Chapter 1: The First Declaration of War, 1917–1939
Economic and industrial developments in late Ottoman Palestine. Greater class mobility and access to education, and increase of literacy and many new newspapers. Most Jews in Palestine living closely with Muslims and Christians. “Whatever it may have looked like to uninformed outsiders, it is clear that by the first part of the twentieth century there existed in Palestine under Ottoman rule a vibrant Arab society undergoing a series of rapid and accelerating transitions, much like several other Middle Eastern societies around it.”
British and Ottoman battles in Palestine destroyed many towns and villages, many conscripts killed in trench warfare.
Balfour Declaration 11/2/1917. “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
British government pledges support for Herzl’s Zionist goals for Jewish colonialization plans, and national rights for the Jewish minority of only 6% of population. and plans unlimited immigration meant to produce a future Jewish majority.
Chaim Weizmann gains influence with British government. Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project.
Husayn-McMahon correspondence in 1915 and 1916 promised independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca.
Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916 British and French secret colonial partition plan for Arab world.
British leaders prevent representative government in Palestine with aim to establish Jewish sate. “At a dinner at Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill—assured Weizmann that by the term “Jewish national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George convinced the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow representative government in Palestine.”
British military banned publication of news of the Balfour Declaration, and did not allow newspapers to reappear for nearly two years. “When reports of the Balfour Declaration finally reached Palestine, they trickled in slowly via word of mouth and then through copies of Egyptian newspapers that travelers brought from Cairo.”
Recent concentrations of private land ownership and absentee landlords allows Zionist settler movement to purchase large tracks of agricultural land and coastal plains, while Palestinian peasants are forced from their ancestral lands.
Dissolution of Ottoman, Romanov, Habsburg empires fuels spread of nationalism and sparks anticolonial upheavals around the world. Palestinians’ view of national identity emerged in similar ways as in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
“Popular dissatisfaction with British support for Zionist aspirations exploded into demonstrations, strikes, and riots, with violence flaring notably in 1920, 1921, and 1929.” “By the early 1930s, younger, educated lower-middle- and middle-class elements, impatient with the conciliatory approach of the elite, began to launch more radical initiatives and organize more militant groups. These included an activist network set up throughout the northern parts of the country by a Haifa-based itinerant preacher of Syrian origin named Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, which was clandestinely preparing for an armed uprising, as well as the Istiqlal (“independence”) Party, whose name summarized its aims.”
Sir Herbert Samuel British minister and committed Zionist helped promote Zionist plans and blocking Palestinians’ rights. “the Zionist movement’s leaders understood that “under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s sympathy.”
New limited national independence in Turkey, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq after WW1
1922 New League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine formalizes British rule and includes Balfour Declaration verbatim, but makes no reference to Palestinians as a people with national or political rights. “In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups. There were people there, certainly, but they had no history or collective existence, and could therefore be ignored.”
“The Zionist movement, in its embodiment in Palestine as the Jewish Agency, was explicitly designated as the official representative of the country’s Jewish population, although before the mass immigration of committed European Zionists the Jewish community comprised mainly either religious or mizrahi Jews who in the main were not Zionist or who even opposed Zionism. Of course, no such official representative was designated for the unnamed Arab majority.”
Article 7 nationality law allowed Jews to obtain Palestinian citizenship, though same law was used to deny nationality for Palestinians who were forced out of the country during the war.
Lord Arthur Balfour in 1919 confidential memo “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.… The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
Jewish migration from Europe Jewish population to increase from roughly 6% at the end of WWI to about 18% by 1926. Immigration spurts again in 1933 with rise of Nazi Germany. More than 60,000 Jewish immigrants come to Palestine in 1935.
Demonstrations and sporadic attacks by Palestinian residents grow larger and more militant by early 1930s, against British domination, unlimited Jewish immigration, and being forced off family lands due to Zionist land purchases. Growing unrest and failure of diplomatic efforts among elites to calm tensions causes numerous British reports.
- Hayward Commission in 1920
- Churchill White Paper in 1922
- Shaw Commission in 1929
- Hope-Simpson Report in 1930
- Passfield White Paper in 1930
- Peel Commission in 1937
- Woodhead Commission in 1938
British create Grand Mufti position, to create an alternative leadership structure to the nationalist Arab Executive of the Palestinian congresses led by the mufti’s cousin, and to create friction between them. The other goal “was to enforce the idea that, besides the Jewish people, with its national characteristics, the Arab population of Palestine had no national nature and consisted only of religious communities. These measures were meant to distract the Palestinians from demanding democratic, nationwide representative institutions, to divide the national movement, and to prevent the creation of a single national alternative to the Mandate and its Zionist charge.”
1936 6 month General Strike, evolved in 1936-1939 Arab Revolt.
Arab Higher Committee (AHC) set up to lead and represent Arabs, but all members are elite merchants or landowners, and tries to take over the general strike, then helps broker its end promising British would redress their grievances.
1937 Peel Commission proposal for small Jewish state in about 17% of territory, from which over 200,000 Arabs would be forcibly displaced, and remaining Palestinian territory to remain under British control or handed to Transjordan.
Armed revolt breaks out in October 1937 across Palestine. British violently suppress uprising, with more than 10% of adult male Arab population either killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.
Hundreds of Palestinians sentenced to death for possession of even 1 bullet, and many more suspected ‘rebel’ Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops. “Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack.”
October 1937, Assassination of the Captain Lewis Andrews British district commissioner for Galilee.
British deports virtually entire Palestinian nationalist leadership to far away countries. “Still others were confined, generally without trial, in more than a dozen of what the British themselves called “concentration camps,” most notably that in Sarafand.”
British lose control of several urban areas and much of countryside, and by December 1938 “practically every village in the country harbours and supports the rebels and will assist in concealing their identity from the Government Forces.”
“The savage British repression, the death and exile of so many leaders, and the conflict within their ranks left the Palestinians divided, without direction, and with their economy debilitated by the time the revolt was crushed in the summer of 1939. This put the Palestinians in a very weak position to confront the now invigorated Zionist movement, which had gone from strength to strength during the revolt, obtaining lavish amounts of arms and extensive training from the British to help them suppress the uprising.”
Brittan sees Palestinian uprising as a risk for new war looming which would need Arab support. 1939 Neville Chamberlain White Paper in attempt to appease outraged Palestinians, calls for strict limits on Jewish immigration and land sales, and promised representative institutions in 5 years and self-determination in 10.
“If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”
King-Crane Commission from 1919 during Woodrow Wilson, warns “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”
“The great initial disadvantage under which the Palestinians labored was compounded by the Zionist organization’s massive capital investments, arduous labor, sophisticated legal maneuvers, intensive lobbying, effective propaganda, and covert and overt military means. The Jewish colonists’ armed units had developed semi-clandestinely, until the British allowed the Zionist movement to operate military formations openly in the face of the Arab revolt. At this point, the Jewish Agency’s collusion with the mandatory authorities reached its peak. There is a consensus among objective historians that this collusion, supported by the League of Nations, severely undermined any possibility of success for the Palestinians’ struggle for the representative institutions, self-determination, and independence they believed were their right.”
“When the British left Palestine in 1948, there was no need to create the apparatus of a Jewish state ab novo. That apparatus had in fact been functioning under the British aegis for decades. All that remained to make Herzl’s prescient dream a reality was for this existing para-state to flex its military muscle against the weakened Palestinians while obtaining formal sovereignty, which it did in May 1948.”
Chapter 2: The Second Declaration of War, 1947–1948
Dr. Husayn knew that Ismail was going to Amman at the behest of the Arab-American Institute to see King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan, and he wanted to send him a personal but official message. When my father heard its contents, he blanched. On behalf of Dr. Husayn and the Arab Higher Committee of which he was the secretary, Ismail was to tell the king that while the Palestinians appreciated his offer of “protection” (he had used the Arabic wisaya, literally “tutelage” or “guardianship”), they were unable to accept. The implicit meaning of the message was that were the Palestinians to succeed in escaping the British yoke, they did not want to come under that of Jordan (which, given pervasive British influence in Amman, meant much the same thing). They aspired to control their own fate.
UN Resolution 181, partition plan, November 29, 1947
By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population.
Under pressure from the Zionist movement and with support from British prime minister Winston Churchill, a Jewish Brigade Group of the British army was formed in 1944, providing the already considerable Zionist military forces with training and combat experience, offering a vital advantage in the conflict to come.
Rise of American empire and influence.
Biltmore Declaration in 1942, Zionist convention in US, “For the first time, the Zionist movement openly called for turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state: the exact demand was that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.”
Arab League formed March 1945 of 6 Arab countries, though still heavily controlled by British
Anglo American Committee of Inquiry in 1946, established by British and US calling for immediate entry of European Jews into Palestine. Hourani warns committee but is ignored “in the past few years responsible Zionists have talked seriously about the evacuation of the Arab population, or part of it, to other parts of the Arab world.” The implementation of the Zionist program, he said, “would involve a terrible injustice and could only be carried out at the expense of dreadful repressions and disorders, with the risk of bringing down in ruins the whole political structure of the Middle East.”
Palestinians had no foreign ministry, no diplomats, and no government departments. “When Palestinian envoys had managed to meet with foreign officials, whether in London or Geneva, they were condescendingly told that they had no official standing, and that their meetings were therefore private rather than official.”
Arab National Fund
Arab Office “Set up as the nucleus of a Palestinian foreign ministry and supported mainly by the pro-British Iraqi government headed by Nuri al-Sa‘id, the Arab Office had both a diplomatic and informational mission, with the goal of making the Palestinian cause better known.”
Rivalry among Arab states competing for regional power. King Abdullah tries negotiating with British and Zionists to grant Arab portion of Palestine to Trans Jordan. “Beyond the strength and broad external support enjoyed by the Zionists, in contrast with the weakness and fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement, the newly independent Arab states—Iraq, Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon—were frail and fraught with rancorous disunity and the Palestinians had to contend with their dueling ambitions.”
King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz of Saudi Arabia meets US President FDR on US warship in Bitter Lake.
Jewish militias attack British targets “This hostility erupted with assassinations of British officials, such as that by the Stern gang in 1944 of Lord Moyne, the resident minister in Egypt, and was followed by a sustained campaign of violence against British troops and administrators in Palestine. This culminated in the 1946 blowing up of the British HQ, the King David Hotel, with the loss of ninety-one lives.”
UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) plan for partitioning Palestine favorable to Jewish minority, giving 56% of land.
“The resolution was another declaration of war, providing the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land, a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter. The expulsion of enough Arabs to make possible a Jewish majority state necessarily and inevitably followed.”
“Its first stage, from November 30, 1947, until the final withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948, witnessed successive defeats by Zionist paramilitary groups, including the Haganah and the Irgun, of the poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them.”
Plan Dalet “conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11.”
“Subjected to similar bombardments and attacks on poorly defended civilian neighborhoods, the sixty thousand Palestinian inhabitants of Haifa, the thirty thousand living in West Jerusalem, the twelve thousand in Safad, six thousand in Beisan, and 5,500 in Tiberias suffered the same fate. Most of Palestine’s Arab urban population thus became refugees and lost their homes and livelihoods.”
Dayr Yasin Massacre “where one hundred residents, sixty-seven of them women, children, and old people, were slaughtered when the village was stormed by Irgun and Haganah assailants.”
Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni resistance leader killed near Jerusalem
More than 300,000 Palestinians forcible displaced before Israeli Independence on 5/15. "In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel). None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so. Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.”
This transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land.
There was no invasion of Israel by 7 Arab armies. Saudi Arabia and Yemen did not have modern armies to speak of and Lebanese army doesn’t cross border. Jordan’s Arab Legion and Iraq’s forces were forbidden by their British allies from breaching the borders of the areas allocated to the Jewish state by partition..
Truman bluntly revealed the motivations behind this major shift when a group of American diplomats presciently warned him that an overtly pro Zionist policy would harm US interests in the Arab world. “I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
The main reasons driving this shift were economic and strategic, related to Cold War considerations and the vast energy resources of the Middle East. Militarily, the Pentagon came to see Israel as a potentially powerfulally.
At the same time as the Nakba provided a new focus for their collective identity, it broke up families and communities, dividing and dispersing Palestinians among multiple countries and distinct sovereignties
Until 1966, most Palestinians lived under strict martial law and much of their land was seized (along with that of those who had been forced from the country and were now refugees). This stolen land, an expropriation deemed legal by the Israeli state, including the bulk of the country’s arable areas, was given to Jewish settlements or the Israel Lands Authority, or placed under the control of the JNF, whose discriminatory charter prescribed that such property could only be used for the benefit of the Jewish people.
Accustomed to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they suddenly had to learn to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a state of all itsbcitizens.
UNRWA’s provision of services in Lebanon and elsewhere, notably universal education and vocational training, enabled Palestinians to become among the most highly educated people in the Arab world. The proficiencies thus acquired facilitated their emigration, especially to the oil-rich Arab countries that badly needed skilled labor and professional expertise. Still, in spite of the safety valve provided by UNRWA’s services, which channeled many young Palestinians away from the refugee camps, nationalism and irredentism were widespread among all classes and communities
A smaller number of Palestinian refugees ended up in Syria, some in camps and others in Damascus and other cities, fewer in Iraq, and fewer still in Egypt.
This volatile dynamic along their borders resulted in the peculiar situation wherein Arab leaders often raised the question of Palestine because of popular pressure but refrained from actually doing anything about it, out of fear of Israel’s might and the disapproval of the great powers
Post-Nakba political vacuum Arab states also prevented Palestinians from organizing or launching attacks against Israel.
Small groups engaged in militant activity primarily aimed atnmobilizing Palestinians to recover primary responsibility for their own cause by taking up arms against Israel. This started spontaneously and consisted mainly of uncoordinated raids on Israeli border communities. Itntook several years before such largely inchoate forms of clandestine armed action coalesced into a visible trend and emerged from obscurity with the formation of organizations like Fatah in 1959.
Palestine Liberation Organization by the Arab League in 1964 at the behest of Egypt was a response to this burgeoning independent Palestinian activism and constituted the most significant attempt by Arab states to control it.
Thus a Palestinian campaign of sporadic but often lethal attacks on Israel was launched despite heavy-handed repression by the Egyptian military and its intelligence services, which tightly controlled the Gaza Strip. Israel’s retaliation for the casualties inflicted by Palestinian crossborder infiltrators, known as feda’iyin (meaning “those who sacrifice themselves”), was massive and disproportionate, and the Gaza Strip bore the brunt of these attacks.
In October 1953, Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Qibya carried out a massacre following an attack by feda’iyin that killed three Israeli civilians, a woman and her two children, in the town of Yehud. Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.
In March 1955, Ben-Gurion proposed a major attack on Egypt and the occupation of the Gaza Strip.74 The Israeli cabinet rejected the proposal, only to acquiesce in October 1956 after Ben-Gurion replaced Sharett as prime minister and his militant ethos won out.
In the buildup to this 1956 attack, Israel carried out a series of largescale military operations against Egyptian army and police posts in the Gaza Strip. These culminated with assaults in which thirty-nine Egyptian soldiers were killed in Rafah in February 1955 and another seventy-two in Khan Yunis six months later, with more soldiers killed in further operations, along with many Palestinian civilians.
Tripartite offensive of Israel, France, and Britain was launched under the pretext that Anglo-French forces were intervening only to separate the combatants. The Egyptian army was decisively and rapidly defeated. Despite the foregone conclusion of a military contest between a powerful Israel backed by two European powers against a weak Third World country that had barely absorbed its new Soviet weapons, the political results were not favorable to the aggressors
Israel did try to drag its feet, not withdrawing the last of its forces from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip until early 1957. As the occupying Israeli troops swept through the Gaza towns and refugee camps of Khan Yunis and Rafah in November 1956, more than 450 people, male civilians, were killed, most of them summarily executed.
According to a Special Report by the director-general of UNRWA, in the first massacre, which took place in Khan Yunis and the neighboring refugee camp on November 3, 275 men were shot. One week later on November 12 in the Rafah camp, 111 were killed. Another 66 were shot between November 1 and 21.
The civilians were killed after all resistance had ceased in the Gaza Strip, apparently as revenge for the raids into Israel before the Suez War. Given the precedent of 1948 and the civilian massacres at Dayr Yasin and at least twenty other locations, as well as the high civilian casualties in the raids of the early 1950s, such as that at Qibya, the gruesome events in the Gaza Strip were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern of behavior by the Israeli military. News of the massacres was suppressed in Israel and veiled by a complaisant American media.
The raids triggered disproportionate Israeli retaliatory attacks on the neighboring Arab states, which ultimately led to the Suez War.