed till ‘final Status negotiations’, the Palestinians have in effect discounted their unilateral and internationally acknowledged claim to the West Bank and Gaza: these have now become ‘disputed territories’. Thus with Palestinian assistance Israel has been awarded at least an equal claim to them. The Israeli calculation seems to be that by agreeing to police Gaza—a job which Begin tried to give Sadat fifteen years ago—the PLO would soon fall foul of local competitors, of whom Hamas is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians may grow weaker, come more under the Israeli thumb, and therefore be less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins. But on the matter of how, by what specific mechanism, to get from an interim status to a later one, the document is purposefully silent. Does this mean, ominously, that the interim stage may be the final one?
Israeli commentators have been suggesting that within, say, six months the PLO and Rabin’s government will negotiate a new agreement further postponing elections, and thereby allowing the PLO to continue to rule. It is worth mentioning that at least twice during the past summer Arafat said that his experience of government consisted of the ten years during which he ‘controlled’ Lebanon, hardly a comfort to the many Lebanese and Palestinians who recollect that sorry period. Nor is there at present any concrete way for elections to be held should they even be scheduled. The imposition of rule from above, plus the long legacy of the occupation, have not contributed much to the growth of democratic, grass-roots institutions. There are unconfirmed reports in the Arabic press indicating that the PLO has already appointed ministers from its own inner circle in Tunis, and deputy ministers from among trusted residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Will there ever be truly representative institutions? One cannot be very sanguine, given Arafat’s absolute refusal to share or delegate power, to say nothing of the financial assets he alone knows about and controls.
In both internal security and development, Israel and the PLO are now aligned with each Other. PLO members or consultants have been meeting with Mossad officials since last October to discuss security problems, including Arafat’s own security. And this at the time of the worst Israeli repression of Palestinians under military occupation. The thinking behind the collaboration is that it will deter any Palestinian from demonstrating against the occupation, which will not withdraw, but merely redeploy. Besides, Israeli settlers will remain living, as they always have, under a different jurisdiction. The PLO will thus become Israel’s enforcer, an unhappy prospect for most Palestinians Interestingly, the ANC has consistently refused to supply the South African government with police officials until after power is shared, precisely in order to avoid appearing as the white government’s enforcer. It was reported from Amman a few days ago that 170 members of the Palestine Liberation Army, now being trained in Jordan for police work in Gaza, have refused to co-operate for precisely that reason. With about 14,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails—some of whom Israel says it may release—there is an inherent contradiction, not to say incoherence, to the new security arrangements. Will more room be made in them for Palestinian security?
The one subject on which most Palestinians agree is development, which is being described in the most naive terms imaginable. The world community will be expected to give the nearly autonomous areas large-scale financial support; the Palestinian diaspora is expected, indeed preparing, to do the same. Yet all development for Palestine must be funnelled through the joint Palestinian-Israeli Economic Co-operation Committee, even though, according to the document, ‘both sides will co-operate jointly and unilaterally with regional and international parties to support these aims.’ Israel is the dominant economic and political power in the region – and its power is of course enhanced by its alliance with the US. Over 80 percent of the West Bank and Gaza economy is dependent on Israel, which is likely to control Palestinian exports, manufacturing and labour for the foreseeable future. Aside from the small entrepreneurial and middle class, the vast majority of Palestinians are impoverished and landless, subject to the vagaries of the Israeli manufacturing and commercial community which employs Palestinians as cheap labour. Most Palestinians, economically speaking, will almost certainly remain as they are, although now they are expected to work in private-sector, partly Palestinian-controlled service industries, including resorts, small assembly-plants, farms and the like.
A recent study by the Israeli journalist Asher Davidi quotes Dov Lautman, president of the Israeli Manufacturers Association: ‘It’s not important whether there will be a Palestinian state, autonomy or a Palestinian-Jordanian state. The economic borders between Israel and the territories must remain open.’ With its well developed institutions, close relations with the US and aggressive economy, Israel will in effect incorporate the territories economically, keeping them in a state of permanent dependency. Then Israel will turn to the wider Arab world, using the political benefits of the Palestinian agreement as a Springboard to break into Arab markets, which it will also exploit and is likely to dominate.
Framing all this is the US, the only global power, whose idea of the New World Order is based on economic domination by a few giant corporations and pauperisation if necessary for many of the lesser peoples (even those in metropolitan countries). Economic aid for Palestine is being supervised and controlled by the US, bypassing the UN, some of whose agencies like UNRWA and UNDP are far better placed to administer it. Take Nicaragua and Vietnam. Both are former enemies of the US; Vietnam actually defeated the US but is now economically in need of it. A boycott against Vietnam continues and the history books are being written in such a way as to show how the Vietnamese sinned against and ‘mistreated’ the US for the latter’s idealistic gesture of having invaded, bombed and devastated their country. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was attacked by the US-financed Contra movement; the country’s harbours were mined, its people ravaged by famine, boycotts and every conceivable type of subversion. After the 1991 elections, which brought a US-supported candidate, Mrs Chamorro, to power, the US promised many millions of dollars in aid, of which only 30 million have actually materialised. In mid-September all aid was cut off. There is now famine and civil war in Nicaragua. No less unfortunate have been the fates of El Salvador and Haiti. To throw oneself, as Arafat has done, on the tender mercies of the US is almost certainly to suffer the fate the US has meted out to rebellious or ‘terrorist’ peoples it has had to deal with in the Third World after they have promised not to resist the US any more.
January 21, 2024
content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, and forced displacement/expulsion
Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh
Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh
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Since the first waves of colonization in Palestine there has been a conscious intent to splinter the Palestinian national identity into a patchwork of fragmented, dispersed territories that evolve as distinct social formations. This is clearly illustrated in the various categories that comprise the Palestinian people: Palestinian refugees, now the largest body of refugees in the world; Palestinians who remained on their land in 1948 and later became citizens of the Israeli state; those scattered in the cantons of the West Bank; and, most recently, others isolated in the Gaza Strip. All these groups of people constitute the Palestinian nation—but the denial of this unity has been the overriding logic of colonization since before 1948.
This fragmentation has been made possible by military power. Israel forcibly prevents Palestinian refugees from returning to their land, divides the West Bank and Gaza Strip from each other, places administrative restrictions on the movement of Palestinian citizens of Israel into the occupied territories, and completely controls movement in the West Bank itself. At the same time—and this is a crucial point that often goes unstated—dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their land continues in a slow-motion manner, confirming that al-nakba is ongoing. But fragmentation is not solely a spatial process; it necessarily rests upon a temporal disruption. The assault on history itself becomes an integral feature of how colonization functions, with the Palestinian experience dehistoricized and reduced to a recent narrative that accepts the results of fragmentation as permanent and given. It becomes possible to speak of “Gazans,” for example, around 70 percent of whom are actually refugees from 1948, with no reference to how this category was constructed through the forcible fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a whole—first during al-nakba, and then through the separation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Or to speak of “empty spaces” in the West Bank with no mention of the dispossession of one-fifth of the population in 1967. Because these categories are accepted as given—legitimized as the focus of political negotiations, financial aid packages, and development strategies—they continue to be reproduced. This process is normalized and sustained through the operational practices of foreign governments, NGOs, and a myriad of development agencies, thus providing a materiality to Israeli power.
At the same time as Israeli colonization was a military project aimed at the fragmentation and destruction of Palestinian identity, it also changed the Palestinian economy. In the West Bank, this has meant a type of “hothouse capitalism,” in which the power of the occupation generated many of the same processes of social trans- formation noted in previous chapters. Rural inhabitants were dispossessed from the land and forced to join migrant labor markets. A capitalist class developed through subcontracting and privileged trade relationships with the occupation. In more recent years, Palestinian policy makers eagerly embraced a neoliberal model of development in close partnership with IFIs. This is neoliberalism under occupation, one driven by an identical logic and reinforcing the same coincidence of poverty and enrichment as seen elsewhere in the region. In this sense, there is very little that is unique in the types of economic policies that are today being implemented by the PA—they have been the standard fare of governments across the Middle East for at least two decades.
Palestinian acquiescence to this process did not come about simply due to the corruption of individual leaders, misplaced political decisions, or an unfavorable international context. Indispensable to explaining the trajectory of the last forty-five years are these shifts that took place in the Palestinian political economy, in which the development of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was accelerated by the whip of Israeli colonization, ensuring the ancillary integration of these areas into the Israeli economy. The profound transformation of Palestinian class structure that occurred in lockstep with Israel’s colonization underpins Palestinian submission to Oslo and the nature of the PA.
The specificity of the neoliberal experience in Palestine lies in the total subjugation of the population by an occupying force and the attempts of more than six decades to fragment and disperse a nation of people from their homeland. Neoliberalism works to reinforce this atomization—turning people away from collective struggle and toward individualized consumption, as mediated through finance. It has produced mass im- poverishment alongside the enrichment of a tiny layer of Palestinians that acts as the interlocutor with Israeli and foreign capital. A society constructed along these principles weakens the capacity of the Palestinian people to resist. Most importantly, it means that the question of Palestine cannot be reduced to a purely “humanitarian” issue or simply an issue of national liberation; it is an essential component of the broader strug- gle against the uneven development and control of wealth across the Middle East. Capitalist development has always acted to consolidate and deepen Israel’s power over Palestine, generating a layer of Palestinian society that stands against the interests of most of the population. In this sense, understanding and confronting the political economy of Palestinian capitalism is very much entwined with a struggle of national liberation and return—the success of one fully depends upon the success of the other.