Dear friends,
please find below my latest article on Palestine for RedFlag.
In solidarity,
Kim
NAKBA: UNDERSTANDING THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE
by Kim
Bullimore
REDFLAG // 16 May 2021
Al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”) refers to the
destruction of Palestinian society that took place in 1948, when more than 500
villages were destroyed by Zionist militia and more than 1 million Palestinians
were forcibly expelled from their homes—750,000 fleeing to neighbouring Arab
states and the other 250,000 becoming internal refugees in the newly formed
Israeli state.
Ever since, Israel has been an apartheid state that has used both
military force and legally sanctioned discrimination to oppress the Palestinian
people. Like other settler colonial states, Israel is primarily concerned
with controlling territory and replacing the indigenous population with a
settler population. As the late Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe noted,
“settler colonialism destroys to replace”.
Zionism, the ideological foundation on which the Israeli state is built,
emerged in the late 1800s in reaction to anti-Semitism and waves of anti-Jewish
pogroms taking place in Europe. At the time, a section of the Jewish middle
class concluded that anti-Semitism was an eternal and inescapable
phenomenon as long as Jews lived among non-Jews. They believed that the only
way to avoid it was to establish an independent state for the Jewish
people. While the Zionist movement eventually settled on Palestine as the
location for the new Jewish state, its leaders also considered a range of other
countries, including Argentina, Turkey, Kenya, Angola and Uganda.
Regardless of the area chosen, Zionism’s founding father, Theodore
Herzl, understood that it would be impossible to establish without the backing
of the one of the major imperial powers. The Zionist movement, however, didn’t
gain an imperial sponsor until in 1917, thirteen years after Herzl’s death,
when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which affirmed that
it would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people”.
Herzl also understood that, regardless of where the Jewish state was
eventually established, it would be necessary to expel the existing indigenous
population to make way for Jewish settler colonists. “When we occupy the land
... 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 country”, Herzl wrote in an 1895 diary entry. “Both the
[expropriation of property] and the removal of the poor must be carried out
discreetly and circumspectly.”
Herzl here articulated two of Zionism’s central doctrines: exclusivist
Jewish labour and “transfer”. As Palestinian historian Nur Masalha explains
in Expulsion of the Palestinians, the concept of
“transfer” within Zionist ideology came to be “a euphemism denoting the
organised removal of the indigenous population of Palestine to neighbouring
countries”. Moreover, he notes, it “occupied a central position in
the strategic thinking of the leadership of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv
[the Jewish population in Palestine prior to the founding of Israel] as a
solution to the ‘Arab question’ in Palestine ... Virtually every member of the
Zionist pantheon of founding fathers and important leaders supported it and
advocated it in one form or another”.
Prior to the 1890s, Jewish people made up less than 4 percent of the
population of Palestine, while Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians made up
the overwhelming majority. It was therefore essential, if the Zionist project
were to succeed, to change the demographic balance. Over the next 50 years,
mass Zionist immigration to Palestine increased the Jewish settler population
to approximately one-third of the overall population. The Zionist movement also
bought land from Palestinian and Arab landowners, establishing dozens of
colonies and expelling the Palestinian tenant farmers and their families who
had worked the land for centuries.
It soon became clear that very few Palestinians had any interest in
selling their land to the colonists. By 1947, Jewish settlers had succeeded in
purchasing just 7 percent of privately owned land in the territory. However, as
Patrick Wolfe notes in his 2016 book Traces of History, even this
limited acquisition of territory allowed the Zionist movement “to establish a
colonial beachhead” in Palestine from which it could carry out the mass,
violent expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population, expropriate the
lands which they once occupied and establish the state of Israel.
As Zionist settler colonialism intensified, political violence in 1920,
1921, 1929 and 1933 erupted as tensions between the Jewish Zionist settlers and
the Palestinian Arab population boiled over. In 1936, Palestinians began a
three-year anti-colonial revolt. Combining non-violent civil disobedience,
general strikes and armed struggle, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from
all classes mobilised to throw off the shackles of British imperialism and
Zionist settler colonialism.
During the revolt, British mandate police stations and government
buildings were targeted; British convoys were attacked; roads, railroads and
telegraph lines were cut; and trains and oil pipelines were blown up. More than
5,000 Palestinians were killed by British troops.
The British authorities also carried out collective punishment against
whole Palestinian villages. This included bombing several villages out of
existence, demolishing houses, enacting curfews, outlawing Palestinian
political parties and associations, deporting or exiling their leaders and
banning public protests. Hundreds of Palestinians were also convicted by
British military courts; more than 50 were hanged and 2,500 detained in
internment camps. By late 1938, Palestine was under a state of siege.
It took more than 20,000 British and 15,000 Zionist troops to finally put
the revolt down in 1939.
By the end of the uprising, the Zionist movement was stronger than it
had been in 1936, having increased its military capacity due to its
collaboration with Britain to suppress the revolt. Between 1940 and 1945,
Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion continued to strengthen and expand the military
capabilities of the Zionist movement in Palestine, while supporting Britain’s
war efforts in Europe.
With the Palestinian national movement crushed, the leaders of the
Zionist movement also began final preparations for the creation of the Zionist
state, including creating a detailed registry of every Arab village in
Palestine. This registry, known as the Village Files, was compiled by the
Jewish National Fund, which was responsible for settling Jewish colonists in
historic Palestine. Today, the fund remains one of the key tools used by the
Zionist movement to enable the colonisation of Palestine.
According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, although the Village Files
recorded the location of the villages, access roads, land quality and other
socio-cultural information such as the names of village leaders, religious
affiliations of the inhabitants and their main sources of income, they were not
simply an “academic exercise in geography”.
Pappe explains in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine that the files also included “an index of hostility” towards
the Zionist project based on whether the villages had participated in the
1936-39 revolt. Accompanying the index was a series of lists, which
identified individuals and families who had fought against the British and the
Zionists during the revolt or had been involved in the Palestinian national
movement in any capacity.
According to Pappe, these lists, along with lists added in 1947
detailing “wanted” persons, were used in 1948 by Zionist militias as they
seized control of and occupied Palestinian villages. Any Palestinians on the
lists were immediately identified and “shot on the spot”.
As the war in
Europe drew to a close in 1945, the Zionists under the leadership of Ben-Gurion
enacted a new strategy, believing they were now militarily and demographically
strong enough to need no longer the imperial backing of Britain. Over the next
three years, Zionist militias attacked not only Palestinian Arabs but also
British troops and infrastructure, including the terrorist bombing of Britain’s
administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946, resulting in the
death of 91 government officials, soldiers, police and office workers.
Zionist terrorist
attacks on both British infrastructure and Palestinian villages escalated
further after 29 November 1947, when the United Nations announced its plan to
partition Palestine. The UN plan allocated 55 percent of Palestine to the
Zionist movement, despite Palestinian Arabs making up two-thirds of the
population.
Between December
1947 and March 1948, Zionist militias stepped up their terrorist bombings of
Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages. Among the attacks ordered by
Ben-Gurion at the end of January 1948 was the destruction of the Sheikh Jarrah
neighbourhood in Jerusalem. On 7 February, a week after the attack, Ben-Gurion
also visited the Palestinian village of Lifta on the outskirts of Jerusalem,
which had been destroyed in early January. According to Pappe, after the visit,
Ben-Gurion “jubilantly recounted” to other leaders of his political party:
“In many Arab
neighbourhoods in the west [of Jerusalem] you do not see even one Arab ... what
happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa—can happen in large parts of the country ...
If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there
will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our
advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic
composition of the country.”
Throughout February
1948, the Zionist militia under Ben-Gurion’s command continued to terrorise
Palestinian villages, expelling their residents. In March, Ben-Gurion finalised
Plan Dalet, the Zionist movement’s blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians. Pappe notes in his book that, at the beginning of April, “each
brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to
be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled”.
Following Ben-Gurion’s formal declaration of the establishment of Israel
on 14 May, his new government set up an unofficial “Transfer Committee” to
oversee the continued ethnic cleansing. In The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem Revisited, Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris notes that a 5 June memorandum issued by the Transfer Committee
argued that “the uprooting of the Arabs should be seen as a solution to the
Arab question” and proposed “preventing Arabs from returning to their places”
by carrying out the “destruction of villages as much as possible during
military operations” and the “settlement of Jews in a number of villages and
towns”.
By the time Zionist forces finished implementing Plan Dalet in January
1949, the Zionist movement had taken control of 78 percent of historic
Palestine and expelled 1 million Palestinians from their homes.
Since 1948, Israel has continued to expand, annexing more and more
Palestinian land. In 1967, it took East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and the
Golan Heights, ethnically cleansing a further 350,000-400,000 Palestinians
from their land and homes. Since then, Israel has established more than 130
colonies in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, while another 100
wildcat (unofficial) colonies have been established independently. More than
600,000 Israeli colonists are living in the Occupied West Bank and East
Jerusalem in contravention of international law.
For Palestinians, the Nakba of 1948 never ended.
