Palestine Has A History (part two)
Thoughts on ‘Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba’
Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro captures a history the state of Israel would like to erase. The Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic. The Nakba occurred in 1948 and was a series of terrible events that forced an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This was 80 percent of the population. This history is not well known because many interested parties would like it to remain unknown. The introductory text to this book of photographs is so well done I decided to share it with you, rather than do a summary sort of book review. It is concise and well researched. It will be posted here in two parts with some photos included. This second part was written by professor Bichara Khader.
The Palestinian Nakba 1947-1949
Between 1917 and 1947, Palestine was held completely hostage to the maneuvers of British colonialism. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Great Britain promised the Zionist movement a Jewish National Home in Palestine. At that time, Jews represented 6 percent of the population and owned barely 1 percent of the land.
During the twenty six year period of the British Mandate (1922-1948), successive waves of Zionist immigrants transformed the demographic composition of Palestine, and by 1947, Jews formed 33 percent of the total population but still owned only 6.6 percent of the territory. British support of the Zionist movement was assured – a support, it must be stated, not driven by philanthropic motives. The postwar Middle East produced a consensus between Zionist objective of colonizing Palestine and the British objective of securing a base of support in the vicinity of the Suez Canal. The Zionist project served the interests of British imperial strategy.
However disastrous the role played by the British would prove for the Palestinian people, it should not obscure the role of the Zionist movement, which, since its first congress in Basel in 1897, had decided to establish a Jewish state in Palestine – which clearly and emphatically meant the “de-Arabization” of Palestine or, in other words, the “invisibilization” of its people to facilitate the Judaization of the country.
But the Palestinians did exist, and they lived in their own land and defended it, as demonstrated by the numerous revolts against the British politics of complicity with the Zionist project that marked the years of the Mandate between the two world wars. Indeed, Ben-Gurion, the future president of Israel, made this revealing statement: “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves, politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country.”
Not limited solely to establishing itself on Palestinian land, the Zionist movement required the uprooting of the Palestinian people. As such, various means – symbolic, institutional, and financial – were used to exert control, manifested through colonial and exclusive concepts such as the “inalienability” of the lands conquered by the Jews and the prohibition of Palestinian peasants (christians and muslims) from continuing to work on those lands.
During World War II, the Zionist movement was already firmly established in Palestine, but its leaders were aware that the role of the British was coming to an end, and thus began to transfer the mechanism of the pro Zionist lobby to the United States. The perception of British patronage had begun to shift; they were now viewed as a roadblock in the path to Jewish statehood. In the mid 1940s, armed Zionist groups such as the Stern, the Irgun, and the Palmach launched a wave of terroristic acts against the Palestinians and the British. On July 22, 1946, an attack on the headquarters of the British army in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, was carried out by the Jewish terrorist group Irgun Zvai Leumi, causing more than ninety deaths.
Despite the costly presence of almost 100,000 British troops (one soldier for every eighteen Palestinians), the Mandate authorities were able to keep a handle on the situation. On February 18, 1847, the British threw in the towel, with Ernest Bevin, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, announcing to Parliament, “We have decided to ask the United Nations for a solution,” while British public opinion demanded the end of the campaign with the slogan “bring the boys home.” On April 28, 1947, a special session of the UN General Assembly was convened at Flushing Meadows to consider the British government’s request to bring an end to the Mandate.
Sociocide
In 1947, the British took the Palestinian question to the UN. Various commissions were created, working groups were formed, successive plans were drawn up and others were rejected: a provincial autonomy plan, a federal plan, a confederate plan, and others. Finally, on September 23, 1947, the UN General Assembly created an ad hoc commission to make definitive proposals. Two proposals were presented: one, the partition of Palestine into two states; another, a single federal state. The Zionists opposed the federal plan in favor of a Jewish rather than binational state. The United States used all possible means, including financial pressure, diplomatic intimidation, and even threats to Latin American countries, to garner support for the Partition Plan.
The UN arrangement meant the Jews, who represented 33 percent of the population and owned only 6 percent of the total area, were granted 56 percent of the territory. This primordial injustice would be immediately compounded by ethnic cleansing carried out by the armed Zionist groups, a process intimately linked to the project of a “predominately Jewish state.”
Following the passage of the UN resolution on November 29, 1947, the Zionist leaders launched a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing. The objective was to conquer “the maximum territory with the minimum population.” On March 10, 1948, the Zionist leadership led by Ben-Gurion gave the green light to the so called Plan Dalet, which established the military strategy to rid the territory of its Arab population. In his book ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,’ Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes part of the master plan:
“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Palestine now faced its worst catastrophe: the forced exile of two thirds of its Arab population. Palestinian historian Saleh Abdel Jawad describes this as a form of “sociocide,” signifying “the total destruction of the Palestinians, not only as a political entity or national political group but as people.”
The plan consisted of attacking Palestinian villages, massacring part of their population, and forcing the rest into permanent exile without any possibility of return. Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it bluntly: “For most of 1948, ideas about how to consolidate and eternalize the Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this goal.”
Perhaps the most symbolic event in this campaign of terror is the massacre of Deir Yassin. This village on the outskirts of Jerusalem was attacked by Irgum troops on April 9, 1948. The Red Cross delegate in Jerusalem, Jacques de Reynier, was one of the first witnesses to arrive at the scene. He recounts it as follows:
“Three hundred persons were massacred without any military reason or provocation of any kind; old men, women, children, newly born were savagely murdered with grenades and knives by Jewish troops of the Irgun, entirely under the control of their chiefs.”
Menachem Begin, Irgun leader and thus the person responsible for the massacre noted in his memoir: “Without the victory in Dier Yasin, the State of Israel would not have existed.” In other words, without the Palestinian exodus, without ethnic cleansing, Israel would not have seen the light of day as a Jewish state. In fact, before the proclamation of the State of Israel and the outbreak of the first Arab Israeli War, almost 300,000 Palestinians had already been forced into exile. This contradicts one of the key tenets of Israeli propaganda, attributing to the war the Arab states on Israel the responsibility for the flight of Palestinian refugees.
On the afternoon of May 14, 1948, Sir Alan Cunningham, the seventh and last of the British High Commissioners in Palestine, boarded the HMS Euryalus. It was the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. The next day, May 15, 1948, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. And exactly eleven minutes later, the United States recognized the provisional government headed by David Ben-Gurion as the de facto authority of the newly created state.
The destruction of Palestinian society was a strategic undertaking. A “sociocide” accompanied by a “memoricide,” as the former Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan acknowledged in an address to a Haifa University audience: “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
On December 11, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 194. It states: refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” This resolution, like many others, was made in vain.
To this day, the Palestinian tragedy remains an open wound. Thanks to the shameful indifference of the West and the international community, the Nakba of 1948 has become a permanent Nakba.
