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30 April 2002
Deep Roots: Israel and Palestine - Part 1
by @jay Shenoy
As the world watches, the Middle East explodes thanks to the issue of Israel and Palestine. Most conventional TV media seems obsessed with the idea of Palestinian suicide bombers and angles its reports towards blaming the whole problem on them. Yet that makes no sense; why would someone feel the urge to strap a bomb to him/herself and commit suicide solely for the sake of taking others down as well? Some would give vague explanations about religious intolerance and the naturally racist attitude of those insane Arabs/Muslims. Others would mumble something about brainwashed fundamentalism. The first, aside from its incredibly hypocritical nature (just who’s the racist, again?), seems to neglect the fact that at one time, both Jews and Muslims lived in Palestine in peace. As for the second, religious fundamentalism to such an extreme degree does not just appear out of nowhere; it stems from dire situations where people feel that life is so bad that they may as well die in a way that they have been told will get them to a better place. What are these situations, and where did they come from? The answer to that stretches back decades to 1917, where a problem improperly handled and at times even ignored festered into the horrifying plague of hatred and revenge seen in the region today. Since the whole story is simply too long to tell all at once, it must be broken into three pieces; this one, the first, will explain all about the Palestinian Mandate, more specifically the events leading to its creation, the events that occurred under its existence, and finally the end of the Mandate.
Creation of Israel/Palestine
One of the most glaring reasons why the Israel/Palestine issue is so bad is that the area known today as Israel and Palestine was created without the consent or representation of the Arabs who already lived there. The story begins, ironically enough considering current events, with the end of a war. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had fallen apart, so the different pieces of it were divided up and redistributed. It was decided that Britain would gain possession of the area known as Palestine. In response to the will of the Zionist Organization, the British government passed the Balfour Declaration (UN DPR). The declaration very carefully said that Britain would support the Zionists’ will to establish a Jewish homeland in the state of Palestine. Note, however, that it proclaimed that it would do nothing to "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" (Balfour, James), a promise soon to be broken.
With the British government’s green light, the Zionists started encouraging mass immigration to the new territory. An oft-repeated Zionist slogan announced, "A land without people for a people without land," conveniently ignoring the 700,000 Palestinians living there in 1917 (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict). At the Paris Peace Conference in January of 1919, the Zionist Organization asked that the High Contracting Parties turn Palestine over to them so they could creating a Jewish homeland, announcing that the territory belonged to them because of "the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine."
The only notable hesitation came from US president Wilson, who wished to send a delegation to find the opinions of the current inhabitants of the territory (as is actually necessary according to the guidelines of the League of Nations). The Arabs answered through the delegation that they refused to allow their country to be turned into a Jewish Commonwealth; however, they asserted that they had no will to deny the Jews already living in their country equal rights. In light of the dissention of the Arabs, commission in charge of the delegation reported that the only way to enforce the "injustice of the Zionist programme" was through great military force. The commission further explained that such use of force would be an atrocity, especially since the Zionists’ claim to Palestine was "based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, [which] can hardly be seriously considered," (UN DPR). Sadly, the commission’s warning went unheeded. The Palestinian Arabs themselves were in no way silent themselves. A few months before the conference, non-violent protest had marked the anniversary of the passing of the Balfour Declaration. In the following years, two separate anti-Jewish riots broke out. A military inquiry reported the causes to be the Arabs’ anger at not receiving the independence they had been promised in WWI, in addition to the fear that the fulfillment of the Zionist plan would lead to being dominated by Jews (UN DPR). Next to a three-mile long neon billboard, this is probably the biggest sign of danger anyone has a right to expect; the British government and the League of Nations were apparently holding out for the billboard, however, and continued over the edge of the cliff.
James Balfour is recorded to have told that leader of the Zionist Movement in the US at the time that one of the biggest obstacles on the Zionist program’s road was an agreement made by France and Britain to consult with the Middle Easterners about their own future. He reasoned, however, that the agreement would be ignored because "we are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to reconstitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future." He further wrote in a memorandum that, unlike as had been done in Syria, in Palestine the Allies would not even "go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country," and that the "age-long traditions" of Zionism were far more important than "desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," (UN DPR). Apparently, the Allied Supreme Council agreed with Balfour, as it decided at the San Remo Conference on 25 April 1920 to place Palestine under British control. In 1922, the League of Nations approved the final text of the Palestinian Mandate, which started operating a little over a year later (UN DPR).
The Palestinian Mandate declared that it would do whatever was politically and economically necessary to turn Palestine into the Jewish homeland, but also promised to protect the civil and religious rights of all who lived in Palestine, including the Arabs. Almost in contradiction, however, it gave them no body that would represent them to the Mandatory and would protect their rights; in contrast, the Jewish Agency was formed to perform these vital functions for the sake of the Jews. Indeed, the Arabs had neither representation nor choice as to the composition or function of the Mandatory, which was to "have full powers of legislation and of administration" except as stated by the Mandate (UN DPR). Thus, it becomes understandable as to why they hated it and often found themselves alienated by it in their own country.
Palestine Under the Mandate
Palestine under the Mandate was full of tension, as the Arabs feared their country was being taken from them, while the Zionists sought to make their fears come true. The Jewish Agency, basically the sole representative of the people of Palestine to the Mandatory, trumpeted its racist long term intentions publicly. The Agency’s Constitution declared, "Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and ... the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people," (UN DPR). The clause blatantly states that acquired land is not to be sold to non-Jews under any circumstance. A later clause explains that the Agency will encourage colonization using only Jewish labor, calling this bigoted practice a "matter of principle" (UN DPR).
Considering policies like these, it seems understandable that the Arabs would have been suspicious of Jewish immigration, believing it to be part of a Jewish plot to seize their country by slowly becoming the majority. Therefore, one can see why they reacted to Jewish immigration so angrily. One would associate Jewish immigration at the time with escaping World War II, but this is not quite accurate. While immigration into Palestine was high in the years before the war, it peaked in 1935, after which it declined (UN DPR) before coming to a halt in 1940-1941 when the Nazis made Jewish immigration from countries under their control illegal (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict). Despite this, the Zionists did everything in their power to coax or coerce Jews into Palestine; in fact, they refused to attend the conferences held in Evian, France in 1938, where thirty-one nations assembled to relocate the survivors of Nazism, afraid that distributing Jews all over the world would leave none for Palestine (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict).
Obviously, the Arabs were not going to take racist procedures and open declarations of Israeli will to dominate lightly. In August of 1929, a dispute over the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem acted as a spark to ignite brewing tension. Riots exploded between Jews and Palestinians, leaving over 200 dead on both sides and hundreds more injured. Once the British government had ended the violence, a special commission was dispatched to look into the riot. The commission observed that before World War I and Britain’s acquisition of Palestine, the Jews and Palestinians had lived together peacefully without any notable violence for 80 years. However, three such incidents of serious attacks by Arabs on Jews had occurred in the last decade (UN DPR). Obviously, the Arabs’ distress, while expressed atrociously, was not mere religious prejudice. Another riot took place in 1933 thanks to massive Jewish immigration just when the Nazis took power in Germany. By all indication, this new violence was due to the old but strong resentment as the 1929 riot (UN DPR).
One of the worst examples of violence was a massive rebellion that started in April of 1936. Once again, minor disputes and fights lit the fuse of the stockpiled dynamite that was resentment towards rule and colonization by foreign states. Palestinian political parties merged into the Arab Higher Committee, which called for a general strike to protest. The British government certainly was not helping the situation by increasing the maximum amount of immigration it would allow, and soon violence flared to new heights. The government tried tactics like mass arrests to subdue the rebellious spirit of the people, but to no avail. The problem grew infinitely worse as Jewish settlers, who earlier had refrained from retaliating too destructively, began organized retribution against the Arabs through militant organizations and covert strike forces like Haganah and the Irgun Tzeva’I Leumi, as well as "special night squads" trained by British officer Major Orde Wingate. The strike did not end until the British government asked leaders of other Arab states to calm the angry people. The government then dispatched a Royal Commission to find the causes of the violence. According to the Commission, there were around 1000 deaths. Unfortunately, the peace was short lived; soon, violence flared up again, and a British District Commissioner was assassinated. Though it lacked hard evidence, the British government blamed the Arab Higher Committee, and proceeded to arrest and deport many leaders, although some higher officials escaped and persisted in guiding the rebellion. Scads of British infantry and armored divisions were brought in to try to control the violence, and military courts formed to sentence many death sentences and imprisonments. The guerilla attacks were slowly halted, while in London a long delayed conference attended by other Arab state discussed the Palestinians’ unrest and the causes behind them. Britain was finally able to end the violence with the help of these friendly states (UN DPR).
Meanwhile, the Royal Commission turned in its report on the situation. Despite its support of the British government and the Balfour Declaration, the report still expressed its understanding of the Palestinians’ concerns. It affirmed that the Palestinians saw the massive Jewish immigration and the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration in the Palestinian Mandate as bids to steal their independence, and so refused to work with the government established by Britain. The Palestinian government had been their target all along, asserted the Commission, since, while many Jews were victimized, the riots were directed mainly against the foreign regime. The Commission summarized the Arab Palestinians’ concerns as a collective will to be independent and a raging fear of having their country converted into a Jewish National Home. Commenting that these causes were the same as those of previous incidents, the Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into separate states, stating that such was the only chance for peace (UN DPR).
At first, the British government supported the commission’s recommendation and declared in a White Paper that it was at its wits end with the whole deal. The Paper continued by generalizing that the two groups could never get along (despite the lasting peace before Palestine became Britain’s), and that the best course would be to give the Arabs the independence they wanted while also creating the Zionists’ Jewish homeland by splitting Palestine in two. The proposal was met with fierce opposition. The Palestinian Arabs refused to accept the idea, and the Arab Higher Committee announced that the Palestinians had a right to the independence of all of Palestine. They backed their demands by continuing the rebellion for another two years. The Palestinians were not alone in rejecting partition; the Zionists would not accept half of Palestine either. While some Zionists supported partition as long as the plan were modified somewhat, the Zionist Congress refused to accept only part of Palestine as the Jewish State, claiming that the British government promised to follow the Balfour Declaration and Palestinian Mandate. Faced with flat refusal from both sides, the British government scrapped partition (UN DPR).
To try to solve the issue, the British government held the London Conference of 1939. Representatives of both the Arabs and Jews were invited to discuss solutions to the problem that was Palestine. The government resolved that if no answer were found here, it would do as it saw fit. Neither side’s will had altered in the least: the Palestinian Arabs remained resolute in gaining the independence Britain had promised them decades earlier, while the Zionists still clamored for the Jewish homeland allotted to them in the Balfour Declaration. Both sides refused to compromise their demands, so the British government decided the Conference was a failure and came up with its own plan. In the MacDonald White Paper, Britain rejected both sides’ primary demands. It decided to end immigration after five years and to eliminate the Mandate within a decade. It decided that Palestine would be a state "in which Arabs and Jews share in government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded…" (UN DPR). Sadly, the now deeply ingrained hatred and mistrust that infected people during the years of the Mandate would prove to serve as the perfect fuel for uncompromising extremists.
The End of the Mandate
The British government was soon at work trying to make the decrees of the White Paper realities. Palestine was split into three subsections, each of which had different land transfer regulations; two of these were meant specifically for the Arabs, while in the last anyone could buy up land. The immigration restrictions were also enforced, but the amount of immigration noted was below the maximum amount of immigration it had decided to allow for the five-year period (UN DPR) (possibly because of the Nazis’ law against Jewish immigration from Nazi-controlled countries (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict)). Considering the ongoing genocide of European Jews, the British government was lax and allowed a moderate amount of immigration after the five-year period (UN DPR).
The Zionists did not take these policies too well. An official document of the British government stated that illegal immigration became rampant after the enforcement of the White Paper. The document further explains that attempts to deport these immigrants to other parts of the British Empire were strongly opposed by Jewish terrorists, as was the case with the scuttle of the S.S. Patricia, resulting in the deaths of hundreds (UN DPR).
Unfortunately, this was only the appetizer; the main course that came later was far bigger and nastier. Various extremist Zionists groups, such as the afore mentioned Haganah and the Irgun Tzeva’I Leumi, began a campaign of terrorism against the government. Engaging in acts such as stealing arms from British forces, ambushing and nearly killing the High Commissioner, assassinating the British Minister of State in the region, bombings, and kidnappings, the terrorists raged against the White Paper’s policies. Indeed, much evidence suggests that the Jewish Agency itself was directing some of the more coordinated efforts, sometimes supporting militant organizations, sometimes doing its own dirty work (though generally under the name of the Jewish Resistance Movement). Even Winston Churchill, a strong supporter of Zionism, denounced the violence and called the extremist Zionists "a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany…" (UN DPR).
At this point, the British government had had just about enough of the Zionists, as can be expected considering all the hair-pulling their plan caused Britain, not to mention their recent terrorism. Finding the British government less and less willing to put up with them, the Zionists turned to a new source for support: the US. To garner support for Zionism, the Jewish Agency Executive journeyed to New York, where a meeting known as the Biltmore Program commenced (UN DPR).
The Executive’s statements boiled down to this: the Zionists reject the White Paper, the White Paper breaches the Balfour Declaration, and that Palestine must be open to Jewish immigration so that it could become the Jewish Commonwealth. They also demanded that it were immediately declared that Palestine would become the Jewish Commonwealth, that the Jewish Agency be given the power to basically become Palestine’s government, that Palestine be given a loan to help move Jews in, that Germany pay reparations to Palestine, and that countries internationally allow Jews to leave for Palestine. Their efforts were basically successful, as President Truman said in a letter that the British government allow an additional 100,000 homeless Jews in Europe to move to Palestine (UN DPR). Apparently, he was unaware that most Jewish holocaust survivors wished to move to the US (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict).
The US, now interested in the Zionist ideology, sent the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee in conjunction with Britain to check out the situation and give advice on how to solve the problem. At this point, the British government was so fed up with the whole deal that it wished to use to Committee’s report to help hand the Palestinian disaster over to the recently formed UN (UN DPR).
The Committee’s reports on the Jewish population were grim: most Jews in Palestine were growing more militaristic by the day, with common people acting more like militia than civilians. Perhaps even worse was the infectious idea that the only way to ensure justice for themselves was through violence (UN DPR).
The Committee observed that the Palestinians remained rooted in the belief that the British mandatory, and indeed the British government itself, had no authority over them. Their violent resistance to the idea of Jewish rule and uncontrolled Jewish immigration only burned hotter upon the start of the Biltmore Program (UN DPR).
The Committee’s recommendations to remedy the situation were somewhat naïve: it seemed to believe that if Palestine were made a UN trusteeship and kept that way for a long time before receiving independence, the problem would resolve itself. It offered no explanation as to how this peace would happen, it just assumed that the Jews and Arabs would somehow just become friendly. It then informed President Truman that the region was open to the Jewish immigration he had hoped for, partly by heading to holocaust survivor camps and polling the Jews about where they wished to go. Unknown to the committee, many Jews wished to immigrate to the US; however, the Jewish Agency’s agents had been on the scene to ensure that the Committee did not interview the "undesirable" witnesses, employing tactics such as filling in questionnaires meant for the refugees with answers matching the selected interviewees (The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict).
Despite the Committee, however, the British and US governments could not agree on exactly what to do with the territory. Therefore, they planned to London Conference to try to settle the issue. However, no Palestinian Arabs or Jews were truly represented since both groups had refused to attend. In the absence of true representation of the actual population of Palestine, several Arab nations were on the scene to look out for the rights of Palestinian Arabs while the Zionist Congress stood in for the Jews (UN DPR).
The Arab states made the first proposition. Their plan was that Palestine would stay one state with a permanent Arab majority. Any Jews living in Palestine who became citizens by living there for a decade would have equal rights with any Arab Palestinian, as well as special safeguards to protect their religious freedom. The lawmaking body would be a legislature in which the number of Jewish representatives would be proportional to the number of Jews in the country up to a maximum of 1/3 of the total number of representatives. Any laws pertaining to immigration or land transfer would require the agreement of the majority of the Arab members in order to pass. Any laws that changed the safeguards protecting the Jews would require the agreement of the majority of the Jewish representatives (UN DPR).
The Zionist Congress’s proposal was that Palestine would become a Jewish Commonwealth. Immigration would be allowed freely and the Jewish Agency would be given powers basically equal to that of a government (UN DPR).
Obviously, these two plans were completely opposite on some parts, so neither side could be completely satisfied. By the end of the Conference, the Palestinian Arab Higher Executive had finally joined the representatives of the Arabs states at the conference, while the Jewish Agency had started its own unofficial negotiations with the British government. Britain came up with its own proposal and presented it to the two sides; it received two rejections. The Zionists, now with a much larger number of Jews in Palestine than before, as well as the support of foreign powers like the US, was not up to a compromise. The Palestinian Arabs, backed by the other Arab states, refused to allow the Jews in Palestine to grow to a majority through uncontrolled immigration and thus take over their country, as they saw it. Neither side was willing to give an inch, and the conditions for massive violence were all present. Now thoroughly exasperated, Britain handed the governing of Palestine over to the UN (UN DPR).
Such was the situation in Palestine in 1947: two sides that could make rocks seem flexible and populations that were becoming increasingly convinced that the only way to be safe was to kill the "enemy." The dim outline of the current fiasco comes into view as one sees the problem in its earlier stages. Two conflicting ideas and positions, a government that tries to give what does not belong to it, and the idea that violence could solve problems instead of compounding them all combined to produce a disaster that claims the lives of far too many innocents.
This is just the first part of a three part history of the region; to find out what happened after 1947, stay tuned
Works Cited
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