Golda Meir, a prime minister of Israel, once said that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. “It is not as though there were a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Of course, 100 years ago there was no such thing as an Israeli either. The “Israeli” and “Palestinian” nations have come into being simultaneously, and in conflict. The assertion of one is often formulated as the denial of the other.
Palestinian-American academic and diplomat Rashid Khalidi argues that Israel is a settler-colonial state, and that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as “a colonial war against the indigenous population”.
The early Zionists saw their venture in 19th century colonial terms. The Jewish state, wrote Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, would “form a part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”.
Palestine was depicted as barren and sparsely inhabited. Insofar as the native Palestinians were acknowledged, it was suggested that colonisation by a more advanced people would be in their own best interest.
Khalidi shows that a nascent Palestinian nationalist movement did exist in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, and Palestinians were horrified at the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which committed Britain to the creation of a Jewish state on a territory where Jews were then 6 per cent of the population. The declaration made no mention of the other 94 per cent of the land’s inhabitants. Seemingly they did not exist. Ze’ev Jabotinski, considered the ideological godfather of what would become the Likud party, did, however, believe in the existence of Palestinians. In 1923 he wrote: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’.”
The way to extinguish their hope, he made plain, was military force.
Rise of fascism
The 1934 novel For Two Thousand Years by Jewish-Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian depicts the reaction among Jews to a public meeting addressed by Jabotinski. One man argues that the rise of fascism makes Zionism about Jewish survival. To which another retorts that Jabotinski is himself a fascist: “And no less of a fascist because he’s a Jew […]Land makes its own terrible demands […]What will you do with the indigenous Arabs, who also have the right to a natural death, rather than abruptly by Zionist extermination?”
Khalidi’s interweaves his history of Israel as a colonial project with the story of his own family’s dispossession and dispersal as refugees. His intent, as an American academic writing for Americans, is to challenge the narrative portraying Israel as a beleaguered victim of irrational Arab hostility.
The establishment of Israel in 1949 was preceded by the ethnic cleansing of important cities and towns, starting with the expulsion of 60,000 Arabs living in Haifa. The Jewish state gained control of 78 per cent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. Some 80 per cent of the 1.3 million Palestinians in Israeli-controlled territory were forced from their homes and became refugees.
In 1967 Israeli seized the remainder of Palestine. The Jewish “settlement” of the West Bank has continued since, and each peace negotiation has further eroded the Palestinian position.
The 1995 Oslo Accord gave limited administrative autonomy to a Palestinian authority, but corralled 87 per cent of the Palestinian population into 40 per cent of its remaining territory. The larger area was reserved for Israeli settlements.
The Palestinian economy contracted as “scores of military checkpoints and hundreds of miles of walls and electrified fences carved the West Bank into a series of isolated islands and scarred the landscape”. The situation for Gazans is still worse.
Colonial projects
Khalidi tells the story of the colonised well. Less complete is his depiction of the coloniser. He acknowledges that Israel differs from other colonial projects, but hesitates to explore the matter deeply.
As it happens I write this in what was the old Jewish area of Bucharest. The deeds to my apartment show that it was sold to Nathan and Betty Coppel – the name is Jewish – in March 1941. This was only weeks after the neighbourhood was ravaged by a deadly pogrom.
In an abattoir nearby the bodies of victims were hung from meat hooks by their tormentors. I imagine the sellers of the apartment saw this as a good moment to leave, perhaps for Palestine.
If Israelis are colonists, they are also Europe’s 20th-century refugee problem. Ireland was not alone in having no interest in taking in Jewish refugees, either before or after the Holocaust.
In 1943, Adolf Eichmann, the logistician of the Holocaust, had the rail stock ready to transport the Jews of Bucharest to Auschwitz; they were only saved because the Romanian authorities had a change of heart. They learned that they could profit by charging for Jews to be allowed to leave for Palestine. This practice of “selling” Jews to Israel continued under the communist dictatorship. The deeds show Nathan and Betty Coppel themselves sold up in 1950.
From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the story is the same for European Jews throughout this period. Extermination or emigration.
Arab regimes
And there is nothing about the Arab regimes that have surrounded Israel since its inception – whether those of Nasser, Saddam Hussein or Assad – that would provide these refugees or their descendants with much comfort. Khalidi notes that “Palestinians assume that their nationalism is pure and historically rooted while denying the same of Israeli Jews.”
Khalidi’s emphasis is on the exercise of Israeli power, and its toleration by its main sponsor the United States, and the disproportionate level of Palestinian suffering.
For example, in Israel’s three major attacks on Gaza – in 2008, 2012 and 2014 – over 3,800 Palestinians were killed. Most were civilians and almost 1,000 were children.
In contrast, the thousands of rockets fired by Hamas at Israel in the same period killed several dozen people. “Thanks to Israel’s excellent early-warning system, its state-of-the-art American-supplied anti-missile capabilities, and its network of shelters, the rockets were very rarely lethal.”
Khalidi mentions Hamas in another context for its “uncompromising and anti-Semitic program and commitment to violence”. The difference between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do damage.
Were you an Israeli in a bomb shelter you might be grateful for the power-differential and your military’s state-of the-art anti-missile capabilities. You might wonder how matters would stand if the situation were reversed.
And these “colonists” – Holocaust survivors and their descendants – might consider it a supreme irony to have gathered themselves conveniently into a tiny strip of land only to expose themselves to a second Holocaust. This fear is intensively manipulated by the heirs of Jabotinski’s militaristic vision.
There are those on the Israeli left who argue for a two-state solution and an end to the colonisation of the West Bank, and believe that security and compromise are compatible. But they lose elections.
Perhaps it is outside the scope of Khalidi’s book to explore this dimension of the conflict, the basis of which is psychological as much as political, but it would have been a truly great book had he been able.
