Palestine: Lessons From History, by Martin Thomas – 31 December 2024

Israel book covers

Soon after the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023, while Israel was bombing Gaza in retaliation but before it invaded, Aaron Bastani of Novara Media named two books as “must-reads”. Those were Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Pappé’s book is an account of 1947-9, by an Israeli historian who moved to Exeter University in 2007. Khalidi’s covers from 1917 to 2024. He is an American academic. Some of his book is personal or family reminiscences: Khalidi was in Beirut, at the American University there, in 1982-3; he was a PLO adviser in the Madrid talks in the early 1990s; his uncle was mayor of Jerusalem in the 1930s, etc. Some of it is straightforward history.

Both books are somewhat skewed, in my view, but Khalidi’s is valuable. He argues for peace by way of “absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights” in a scheme for “the two societies”, Israeli and Palestinian. He is no socialist, so social and economic rights are outside his vision, but he wants consistent democracy. In Solidarity, we have expressed that idea as “two states, equal rights”.

Khalidi rages at the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians over the last century. But he insists that the Israeli Jews have created a “thriving national entity”. However it came about (few nations have solidified without wars and atrocities), it exists. A search for revenge will not bring progress. Palestinians, he argues, “need weaning from a pernicious delusion… that Jewish Israelis are not a ‘real’ people and that they do not have national rights”.

He quotes Eqbal Ahmad’s argument that military tactics (let alone militarism primarily targeting Israeli civilians) are no substitute for politics in this case. He describes the First Intifada (from 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza, and deliberately using stone-throwing to keep exchanges a step below outright war) as a great advance, and the Second Intifada (from 2000, soon centring round suicide bombs) as “a major setback for the Palestinian national movement”.

Pappé is different. He writes that “the solution” is for “Israel… to transform itself… into a civic and democratic state”, and that means organising the “return” (resettlement) in its territory of six million or more descendants of 1948 refugees. Who will do that? He dismisses “the contemporary Israeli left” as “racist”.

Really he doesn’t think the Israeli Jews will voluntarily remake themselves as a minority under a majority sure to be more or less hostile. As a parallel he cites the medieval Crusaders’ Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. History reports that in the final defeat of that Kingdom, the fall of Acre in 1291, “the conquerors only thought of destroying the city, the only object of the conquered was to escape”. What the Crusaders had inflicted on others, they now suffered themselves.

Pappé authorises himself for blanket anti-Israelism by a claim to be redressing the balance. “The dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel” has been “erased almost totally from the global public memory”. Even Khalidi has a bit of the same tilt: it can all “be understood as both a colonial and a national conflict. But our concern here is its colonial nature, as this aspect has been… underappreciated”.

Pappé depicts a world consensus accepting old official Israeli apologetics. The 1948 refugees fled only because Arab leaders told them to.

But even in the 1950s, though the Palestinians as yet essentially had no voice, many people denounced how they had been pushed into fleeing and often driven out. These days, even Israel-apologists like Efraim Karsh in his Palestine Betrayed have abandoned the old story.

Our political tendency wrote about Israel-Palestine in 1967 (Workers’ Republic 19). Like other Marxists then, we did not imagine that Israel should or could be erased. We were for “class unity of Israeli [Jewish] and Arab workers” and a socialist federation of the Middle East in which the Israeli Jews and the Kurds would have the right to self-rule. But, again like other Marxists, we had no doubt that “from the part of [Palestine] that was to become Israel, [Arabs] were driven out by terror”.

As Khalidi points out, world opinion has shifted against Israel’s rulers repeatedly since then: after 1967 (occupation of West Bank and Gaza), after 1982 (Israeli war in Lebanon), after 1987 (first intifada), and after the repeated Israeli wars in Gaza. Over a very broad range of leftish opinion, demonisation of Israel has become more common than complacency about it.

Back in the 1980s, Pappé was one of Israel’s “new historians”, with Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and others. Now Pappé says that “the new historians never contributed significantly to the struggle against the Nakba denial”.

Morris, once jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank, and still very anti-Netanyahu, has shifted to the right politically since about 2000, with weary “pessimism” – two states won’t happen, because revanchist political Islam is too strong – which has led him to shocking bleak “realpolitik” comments. The shift has not made him revise history to favour official Israeli apologetics. In his The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), his main shift from his 1988 book on the subject was “that pre-1948 [Zionist] ‘Transfer’ thinking had a greater effect on… 1948 than I had allowed for”. Khalidi is nearer to Solidarity’s views politically, but Morris’s Righteous Victims (1999) is a better source for finding historical fact.

Comparing Pappé’s list of Israeli atrocities with Morris’s books on 1948, I find nothing real omitted in Morris, but often sloppy extrapolations in Pappé. Adam Raz, author of a recent book denouncing the looting of Palestinians’ property within Israel after 1948, writes of Pappé: “So many errors and manipulations” serving a claim of “a master plan from the beginning of Zionism”. Raz chooses Pappé’s claim of rapes “throughout” Israel’s conquest of Arab villages in 1948 as an example of where his story is full of extrapolations.

The expulsions were not just “what happens in war”; equally, the expulsions and the large-scale fearful flight were not just a read-out of an old “master-plan” to be pursued even with little or no war. Israel kept a 20% Arab minority.

Pappé highlights John Bagot Glubb, the seconded British commander of the Jordanian forces in the 1948 war, talking then about a “phony war”. Glubb did not mean the war as a whole was “phony”. He used the phrase after the First Truce, 11 June to 8 July 1948. Jordan had won all it could reasonably hope to win, namely the West Bank, allotted by the UN to a Palestinian Arab state which Jordan and Egypt snuffed out, and East Jerusalem, theoretically due to be part of an international zone. Now it should be cautious.

In 1948 everyone on the left regarded the Arab states as corrupt, mostly semi-colonies of Britain, and the Muslim Brotherhood volunteers who came to fight Israel as far-right reactionaries. The Palestinians themselves were unable to produce more than local militias allied with the volunteer Arab Liberation Army, assembled in Syria, which entered Palestine in January 1948. Almost no-one on the left wished for victory of the Arab states.

Yet for Pappé the Arab forces represented only attempts to “save the Palestinians”, slight because “Egypt and Iraq were embroiled in the final stages of their own wars of liberation”. Egypt and Iraq in 1948 did keep troops at home in 1948, but to prop up their monarchies, not to pursue “wars of liberation”.

Pappé praises Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the leader of ALA , as “charismatic”. But what were his politics? In World War Two al-Qawuqji had thrown in his lot with the Nazis, going to Berlin with the originally-British-appointed nominal leader of the Palestinian Muslims, the Mufti of Jerusalem. He became a colonel in the German army. As the United Nations moved towards approving a Jewish state, he responded: “We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish”.

On 12-13 May 1948, Jordan’s Arab Legion (still then officially part of the British Army) and local Arab militias destroyed four Jewish settlements, the Etzion Bloc, killing about 130 people, some massacred after surrendering. After the massacre, the Legion managed the safe evacuation of the remaining settlers who surrendered.

Because Arab forces conquered few Jewish settlements, there were far fewer incidents like that in the 1947-9 warfare than of Israeli atrocities. But Pappé airbrushes the massacre. He writes only: “The Legion rescued the Gush Etzion settlers from the hands of angry Palestinian paramilitary groups”.

Raz sums up: “Pappé is disgusted with the Israelis”. Pappé denounces, fairly, Israeli government failure to acknowledge old Arab buildings and villages. But then he insists all old-Arab sites are “beautiful”; wherever Jews have built since 1948, is not. The story becomes one of a predetermined drive to replace beauty by ugliness.

What really happened? After pogroms in the Russian empire in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the Dreyfus affair in France, some became convinced that persecution of Jews in Europe was not fading away, as it had appeared set to do. Adapting a common social recipe of the time (Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, USA, Australia…) they thought an answer lay in creating a new Jewish society by settlements somewhere.

Palestine was sparsely populated at the time (about 500,000 where there are 15 million now). It not been a political unit for centuries. It was a vaguely defined region within the Ottoman Empire.

The Jewish settlers shared the complacency common among Europeans at the time about European settlement. There were then many more Jews in Europe than there would be by 1945. If only a fraction went to Palestine, they would be a majority. The Arabs would be surely better off than under Ottoman rule.

However, Arab nationalism began to stir soon after Zionist efforts began. Aiming to win Arab and Jewish support in World War One, Britain made promises to both. Those included British protection for Jewish settlement in Palestine, which Britain seized in 1918. By 1921 there were the first Arab riots against Jews. That the Arabs were resentful about incomers is no more surprising than that the Zionists were inclined to “look down on” the Arabs.

In Europe, Marxists disputed with the Zionists, arguing that Jews should instead join the class struggle in the countries where they lived. In the late 1920s it looked as if the Zionist experiment would fade away as one of history’s dead ends. More Jews were leaving Palestine than were arriving.

Hitler’s coming to power changed everything. (As Khalidi notes: not Pappé, though his own parents came to Palestine from Germany in the 1930s).

More Jews fleeing to Palestine, as other countries closed their borders to them. More Arab revolt. Britain moving against Jewish migration and land purchases so as to stabilise its Empire’s hold on other Arab lands.

After 1945, Holocaust survivors in Europe wanted to go to Palestine. The British blocked them. The Palestinian leadership had bet on Germany in World War Two, and was dispersed and discredited. The Jews in Palestine, now a third of the population there and a majority in the big cities, warred against the British occupying forces. Britain joined with the USA to recommend a binational state in Palestine. That had no Arab and few Jewish takers. Britain then gave up and referred the issue to the UN.

Seeing two nations now in the territory, the UN voted for partition, and made no provision for organising it. Palestinian militias and the ALA went to war against the Jews. When the British quit in May 1948, the Jewish community declared a state. Now the Arab states invaded. Despite their much larger populations and larger armies, they were ill-prepared and ill-coordinated, and lost.

The Jewish forces fought as embittered nationalists, intent on defensible borders whatever the cost to others. It was a war with no umpire.

“Transfer” of populations was not a special Jewish idea. In the 1920s the big powers had overseen “transfer” of 1.6 million in a deal after the Greece-Turkey war. The British government had proposed a small “transfer” in a failed 1937 plan for Palestine.

Morris uses the word “atrocity” often in his books on 1948, and with good reason. Pappé is not wrong in being angry. He is wrong in building a sort of conspiracy theory out of his disgust at his own people becoming mean-minded and brutal as communities do in poisoned national wars.

For him it was the work of “the Jews who, since the late 19th century, wished to uproot” the Palestinians. “The aim of the Zionist project has always been to construct and then defend a ‘white’ (Western) fortress in a ‘black’ (Arab) world… Their primary goal is to keep the population of the state ‘white’, that is, non-Arab”.

Such is the thinking behind the slogans on Gaza demonstrations about “75 years of Nakba”, interpreting the discriminations against Arabs in Israel since 1948 as an irresolute form of the eternal conspiracy. In fact the Arab population of Israel is 20% today as it was in 1950. There has been nothing like the decline in the Protestant percentage in the 26 Counties of Ireland from 10% in 1891 to 3% in 1991.

In Pappé’s world-view, some people are racist, but then the Jews… something else again. They are set on scanning for places where “black” people live and replacing them with “white” people.

Probably a majority of today’s Israeli Jews have heritage from Arab countries, Ethiopia, Iran, or such, and are no more “white” than Arabs. In any case, where did the Jews, a dispersed and persecuted minority, get a predetermined power to “uproot” remote areas at will? And why would they make the effort?

Just more of the malign intentions and powers that conspiracy theories have attributed to Jews for centuries now?

The usual answers are either that the USA wanted to dominate the Middle East for the sake of oil, and found Israel its best local agent to do that (but then why was Israel the only ally which the USA pointedly did not want in its coalition for Iraq in 2003?); or, conversely, that Israel, by dint of “the Zionist lobby”, has been able to suborn the USA for its own local-imperialistic interests.

Pappé gives neither answer. In the detail of his account Khalidi refutes all such simplistic stories.

Khalidi shows, for example, that the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA were wary of the Palestinian Jews in the 1940s; that the USA briefly reversed its support for the UN partition plan in March 1948; that the USA pressed hard for return of the Palestinian refugees for a short while after 1949; that the modern full-scale US-Israel alliance dates only from 1967, when the USA became convinced that Israel was both the most stable ally it could hope for in the region and the strongest; and that even since then the US has often gone out of lockstep with Israel.

In the title of his book, though, he contradicts the detail. The chapters are headed First, Second… up to Sixth Declaration of War, saying that Britain, then the USA and USSR, then a more autonomous Israel in 1967, etc. repeatedly “declared war” on “Palestine”.

The kernel of truth, I guess, is that the Jewish settlement in Palestine survived only because, each time an old source of strength peeled away, it found a new one. But is Khalidi arguing that Zionists had programmed it all in advance? That the Jewish settlers had some unique power to gain allies? That it has been a single “war”, a single read-out over a hundred years of evil Jewish plans against a stable entity called “Palestine”? That the entity has been passive all through?

In detail, certainly not. But the oddity of the title and the chapter headings may connect to an oddity in Khalidi’s indications of possible agency for progress.

He deplores at length Palestinian ineptitude at winning over opinion in the USA (by which he seems to mean ruling-class opinion). In some generalisations he seems to say that the USA could never support Palestinian rights, but in detail he describes himself working with the PLO on that political effort, and registers frustration as if he thinks with better backup he could have had successes.

So the lever for change is to shift opinion in the USA? Khalidi, though only in passing, backs BDS (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions”).

Even if BDS were good for winning support in the USA or Europe – and I think it is not – it is certainly bad for connections and help for groups within Israel which support Palestinian rights. Khalidi is unfussed about that.

He does not explicitly denounce the Israeli left as Pappé does, and he is aware that since 1982 there has been a section of Israeli society – of fluctuating strength, and weaker in recent years – looking for democratic redress. But he sees no important lever for change in those groups within Israel, not even in those like Standing Together with roots in Israel’s 20% Palestinian minority, which these days is the segment of Palestinians with the greatest social power and freedom to act.

He does not look instead to Hamas – “uncompromising and antisemitic… extremely conservative social positions”. He is aware that autonomy under the Oslo Accords has left the Palestinians in the West Bank politically and economically weaker than direct Israeli rule did: the Israeli army does not have to try to control the streets in the 160-odd separate patches of land under Palestinian Authority oversight, and can do what it likes around them in Area C. But his answer seems to be external agency – BDS, not so much a a way of pressurising the Israeli government, but first as a lever to budge the US ruling class.

His book is still worth reading. Pappé’s, not so much.

Martin Thomas is a London-based mathematics teacher and editor of Solidarity.

This text was first published on the website of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

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