Greater Israel aka Palestine: “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz

“Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz - The Origin Of The Dispute

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The Origin Of The Dispute

Posted on Sat, November 13, 2010 at 05:10 am CET

Sat, Nov 13, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

Aug, 1929: British troops march through Jerusalem after Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husayni incited Arab riots to kill Jews.

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The War Before The Six Day War

Posted on Thu, November 11, 2010 at 05:30 am CET

Thu, Nov 11, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

An Israeli soldier stands next to an Egyptian gun that had blocked the Tiran Straits (source: wikipedia)

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The War Before The Six Day War

This article is the first chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. In the next few days, we will publish each chapter from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

About the book: “A fully documented, dramatic history of the events which shaped the Middle East. Every key problem in the Arab-Israel conflict, every decision is carefully analyzed, from the questionable policies of Britain in 1948 to how the Palestinian refugee problem began. The territory won in the war of 1967, and the terrorist war of attrition is discussed.” (From the intro at ShmuelKatz website). To view the entire book online, go to Shmuelkatz.com. To buy the book, go to Afsi.org.

On May 14, 1967, the territorial limits of the State of Israel were the lines agreed upon in her Armistice Agreements of 1949 with Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Israel held none of the territories she was to gain as a result of the still undreamed-of war three weeks away.

No more vulnerable boundaries could be imagined. Along its middle strip, on the Mediterranean coast, the country was no where more than ten miles wide. Within this narrow waist were crowded the main centers of the Israeli population: Tel Aviv, with its smaller sister towns Ramat Gan and Petah Tiqva to the east, Bat Yam and Holon to the south, Herzliya and Natanya to the north. These formed its main commercial concentrations and most of its industry. Overlooking the strip from the east was the central range of Palestine’s mountains–the mountains of Ephraim–and holding these mountains were the Arabs of the Kingdom of Jordan. This central area of the State of Israel could be raked with shellfire, clear through from border to border, without a single gun having to be moved across the frontier. In the early morning of June 6, 1967, a shell fired from the Arab village of KalkiReh, beyond the northeastern corner of the coastal strip, sailed southwestward through half its length and all its width and exploded half a mile from the Mediterranean beach in an apartment near Masaryk Square in Tel Aviv.

In the northeastern section of the state, the Huleh plain, reclaimed from the swamp, dotted with Israel’s green villages, lay flat as a billiard table under the stark overhang of the Golan Heights – and the heights were held by the Arabs of Syria.

In the southwestern sector, the Sinai Desert, though almost empty of population, was nevertheless well provided with Egyptian military airfields, within three to ten minutes’ flying time from Israel’s densely populated coastal strip.

It was from these frontiers that on June 5, 1967, Israel launched her air force and her army against the Egyptian armed forces, subsequently resisted the invading forces from Jordan and Syria, defeated them all, and gained control of the remainder of western Palestine clear to the Jordan River, of the Golan Heights, and of the Sinai Peninsula – down to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.

It is to those frontiers of June 5, 1967–to be precise, the Armistice lines of 1949–”with minor insubstantial modifications,” that Israel has since then been called on to return, even by some of her friends. The pressures suggest that such a withdrawal from Sinai and the Gaza district to the gates of Ashkelon, from Samaria and Judea back to the ten-ninewide coastal strip – and the restoration to Syria of the Golan Heights above the Huleh Valley will bring peace between Israel and the Arab states. The way to peace, it is implied, lies in restoring the conditions that existed before June 5, 1967.

The central fact in the life of Israel in the period before June 5 was that in those restricted and confined and frighteningly fragile frontiers the Arab states threatened, planned, and tried to destroy her. It was against Israel in those borders that on May 14, 1967, the neighboring Arab states – Egypt, and after her Syria and Jordan, with some support from Iraq – began massing their forces and their resources to prepare for an imminent onslaught on Israel from three sides. In simultaneous action, they set in motion all the available means of communication with the world at large to make known Israel’s forthcoming annihilation. Israel saved herself from that threat and that purpose by the only strategy feasible in her topographical circumstances: a preventive attack on the forces of Egypt, the main enemy. Ile battles that followed on three fronts, for all their startling, spectacular, even historic success, cost Israel in six days twice as many dead in proportion to her total population as the United States lost in eight years of fighting in Vietnam.

The offensive that took shape in Arab minds and began to emerge in May 1967 was the climax – indeed, the grand finale – of eighteen years of hostilities against Israel on every front except the direct confrontation of the military battlefield. During those eighteen years, the various hostile acts of the Arab states broke every relevant paragraph in the Armistice Agreements of 1949, which all the states had negotiated and signed and which theoretically governed their relations with Israel.

Who today remembers a ship called Rimfrost? Or Franca Maria, or Capetan Manolis? Who remembers Inge Toft and Astypatea? The sailors who manned them, no doubt, and the merchants whose cargoes they carried. In the 1950s they, and many others like them, were actors in the drama of the continuing and all-embracing Arab attack on Israel.

The Inge Toft, a Danish ship carrying an Israeli cargo of phosphates and cement, was arrested in the Suez Canal in May 1959. She was detained for 262 days, until her owners, despairing of their legal rights, ordered the captain to submit to the demands of the Egyptian authorities. The captain released the cargo, and the Egyptians confiscated it. The Inge Toft sailed back to Haifa with emptied holds. In those 262 days, many protests were made in direct communications to Cairo and in debates in the United Nations Assembly against Egypt’s flagrant violation of international rights and decisions. None had any effect.

By sending a Danish ship through the Suez Canal, the Israeli government was in fact retreating from a defense of Israel’s absolute right to send her own ships freelv through the Canal. For eight years, Egypt had forcibly prevented Israeli ships from doing so. International advice – in fact the urgings of the Secretary General of the UN – had prompted Israel’s government to try the compromise of sending an Israeli cargo on a non-Israeli ship. While the imprisoned Inge Toff continued to demonstrate daily that the Egyptian government would not allow an Israeli cargo through even when carried on a non-Israeli vessel, new advice was forthcoming.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskold, informed the Israeli government that he had reason to believe that if, now, on a non-Israeli ship they were to send a non-Israeli cargo that is, an FOB cargo already the property of the non-Israeli buyer – Egyptian President Nasser would show what was described as moderation and allow the ships through the Canal. This proposal was accepted by the Israeli government, which even agreed to keeping the transaction secret.

The Inge Toft was thus still in detention when, on December 17, 1959, the Greek vessel Astypalea, carrying an FOB cargo, sailed into the Suez Canal. She was promptly arrested and detained. After four months of international protests, her owners also submitted to the Egyptians’ demands and allowed the cargo to be confiscated.

In the tense months of diplomatic and undiplomatic struggle over these ships, most of the world’s maritime powers protested volubly and often. Their own ships, however, continued to sail freely through the Canal. Egypt was thus given daily, even hourly, assurance that, except for name calling, she need fear no reprisals, no punitive or even admonitory action for violating the famous, hitherto sacrosanct and unequivocal Constantinople Convention of 1888. That international compact laid down that:

The Suez Maritime Canal shall always be free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or war, without distinction of flags…. The Canal shall never be subjected to the exercise of the right of blockade.

The daily unblushing procession past the imprisoned Inge Toft by ships of members of the United Nations made it plain, moreover, that the resolutions they had themselves passed in the Security Council against such a breach of international law need not be taken too seriously. The Council had passed such a resolution in 1951, when the Egyptians first blockaded the Canal against Israel. It had reaffirmed it in 1954. The resolution called on Egypt “to terminate the restrictions on the passage ‘of international commercial shipping and goods through the Suez Canal wherever found, and to cease all interference with such shipping.

The closing of the Suez Canal to Israel was one detail of the economic war which the Arab states pursued with unrelenting ferocity ever since the State of Israel was established. After signing the 1949 Armistice Agreements, in which they forswore “any warlike or hostile acts,” they progressively broadened the scope and deepened the intensity of an all-embracing range of economic hostilities.

The Arab states tried to starve Israel of water. First they refused to cooperate in an American-sponsored scheme for regional exploitation of the sources of the Jordan. Next they tried by force-employing artillery to interfere with Israel’s own efforts to realize her meager water resources (by diverting that part of the Jordan River that ran within her territory). Indeed, because the water shortage was a built-in weakness of Israel’s economic structure, throughout those years the Arabs saw Israel’s water supply as a prime target for their offensive.

The Arab boycott of Israeli goods and services had been launched against the Palestine Jewish community even before the State of Israel was created, and it developed from year to year. In the Arab countries themselves, all commercial relationships with Israel were forbidden on pain of heavy penalties. In fact, any contact whatever with Israel was prohibited. The governments enforced the suspension of all postal, telephone, and telegraph facilities for communications with Israel and prohibited all communication by sea, air, and rail. Any traveler whose passport showed that he had at any time been in Israel, or intended going to Israel, was refused admission to any Arab state.

The boycott was extended to every corner of the world. A vast machine saw to its organization and operation. Over the years, the central boycott office in Damascus compiled a long blacklist of firms the world over who traded with or in Israel, of ships that called at Israeli ports, even of actors or musicians who visited Israel or expressed friendship for Israel. From Damascus a campaign of pressure, threatening blackmail or coercion, was directed at all of them. Questionnaires and admonitory letters were sent to large numbers of firms in many countries to impress upon them that they would not be allowed to do business with the states of the Arab League if they tried to do business with Israel. In Damascus, a worldwide network of inspection was also developed to detect breaches of the boycott.

This campaign met with substantial success The Arab states, with their 100 million potential customers, exercised considerable appeal to manufacturers and merchants hungry for markets. In some of them, soaring oil production had brought about a steep increase in the citizens’ spending power. Many firms throughout the world consequently succumbed to the demands, or threats, of the Arab states and quietly joined in the boycott of Israel.

The tactics of economic warfare were early extended into every phase of international intercourse and activity, and to the utmost extremity. Planes touching at an Israeli airport were forbidden to fly over Arab territory; they would ask in vain for flight information or even rescue services from an Arab airport. The Arab states refused to cooperate with Israel in any international agency or operation whatsoever, including regional health operations, the war against locusts, the war against narcotics.

Economic warfare carried on day in, day out was the unchanging accompaniment to the military and paramilitary siege warfare which Egypt, Jordan, and Syria waged almost incessantly against Israel…In a seven-year period, Arabs carried out 11,873 acts of sabotage and murder. Israel suffered 1,335 casualties; of these, over 1,000 were civilians…In 1956, the campaign reached a climax. Suddenly the Egyptian government blockaded the Straits of Tiran, the only approach to Israel’s southern port of Eilat. On Sanab and Tiran–two tiny, otherwise unused islands in the Straits–they installed gun emplacements. From these, Egypt could straddle and control the southern gateway to Israel, which was thus cut off from direct contact with the southern hemisphere, with the east coast of Africa, and with the Far East.

Now, too, armed Egyptian raids into Israel became a daily occurrence. The infiltrators grew ever bolder. From short penetrations across the border, they developed a longer reach into the heart of the country. Individual acts of terror were carried out at the very gates of Tel Aviv.

Then, in the early autumn, convoys of Egyptian tanks began to cross the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula. A front line took shape in the desert along the demarcation lines with Israel and in the Gaza Strip, and behind the front line there was a mass of new armor.

The tanks gave concrete expression to the purposeful entry of a new element into the arena: the Soviet Union. In 1955, Moscow had begun sending into Egypt tanks and guns and planes in quantities unknown in the area since the major battles in the Western Desert during the Second World War.

With these preliminaries in train, the Egyptian government now reached agreement with Jordan, Syria, and Iraq for setting up a joint command. In an atmosphere of high expectation, they prepared for the invasion of Israel. The Israeli Army forestalled them. At the end of October, in a swift campaign, it forced the Egyptian Army back across the Suez Canal into Egypt, eliminated the offensive bases of the infiltrators, and reopened the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. But the United States government, displaying – not for the first time – considerable misapprehension of Arab purposes and the Arab character and a less understandable failure to grasp the elements of Soviet imperialistic strategy, bore down on Israel with heavy diplomatic pressure and the veiled threat of punitive economic action. Israel’s government succumbed, and its army drew back from Sinai and the Gaza plain. United States pressure was accompanied at the United Nations by undertakings, seconded by France and Britain and other maritime powers, that they would assure Israel’s freedom of navigation in the straits. There were even promises, though more nebulous, from Washington to assure Israel’s right of navigation in the Suez Canal. (When the time of trial came in May 1967, none of these promises was kept.)

Yet the swift defeat in battle had battered and demoralized the Egyptian Army. A large part of its armor and equipment was destroyed or captured. Then came two years of comparative tranquility.

It was not long before the Soviet Union invited Egypt to submit specifications of the arms and equipment needed to replenish her armed strength. The flow of tanks and planes and guns from the Black Sea ports to Egypt was renewed. Later, the Soviet Union began to supply arms with even more pronounced exclusivity to Syria as well. Thenceforward, Egypt’s and Syria’s relations with the Soviet Union grew increasingly close. The flow of arms grew ever greater. The Arab campaign of violence was resumed in 1959 … Across the various Armistice lines (except that with Lebanon), Israel was under constant attack: from Jordan-held territory in the heart of western Palestine, from the Gaza plain and Sinai, and from the Golan Heights to the northeast.

Tension and harassment were Israel’s daily bread. Especially popular with the Arabs were the artillery bombardments from the sheer bluffs of the Golan Heights on the Israeli villages below. There are hundreds of young people in Israel today, bom in proximity to the armistice lines of 1949, who spent most of the nights of their childhood, and many of their daylight hours, in underground shelters.

From time to time, the Israeli Army carried out retaliatory raids, on the principle of accumulative retribution. It usually succeeded in halting the Arab belligerence temporarily, but it could not stop it altogether.

The full significance of Israel’s vulnerability was made manifest suddenly, and to almost universal surprise, in May 1967. Ostensibly, everybody knew that Egypt was capable of turning Sinai into a vast offensive base threatening the very heart of the Jewish state. Ostensibly, it was common knowledge that the United Nations Observer Force, set up in 1957 after the Sinai campaign, would evaporate if Egypt decided to attack. Ostensibly, it was common knowledge that at a moment of destructive exhilaration the Arab states might be capable of united action, forcing a war on three fronts against an Israel outmanned, outgunned, and outnumbered in planes by nearly three to one and in tanks by more than three to one. These elementary facts were largely ignored even by many people in Israel itself–just as, since the war, Israel has been pressed to forget them again.

The facts became clear in quick succession. On May 14, President Nasser started moving his troops and tanks into Sinai. Three days later, the Syrians announced that their forces on the Golan Heights were also ready for action. On the same day, Nasser demanded the immediate withdrawal of the United Nations force from Sinai. The UN Secretary General, U Thant, promptly complied; the United Nations force disappeared.

Simultaneously, the Commander of the Egyptian forces in Sinai, General Murtagi, issued an Order of the Day. For greater effect it was broadcast on Cairo Radio on May 18, 1967:

The Egyptian forces have taken up positions in accordance with our predetermined plans. The morale of our armed forces is very high, for this is the day they have so long been waiting for, for this holy war.

Four days later, Nasser announced the renewed blockade of the Tiran Straits. Then on May 30, King Hussein of Jordan hastened to Cairo and there signed a mutual-defense pact with Nasser. All now seemed ready. In two weeks, a noose had been drawn around Israel’s neck.

Believing in the power of their numbers, in their unity, and in their ability to exploit Israel’s glaring strategic weakness, the Arabic leaders and spokesmen now articulated the simple objective of their policy and their labors: annihilation of the Jewish state.

The Arab leaders, as it turned out, had miscalculated. They were, it is true, united; they did outnumber the Israelis heavily in men, planes, tanks, guns, and ships; if they had been able to exploit these conditions, Israel’s topographical weakness could have been fatal to her. Israel is now being asked (or told, or cajoled) to resume that topographical weakness, or that topographical weakness with, in the words of the United States government, “insubstantial modifications.”

The Arabs’ war against Israel in the years between 1949 and 1967 was accompanied and dramatized by an incessant diplomatic offensive and a campaign of propaganda that grew progressively in volume and scope. Its purpose was not kept secret. It was repeated again and again. “Our aim,” it was epitomized by Nasser on November 18, 1965, “is the full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people. In other words, we aim at the destruction of the State of Israel. The immediate aim: perfection of Arab military might. The national aim: the eradication of Israel.”

Year after year, the autumn sessions of the United Nations in New York were converted into a sounding board for the combined verbal onslaught on Israel of the delegates of the ever-growing number of Arab states.

The war against Israel on its many fronts was pursued against an Israel that did not embrace the “occupied territories” of today. At that time, too, Israel was pressed and urged from many sides to make concessions. What could these concessions have been? In those years, too, Israel was pressed to offer concessions of “territory.” But it was the Arab refugee problem that was named as the prime cause of Arab intransigence, as the source of all the trouble in the Middle East. That was then proclaimed the major obstacle to peace.

Arab Refugees

Posted on Fri, November 12, 2010 at 05:42 am CET

Fri, Nov 12, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

Arab 'refugees' in camp in Gaza. The control in the Gaza Strip was until 1967 in the hands of Egypt. The Egyptian authorities maintained a strict separation between "refugees" and the ordinary population of the area. Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1961 (when Gaza was in the hands of Egypt): the Gaza Strip, "is not a hell-hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse. It is a jail." (Atlantic Monthly, October 1961)

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

Arab Refugees

This article is the second chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the first chapter: The War Before The Six Day War. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

Only a George Orwell or a Franz Kafka could have done justice to the story of the Arab refugee problem. For twenty years, the world has been indoctrinated with a vision of its origins, its scope, the responsibilities for its solution. The intent of this picture is, roughly, that in 1948 the Jewish people launched an attack on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, drove them out, and thus established the State of Israel.

The number of innocent peace-loving Arabs thus turned refugee was there you may insert any figure that occurs to you, such as a million, one and a half million, two million. Justice demands that the refugees be restored to their homes, and until that day, the world (everyone, that is, except the Arab people) must care for their upkeep.

The Arabs are the only declared refugees who became refugees not by the action of their enemies or because of well-grounded fear of their enemies, but by the initiative of their own leaders. For nearly a generation, those leaders have willfully kept as many people as they possibly could in degenerating squalor, preventing their rehabilitation, and holding out to all of them the hope of return and of “vengeance” on the Jews of Israel, to whom they have transferred the blame for their plight.

The fabrication can probably most easily be seen in the simple circumstance that at the time the alleged cruel expulsion of Arabs by Zionists was in progress, it passed unnoticed. Foreign newspapermen who covered the war of 1948 on both sides did, indeed, write about the flight of the Arabs, but even those most hostile to the Jews saw nothing to suggest that it was not voluntary.

In the three months during which the major part of the flight took place – April, May, and June 1948 – the London Times, at that time [openly] hostile to Zionism, published eleven leading articles on the situation in Palestine in addition to extensive news reports and articles. In none was there even a hint of the charge that the Zionists were, driving the Arabs from their homes.

More interesting still, no Arab spokesman mentioned the subject. At the height of the flight, on April 27, Jamat Husseini, the Palestine Arabs’ chief representative at the United Nations, made a long political statement, which was not lacking in hostility toward the Zionists; he did not mention refugees. Three weeks later (while the flight was still in progress), the Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, made a fiercely worded political statement on Palestine; it contained not a word about refugees.

The Arab refugees were not driven from Palestine by anyone. The vast majority left, whether of their own free will or at the orders or exhortations of their leaders, always with the same reassurance that their departure would help in the war against Israel. Attacks by Palestinian Arabs on the Jews had begun two days after the United Nations adopted its decision of November 29, 1947, to divide western Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The seven neighboring Arab states Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt then prepared to invade the country as soon as the birth of the infant State of Israel was announced.

Their victory was certain, they claimed, but it would be speeded and made easier if the local Arab population got out of the way. The refugees would come back in the wake of the victorious Arab armies and not only recover their own property but also inherit the houses and farms of the vanquished and annihilated Jews. Between December 1, 1947, and May 15, 1948, the clash was largely between bands of local Arabs, aided by the disintegrating British authority, and the Jewish fighting organizations.

The earliest voluntary refugees were understandably the wealthier Arabs of the towns, who made a comparatively leisurely departure in December 1947 and in early 1948. At that stage, departure had not yet been proclaimed as a policy or recognized as a potential propaganda weapon. The Jaffa newspaper Ash Shalab thus wrote on January 30, 1948:

“The first group of our fifth column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere….At the first sign of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle.”

Another weekly, As-Sarih of Jaffa, used even more scathing terms on March 30, 1948, to accuse the inhabitants of Sheikh Munis and other villages in the neighborhood of Tel Aviv of “bringing down disgrace on us all” by “abandoning their villages.” On May 5, the Jerusalem correspondent of the London Times was reporting:

“The Arab streets are curiously deserted and, ardently following the poor example of the more moneyed class there has been an exodus from Jerusalem too, though not to the same extent as in Jaffa and Haifa.”

As the local Arab offensive spread during the late winter and early spring of 1948, the Palestinian Arabs were urged to take to the hills, so as to leave the invading Arab armies unencumbered by a civilian population. Before the State of Israel had been formally declared – and while the British still ruled the country – over 200,000 Arabs left their homes in the coastal plain of Palestine.

These exhortations came primarily from their own local leaders. Monsignor George Hakim, then Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, the leading Christian personality in Palestine for many years, told a Beirut newspaper in the summer of 1948, before the flight of Arabs had ended:

“The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the ‘Zionist gangs’ very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.” [Sada at Tanub, August 16, 1948]

The exodus was indeed common knowledge. The London weekly Economist reported on October 2, 1948:

“Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit….It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

And the Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station from Cyprus stated on April 3, 1949:

“It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.”

Even in retrospect, in an effort to describe the deliberateness of the flight, the leading Arab propagandist of the day, Edward Atiyah (then Secretary of the Arab League Office in London), reaffirmed the facts:

“This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country.”

Kenneth Bilby, one of the Americans who covered Palestine for several weeks during the war of 1948, wrote soon afterwards on his experience and observations:

The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin el Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea. [New Star in the Near East (New York, 1950), pp. 30-31]

After the war, the Palestine Arab leaders did try to help people –including their own– to forget that it was they who had called for the exodus in the early spring of 1948. They now blamed the leaders of the invading Arab states themselves. These had added their voices to the exodus call, enough not until some weeks after the Palestine Arab fighter Committee had taken a stand. The war was not yet over when Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, stated in an interview with a Beirut newspaper:

I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing Partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem, [Daily Telegraph, September 6, 19481]

In retrospect, the Jordanian newspaper Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949:

The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.

The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade…He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean…Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.

As late as 1952, the charge had the official stamp of the Arab Higher Committee. In a memorandum to the Arab League states, the Committee wrote:

Some of the Arab leaders and their ministers in Arab capitals…declared that they welcomed the immigration of Palestinian Arabs into the Arab countries until they saved Palestine. Many of the Palestinian Arabs were misled by their declarations… It was natural for those Palestinian Arabs who felt impelled to leave their country to take refuge in Arab lands…and to stay in such adjacent places in order to maintain contact with their country so that to return to it would be easy when, according to the promises of many of those responsible in the Arab countries (promises which were given wastefully), the time was ripe. Many were of the opinion that such an opportunity would come in the hours between sunset and sunrise.

Most pointed of all was the comment of one of the refugees:

“The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.”

When the onslaught of the local Arabs had been in progress for over four months, and a month before the planned invasion by the seven Arab states, about half the population still remained in the area mapped out by the United Nations as the Jewish state. Now began the fantastic phase of the exodus. A large part of the population panicked. Suddenly the countryside was filled with rumors and alleged reports of Jewish “atrocities.”

A highly colored report of a battle near Jerusalem became the driving theme. At the village of Dir Yassin, one of the bases of the Arab forces maintaining pressure on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road, an assault by the “dissident” Irgun Zvai Leumi and the FFI (Stern Group) had continued for eight hours before the village was finally captured, and then only with the help of a Palmach armored car, which arrived on the scene unexpectedly. The element of surprise having been lost, the Arab soldiers could turn every house in the village into a fortress. Jewish casualties amounted to one third of the attacking force (40 out of 120). The Arabs, barricading themselves in the houses, had omitted to evacuate women and children, many of whom were thus lolled during the attack.

The Arab leaders seized on the opportunity to tell an utterly fantastic story of a “massacre,” which was disseminated throughout the world by all the arms of British propaganda. The accepted “orthodox” version to this day, it has served enemies of Israel and anti-Semites faithfully.

The effect of the story was immediate and electric. The British officer who had done most in the years before 1948 to build up the Transjordanian Army, General Glubb Pasha, wrote in the London Daily Mail on August 12, 1948:

“The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” And the refugee from Dir Yassin, Yunes Ahmed Assad, has soberly recorded that “The Arab exodus from other villages was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews” (Al Urdun, April 9, 1953).

Another quarter of a million Arabs thus left the area of the State of Israel in the late spring and early summer of 1948.

Where they had the opportunity, the Yews tried to prevent the Arabs’ flight. Bishop Hakim of Galilee confirmed to the Rev. Karl Baehr, Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, that the Arabs of Haifa “fled in spite of the fact that the Jewish authorities guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens of Israel.” This episode is described in depth in Days of Fire (New York, 1968). The Zionist establishment of 1948, in its eagerness to blacken the dissident underground, helped the libel along.

Only years later did the Israeli Foreign Office correct the record (in Israel’s Struggle for Peace, Israel Office of Information, New York, 1960) and in an extensive statement entitled “Dir Yassin,” published on March 16, 1969. An earlier Arab eyewitness account is a stunning refutation of the libel. On the fifth anniversary of the battle, Yunes Ahmed Assad of Dir Yassin wrote in the Jordan daily Al Urdun (April 9, 1953):

“The Jews never intended to hurt the population of the village but were forced to do so after they met hostile fire from the population which killed the Irgun commander.”

A report by the Haifa District HQ of the British Police sent on April 26, 1948, noted that “Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.” The Jewish effort was in vain. The police report continues: “A large road convoy, escorted by [British] military…left Haifa for Beirut yesterday…Evacuation by sea goes on steadily.” Two days later, the Haifa police continued to report. The Jews were “still making every effort to persuade the Arab populace to remain and to settle back into their normal lives in the towns”; as for the Arabs, “another convoy left Tireh for Transjordan, and the evacuation by sea continues. The quays and harbor are still crowded with refugees and their household effects, all omitting no opportunity to get a place an one of the boats leaving Haifa.”

This orderly evacuation took place as the outcome of truce negotiations after the Jewish forces had broken the Arab offensive and taken control of the city. The Arab military delegates, refusing the truce, asked for British help in transfers the Arab population to the neighboring Arab countries. The British provided facilities, including trucks. The voluntary nature of the evacuation was proclaimed a virtue by the leader and chief spokesman of the Palestinian Arabs. While it was in progress, Jamal Husseini, Acting Chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, told the United Nations Security Council:

“The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce they rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did.”

These documents were in the British police files taken over by the Haganah on the evacuation of Haifa by the British a fortnight later.

Most of the Arab evacuees did not go so far as the neighboring Arab states. Many went to towns in Judea and Samaria and remained there under Transjordanian rule. Others stopped at Acre, where they could look across the bay at their hometown and wait patiently for the day, a month later, when they would make their triumphant way back in the wake of the victorious Arab armies. The victorious Arab armies never arrived; instead, Acre was won by the Jewish forces, and the evacuees moved on again. Only now they were to be called “refugees.”

The Arab National Committee of Haifa, in a memorandum two years later to the governments of the Arab League, recalled frankly that “the military and civil authorities and the Jewish representative expressed their profound regret at this grave decision [to evacuate]. The [Jewish] Mayor of Haifa made a passionate appeal to the delegation to reconsider its decision.” When the Arab onslaught on Israel failed and the Arab leaders’ promise of an early return and a takeover of Jewish property was revealed as an irresponsible, malicious miscalculation, the theme of Israel’s responsibility for the flight and the plight of the Arab refugees developed.

The transfer of blame to the Jews was first of all a natural act of self-exculpation by the Arab leaders. It soon became a powerful propaganda weapon in the general war against Israel. Even sophisticated Arab apologists, pressed at times by the courtesies of debate to meet the challenge of the facts, parry the question.

Thus, Albert Hourani, in an article in the London Observer on September 3, 1967, talks of the “myth that the Arabs left willingly under orders from their leaders.” “No more than the most tenuous evidence was produced for this,” writes Mr. Hourani. How many of his readers would know the facts, would know that Hourani’s own words represented an act of collaboration in a monstrous fraud, perpetuated by the Arab leaders responsible for the refugee problem?

The fraud developed. Its next feature was the inflation of the numbers of the refugees. Mr. Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee during the war, is a typical purveyor. In his 1960 speech at the United Nations, he set the number of “expelled” Arabs at two million. The Arab spokesmen who succeeded him in the debate presumably considered this figure too high. On November 25, the Lebanese representative, Nadim Dimechkie, declared that “More than one million Arabs have been expelled.” Four days later, the spokesman for Sudan struck an average, speaking of the “expulsion of one and a half million Arabs.” These speeches are characteristic; ever since the policy of falsification was adopted, the figure used by Arab spokesmen has never fallen below a million. The misrepresentation may be epitomized in a comparison of two of Emil Ghoury’s statements.

Emil Ghoury to the Beirut Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948:

“I do not want to impugn anybody, but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem.”

Emil Ghoury in a speech at the United Nations Special Political Committee, November 17, 1960:

“It has been those (Zionist] acts of terror, accompanied by wholesale depredations, which caused the exodus of the Palestine Arabs.”

In 1947, there were approximately one million Arabs in the whole of western Palestine. (British figures, certainly inflated, put the number at 1,200,000; independent calculations claim 800-900,000). Of these, the total number actually living in that part of Palestine which became Israel was, according to the British figure, 561,000. Not all of them left. After the end of hostilities in 1949, there were 140,000 Arabs in Israel. The total number of Arabs who left could not mathematically have been more than some 420,000.

At the time, before the policy of inflation had been conceived, these were the commonly stated proportions of the problem. At the end of May 1948, Faris el Khoury, the Syrian representative on the UN Security Council, estimated their number at 250,000.

The even more authoritative Emil Ghoury (who twelve years later talked of two million) announced on September 6, 1948, that by the middle of June, at the time of the first trace, the number of Arabs who had Red was 200,000. “By the time the second truce began (July 17),” he said, “their number had risen to 300,000.” Count Bernadotte, the UN Special Representative in Palestine, reporting on September 16, 1948, informed the United Nations that he estimated the number of Arab refugees at 360,000, including 50,000 in Israeli territory (UN Document A/1648). After July 1948, there was a fourth exodus of some 50,000 Arabs from Galilee and from the Negev.

The inflation may at first have been accidental. The United Nations at once provided the refugees with food, clothes, shelter, and medical attention. There was no system of identification; any Arab could register as a refugee and receive free aid. Immediately a large number of needy Arabs from various Arab countries flocked to the refugee camps, were registered, and thenceforth received their rations.

Already by December 1948, when their total could not yet have reached the maximum of 425,000, the Director of the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization, Sir Rafael Cilento, reported that he was feeding 750,000 refugees. Seven months later, the official figure had increased to a round million in the report of W. de St. Aubin, the United Nations Director of Field Operations.

The inflation of the numbers was helped not only by the understandable readiness of needy and greedy people to take advantage of free upkeep. The International Committee of the Red Cross pressed the United Nations Relief headquarters to recognize as refugees any destitute Arab in Palestine and to let him have refugee facilities in his own home.

The Red Cross Committee made no effort to conceal its purpose; it claimed that it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate levels of need “between the refugees and the residents, as the Arab-occupied areas do not produce sufficient food or salable goods to nourish more than a small percentage of the resident population.” If this fraudulent addition of 100,000 to the rolls for food and medical care was feasible, it would indeed be “senseless,” as the Red Cross communication noted, also to force them “to abandon their homes to be able to get food as refugees.” At least 100,000 ordinary Arab citizens in this category thus became refugees de luxe.

To round out the picture, both the Jordanian authorities and the Egyptian administration in the Gaza Strip insisted that the refugee rolls include any Arab who would be described as needing support as a result of the war of 1948. Though the United Nations Relief and Works Administration made gestures of protest, it finally accepted this situation, thus becoming a major partner in the deception. Moreover, it submitted to the decision of the host governments to deny it any opportunity to investigate the bona fides of claimant refugees.

Many of the names of Arab refugees on the U.S. relief rolls were those of persons long since dead.

Nor were the relief organizations permitted by the host governments to investigate or to take steps to combat the large-scale forging of and trading in ration cards, which had become a major well-known “racket” throughout the Middle East.

“There is reason to believe,” reported the UNRWA Director as early as 1950, “that births are always registered for ration purposes, but deaths are often, if not usually, concealed so that the family may continue to collect rations for the deceased” (UN Document A/ 1451, pp. 9-10).

Nine years later, the UNRWA Director’s report for 1959-1960 equally laconically records that its figures of Arabs receiving relief –1,120,000– do not necessarily reflect the actual refugee population owing to factors such as “the high scale of unreported deaths, undetected false registration, etc.” (UN Document A/4478, p. 13). In October 1959, the Director had admitted that ration lists in Jordan alone “are believed to include 150,000 lneligibles and many persons who have died.”

The result has been the creation of a large, amorphous mass of names, some of them relating to real people, some of them purely fictitious or relating to persons long since dead, a minority relating to people without a home as a result of their or their parents’ leaving Palestine in 1948, the majority relating to people who, whatever their origins, are now living and working as ordinary citizens but continuing to draw rations and obtaining medical attention at the expense of the world’s taxpayers – all of them comfortably lumped together in official United Nations lists as Arab refugees and vehemently described as “victims of Jewish aggression.”

The economic interest of the individual Arab in the perpetuation of the refugee problem and of his free keep is backed by the accumulating vested interest of UNRWA itself to keep itself in business and to expand.

The United Nations Relief and is thought of as a band of dedicated humanitarians, devoted exclusively to the task of helping suffering refugees. The fact is that the organization consists of some 1,000 officials of whom all but a handful are Arabs who are themselves inscribed on the rolls as “refugees.” They perform the field work; they, that is, hand out the relief. The remaining handful consists of some 120 Americans and Europeans who man the organization’s central offices. Since UNRWA itself is thus a source of livelihood for some 50,000 people, no one connected with it has the slightest interest in seeing its task end or in protesting the fraud and deception it has perpetuated for over twenty years. The myth continues to live and to thrive, feeding on itself.

A strict examination of the reports of UNRWA itself will show that the facts of the fraud are essentially not concealed, rendering the misrepresentation in definitions and figures all the more deliberate. It is a misrepresentation that has been publicly exposed by diligent independent investigators. The American writer Martha Gellhom publicly made these charges. Somewhat earlier, a detailed analysis of every aspect of the problem, the fruit of study year after year, had been published by Dr. Walter Pinner, who was consequently able to confront the international authorities with the facts and to publish them in two books.

The UNRWA, disregarding its own reports in 1966, set the number of refugees at 1,317,749. In fact, the number of real refugees, as calculated by Dr. Pinner, was 367,000. The difference of over 950,000 is roughly made up as follows:

Unrecorded deaths 117,000;

Refugees resettled in 1948 109,000;

Refugees who became self-supporting between 1948 and 1966 (85,000 in Syria, 60,000
in Lebanon, and 80,000 in Jordan) 225,000;

Frontier villagers in Jordan (nonrefugees) 15,000;

Self-appointed nonrefugees (pre-1948 residents of “West Jordan” and the Gaza Strip registered as refugees) 484,000.

Of the real refugees, nearly half were in the Gaza Strip – 155,000 out of 367,000. The reason is simple. Control of the Gaza Strip was in the hands of Egypt. While Jordan, Lebanon, and even Syria did not restrict the movement of refugees or obstruct the efforts of the refugees themselves to rehabilitate themselves (provided they did not give up their status as “refugees”), the Egyptian authorities maintained a strict separation between “refugees” and the ordinary population of the area. The Gaza Strip, wrote Martha Gellhorn, “is not a hell-hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse. It is a jail.” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1961).

The outline of the refugee problem is sharp and clear-cut. Many of them in the parts of western Palestine annexed by Jordan in 1950, in Syria, and in Lebanon, took affairs into their own hands and became more or less self-supporting though, like many hundreds of thousands of their neighbors who had never been refugees in any sense, they continued to supplement their earnings by the free food, free medical supplies, and even the free, if inferior, shelter provided by UNRWA.

“There are numerous instances of full-time Government employees remaining on ration rolls because of the high income scale,” states a laconic UNRWA report in 1952. (UN Document A/2171, p. 16.)

Having established the image of a major problem, the Arab governments maintained and projected it. The fact that the vast majority of the Arabs who had actually left the Israeli part of Palestine had integrated into the life of their host country (or had emigrated to seek prosperity in Kuwait or elsewhere) did not disturb the myth.

The governments had only to block any official scheme for resettlement of the refugees, so that the relief rolls never decreased, and to ensure the continued existence of camps that could be photographed, showing people labeled “refugees” living in circumstances of various degrees of sordidness and squalor.

In the early years after 1948, Arab governments did from time to time pretend to consider plans for the integration of refugees put forward by the United Nations. In 1952 Jordan, Egypt, and Syria all signed agreements with UNRWA for the execution of a plan for integration that was to cost the United Nations $200 million. The plan was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN on January 26, 1952. However, they never took any steps to implement the plan. Not a single one of the projects it envisaged was ever launched.

In the years that followed, other schemes were proposed. Any plan that involved resettlement of the refugees was automatically rejected. The Arab states agreed on one form of aid only charity, the annual United Nations grant for relief, most of which was spent on people who had no need of it or who had never in any sense been refugees.

If there had in fact been even as many as a million refugees, their integration could have been effected in a few years. In this period, vast international experience accumulated in integrating and resettling refugees. Since the Second World War, there have been some forty million refugees in the world. The vast majority were either driven physically from their homes–where in some cases their families had lived for hundreds of years or fled under the immediate threat of physical danger or political oppression.

Immediately after the Second World War, some twelve million Germans were physically driven into Germany – West and East – from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania.

They left all their property behind. The transfer from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was carried out with the prior approval of the three great powers participating in the Potsdam Conference – the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States – in the summer of 1945.

The expulsion under these international auspices was carried out in such a way that many hundreds of thousands of refugees died in the process.”’ Their property was confiscated; nobody even suggested paying them compensation. The territory of Germany had been reduced by some 20 percent; now its population was forcibly increased by 20 percent.

In the months of chaos that followed the end of the war in Germany, when hunger and suffering predominated, there was for a while some talk of returning at least part of the refugees to Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Liberal President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia replied on May 9, 1947:

“If somebody should get the idea that this question has not been definitely settled, we would resolutely call the whole nation to arms.”

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was no less explicit:

“One very idea,” he said, “of involving millions of people in such experiments [of reversing the process of eviction of Germans from Poland] is unbelievable, quite apart from the cruelty of it both toward the Poles and the Germans themselves.”

The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, added his government’s opinion:

“Poland’s new frontier and the transfer of population are accomplished facts,” he told the Council of Foreign Ministers in London in November 1947, “and it is no use thinking they can be reversed now.”

The West German government, confronted with gigantic physical, political, and psychological problems of reconstruction, did not hasten to accept the longterm implications of absorbing millions of refugees.

Even five years after the end of the war, voices were still raised in the West from time to time, complaining of tardiness in their resettlement. Thereafter, the German government set in motion vast housing, education, and labor programs for the reintegration of fellow Germans into the national economy and society. It received no outside help; no international fund was set up; the United Nations Organization never sought, nor was it asked, to deal with the deliberate uprooting–sometimes forcible, always against their will–of twelve million human beings or with the problems attendant on their rehabilitation.

When, at the other end of the world, India was partitioned in 1947, fourteen million people became refugees within a few months. No international agency showed any sip of agitation at the terror-stricken flight of eight million Hindus from Pakistan and of six million Moslems from their homes in India. The Indian and Pakistani leaders made vain appeals to their peoples to stay where they were. They were certainly not to blame for the two-way exodus or for the bloody riots that preceded it. But both the Indian and Pakistani governments at once set about giving the refugees succor and homes. They first of all used the homes forsaken by the refugees who had fled in the opposite direction.

The exchange of populations in itself came to be viewed on all sides as a perfectly natural–indeed, as the best–solution to the problem of communal relations in the two states. Neither Pakistan nor India are wealthy countries, and the efforts of both peoples to solve the problem of absorption and integration went on for years. They received no international help; no special funds were set up to help them.

In 1947, after the Second World War, Finland was compelled to give up almost one eighth of her territory and at the same time to receive nearly half a million Finnish refugees expelled by the Soviet Union.

In 1950, the Bulgarians expelled 150,000 Turks with whom they had last fought a war two generations earlier. These refugees, their property confiscated, were allowed to take personal belongings up to a value of two dollars when they were sent across the frontier into Turkey. The Turkish government, neither the richest nor most efficient government in the world, planned and carried out an absorption program that was completed in two years.

Tens of millions of refugees were thus absorbed by their own people, speaking the same language, with basically similar cultural backgrounds. Some were absorbed by foreign countries that owed them nothing except common humanity. A minority–rather more than a million–was settled in a variety of countries through the efforts of the International Refugee Organization.

The perpetuation of the Arab refugee problem by the Arab states has the same central purpose as its creation: to bring about the destruction of the State of Israel.

No Arab leader has ever tried to hide or obscure this aim. They have repeatedly made it clear that their refusal to absorb refugees into their large, empty, and population-hungry territories stems from their insistence on the right of the refugees “to return to their home,” a “right” held to be identical with the right of the Arab people to Palestine.

A natural corollary of this right is the destruction of Israel as a state. The perpetuation of the “refugee problem” is part of the same policy that refuses to concede Israel’s very right to exist.

“Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem not based on assuming the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason,” stated a resolution of the Refugee Conference held at Homs, Syria, in 1957. “If Arabs return to Israel–Israel will cease to exist,” Gamal Abdel Nasser himself said in an interview in Zuericher Woche, September 1, 1961.

The Arab states hoped to achieve the right to introduce into Israel an army (labeled refugees) to blow it up from within as they have failed to destroy it from without. The cause of the Arab refugees has been maintained with the help of the Western nations and the manipulation of the United Nations Organization by the Arabs and their supporters.

United Nations decisions are based on the quintessence of the interests of the participating nations or, in many cases, on the simple principle of buying political credit. Where a specific issue does not affect a country’s interests directly, it votes for the side from which it expects some political benefit tomorrow–such is the basic law of nations. This circumstance has been exploited to the fall by the Arabs.

Having set up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the international statesmen received its yearly reports, ostensibly read them, ignored the falsehoods and fraud they reflected, deplored the plight of the refugees, and passed a new vote of funds that served to perpetuate the problem.

Never was a problem less deserving of international aid–certainly not from the governments who have not considered lifting a finger even in charity for the tens of millions of innocent refugees driven or forced from their homes in all parts of the world: from the Finns In 1945, to the Biafrans in 1967-1969, to the Nilotic Negroes in Sudan, and the ten million East Bengalis who fled to India while this book was in preparation. Except for the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland whom Hitler used as an excuse for war, and who on his defeat were forced into the restricted area of postwar Germany, the Arabs are the only people whose refugees are the product of their own aggression.

That aggression, moreover, was designed to nullify a resolution of the United Nations itself. And they are the only people, not excepting the Germans, who deliberately created a refugee problem with the intent to destroy another people.

It was no great problem for the Arab nations, with their vast territory and resources, to absorb the 400,000 Arabs who left Israeli territory in Palestine. Even a million would have presented no insuperable problem. In fact, the vast majority of the refugees have been absorbed. The fantastically wealthy oil state of Kuwait has taken in large numbers of Palestinian Arabs who fled as well as many Arabs who simply emigrated. From Judea and Samaria, the part of western Palestine controlled by Jordan in the years 1948-1967, some 400,000 Arabs emigrated voluntarily, without aid.

The Western statesmen have turned a blind eye to the fact that the Arab states, when they failed to destroy the Jewish state at birth, expelled or forced out large numbers of the Jewish citizens of their own countries. Of 900,000 Jews who were so driven out – and whose property was confiscated – Israel took in and absorbed nearly three quarters of a million.

All these Jews were private citizens, most of them members of families that had lived in those countries for many generations, some of them for hundreds of years before their Arab oppressors.

A central ethnic feature of the whole of what is now called the Middle East and of the North African coast for more than 2,000 years has been the continuity there of Jewish life.

At the time of the rebirth of Jewish statehood in Palestine, approximately one million Jews were living in this area. Arab propagandists usually claim that the Arabs treated “their” Jews with tolerance. This is, generally speaking, untrue. But except in Yemen, it is only comparatively recently that the Arabs became the rulers who could decide on the “treatment” of Jews or of other minorities in their states. That treatment was sad and horrifying. Yet the oppression and discriminatory practices of the period before 1948 are for the most part insignificant in the light of what happened to the Jews of those countries after 1948.

Their agony was not uniform. In Yemen (where Jewish origins are lost in antiquity but certainly go back 2, 00 years), the Jews lived for generations as second-class citizens in a primitive, medieval society. Restriction, discrimination, and humiliation had been their lot since the Middle Ages, an era which in Yemen has not yet come to an end. Though they were not expelled after 1948, the danger to their safety was so blatant that the exodus of the whole community was organized from Israel in one large-scale operation in 1949 with the passive consent of Yemeni authorities.

Arriving at the transit camps by bus, on foot, or on donkeys, from every comer of the mountainous and ragged kingdom, often after much harassment on the way 48,000 Jews, most of them emaciated and sick and suffering from endemic eye diseases, were evacuated and flown to Israel in what became known as Operation Magic Carpet.

In other Arab countries, a much more savage tale unfolded. The years 1948-1960 may well prove to have been the blackest period in the annals of the Jewish communities in Arab countries. Humiliation and discrimination were the Jews’ daily lot, then violence and looting and murder, then the closing of the borders to prevent their escape, only to have them suddenly opened again to engender the inevitable hasty empty-handed flight; such, in varying degrees of intensity, was the pattern. Most gruesome of all was the Jewish experience in Iraq and Egypt, which people in the West tend to treat as though they were civilized countries.

In Iraq, the range of repression of the Jews, growing in intensity from 1948, compares only with the worse excesses of the Nazi regime in the 1930s: violent searches, wanton vandalism, confiscation of goods, arbitrary extortion, often under torture; frequently, after release, rearrest and repetition of the process of threat, violence, and extortion.

These “Processes of law” were covered by the Iraqi Proclamation of Martial Law of May 1948. Its refinements were considerably extended two months later by the simple expedient of adding “Zionism!’ to the list of capital crimes. Under this amendment to the Iraqi Criminal Code, it was sufficient for two Moslems to swear that they knew someone to be sympathetic to Zionism to render him liable to hanging. Though few hangings were in fact carried out, a wave of terror against the Jews followed. In consonance with the spirit of the time, Jews were ousted overnight from government service, deprived of licenses as doctors, and prevented from obtaining new clerical posts. The schools and universities were “cleansed” of Jewish students– Severe restrictions were imposed on Jewish merchants and banks.

For nearly two years this comprehensive persecution continued. At the same time, any attempt by a Jew to leave the country for Israel was declared a capital offense. Sentences of hanging, long imprisonment, and – in most cases – confiscation of property were imposed on a large number of Jews who were thus caught. To round out the picture, even Jews who had left in earlier years were tried in absentia and sentenced.

Suddenly, in March 1950, the government hastily pushed through the Iraqi Parliament a law enabling Jews to leave the country, provided they renounced their Iraqi citizenship. Emigrants were allowed to take only small cash sums; the property they left behind in Iraq, however, remained legally theirs. This omission was corrected a year later. In March 1951, after all but a handful of the 130,000 Jews of Iraq had registered for emigration and a substantial number had already left the country, the property of all of them was confiscated.

In Egypt before May 1948, the severities of economic repression and the ousting of people from hardly won positions and status in commerce and the professions were only theoretically mitigated for the Jewish community by the fact that in their early stage they were claimed to be directed against all foreigners and minorities.

It was mainly Jews, however, who were the sufferers. Then a law was passed enabling the government to take over the property of anyone whose activities were deemed “prejudicial to the safety and security of the state” or who had been placed “under surveillance.” Though this regulation could apply to everyone, it was in fact applied almost exclusively to Jews.

Indiscriminate arrest and imprisonment followed as well as did pogroms in the streets of Cairo, with their inevitable crop of murder and destruction. Here, too, in order to ensure the maximum impact of terror. the gates were barred to departure and then suddenly opened in August 1949.

Repression was relaxed until 1954, when Abdel Nasser, in the second phase of the “Egyptian revolution,” took over power and brought down a new black night on the Jews of Egypt.

Thereafter, the regime of oppression, discrimination, and confiscation in a framework of police surveillance spread and deepened. Introduction of the techniques of Nazi Germany was facilitated by the generous employment of former officials of the Nazi regime who had fled retribution. Arbitrary confiscation of property was legalized and emigration was encouraged. The policy was accompanied by automatic sequestration. These measures, too, were directed against a few foreigners, but the victims were predominantly Jews born in Egypt.

A conference of World Jewish Organizations in January 1957 described how Jews were encouraged to leave Egypt:

“Large number of Jews of all nationalities have either been served with orders of expulsion, or were subjected to ruthless intimidation to compel them to apply for permission to depart. Hundreds who have reached lands of refuge have testified that they were taken in shackles from prison and concentration camps to board ships. In order to ensure that this deliberate creation of a new refugee problem should not evoke protests from international public opinion, documents proving expulsion were taken away from expellees before departure. Furthermore they were compelled to sign statements certifying that they left voluntarily. The victims of this barbaric process were deprived of their possessions.”

By 1960, some 80 percent of the 85,000 Jews in Egypt bad emigrated, leaving most of their property behind.” Most of the remaining Jews followed before the Six Day War, and a smaller number emigrated after 1967. Israel absorbed about 50,000.

In varying degrees of harshness, some 900,000 human beings were arbitrarily driven or forced out from these and the remaining Arab countries, notably Syria, Algeria, and Morocco. Their number is thus about double that of the Arabs who abandoned their homes in Palestine in 1948. Some 700,000 of them were brought to Israel and were absorbed into the country. Almost all came penniless. Their property, which certainly far exceeded the abandoned property of Arabs in Israel, simply enriched the states that had driven them out.

Could an Orwell or a Kafka really have done justice to the monstrous fiction called the “Arab refugee problem”?

We would like to thank ShmuelKatz.com for providing us with the material for this article. This article is republished with the permission of David Isaac, e-Editor of ShmuelKatz.com. For republishing rights please contact David Isaac directly at David_Isaac@ShmuelKatz.com.

The Origin Of The Dispute

This article is the third chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the second chapter: Arab Refugees. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, clickHere.

On November 29, 1947 – the day the United Nations Assembly decided to recommend the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state – there were no Arab refugees. The area allotted to the Jewish state was much smaller even than that established by the Armistice lines of 1949 (which lasted until June 5, 1967), to which Israel is now urged to withdraw. At that time, Israel had no “occupied territories from which to withdraw.

It was against that embryo state that the Arabs declared and waged their war. Its total area, amounting to little more than half of western Palestine, was roughly 15,000 square kilometers (about 6,000 square miles), Including the semi-arid Negev. The Arabs were thus assured of seven-eighths of the totality of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan as it was reward at the end of the First World War by all the nations of the world as the territory for the Jewish National Home.

The seven Arab states In existence in 1947 Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Transjordan– whose leaders decided to prevent the birth of Israel, contained an area 230 times larger than the projected Jewish state and a population 60 times that of its Jewish inhabitants who numbered only a little more than half a million.

The Arab appetite would be satisfied with nothing less than the remainder. It was, moreover, characteristic that the Secretary of this confederation of invader states, Azzam Pasha, in forecasting the success of the invasion, invoked the memory of the massacres by the Mongols and the Crusaders.

Such was the attitude of the Arabs in 1947, when they had in their hands all, and more than, the territory they are now demanding from Israel. At that time, they violently refused to share Palestine with the Jews in a territorial ratio of seven to one. They refused to recognize the Jewish claim to the country or to the smallest part of it; to acquiesce in the international recognition of that claim; or to abate this one jot of their designs on the whole of the area that had once been the Moslem Empire in Asia.

Less than thirty years later, the “historic rights” of the Arabs to Palestine, allegedly existing for a thousand years, had not yet been discovered. In February 1919, the Emir Faisal, the one recognized Arab leader at the time, then still striving for the creation of Arab political independence in Syria (of which he was briefly king) and Iraq (over which he and his house subsequently ruled for forty years) signed a formal agreement with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing the Zionist Organization. This provided for cooperation between the projected Arab state and the projected reconstituted Jewish state of Palestine.

Borders were still to be negotiated, but Faisal had already described the Zionist proposals as “moderate and proper.” The borders proposed by the Zionists included what subsequently became Mandatory Palestine on both banks of the Jordan as well as northwestern up to the Litany River — later included in southern Lebanon part of the Golan Heights later included in Syria — and part of Sinai left under British administration in Egypt.

When and how were the Jewish rights, historic and recognized, “transferred” to the Arabs?

The key to this question is reflected in the behavior of the British in 1947, when, in that year, the Arabs rejected the partition of Palestine and refused to set up the projected Arab state, the British administration, then still governing Palestine under the Mandate, refused to carry out the recommendations of the United Nations to implement the partition plan.

The British government made it plain that it would do all in its power to prevent the birth of the Jewish state. Britain announced that she would not —and indeed, she did not— carry out the orderly transfer of any functions to the Jewish authorities in the Interim before the end of the Mandate on May 15, 1948. Everything was left in a state of disorder. This was Britain’s first contribution to the burden of the nascent state.

When, immediately after the United Nations Assembly decision, the Palestine Arabs launched their preliminary onslaught on the Jewish community, the British Army gave them considerable cover and aid. It obstructed Jewish defense on the ground; it blocked the movement of Jewish reinforcements and supplies to outlying settlements; it opened the land frontiers for the entry of Arab soldiers from the neighboring Arab states; it maintained a blockade in the Mediterranean and sealed the coast and ports through which alone the outnumbered Jews could expect reinforcements; it handed over arms dumps to the Arabs. When Jaffa was on the point of falling to a Jewish counterattack, it sent in forces from Malta to bomb and shell the Jewish force. Meanwhile, it continued to supply the Arab states preparing to invade across the borders with all the they asked for and made no secret of it.

The British government was privy to the Arab plans for invasion; and on every diplomatic front, and especially in the United Nations and in the United States, it pursued a vigorous campaign of pressure and obstruction to hinder and prevent help to the embattled Zionists and to achieve the abandonment of the plan to set up a Jewish state. When the state was declared nevertheless, the British government exerted every effort to bring about its defeat by the invading armies. It was not by choice that one of the last operations in the war between Israel and the Arab states in January 1949 was the shooting down on the Sinai front of five British RAF planes that had flown across the battlelines into Israeli-held territory.

This was the culmination of a policy developed and pursued by the British throughout their administration of the Mandate — surely not the least of the great betrayals of the weak by the strong in the twentieth century.

The policy of Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was severely criticized, was not more than the logical, if extreme, evolution of the policies of Anthony Eden, who inspired the creation of the Arab League in 1945; of Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary who presided over the declaration of death to Zionist in the White Paper of 1939, and of their predecessors who shaped the “Arab Revolt” of 1936, who made possible the “disturbances” of 1929, and who were responsible for the pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920.

It is impossible and, indeed, pointless and misleading to explain, analyze, or trace the development of Arab hostility to Zionism and the origins of Arab claims in Palestine without examining the policy of the British rulers of the country between 1919 and 1948.

One of the great objects of British diplomacy as the conflict in Palestine deepened during the Mandate period was to create the image of Britain as an honest arbiter striving only for the best for all concerned and for justice.

In fact, Britain was an active participant in the confrontation. She was indeed more than a party.

The Arab “case” in Palestine was a British conception. It took shape and was given direction by the British military administration after the First World War. The release in recent years of even a part of the confidential official documents of the time has strengthened the long-held suspicion that the Arab attack on Zionism would never have began had it not been for British inspiration, tutelage and guidance.

In the end, it is true, British sympathy, assistance, and cooperation came to be auxiliary to Arab attitudes and actions. Those attitudes, however, had their beginnings and their original motive power as a function of British imperial ambitions and policy.

The two intertwined progressively throughout thirty years, until their open cooperation after 1939. At the last, in 1947-1949, they consummated an imperfectly concealed alliance for the forcible prevention of the establishment of the Jewish state.

British policy in the Middle East was not confined to Palestine. Its purpose, though now a defeated anachronism, informs British attitudes even today. It had its genesis in a historic misrepresentation: the inflation, out of all relation to the reality, of the so-called Arab Revolt during the First World War. This hoax was part of the intricate maneuvers of the great powers at the end of the war. It was at first directed against France.

Early in the First World War, after the defeat at Gallipoli, a group of senior British officers serving in the countries on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire in Egypt and the Sudan conceived the idea of bringing the vast Arab-speaking areas of the Ottoman Empire under British control after the war.

In the words of the then Governor General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, they envisaged

“a federation of semi-independent Arab states under the guidance and supervision… Owing spiritual allegiance to a single Arab primate, as its patron and protector.”

The early disaster to British arms in the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 provided the impulse. The British government called on its agents with contacts in the Arab-speaking countries to make an effort to detach the Arabs from the Turks. The men on the spot in Cairo and Khartoum decided that Hussein ibn-Ali, Sherif of Mecca, Guardian of the Moslem Holy Places, a semi-autonomous chieftain in Hejaz (Arabia proper), was the suitable candidate for levering all the Arabs out of the Turkish war machine.

While London was interested in immediate relief, the Arabists in Cairo and Khartoum contrived to steer and manipulate the relations with Hussein toward their own more grandiose schemes. Hussein asked a high price for his participation in liberating his people from Turkish rule, even at one stage threatening to fight on the side of the Turks.

He demanded all the territory in Asia that had ever been in the Moslem Empire. He was of course employing the accepted oriental gambit in a bout of bargaining: he asked for much more than he expected to get. Moreover, the negotiators were warned from London that the British government had made other commitments in the area, concerning Palestine, Lebanon, and the Mosul area in Mesopotamia (Iraq). In return for the promise of liberation in his own territory and the gift of part of the other Arabian lands, together with vast sums of money (in gold) and considerable quantities of arms, Hussein launched his revolt, led in the field by his son Faisal.

Toward the end of the First World War, and increasingly after the war, it became common knowledge and part of the popular literature of the age that in the defeat of the Turks a specific and notable part was played by the Arab revolt and that its leaders had enjoyed the indispensable cooperation and advice of a brilliant young British officer named Thomas Edward Lawrence.

This revolt, according to the account, began in Arabia, displacing the Turks, spread over into Syria and reached a climax in the capture of Damascus. In the end, so the story ran, the promises to the Arabs were broken. The Arabs based their later vociferous propaganda and their claim to vast additions of territory, including Palestine in this account.

The major part of the story of the revolt was a fabrication, largely created in Lawrence’s imagination. It grew and grew and was not exposed for many years. It well suited the makers of British policy at the time.

The aid given to the Allied campaign against the Turks by the Arab Revolt was minor and negligible; Lawrence himself in one of his outbursts of near penitence, once described it as “a sideshow of a sideshow.” ‘Though the Sherif Hussein did send out his call for an Arab rising throughout the Ottoman Empire, in fact no such rising took place. Nor was there a mutiny by Arabs anywhere in the Turkish Army; on the contrary, the Arabs fought enthusiastically in the cause of their Turkish overlords.

The operations of the “Arab Army” can be summed up in Aldington’s words:

“To claim that these spasmodic and comparatively tiny efforts had any serious bearing on the war with Turkey, let alone on the greater war beyond is … absurd” (p. 209).

Aldington further explains that the revolt was limited to the distant Hejaz, an area that was relatively unimportant to the Turks, and to

“desert areas close to the British army, from which small raids could be made with comparative immunity. Beyond those areas, where there was real danger to be found and real damage to be done, the Arabs did nothing but talk and conspire” (p. 210).

The operations in the, Hejaz itself were not conclusive.

A few weakly held Turkish positions were taken, but the Turks were not driven out; they held out in Medina for two years. In consequence,

“much of the effort of the Arab forces… say, 20,000 to 25,000 tribesmen plus the little regular army of 600 … was diverted and ran around on the outside of Medina and to attacks on that part of the Damascus-Medina railway which was of least importance strategically” (p. 177).

These demolition raids on the Hejaz Railway became the most famous operation of the Arab Revolt. Their avowed object was to cut the Turkish supply route to Medina, but in fact they did nothing of the sort. Any damage they caused was quickly repaired; its extent was no greater than the damage inflicted on the same railway by the same Bedouin tribesmen in peacetime as part of their customary marauding activities. When General Allenby decided finally to put the railway out of commission, he sent British General Dawnay, with a British force, for the purpose; Dawnay demolished it beyond repair.

During the final phase of the war, the British conquered southern Palestine. The prospect of victory over the Turks appeared over the horizon. Soon there would be an accounting of what had and what had not been achieved, and by whom. Now, therefore, came the last fantastic phase of the “Revolt.”

Allenby’s great breakthrough in September 1918 provided [the Arabs] with sitting targets which nobody could miss, and the chance to race hysterically into towns which they claimed to have captured after the British had done the real fighting. There was calculated purpose in this behavior. It was part of an agreement between the makers of British policy and their Arab collaborators. The Arab Revolt had obviously failed as a major or even a significant enterprise. Outside of Hussein!s own area of Arabia, it had not attracted any significant assistance from Arabs. In spite of efforts at persuasion by Faisal and Lawrence, the Arabs of Syria had refused to join the war effort.

No Arab had risen–even in the rear of the advancing British troops in southern Palestine. The Hejaz regular force was numerically insignificant, and the Bedouin tribesmen, traditionally well versed in the primitive techniques of looting forays, could contribute nothing to Allenby’s offensive through Palestine and Syria. The discussion on the future of the area thus threatened to remain a dialogue between Britain and France, who had reached agreement earlier on the division of the spoils.

Herein lay the British dilemma. French control of part of the area, to which London had previously agreed, ruled out the later plan by Cairo and Khartoum for British control of the whole area. Thus the objective of British policy now became to find a way to “biff the French out of all hope of Syria!” (in Lawrence’s words) or, in the blunter terms used–disapprovingly–in the British Cabinet by Lord Milner, “to diddle the French out of Syria.” This could only be done, if at all, by establishing a plausible Arab claim.

In June 1918, an ingenious solution was accepted by the British government. Osmond Walrond, an intelligence officer attached to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, read out in that city a statement in which the British government officially pledged itself to recreate in the areas not yet conquered the “complete and sovereign independence of any Arab area emancipated from Turkish control by the option of the Arabs themselves.”

On this principle Lawrence and the Sherifians now hastened to operate in order to establish the “facts” they required. As an Arab historian has summed it up:

“Wherever the British Army captured a town or reached a fortress which was to be given to the Arabs it would halt until the Arabs could enter, and the capture would be credited to them.”

Hence the wild chase that followed to raise the Arab flag in towns from which the Turks had already been driven by the British… At Damascus, there was a serious difficulty, and the maneuver did not succeed.

The capture of Damascus, the ancient seventh-century capital of the Arab Umayyad dynasty, was to have been the climax of the revolt, installing Faisal as the indigenous King of Syria before the French could object. General Allenby, the British Commanderin-Chief, ordered the officers in command of the combined British, Australian, and French forces advancing on Damascus not to enter the city.

It was assumed that the retreat of the Turks could be completely cut off north of the city. Only the Sherifian troops were to be allowed to pass into the city, to announce its capture… All this was worked out in advance between the British War Office, Allenby, and Lawrence. Because Faisal’s 600 soldiers were not adequate for the required pomp, one of his supporters was sent to recruit Druze and Haurardans to march in with what was now called the Northern Arab Army (it was, in fact, the southern contingent gone north).

Two unforeseen circumstances upset the plan. The Australian Commander, Brigadier Wilson, finding that he could not cut off the Turks’ retreat without entering the city, therefore went in, and so it was to the Australians that Damascus was in fact surrendered. Later, a British force went in to quell a revolt against the British and against the planned installation of Faisal. It was put down only by the application of considerable force.

Nevertheless, a Sherifian administration was installed, and the fiction was then promoted that the Arabs had captured Damascus.

From this scramble to claim territory by “right of conquest,” Palestine was excluded. No such effort was made by the Sherifian forces on either side of the Jordan. Coming as it did a year after the publication of the Balfour Declaration on the Jewish National Home in Palestine, this reaction underlines the fact that the Arab leaders felt no urge to oppose or obstruct the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

In Syria, the clash between French claims, accepted by the British in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915, and Arab claims, conceived and fostered by the British after 1916, was not finally resolved until 1945. In Palestine, the French effectively gave up their claims as early as 1918.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, providing for an international administration in Palestine, was the original reason for the exclusion of Palestine from the promises made to Hussein. But in 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

To achieve this promise of support in the restoration of their ancient homeland, issued after much negotiation and deep consideration, the Jews made a significant contribution to the British war effort. Whatever fantastic interpretations were later put on it, the British intention was clear and was understood clearly at the time. A Jewish state was to be established – not at once, but as soon as the Jewish People by immigration and development become a majority in the still largely derelict and nearly empty country with its then half-million Arabs and 90,000 Jews.

This plan would require the tutelage of a major power. The Mandate system of the then infant League of Nations seemed to apply perfectly to the situation. British overall control could be achieved by granting a Mandate to Britain. With a group of Arab states in Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia — “semi-independent,” with British mentors and advisors in Jedda, Damascus, and Baghdad (not to mention the British-controlled administration in Cairo and Khartoum) — and with, now, a British Mandatory Administration in Palestine, Britain would have unhampered control of the whole Middle East, from the Mediterranean clear to the borders of India.

Zionist diplomacy was now exploited by the British to achieve the consent of France to, in effect, her own elimination from any direct influence in Palestine. This was not an easy matter, especially in view of obvious British efforts to “biff” her out of Syria as well. The French, however, were also sensitive during the war to American opinion and had already acquiesced in the Balfour Declaration. In order to ensure the establishment of the Jewish National Home, the French agreed, in the end (and not without some mining and sapping), to waive their claims in Palestine by acceding to the grant of the Mandate over Palestine to Britain.

Considerable pressure had to be exerted on France over the question of the borders; in the north she did hold out successfully for the inclusion in “her” zone of the area enclosing the main water sources of Palestine (which remained largely unexploited). Northwestern Galilee was included m Lebanon, and Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights in Syria.

The claim to eastern Palestine — Transjordan on the other hand was, after a struggle, relinquished by France. Characteristic of the argument brought to bear by the British to persuade her was a leading article in the London Times, in those days an authentic spokesman for the British government. The paper called for the inclusion of Palestine as essential to the Jewish state and urged a “good military frontier” for Palestine to the east of the Jordan River “as near as may be to the edge of the desert.”

The Jordan, noted the Times on September 19, 1919, “will not do as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Our duty as Mandatory Is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life.” France consented; eastern Palestine remained part of the area designed for the Jewish National Home and thus passed into British control.

A dovetailed Middle East, with Arab client states and a Jewish client state coexisting and cooperating under a completely British umbrella, provided the motive power of official British policy in the period 1917-1920.

On December 2, 1917, Lord Robert Cecil had said at a large public meeting in London:

“The keynote of our meeting this afternoon is liberation. Our wish is that the Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians and Judea for the Jews.”

The Zionists, moreover, helped the Arabs and the British in the great diplomatic campaign that went on around the Paris Peace Conference and used their influence in Washington to urge the Arab claims. The Emir Faisal was not overstating when he wrote on March 3, 1919, to Felix Frankfurter:

“Dr. Weizmann has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their
kindness.”

France, pressing her claim to Syria and Lebanon, was granted control over them by the Peace Conference. In defiance of this decision, a so-called General Syrian Congress offered the throne of Syria to Faisal; he was subsequently installed in Damascus, where he set up an administration. The Supreme Allied Council in Paris retorted by formally granting the Mandate over Syria. and Lebanon to France. This duality could not last. In July 1920, the French ordered Faisal out of the country.

Faisal, bereft of the Syrian crown for which Lawrence and the Arab Bureau had labored so hard, was instead offered the throne of Iraq by the. British, though it had previously been earmarked for Faisal’s younger brother Abdullah ibn-Hussein, who was thus left without a throne.

At the end of October 1920, Abdullah therefore collected some 1,500 Turkish exsoldiers and Hejaz tribesmen, seized a train on the Hejaz Railway, and entered eastern Palestine. Here he announced that he was on his way to drive the French out of Syria and called on the Syrians to join him. There was no response, nor was Abdullah given any encouragement by the handful of inhabitants of Transjordan itself.

His continued encampment in eastern Palestine created a dilemma for the British. They had not yet set up any administrative machinery in what was largely empty territory— its 90,000 square kilometers were estimated to hold at most 300,000 inhabitants, most of them nomads.

The British feared, or were induced to fear, that the French, angered by Abdullah’s threats, would invade eastern Palestine. They therefore casually suggested to Abdullah that he forget about Syria and instead become a representative of Britain in administering eastern Palestine on behalf of the Mandatory authority. Whereupon Abdullah generously assigned himself to the French presence in Syria and took up office in Transjordan, and in time accepted it as a substitute.

The British government then recalled that eastern Palestine was part of the area pledged to the Jewish people. They thereupon inserted an alteration in the draft text of the Mandate (then not yet ratified by the League of Nations), which gave Britain the right to “postpone or withhold” the provisions of the Mandate relating to the Jewish National Home “in the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined.”

The Zionist leaders were stunned by this threatened lopping off of three quarters of the area of the projected Jewish National Home; its establishment had, after all, been Britain’s warrant for being granted the Mandate. But the British government countered with the proposal that, if the Zionists did not accept the situation, Britain would decline the Mandate altogether and thus withdraw her protection from the Jewish restoration.

The Zionist leaders – struggling with the material problem of building a country out of a desert and restoring a people, largely impoverished, from the four corners of the world – were moreover inadequately equipped with political experience to judge the emptiness of the British threat. They did not feel strong enough to resist this blow to the integrity and security of the state-in-building and to their faith in the sanctity of compacts.

Thus, as a purely British manufacture, filched from the Jewish National Home, torn out of Palestine of which it had always been an integral part, there was brought into being from the empty waste what subsequently became a spearhead in the “Arab” onslaught on the Jewish state, the Emirate of Transjordan, later expanded across the river and renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The elimination of eastern Palestine in 1921-1923 was only the first act —though stark, dramatic, and momentous — in a developing effort by the British to frustrate and emasculate the Jewish restoration that began in Palestine immediately after the British occupation.

At first, British policy was confined to the military administration in Palestine itself In colonial politics, nothing seems to succeed like repeated error and miscalculation and failure. The Cairo-Khartoum school of British officials in 1916 had grossly overestimated the influence of the Sherif Hussein of Hejaz on the Arabs outside his own area. His “revolt” proved a damp squib and had to be retrieved and embellished by a large fraud.

But these officials did not give up their dream of a large Arab state or federation of states, extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and from the border of Turkey to the southern seaboard of Arabia and supervised by Britain.

It was the men of this school who continued from Cairo to direct overall British policy for the occupied territory and who came into Palestine with Allenby or, in the wake of his victory in 19187 to form the military administration in Palestine. They were stricken to the ban by their government’s deviation from what they had conceived as the correct policy to be followed in the Fertile Crescent.

But the Balfour Declaration, the promise of Jewish restoration, even if shorn of its historical sweep, was seen by London as a clear quid pro quo to the Jews for their contribution to Allied victory and as a great moral reason for France’s renunciation of her claim. The policy it embodied became the indispensable (or unavoidable) condition for the Mandate being granted to Britain.

To the ruling group in Jerusalem almost wholly composed of leaders or disciples of the Cairo school— the Balfour Declaration guaranteeing Jewish restoration represented an intolerable interference in their plans.

Just as they continued trying to “biff the French bit of Syria,” they applied themselves to biffing the Zionists out of Palestine. While their government was still canvassing international support to grant Britain the Mandate in order to implement the Zionist policy, and while the Zionists were urging Britain’s claims, the first British administration in Palestine was busily engaged in open defiance of its government’s declared policy.

It was this group, all-powerful on the spot, that inspired and mobilized and established organized Arab resistance to the Jewish restoration. It used its power and authority as a military regime to establish facts, to create events, and to control them. It was this group whose views progressively pervaded the subsequent Mandate regime.

That is the background of the sudden appearance In 1919 of a militant Arab “movement.” In the circumstances of the time, the British military administration should have invited and ensured the cooperation of the local population, Moslem and Christian, in implementing London’s policy. What was required was dissemination of clear and concise information on the vast areas of Arabia and Mesopotamia that had been liberated by the British and their Allies and were to become Arab or predominantly Arab states; on the contribution made by the Jews to the liberation of Palestine, their ancient and unrelinquished homeland; and on the undertaking made to them in the Balfour Declaration and the safeguards in that declaration for the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

It might have been made clear that the Sherif Hussein had called on the Moslems to welcome the Jews to Palestine; information should have been spread about the cordial meetings between Faisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann and the agreement they had signed; and last but not least, the determination of the British government to carry out Its Zionist policy should have been confirmed.

Such a declaration would without a doubt have created the right climate for launching that policy.

“No Military Administration ruled the country which waited on its very nod,” wrote a contemporary observer. “It would consequently have required the maximum of moral courage, enmity or external support, deliberately to go in the teeth of the policy of the Administration above and in the Levant where the whole population is so singularly sensitive to every nuance of tyranny and of intrigue.”

The popularization of the Jewish National Home Policy was, however, farthest from the minds of the military administration. For more than two years, it neither published nor allowed the publication of the Balfour Declaration In Palestine. This act of omission was backed by a specific prohibition from headquarters in Cairo. The Declaration, wrote the Chief Political Officer to the Chief Administrator in Jerusalem on October 9, 1919, “is to be treated as extremely confidential and Is on no account for any publication.”

The group in power In Jerusalem made no secret of its hostility to Zionism. The whole of Its administration, even down to its social occasions, was permeated with an anti-Jewish atmosphere that reminded some Jewish observers of the Tsarist regime in Russia. Indeed, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then serving as a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion, which he had founded, and himself a native of Russia wrote:

“Not In Russia nor in Poland had there been seen such an intense and widespread atmosphere of hatred as prevailed in the British Army in Palestine in 1919 and 1920.”

Nor did the administration wait on events. They worked hard, simultaneously on two fronts, the second being in Syria, against the French. In July 1919, “Syrian National Congress” demanded the unity of Syria (that is, to include Palestine) and the installation of Faisal as king. The French expressed a fear that this sudden materialization from nowhere of a Syrian national movement, and the reversal of the popular feeling against the Sherifians was the result of a British intrigue. The British replied with denials and reassuring statements. In fact, Allenby in Cairo and his subordinates in Palestine, O.O.C. General Bois and his Chief of Staff, Col. Waters-Taylor, were secretly pressing their home government to “accept the situation”: to jettison their government’s pact with the French, to abandon the Zionists, and to give Syria and Palestine to Faisal.

The plan, however, could not be pursued as a bald British purpose. In the face of London’s official Zionist policy, it had to be covered by an Arab cloak, and quickly. The military administration itself began creating an Arab organization that could then be presented as the authentic voice and representative of “the Arabs” in rejecting and combating the Zionists and the Zionist policy of the British government.

Here began the history of the first Arab political organization, the Moslem Christian Association (MCA). Its first branch, in Jaffa, was organized at the inspiration of the District Military Governor, Lt. Col. J. E. Hubbard – who had formally proposed to his superiors in the administration the setting up of an Arab organization – and under the personal direction of the district head of British Intelligence, Captain Brunton. Not insignificantly, the most active and disproportionately numerous early recruits were Christian Arabs. Years later, a leading member of the military administration, Sir Wyndham Deedes, admitted that from its inception the Moslem Christian Association had enjoyed “the support and financial aid of the British administration.”

The purposes of the administration were now pursued by a stream of memoranda of protest and demands by the several branches of the MCA, dutifully forwarded to London with accompanying evaluations of their originality, spontaneity, sincerity, and the representative character of their signatories.

Memoranda, however, were not enough to generate quick action; a “situation” had to be created. Col. Waters-Taylor maintained contact with Faisal in Damascus, urging upon him action to assume power in Syria from the French. He assured him that the Arabs of Palestine were behind him and would welcome him as king of a “united Syria,” that is, including Palestine. He urged him, moreover, “to stand up against the British Government for his principles.” Early in 1920, this general effort at persuasion gave way to more specific inducement; money and arms were provided for the planned coup.

In Jerusalem, Waters-Taylor and Col. Ronald Storrs, one of the original members of the Cairo school and now Governor of the city, established and maintained regular contact with the handful of militant Sherifians, notably Haj Amin el Husseini, the young brother of the Mufti of Jerusalem, and Aref el Aref. In early 1920, Waters-Taylor suggested to his and Storrs’ Arab contacts the desirability of organizing “anti-Jewish riots to impress on the Administration the unpopularity of the Zionist policy.” A detailed critical report of all these activities was submitted to General Allenby by the political officer of the Palestine administration, Col. Richard Meinertzhagen. Allenby told him he would take no action.

The spring of 1920 was chosen for action. In March, the coup was carried out in Damascus and Faisal was installed as king. In order to achieve a sizable riot in Palestine, the country (in the words of the subsequent military Court of Enquiry) was “infested with Sherifian officers,” who carried on a lurid agitation against the Jews. As the court noted euphemistically, the administration took no action against them.

On the Wednesday before Easter, Col. Waters-Taylor had a meeting in Jerusalem with Haj Amin el Husseini and told him

“that he had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine; that Zionism was unpopular not only with the Palestine Administration but in Whitehall; and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, both General Bols and General Allenby would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish Home.”

That year, Easter coincided with the Moslem festival of Nebi Musa. Its celebration included a procession starting in Jerusalem, where the crowd was addressed by the Sherifians and told to fall on the Jews “in the name of King Faisal.” For doubters, there was an even more convincing argument: A’dowlah ma’ana – the government is with us. This was a demonstrable fact; all but a remnant of the Jewish regiments that had helped liberate Palestine had been disbanded over the preceding months; the few remaining soldiers were confined to camp at Sarafand. On the day of the outbreak, all British troops and Jewish police had been removed from the Old City; only Arab policemen were left.

The mob in the Old City, armed with clubs and knives, first looted shops. Then it caught and beat up or killed Jews and raped Jewish women. The Court of Enquiry-itself a creation of the administration summed up:

“The Jews were the victim of a peculiarly brutal and cowardly attack, the majority of the casualties being old men, women and children.”

Zeev Jabotinsky and Pinchas Rutenberg had in the, preceding days hastily organized a Jewish self-defense unit. Their way into the Old City was barred at the gates by British troops.

In the the first flush of enthusiasm, a British military compounded the offense in traditional fashion: The defenders were punished. Jabotinsky was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment and twenty of his followers were given lesser terms.

But Haj Amin and el Aref had operated too openly for any government publicly to ignore their guilt.

Though they escaped across the Jordan, they were sentenced in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment each. The British government, however much whitewash it was willing to splash over the events in Jerusalem, had to react to the outcry that went up in Europe and the United States at the phenomenon of a pogrom in Jerusalem. Nor could it ignore the factual inside information it received.

Meinertzhagen, as a representative of the Foreign Office, sent a new, detailed report derived from an independent intelligence unit he had established. This time, he bypassed Allenby and wrote directly to the Foreign Office.

As a result, the sentence on Jabotinsky was quashed; the most obvious conspirators, including Bols and Waters-Taylor, were removed; the military regime was replaced by a civil administration. Storrs, more subtle than his colleagues, remained, and he was not alone.

The Arabist purpose of the Cairo school did not change but was carried over into the civil administration of Palestine and pervaded and finally dominated the Mandatory regime.

It did not succeed in creating an Arab “nation” in Palestine. In 1918, at the height of his campaign to register Arab achievements, Colonel Lawrence himself had cautiously confessed in one of his confidential reports:

“The phrase Arab Movement was invented in Cairo as a common denominator for all the vague discontents against Turkey which before 1916 existed in the Arab provinces. In a non-constitutional country, these naturally took on a revolutionary character and it was convenient to pretend to find a common ground in all of them. They were most of them very local, very jealous, but had to be considered in the hope that one or the other of them might bear fruit.”

In 1919 and 1920, despite the historic transformation that had taken place around them, the Arabs had not changed. When in July 1920 the French in Syria decided on a firm stand and ordered Faisal to leave the country, he meekly complied. The popular forces which his British sponsors attributed to him did not show themselves.

In Jerusalem that Easter, even the Arab mob in the marketplace, before they attacked Jews, had to be fired by religious incitement, by the Invocation of a living king, by the visible evidence that their victims were defenseless, and by the assurance that their violence would be welcomed by the British rulers.

The political officer to the administration went even further: “Arab national feeling,” be wrote, “is based on our gold and nothing else”.

In the early years of the civil administration, there was still a running policy conflict between the British statesmen who had been responsible for, or associated with, the negotiations with the Zionists and the undertakings made to them and the purveyors of Laurentian pan-Arabism. The Laurentians, however, contrived to fill key posts in the Palestinian administration, and some of them were inevitably recruited to fill the posts in the Middle Eastern Department of the Colonial Office, which in 1921 took over responsibility for Palestine.

Haj Amin el-Husseini received the lowest number of votes and thus could not be included in the recommended list of three. Richmond launched an energetic campaign to get Samuel to appoint him nevertheless. He urged upon him the “expert” view that the poll was unimportant, that Haj Amin was the man the “Moslem populations insisted on. A virulent agitation was let loose within the Moslem community against the successful candidate, Sheikh Jurallah, who was described, among other things, as a Zionist who intended to sell Moslem holy property to the Jews.

Samuel gave way. He did not in fact send Haj Amin the letter of appointment and it was never gazetted. Haj Amin simply “became” the Mufti of Jerusalem. Thus, this man, imposed on the Moslem community, became and remained, for most of the crucial years of the Mandate, the director and spearhead of the war on Zionism.

The Moslem dignitaries, whom even the backward Turks had not accustomed to such outrageous interference or dictation, nevertheless took the hint. They knew now beyond any doubt what the British power expected of them.

When he started on his career, however, Haj Amin’s followers were few, and he had no sources of finance for the political task projected for him. This, too, had been thought of. The administration then set up a body called the Moslem Council. Haj Amin, now clothed with the authority of Mufti and authentic favorite of the British, was elected its president without difficulty. His position was entrenched. The appointment was for life, so that no opposition could ever unseat him democratically. He and his pliant subordinates became the arbiters of all Moslem religious endowments and expenditure.

Many Moslems became dependent on him for their livelihood. He controlled an annual income of more than £100,000 (Palestinian pounds), for which he was not accountable. (By today’s values, this would be equivalent in purchasing power to about $2 million.) Such was the origin of the organized “national movement” of the “Arabs of Palestine.” The means of organizing propaganda and violence against Zionism and the pattern of its organization were thus assured. A short localized attack took place in 1921 and simultaneous onslaught in several areas in 1929. This latter attack was again distinguished by the choice of helpless, defenseless people as its target – in Hebron the bulk of the community of rabbis and yeshiva students and their wives and children were slaughtered by the blatantly benevolent neutrality forces of law and order, one of whose first acts was to disarm the Jewish villages. In 1936 come the last and most protracted offensive, officially organized by an informal political body called the Arab Higher Committee, it was led by Haj Amin el Husseini, still Mufti and still President of the Moslem Supreme Council.

In the intervening years, the men of the Cairo school as they progressively increased their dominance in Palestine as well as over the central policies in the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office – were able to deepen and diversify their campaign against Zionism. During those years, their propaganda identified Zionism with Bolshevism – an image carrying instant demonic conviction with devout Christians as well as devout Moslems.

During those years, the Lawrence myth was built into the popular history of the age, and with it the story of the “Arab Revolt” gained credence. Now the Arabs, and even the Arabs of Palestine, gradually came to play a major role in the liberation of the country from the Turks. Now, too, the claim promoted by Lawrence and embellished by oriental imagination about how the Arabs had been “let down” by the British was broadcast as historic truth. The very real and significant Jewish share in Allenby’s campaign in Palestine on both sides of the Jordan was not mentioned. The Balfour Declaration was somehow twisted at one and the same time into a discreditable transaction and a meaningless document that promised the Jews nothing. During those years, in order to match the unique relationship of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the “rights of the Palestine Arabs” were manufactured and endowed with the fictitious historical continuity which serves as the substance of present-day Arab propaganda.

In Palestine, the measures to confine and restrict Jewish reconstruction slowly tightened. The British government was not free to make drastic changes since Britain had no sovereignty in Palestine. She was there constitutionally to fulfill the Mandate and was answerable to the League of Nations for her actions.

As long as the League had prestige in the world, it served as a restraining influence on the deepening tendency in London to turn the purpose of the Mandate from the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home, to the creation of an Arab-dominated dependency of Great Britain. Informed public opinion could not be disregarded, nor that part of the British establishment that fought back, though ever less effectively, against the Arabist erosion of its obligation to the Jewish people.

But while the Colonial Office and the administration In Palestine reduced the essentials of the Mandate, the League of Nations grew progressively less effective; its influence waned gradually in the 1920s, speedily after Its show of impotence over the Japanese seizure of Manchuria In 1931. In sum, Zionism was fought on every possible front: economically, in the social services, in the police and public service. The administration was so filled with officials hostile to the purpose of the Mandate that the exceptions became famous. The progress of Jewish restoration was retarded as much as possible.

The central and most effective weapon in the British armory was the control of immigration, and this was used with ever increasing severity. In justification, economics were Invoked; a principle called “economic absorptive capacity” was the guiding criterion. With the help of “experts” who asserted that there simply was little or no cultivable land left for development, the government’s control of Jewish immigrationadministered by a system of quotas became ever more restrictive. (At that time, there were less than a million people in western Palestine; today there are four million, with still undefined possibilities of growth.)

Through the country’s back door, in quiet defiance of its Mandate, it also allowed an Incessant inflow of Arabs. These came mainly from Syria and Transjordan, attracted by the progress and prosperity the Jews were bringing to Palestine. In a constant atmosphere of Jewish crisis and tragedy, In the twenty-six years of the Mandate period, the British allowed the entry of approximately 400,000 Jews into their national home and hounded and punished and, in the end drove back or deported Jews who were trying to steal in. In that same period, crossing the Jordan with ease, probably 200,000 Arabs came in to swell the “existing non-Jewish population.”

Yet, though the effort was sustained for a whole generation, from the early 1920s to 1948, neither the British rulers nor Haj Amin el Husseini with the machine he had built for propaganda and indoctrination, ever succeeded in converting the Arab population of Palestine into a national conscious entity, moved and animated by a hunger for “liberation,” proclaiming and asserting itself as a people with a positive aim. The fundamental reason is that it was – and is still – no such thing. A nation cannot be “created” In a generation or even in two, certainly not when essential ingredients are lacking. It was difficult to distinguish an Arab people altogether, not only in Palestine.

A sense of fraternal solidarity did exist In the Arab family, in its economics, in its sense of honor. It existed in the clan that might grow out of the individual family. It might exist in the village. Beyond these loyalties, there was only a religious sense, a sense of community in Islam. Even that, with the considerable sectarian fragmentation, never proved itself. In modern times as an effective force. There was little sense of belonging to “Arabdom.” To the degree that such a feeling ultimately did take root, it was expressed by an affinity to the large Arab people as a whole. Such an affinity could at least refer back to the ancient glory of a vast Arab Empire. This very frame of reference emphasized the absence of a “Palestinian” consciousness, which had in fact never existed and which could not be conjured up. Whenever, therefore, a reaction was to be provoked in the more militant, or more unruly, section of the Arab population, it was the vaguer generality of Islam or of pan-Arabism that was invoked.

Thus, the disturbances in 1929 were organized on a religious pretext – the alleged designs of the Zionists on the Moslem Holy Places and an Arab assertion of Moslem ownership of the Western Wall (of the Jewish Temple), which abuts the Temple Mount where the Moslems built their mosques. These disturbances, marked by the resolute permissiveness of the British authority, were characterized by outbursts of sheer slaughter. The massacre of the scholarly Jewish community of Hebron remained unrepeated elsewhere because of the defense provided by the newly effective Jewish Haganah organization.

The “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939, developed by British and Arab cooperation into an expression of pan-Arab policy, was far more ambitious. It was intended – and indeed came to be – the herald of Britain’s final abrogation of her pact with the Jewish people. For between 1929 and 1936, a drastic and dire change had occurred in the world.

The Nazis had come to power in Germany. The campaign of the German state against the Jewish people in Germany and throughout the world, the wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the Jews of Eastern Europe and poisoning the wells of the West, had created an unprecedented pressure on the gates of their national home. During the three years after 1933, when the official anti-Jewish terror in Germany began, some 150,000 Jews had entered Palestine by taking advantage of remaining loopholes in the immigration regulations. The plight of the Jews remaining in Germany and of the persecuted, increasingly desperate, five million Jews in eastern Europe was arousing considerable international attention. Opening the gates of Palestine, though the obvious solution, would have meant the defeat of the Arabists’ purpose. A few more years of large-scale Jewish immigration would have placed the Jews in a majority. If the Jews could proclaim a state, the Arab population for the most part probably prepared to resign itself to a Jewish regime if it did not interfere with its way of life – might well make peace with it, and the British presence would come to an end. The pressure of Jewish need and world sympathy could be countered only by a more powerful, irresistible force which would prove that it was impossible to achieve the Mandate’s original purpose, that Arab resistance was too strong, too determined. The Arab “Revolt” was the result.

It was not a revolt at all but a campaign of violence directed against the Jews. Haj Amin’s resources, after fifteen years of organization, were adequate to give it a country-wide though still primitive and improvisational-character. In 1920, the pogroms had been inspired and connived at by the military administration in an effort to nip its home government’s Zionist policy in the bud. In 1936, the Arab campaign of violence was a move calculated to further the British home government’s intention of finally burying Zionism. The policy laid down in 1939 in the White Paper was the preordained purpose for which the 1936 outbreak was needed.

The permissive attitude of the Palestine government to the campaign of violence was evident from the outset. The outbreak was signaled months in advance. Inciting speeches by Arab political and religious notables and inflammatory articles in the Arab newspapers were the order of the day. It was common talk among both Jews and Arabs that the Arab villages (as in 1920) were “infested with agitators” who were inciting the population to violence against the Jews and that once again the people were being assured that a’dowlah ma’ana. This process was not disturbed by a single overt act, no by any public statement, nor any warning of preventive or punitive action by the government.

When, in the face of this astonishing forbearance, warnings were addressed to the High Commissioner and to the colonial Office in London of the signs of the imminence of Arab violence, the reply was that the situation was under control. Similar reassuring statements were made after the first day’s toll of seventeen Jews killed by Arab mobs in the public streets of Jaffa under the nose of the British authority (Katz, pp. 4-5).

Had the campaign been in fact a spontaneous Arab outbreak, and had the government been determined to maintain law and order, the outbreak would have lasted no more than a few days and would have made little impact. A completely typical illustration of the administration’s solution to the problem of pretending to be putting down the “rebellion” is provided by the description by a British soldier on the spot, given in the London journal New Statesman and Nation, September 20, 1936:

At night, when we are guarding the line against the Arabs who come to blow it up, we often see them at work but are forbidden to fire at them. We may only fire into the air, and they, upon hearing the report, make their escape. But do you think we can give chase. Why, we must go on our hands and knees and find every spent cartridge-case which must be handed in or woe betide us.

In a similar spirit, the general strike proclaimed by the Arab Higher Committee (the selfappointed leadership of the Arab community, headed by Haj Amin el Husseini) and imposed on the Arab masses as the central weapon and symbol of the campaign was not resisted by the administration. It refuses to declare the strike illegal, in flagrant contrast to its swift crushing of an earlier strike in nonviolent protest by the Jews against Jabotinsky’s arrest after the pogrom of 1920.

When, subsequently, the “rebels,” mistaking British permissiveness for Arab strength, went beyond attacks on Jewish villages and on Jewish life and property and attacked British personnel, effective measures were taken, and the “rebels” were firmly suppressed.

The revolt, widely publicized, served its purpose. The British government proclaimed in its famous White Paper of 1939 its abandonment of the Zionist policy. After the introduction of 75,000 more Jews into Palestine during the ensuing five years, the gates would be closed. The way would thus be open for that ultimate semi-dependent Arab state that would complete the British pan-Arab dream in the Middle East.

This document was rejected as inconsistent with the Mandate by the supervising body of the League of Nations, the Permanent Mandates Commission. But the League of Nations was dying, and Britain treated it with appropriate contempt. Four months later, the Second World War broke out, and the British government executed the White Paper policy as if Palestine had been a British possession and the White Paper an act of Parliament. Unnumbered Jews thus were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe when, but for the rigid and unrelenting application of the provisions of the White Paper, they could have escaped to Palestine even during the war.

It may be that this grim consequence of British policy is the reason why the British government later willfully destroyed so many of the documents that could have provided direct evidence of the Palestine government’s behavior. After thirty years, the British state archives were, in accordance with custom, opened to the research of writers and historians. The entire correspondence between the Palestine administration and its chiefs at the Colonial Office in London relating to the records of the meetings of the Executive Council (in effect the Cabinet) of the Palestine government had been “destroyed under statute.” Another obviously important file so destroyed was that relating to the Haganah organization, which, if it had not been hamstrung by the government, was itself capable of putting a swift end to the Arab attacks. Yet another file destroyed was on “Propaganda Among the Arabs” the incitement against the Jews – which the Palestine government had often been charged with inspiring, sponsoring, or at least facilitating.

The sanctity of the minutes of the British Cabinet in London has, however, saved one item of direct documentary evidence on the British government’s relationship to the “revolt” and to the “rebels.” The disturbances were not even mentioned when the Cabinet met soon after they broke out. Nor was the outbreak discussed at the next meeting or the one after that. Indeed, five meetings went by before the Cabinet discussed any aspect of the situation in Palestine. At the meeting of May 11. 1936 three weeks and a day after the outbreak the Secretary of State for the Colonies presented the Cabinet with a memorandum, not indeed proposing or even announcing measures for putting an end to the violence, but reporting that the High Commissioner recommended that the most helpful means now open to His Majesty’s Government of preventing the present disorders from spreading and increasing in violence would be for an immediate announcement of a Royal Commission, with wide terms of reference, with power to make recommendations for lessening animosities and for establishing a feeling of lasting security in Palestine. [Cab. 23/841]

The Secretary of State “did not,” the minutes continue, “ask for a decision on the Terms of Reference to, or composition of the proposed Royal Commission which would require careful consideration, but merely for permission to tell the High Commissioner that His Majesty’s Government was favorable to the proposal so that he could sound the Arabs and report further” (italics added).

Nevertheless, in spite of this conclusion, the development of the “revolt” was made possible and given shape and thrust only by the introduction of help by Arabs from outside Palestine. One of the outstanding features of the “revolt” was the failure of the Arabs of Palestine themselves to act appropriately.

The Palestinian Arabs were comfortably aware of the existence around them, in addition to their original homeland in Arabia, of six more Arabic speaking countries, five of them predominantly Moslem, all part of the same sprawling territory which many centuries ago had been won and lost by the invaders from Arabia. Those Arabs who had dealings with the Jews got on well with them, and even if they did not like the idea of Jews, rather than Turks or British, ruling the country, they could not conjure up enough hostility to fight them. In 1929, the Mufti had incited them by distributing postcards which showed the El Aksa Mosque flying the Zionist flag an effective essay in photomontage. In 1936, the bulk of Palestinian Arabs still remained cold to the urgings of Haj Amin. A minority carried out the street knifings, the sniping at Jewish transport, the throwing of bombs in cinemas and marketplaces. The general strike was maintained only by the constant threat of force by the Mufti’s organization; and the threat was made more persuasive by the refusal of the administration to declare the strike illegal.

The effort of the Palestine Arabs was not enough to Impress the world. After the first phase of sniping, of attacks by street mobs, of individual bomb throwing, of shooting at transport on the main roads, there came a relaxation even of this effort. “Rebels” were consequently imported. A Syrian, Fawzi Kaukji, led a mixed band of Syrian and Iraqi mercenaries in the extended campaign directed mainly against the Jewish villages. The Palestine Arab population on the whole refused to cooperate with these liberators, often even denying them shelter. The outcome was a campaign of murder against the Palestinian Arabs. When Arab villages appealed to the British administration for arms to defend themselves against Kaukji’s invading bands, they were refused. In the end, more Arabs than Jews were killed by the “rebels.”

The intervention by Arabs from the neighboring countries was a reflection of the Cairo school’s dream. To its members, Palestine was only part of the larger scheme; it was needed only to complete the homogeneity of a large Arab “world” under British tutelage.

That dream was not abandoned. Indeed, the British government worked energetically to create a form of unity, or at least a, framework of cooperation, among the Arab states. In an Arab world riven with disagreements and jealousies, the Palestine issue was the ideal instrument to bring about such cooperation. To appear, without much effort, as the champions of their brothers in Palestine and at the same time to nourish the hope that the Fertile Crescent might become homogeneously Arab this was a prospect that appealed to the Arab states.

As early as 1936 the real or nominal heads of the Arab states or states in embryo were called in by the administration and generously agreed to “secure” from the Mufti and his Arab Higher Committee a temporary cessation of the revolt so as to enable an investigation of grievances. When the Mufti in turn graciously consented, the government permitted the main body of Fawzi Kaukji’s terrorists to go back across the Jordan, where they could rest and reorganize. Thereafter, it became a self understood facet of British policy that the Arab states had acquired a right to intervene in the affairs of Palestine. As though they were parties to the “dispute,” with a claim and interests in the country and in flagrant flaunting of the origin, the concept, the letter and the spirit of Britain’s own defined Mandate, the Arab rulers were invited in 1939 to a so called Round Table Conference. The predetermined failure of this conference (where the Arab representatives refused to meet the Jews face to face) was enshrined in the white Paper that followed immediately. Looking ahead, through the storms of the war that followed to the final consummation of the White Paper, the British government took active steps to create a formal instrument of pan Arabism. Thus, the Arab League was born. After Anthony Eden first mentioned it publicly in 1941, the then British Foreign Secretary presided over the necessary diplomatic exchanges and negotiations that brought about the formal establishment of the League in 1945.

The pan Arab dream, had meanwhile also assumed that large economic importance which had been part of its inspiration. The oilfields of Iraq proved to be but a small portion of a vast potential in Iraq itself and, even more, in Saudi Arabia and the British dependent sheikhdoms on the Persian Gulf. British commercial interests played a large part in their exploitation.

Thus, after thirty years, an Arab entity coexisting of seven countries Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Transjordan formally independent, semi-dependent, or on the way to forced independence and providing substantial dividends, to an impoverished British economy, promised to realize the dream, conceived in 1915, of an Arab confederation that would “look to Britain as, its patron and protector. Western Palestine was, still lacking to complete the picture, but its inclusion seemed imminent. It remained only to give the finishing stroke to Zionisin. That should not be difficult after the battering the Jewish people had suffered from the Nazis.

Zionism however, refused to die. On the contrary, with a drive and a passion that may have been unexpected by the British, a Jewish resistance sprang up, determined now, after six million Jews had been exterminated, to take what seemed the last chance to restore the Jewish independence that Britain had been pledged to establish and had now betrayed. In varying degrees of intensity before the end of the Second World War, and at increased and increasing pitch after the war, the Jews were locked in struggle with the Mandatory regime. Large military forces were poured into, the country by Britain.

Now, at last, the time had come for the assertion of a “Palestinian” Arab entity. The Arabs could theoretically have joined the Jews in a classic war of liberation from a foreign ruler and established a claim to partnership in the ensuing independence. Or, more credibly, the British having already promised them in fact independence which the Jewish resistance was endangering, they might have rushed in to help the British in, crushing the Zionists. In fact, faced with the two alternatives, they chose a third. They did nothing.

The Arab population of Palestine sat by while the Jewish resistance movement brought about the end of British rule.

The claim has in fact been made that the Arabs restraint was calculated. “Let” the Jews get rid of the British, then “settle” with the Jews. The facts prove otherwise. When the United Nations General Assembly decided on, November 29, 1947, to recommend the partition of Palestine and the establishment of two states, the Arabs did launch a countrywide attack on the Jews. But this, too, was carried out only with considerable aid from the British who maintained their presence in the country for another six months. Clearly, also, the attacking Arabs were a minority of the people, while the majority remained passive or evacuated in order to leave the field to the invading Arab states, who promised to drive the Jews into the sea. The Palestine Arabs were truly a people of noncombatants, they contributed very little manpower to the ensuing full scale war that was supposed to be a life-and-death struggle for them. The British statistics gave the Arabs a population of 1,200,000 in western Palestine. Even if, as is likely, this figure is an exaggeration, there must still, at a highly conservative estimate, have been 100,000 men of military age. The report of the Iraqi Government Commission, which subsequently inquired into the cause of the defeat established that the total number of Palestinian Arabs who took part in the war was 4,000. The Jews, altogether some 650,000, lost one-and-a-half times that number.

This confrontation of figures is symbolic of the affinity to Eretz Israel of the Jewish people and of the real Arab relationship to the country. The Arabs of Palestine were under no physical compulsion when their vast majority deliberately left their homes unguarded and exposed and moved off across the Jordan or into Syria or Lebanon or to those parts of western Palestine that fell under the control of the Arab invaders. The Jews, most of them the first and second generation of the organized return to their ancestral country, stood and fought and died for every inch of the land. This stark confrontation of affinities has its deep roots in the history of the land and the people.

The Jewish Presence in Palestine

Posted on Sun, November 14, 2010 at 02:53 am CET

Sun, Nov 14, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

Jews praying at Western Wall, Jerusalem, early 1900s (Source: The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection: Jerusalem)

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The Jewish Presence in Palestine

This article is the fourth chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the third chapter: The Origin of the Dispute. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

Promoted by two such powerful forces as Soviet assertions and Arab propaganda, the claim of Arab historical rights has become a central element in the international debate. By sheer weight of noise, it has impressed many otherwise knowledgeable and well meaning people. The facts of history are thus a vital element to understanding the conflict over Palestine and for placing it in its proper perspective. They are all readily ascertainable.

In our day, we are witnessing an astonishing phenomenon demonstrating and dramatizing the depth of attachment to the land of Israel in the heart by Jews long alienated from it both physically and spiritually: the explosion of Zionism among the Jewish youth of the Soviet Union.

For fully fifty years the Soviet state, clothed with totalitarian authority, by its very nature brooking no other ideology, has labored to indoctrinate its people with the Communist faith. Hostile to all religions, the Soviet regime has made a special, purposeful effort to eradicate Judaism. It has achieved the closing down of most of the synagogues in the country; there are no Jewish religious schools or classes in the Soviet Union. After thirty, forty, fifty years, as the third generation of Soviet-educated, Soviet indoctrinated young Jews grew up, only faint remnants of Jewish religious observance, survived.

The idea of the return of the Jewish people to Palestine was outlawed by the Soviet regime. For nearly thirty years Zionism was denounced as an instrument of British imperialism and of international capitalism, as an enemy of the Soviet state and of Communism.

It was a crime in the Soviet code. At different times, tens of thousands of Jews were jailed or toiled and suffered – and often died – in Siberian exile for no other reason than that they were declared or suspected Zionists. Hostility to Zionism has found ever more violent expression in concentrated enmity to the State of Israel.

By its very nature and content, Soviet education not only insured that young Jews should not be taught the faith of their fathers, but also subjected them throughout their formative years to a curriculum of hatred and contempt for the ideas, values, and achievements of Zionism.

While the first generation of Jews in the era of the Bolshevik Revolution may have been able to inspire some spiritual resistance in the hearts of its sons, that little had all but evaporated when, after the creation of the Jewish state, the sons were faced with the task of rearing the third generation. No wonder, then, that twenty-five years ago many of us in the West assumed that the Soviet Union had probably succeeded in forcing assimilation on the Jews of the USSR, that where indoctrination and suppression had not entirely succeeded in the first generation, sheer ignorance in the second and third would complete the process.

In fact, under the surface, a completely different spiritual transformation was taking place. It came to fulfillment precisely in the third generation – whose parents were born and reared in the embrace of the Soviet state. It incubated and grew slowly. Only from time to time were there public signs of nonconformism. It became explosive after the Six Day War.

In the years since 1967, the Jewish community in the Soviet Union has become a boiling cauldron. The third generation, the sons of the “lost” generation, are visibly restless with longing for this land they have never seen and of which they know very little. They have made manifest a fierce sense of alienation from the society that reared them and a passion of oneness with the Jewish people against whom their whole education and the culture of their upbringing has nurtured them. A movement has spread throughout the Soviet Union in spite of the totalitarian repression of the regime. This movement is one of young people, challenging the very core of Soviet indoctrination.

It started in the secret study of Hebrew, which was frowned upon, in copying and spreading literature about Israel, which was by definition forbidden, in word-of-mouth dissemination of news gleaned from foreign radio broadcasts. Many of the young Jews emerged from their anonymity. At the very moment that the Soviet Union exchanged its, long-standing policy of arming and backing the forces arrayed against Israel for a policy of direct physical intervention on their behalf, these young Soviet Jews boldly addressed the authorities, proclaiming their renunciation of identification with the Soviet state. They demanded the fulfillment of their right – formally entrenched in the Soviet Constitution but denied by Soviet policy – to leave the Soviet Union and to join the Jewish people in their homeland. They also drew many of their parents out of their timidity; the Soviet Home Office was flooded with numerous applications by whole families in the tens of thousands. Defying the states capacity for retribution and its potential for punishment, they declared their desire to give up their Soviet citizenship, give up all they have in the Soviet Union, and go, “on foot if necessary,” to join their people in the State of Israel.

For a variety of alleged offenses committed in the process, many of them have been sent to jail or, in a few cases, to mental homes. In response, far from deterring others, has spurred them on to more and more defiant action. An unsuccessful attempt to hijack a Soviet plane and thus fly to freedom; unprecedented demonstrations of protest by groups of Jews inside Soviet government offices; the passion that alone could make possible such an explosion of defiance are all powerful indications that a form of Zionist rebellion is in progress inside the Soviet Union.

The emergence and the progressive intensification of Jewish national identification in the Soviet Union has seemed miraculous even to many historically minded people. It is, in fact, merely an expression sharpened, deepened, and concentrated by the circumstances of the central fact of 3,500 years of Jewish history: the passion of the Jewish people for the land of Israel. The circumstances in which the Jewish people, its independence crushed nineteen centuries ago and large numbers of its sons driven into exile, maintained and preserved its connection with the land are among the most remarkable facts in the story of mankind. For eighteen centuries, the Zionist passion – the longing for Zion, the dream of the restoration, and the ordering of Jewish life and thought to prepare for the return – pulsed in the Jewish people. That passion finally gave birth to the practical and political organizations which, amid the storms of the twentieth century, launched the mass movement for the return to Zion and for restored Jewish national independence.

The Jews were never a people without a homeland. Having been robbed of their land, Jews never ceased to give expression to their anguish at their deprivation and to pray for and demand its return. Throughout the nearly two millennia of dispersion, Palestine remained the focus of the national culture. Every single day in all those seventy generations, devout Jews gave voice to their attachment to Zion.

The consciousness of the Jew that Palestine was his country was not a theoretical exercise or an article of theology or a sophisticated political outlook. It was in a sense all of these – and it was a pervasive and inextricable element in the very warp and woof of his daily life. Jewish prayers, Jewish literature, are saturated with the love and the longing for and the sense of belonging to Palestine. Except for religion and the love between the sexes, there is no theme so pervasive in the literature of any other nation, no theme has yielded so much thought and feeling and expression, as the relationship of the Jew to Palestine in Jewish literature and philosophy. And in his home on family occasions, in his daily customs on weekdays and Shabbat, when he said grace over meals, when he got married, when he built his house, when he said words of comfort to Mourners, the context was always his exile, his hope and belief in the return to Zion, and the reconstruction of his homeland. So intense was this sense of affinity that, if in the vicissitudes of exile he could not envisage that restoration during his lifetime, it was a matter of faith that with the coming of the Messiah and the Resurrection he would be brought back to the land after his death.

Over the centuries, through the pressures of persecution – of social and economic discrimination, of periodic death and destruction – the area of exile widened. Hounded and oppressed, the Jews moved from country to country. They carried Eretz Israel with them wherever they went. Jewish festivals remained tuned to the circumstances and conditions of the Jewish homeland. Whether they remained in warm Italy or Spain, whether they found homes in cold Eastern Europe, whether they found their way to North America or came to live in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed, the Jews celebrated the Palestinian spring and its autumn and winter. They prayed for dew in May and for rain in October. On Passover they ceremonially celebrated the liberation from Egyptian bondage, the original national establishment in the Promised Land – and they conjured up the vision of a new liberation.

Never in the periods of greatest persecution did the Jews as a people renounce that faith. Never in the periods of greatest peril to their very existence physically, and the seeming impossibility of their ever regaining the land of Israel, did they seek a substitute for the homeland. Time after time throughout the centuries, there arose bold spirits who believed, or claimed, they had a plan, or a divine vision, for the restoration, of the Jewish people to Palestine. Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews’ hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.

There were Jews who fell by the wayside. Given a choice under torture, or during periods of civic equality and material prosperity, they foresook their religion or turned their backs on their historic country. But to the people, the land – as it was called for all those centuries: simply Ha’aretz, the Land – remained the one and only homeland, unchanging and irreplaceable.

If ever a right has been maintained by unrelenting insistence on the claim, it was the Jewish right to Palestine.

Widely unknown, its significance certainly long ungrasped, is the no less awesome fact that throughout the eighteen centuries between the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and the beginnings of the Third, in our time, the tenacity of Jewish attachment to the land of Israel found continuous expression in the country itself. It was long believed – and still is – even in some presumably knowledgeable quarters, that throughout those centuries there were no Jews in Palestine. The popular conception has been that all the Jews who survived the Destruction of 70 C.E. went into exile and that their descendants began coming back only 1,800 years later. This is not a fact. One of the most astonishing elements in the history of the Jewish people – and of Palestine – is the continuity, in the face of the circumstances of Jewish life in the country.

It is a continuity that waxed and waned, that moved in kaleidoscopic shifts, in response to the pressures of the foreign imperial rulers who in bewildering succession imposed themselves on the country. It is a pattern of stubborn refusal, in the face of oppression, banishment, and slaughter, to let go of an often tenuous hold in the country, a determined digging in sustained by a faith in the ultimate fall restoration, of which every Jew living in the homeland saw himself as caretaker – and precursor.

This people that was “not here” – the Jewish community in Palestine, its history continuous and purposeful – in fact played a unique role in Jewish history. Too often lacking detail and depth, the story of the Jewish presence in Palestine, threaded together from a colorful variety of sources and references, pagan and Christian, Jewish and Moslem, spread over the whole period between the second and the nineteenth centuries, is a fascinating and compelling counterpoint to the dominating theme of the longing-in-exile.

Only when they had crushed the revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba in 135 C.E. – over sixty years after the destruction of the Second Temple – did the Romans make a determined effort to stamp out Jewish identity in the Jewish homeland. They initiated the long process of laying the country waste. It was then that Jerusalem, “plowed over” at the order of, Hadrian, was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and the country, denied of the name Judea, was renamed Syria Palestina. In the revolt itself–the fiercest and longest revolt faced by the Roman Empire – 580,000 Jewish soldiers perished in battle, and an untold number of civilians died of starvation and pestilence; 985 villages were destroyed.

Yet even after this further disaster, Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centered on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was then that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land.

The Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century; henceforth its policy in Palestine was governed by a new purpose: to prevent the birth of any glimmer of renewed hope of Jewish independence.

It was, after all, basic to Christian theology that loss of national independence was an act of God designed to punish the Jewish people for their rejection of Christ The work of the Almighty had to be helped along. Some emperors were more lenient than others, but the minimal criteria of oppression and restriction were nearly always maintained.

Nevertheless, even the meager surviving sources name forty-three Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley.

The Jews’ thoughts at every opportunity turned to the hope of national restoration. In the year 351, they launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. When, in 438, the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews’ praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call “to the great and mighty people of the Jews” which began: “Know then that the end of the exile of our people has come”!

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jaws made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for three years governed the City. But the Persians made their peace with the Emperor Heraclius. Christian rule was reestablished, and those Jews who survived the consequent slaughter were once more banished from the city. A new chapter of vengeful Byzantine persecution was enacted, but as it happened, it was short-lived. A new force was on the march. In 632, the Moslem Arab invaders came and conquered. By the year 640, Palestine had become a part of the emerging Moslem empire.

The 450-year Moslem rule in Palestine was first under the Omayyads (predominantly Arab), who governed tolerantly from Damascus; then under the Abbasid dynasty (predominantly Turkish), in growing anarchy, from Baghdad; and finally, in alternating tolerance and persecution, under the Fatimids from Cairo. The Moslem Arabs took from the Jews the lands to which they had clung for twenty generations after the fall of the Jewish state. The Crusaders, who came after them and ruled Palestine or parts of it for the better part of two centuries, massacred, the Jews in the cities. Yet, under the Moslems openly, under the Crusaders more circumspectly, the Jewish community of Palestine, in circumstances it is impossible to understand or to analyze, held on by the skin of its teeth, somehow survived, and worked, and fought. Fought. Along with the Arabs and the Turks, the Jews were among the most vigorous defenders of Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered the Jews in a synagogue and burned them. The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month (June-July 1099). At this time, a full thousand years after the fall of the Jewish state, there were Jewish communities all over the country. Fifty of them are known to us; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.

During more than six centuries of Moslem and Crusader rule, periods of tolerance or preoccupied indifference flickered fitfully between periods of concentrated persecution. Jews driven from the villages, fled to the towns. Surviving massacre in the inland towns, they made their way to the coast. When the coastal towns were destroyed, they succeeded somehow in returning inland. Throughout those centuries, war was almost continuous, whether between Cross and Crescent or among the Moslems themselves. The Jewish community, now heavily reduced, maintained itself in stiff-necked endurance.

Moslem and Christian records report that they pursued a variety of occupations. The Arab geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed-known as Mukadassi – writing in the tenth century, describes the Jews as the assayers Of coins, the dyers, the tanners, and the bankers in the community. In his time, a period of Fatimid tolerance, many Jewish officials were serving the regime. While they were not allowed to hold land in the Crusader period, the Jews controlled much of the commerce of the coastal towns during times of quiescence. Most of them were artisans: glass blowers in Sidon, furriers and dyers in Jerusalem.

In the midst of all their vicissitudes and in the face of all change, Hebrew scholarship and literary creation went on flourishing. It was in this period that the Hebrew grammarians at Tiberias evolved their Hebrew vowel-pointing system, giving form to the modern study of the language; and a large volume of piyutim and midrashim had their origin in Palestine in those days.

After the Crusaders, there came a period of wild disturbance as first the Kharezmians – an Asian tribe appearing fleetingly on the stage of history – and then the Mongol hordes, invaded Palestine. They sowed new rain and destruction throughout the country. Its cities were laid waste, its lands were burned, its trees were uprooted, the younger part of its population was destroyed.

Yet the dust of the Mongol hordes, defeated by the Mamluks, had hardly settled when the Jerusalem community, which had been all but exterminated, was reestablished. This was the work of the famous scholar Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides, the, “RaMbaN”) . From the day in 1267 when RaMbaN settled in the city, there was a coherent Jewish community in the Old City of Jerusalem until it was driven out, temporarily as it proved, by the British-led Arab Legion from Transjordan nearly seven hundred years later.

For two and a half centuries (1260-1516), Palestine was part of the Empire of the Mamluks, Moslems of Turkish-Tartar origin who ruled first from Turkey, then from Egypt. War and uprisings, bloodshed and destruction, flowed in almost incessant waves across their domain. Though Palestine was not always involved in the strife, it was frequently enough implicated to hasten the process of physical destruction Jews (and Christians) suffered persecution and humiliation. Yet toward the end of the rule of the Mamluks, at the close of the fifteenth century, Christian and Jewish visitors and pilgrims noted the presence of substantial Jewish communities. Even the meager records that survived report nearly thirty Jewish urban and rural communities at the opening of the sixteenth century.

By now nearly fifteen hundred years had passed since the destruction of the Jewish state. Jewish life in Palestine had survived Byzantine ruthlessness, had endured the discriminations, persecutions, and massacres of the variegated Moslem sects – Arab Omayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids, the Turkish Seljuks, and the Mamluks. Jewish life had by some historic sleight of hand out lived the Crusaders, its mortal enemy. it had survived Mongol barbarism.

More than an expression of self-preservation, Jewish life had a purpose and a mission. It was the trustee and the advance guard of restoration. At the close of the fifteenth century, the pilgrim Arnold Van Harff reported that he had found many Jews in Jerusalem and that they spoke Hebrew. They told another traveler, Felix Fabri that they hoped soon to resettle the Holy Land.

During the same period, Martin Kabatnik (who did not like Jews), visiting Jerusalem during his pilgrimage, exclaimed:

The heathens oppress them at their pleasure. They know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews, for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.

At the height of their splendor, in the first generations after their conquest of Palestine in 1516, the Ottoman Turks were tolerant and showed, a friendly face to the Jews. During the sixteenth century, there developed a new effervescence in the life of the Jews in the country. Thirty communities, urban and rural, are recorded at the opening of the Ottoman era. They include Haifa, Sh’chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north. Their center was Safed; its community grew quickly. It became the largest in Palestine and assumed the recognized spiritual leadership of the whole Jewish world. The luster of the cultural “golden age” that now developed shone over the whole country and has, inspired Jewish spiritual life to the present day. It was there and then that a phenomenal group of mystic philosophers evolved the mysteries of the Cabala. It was at that time and in the inspiration of the place that Joseph Caro compiled the Shulhan Aruch, the formidable codification of Jewish observance, which largely guides orthodox custom to this day. Poets and writers flourished. Safed achieved a fusion of scholarship and piety with trade, commerce, and agriculture. In the town, the Jews developed a number of branches of trade, especially in grain, spices, and cloth. They specialized once again in the dyeing trade. Lying halfway between Damascus and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast, Safed gained special importance in the commercial relations in the area. The 8,000 or 10,000 Jews in Safed in 1555 grew to 20,000 or 30,000 by the end of the century.

In the neighboring Galilean countryside, a number of Jewish villages – from Turkish sources we know of ten of them – continued to occupy themselves with the production of wheat and barley and cotton, vegetables and olives, vines and fruit, pulse and sesame.

The recurrent references in the sketchy records that have survived suggest that in some of those Galilean villages – such as Kfar Alma, Ein Zeitim, Biria, Pekiin Kfar Hanania, Kfar Kana, Kfar Yassif – the Jews, against all logic and in defiance of the pressures and exactions and, confiscations of generation after generation of foreign conquerors had succeeded in clinging to the land for fifteen centuries. Now for several decades of benevolent Ottoman rule, the Jewish communities flourished in village and town.

The history of the second half of the sixteenth century illustrates the dynamism of the Palestinian Jews their prosperity, their progressiveness, and their subjugation. In 1577, a Hebrew printing press was established in Safed. The first press in Palestine, it was also the first in Asia. In 1576, and again in 1577, the Sultan Murad III, the first anti-Jewish, Ottoman ruler, ordered the deportation of 1,000 wealthy Jews from Safed, though they had not broken any laws or transgressed in any way. They were needed by Murad to strengthen the economy of another of the Sultan’s provinces – Cyprus. It is not known whether they were in fact, deported or reprieved.

The honeymoon period between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews lasted only as long as the empire flourished. With the beginning and development of its long decline in the seventeenth century, oppression and anarchy made growing inroads into the country, and Jewish life began to follow a confused pattern of persecutions, prohibitions, and ephemeral prosperity. Prosperity grew rarer, persecutions and oppressions became the norm. The Ottomans, to whom Palestine was merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the Jews fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently made to pay a heavy price for living there. They were taxed beyond measure and were subjected to a system of arbitrary fines. Early in the seventeenth century, two Christian travelers, Johann van Egmont and John Hayman, could say of the Jews in Safed: “Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.”

The Turks so oppressed them, they wrote, that “they pay for the very air they breathe.” Again and again during the three centuries of Turkish decline, the Jews so lived and bore themselves that even hostile Christian travelers were moved to express their astonishment at their pertinacity – despite suffering, humiliation, and violence – in clinging to their homeland.

The Jews of Jerusalem, wrote the Jesuit Father Michael Naud in 1674, were agreed about one thing:

“paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here. . . . They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere…The love of the Jews for the Holy Land, which they lost through their betrayal [of Christ], is unbelievable. Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though the yoke is heavy.”

And not in Jerusalem alone. Even as anarchy spread over the land, marauding raids by Bedouins from the desert increased, and the roads became further infested with bandits, and while the Sultan’s men, when they appeared at all, came only to collect both the heavy taxes directed against all and the special taxes exacted from the Jews, Jewish communities still held on all over the country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, travelers reported them in Hebron (where, in addition to the regular exactions, threats of deportation, arrests, violence, and bloodshed, the Jews suffered the gruesome tribulations of a blood libel in 1775); Gaza, Ramleh, Sh’chem, Safed (where the community had lost its preeminence and its prosperity); Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish; and Jews continued to live and till the soil in Galilean villages.

But as the country itself declined and the bare essentials of life became inaccessible, the Jewish community also contracted. By the end of the eighteenth century, historians’ estimates put their number at between 10,000 and 15,000. Their national role, however, was never blurred. When the Jews in Palestine had no economic basis, the Jews abroad regarded it as their minimum national duty to insure their physical maintenance, and a steady stream of emissaries brought back funds from the Diaspora. In the long run, this had a degrading effect on those Jews who came to depend on these contributions for all their needs. But the significance of the motive and spirit of the aid is not lessened: the Jews in Palestine were regarded as the guardians of the Jewish heritage. Nor can one ignore the endurance and pertinacity of the recipients, in the face of oppression and humiliation and the threat of physical violence, in their role of “guardians of the walls.”

However determined the Jews in Palestine might have been, however deep their attachment to the land, and however strong their sense of mission in living in it, the historic circumstances should surely have ground them out of physical existence long before the onset of modern times.

Merely to recall the succession of conquerors who passed through the country and who oppressed or slaughtered Jews, deliberately or only incidentally to their struggle for power or survival, raises the question of how any Jews survived at all, let alone in coherent communities. Pagan Romans, Byzantine Christians, the various Moslem imperial dynasties (especially during the Seljuk Turkish interlude, before the Crusaders), the Crusaders themselves, the Kharezmians and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks – all these passed over the body of the Jewish community.

How then did a Jewish community survive at all? How did it survive as an arm of the Jewish people, consciously vigilant for the day of national restoration?

The answer to these questions reflects another aspect of the phenomenal affinity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. In spite of bans and prohibitions, in spite of the most improbable and unpromising circumstances, there was never a period throughout the centuries of exile without Jewish immigration to Palestine. Aliyah (”going up”) was a deliberate expression and demonstration of the national affinity to the land. A constant inflow gave life and often vigor to the Palestinian community. By present-day standards, the numbers were not great. By the standards of those ages, and in the circumstances of the times, the significance and weight of that stream of aliyah – almost always an individual undertaking – matches the achievements of the modem Zionist movement.

Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new: The living movement to the land had never ceased. The surviving records are meager. There was much movement during the days of the Moslem conquest. Tenth century appeals for aliyah by the Karaite leaders in Jerusalem have survived. There were periods when immigration was forbidden absolutely; no Jew could “legally” or safely enter Palestine while the Crusaders ruled. Yet precisely in that period, Yehuda Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, issued a call to the Jews to emigrate, and many generations drew active inspiration from his teaching. (He himself died soon after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1141, crushed, according to legend, by a Crusader’s horse.) A group of immigrants who came from Provence in France in the middle of the twelfth century must have been scholars of great repute, for they are believed to have been responsible for changing the Eretz Israel tradition of observing the New Year on only one day; ever since their time, the observance has lasted two days. There are slight allusive records of other groups who came after them. Among the immigrants who began arriving when the Crusaders’ grip on Palestine had been broken by Saladin was an organized group of three hundred rabbis who came from France and England in 1210 to strengthen especially the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Ramleh. Their work proved vain. A generation later came the destruction by the Mongol invaders. Yet no sooner had they passed than a new immigrant, Moses Nachmanides, came to Jerusalem, finding only two Jews, a dyer and his son; but he and the disciples who answered his call reestablished the community. Though Yehuda Halevi and Nachmanides were the most famous medieval preachers of aliyah, they were not the only ones. From the twelfth century onward, the surviving writings of a long series of Jewish travelers described their experiences in Palestine. Some of them remained to settle; all propagated the national duty and means of individual redemption of the “going up” to live in the homeland.

The concentrated scientific horror of the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe has perhaps weakened the memory of the experience of the people to whom, year after year, generation after generation, Europe was purgatory. Those, after all, were the Middle Ages; those were the centuries when the Jews of Europe were subjected to the whole range of persecution, from mass degradation to death after torture. For a Jew who could not and would not hide his identity to make his way from his own familiar city or village to another, from the country whose language he knew through countries foreign to him, meant to expose himself almost certainly to suspicion, insult, and humiliation, probably to robbery and violence, possibly to murder. All travel was hazardous. For a Jew in the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century (and even later) to set out on the odyssey from Western Europe to Palestine was a heroic undertaking, which often ended in disaster. To the vast mass of Jews sunk in misery, whose joy it was to turn their faces eastward three times daffy and pray for the return to Zion, that return in their lifetime was a dream of heaven.

There were periods, moreover, when the Popes ordered their adherents to prevent Jewish travel to Palestine. For most of the fifteenth century, the Italian maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for getting to Palestine, thus forcing them to abandon their project or to make the whole journey by a roundabout land route, adding to the initial complications of their travel the dangers of movement through Germany, Poland, and southern Russia, or through the inhospitable Balkans and a Black Sea crossing before reaching the comparative safety of Turkey. In 1433, shortly after the ban was imposed, there came a vigorous call by Yitzhak Tsarefati, urging the Jews to come by way of then tolerant Turkey. Immigration of the bolder spirits continued. Often the journey took years, while the immigrant worked at the intermediate stopping places to raise the expenses for the next leg of his journey or, as sometimes happened, while he invited the local rich Jews to finance his journey and to share vicariously in the mitzvah of his aliyah. Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in 1479, wrote down the route and stopping places of a Jew newly arrived as an immigrant from Germany. He had set out from Nuremberg and traveled to Posen (about 300 miles).

Then Posen [Poznan] to Lublin 250 miles;
Lublin to Lemberg [Lvov] 120 miles;
Lemberg to Khotin 150 miles;
Khotin to Akerman 150 miles;
Akerman, to Samsun 6 days;
Samsun to Tokat 6-7 days;
Tokat to Aleppo 15 days;
Aleppo to Damascus 7 days;
Damascus to Jerusalem 6 days.

The Ottoman Sultans had encouraged Jewish immigration into their dominions. With their conquest of Palestine, its gates too were opened. Though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a very few Jews to “get up and go,” a stream of immigrants flowed to Palestine at once. Many who came were refugees from the Inquisition. They comprised a great variety of occupations; they were scholars and artisans and merchants. They filled all the existing Jewish centers. That flow of Jews from abroad injected a new pulse into Jewish life in Palestine in the sixteenth century. As the Ottoman regime deteriorated, the conditions of life in Palestine grew harsher, but waves of immigration continued. In the middle of the seventeenth century, there passed through the Jewish people an electric current of self-identification and intensified affinity with its homeland. For the first time in Eastern Europe, which had given shelter to their ancestors fleeing from persecution in the West, rebelling Cossacks in 1648 and 1649 subjected the Jews to massacre as fierce as any in Jewish history. Impoverished and helpless, the survivors fled to the nearest refuge – now once more in Western Europe. Again the bolder spirits among them made their way to Palestine. That same generation was electrified once more by the advent of Shabbetai Zevi, the self-appointed Messiah whose imposture and whose following among the Jews in both the East and the West was made possible only by the unchanged aspirations of the Jews for restoration. The dream of being somehow wafted to the land of Israel under the banner of the Messiah evaporated, but again there were determined men who somehow found the means and made their way to Palestine, by sea or by stages overland through Turkey and Syria.

The degeneration of the central Ottoman regime, the anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions, plagues and pestilence, and the rain of the country, continued in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. The masses of Jews in Europe were living in greater poverty than ever. Yet immigrants, now also in groups, continued to come. Surviving letters tell about the adventures of groups who came from Italy, Morocco, and Turkey. Other letters report on the steady stream of Hasidim, disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, from Galicia and Lithuania, proceeding during the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century.

It is clear that by now the state of the country was exacting a higher toll in lives than could be replaced by immigrants. But the immigrants who came shut their eyes to the physical ruin and squalor, accepted with love every hardship and tribulation and danger. Thus, in 18 10, the disciples of the Vilna Goan who had just emigrated, wrote:

Truly, how marvelous it is to live in the good country. Truly, how wonderful it is to love our country. Even in her ruin there is none to compare with her, even in her desolation she is unequaled, in her silence there is none like her. Good are her ashes and her stones.

These immigrants of 1810 were yet to suffer unimagined trials. Earthquake, pestilence, and murderous onslaught by marauding brigands were part of the record of their lives. But they were one of the last links in the long chain bridging the gap between the exile of their people and its independence. They or their children lived to see the beginnings of the modern restoration of the country. Some of them lived to meet one of the pioneers of restoration, Sir Moses Monteflore, the Jewish philanthropist from Britain who, through the greater part of the nineteenth century, conceived and pursued a variety of practical plans to resettle the Jews in their homeland. With him began the gray dawn of reconstruction. Some of the children of those immigrants lived to share in the enterprise and purpose and daring that in 1869 moved a group of seven Jews in Jerusalem to emerge from the Old City and set up the first housing project outside its walls. Each of them built a house among the rocks and the jackals in the wilderness that ultimately came to be called Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the Seven). Today it is the heart of downtown Jerusalem, bounded by the Jaffa Road, between Zion Square and the Bank of Israel.

In 1878, another group made its way across the mountains of Judea to set up the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement at Petah Tikva, which thus became the “mother of the settlements.” Eight years earlier, the first modern agricultural school in Palestine had been opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa. As we see it now – and they in 1810 would not have been surprised, for this was their faith and this was their purpose – the long vigil was coming to an end. But the conception and application of practical modern measures for the Jewish restoration was preceded by a fascinating interlude: Zionist awakening in the Christian world.

The affinity of the Jewish people for Palestine, unique in the historic circumstances, had become an integral part, inextricably entwined in the texture ofWestern culture. It was a commonplace of all education. The persistence of the Jewish people as an entity, kept alive for century after century of monstrous persecution by a faith in ultimate restoration to its Homeland, was congenial to some Christians, unpalatable to others.

The Christian Churches had their share in perpetuating the forced exile of the Jewish people. To Catholics, it was a matter of duty as God’s servants to enforce the Jewish dispersion; they therefore could not even countenance Jewish restoration to their land. It was part of his apostasy that in 464 the Emperor Julian announced his intention of rebuilding the Temple. With the splits and schisms in the Church, the coming of the Reformation, and the evolution of the various Protestant sects, voices were heard proclaiming it as a Christian act to help the Jewish people regain its homeland. Palestine, however, was in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and there was no means of translating Christian feeling into action.

In practical Christian minds, this situation began rapidly to change during the early nineteenth century.

The first catalytic agent may have been Napoleon Bonaparte. On launching his campaign for the conquest of Palestine in 1799, he promised to restore the country to the Jews. Though Napoleon was forced to withdraw from Palestine, the prospect he opened may have been instrumental in setting off a chain of developments, primarily in Britain, that grew in intensity and significance as the nineteenth century wore on. A distinguished gallery of writers, clerics, journalists, artists, and statesmen accompanied the awakening of the idea of Jewish restoration in Palestine. Lord Lindsay, Lord Shaftesbury (the social reformer who learned Hebrew), Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Lord Manchester, George Eliot, Holman Hunt, Sir Charles Warren, Hall Caine – all appear among the many who spoke, wrote, organized support, or put forward practical projects by which Britain might help the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. There were some who even urged the British government to buy Palestine from the Turks to give it to the Jews to rebuild.

Characteristic of the period were the words of Lord Lindsay: The Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence opened to them, may once more obtain possession of their native land…The soil of “Palestine still enjoys her sabbaths, and only waits for the return of her banished children, and the application of industry, commensurate with her agricultural capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the days of Solomon.” In 1845, Sir George Gawler urged, as the remedy for the desolation of the country:

“Replenish the deserted towns and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affections are rooted in the soil”

There were times when this concern took on the proportions of a propaganda campaign. In 1839, the Church of Scotland sent two missionaries, Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne, to report on “the conditions of the Jews in their land.” Their report was widely publicized in Britain, and it was followed by a Memorandum to the Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. This memorandum, printed verbatim by the London Times, was the prelude to many months of newspaper projection of the theme that Britain should take action to secure Palestine for the Jews. The Times, in that age the voice of enlightened thought in Britain, urged the Jews simply to take possession of the land. If a Moses became necessary, wrote the paper, one would be found.

Again and again groups and societies were projected or formed to promote the restoration. The proposals and activities of Moses Montefiore found a wide echo throughout Britain. Many Christians associated themselves practically with his plans; others brought forward plans and projects of their own and even took steps to bring them to fruition. What was probably the first forerunner in modern times of the Jewish agricultural revolution in Palestine was the settlement established in 1848 in the Vale of Rephaim by Warder Cresson, the United States Consul in Jerusalem; he was helped by a Jewish – Christian committee formed in Britain for the Jewish settlement of Galilee.

The ideas of Sir George Gawler, a former governor of South Australia, before and after the Crimean War, when he formed the Palestine Colonisation Fund; of Claude Reignier Conder who, with Lieutenant Kitchener, carried out a survey of Palestine and brought to public notice the fact that Palestine could be restored by the Jews to its ancient prosperity; of Laurence Oliphant, the novelist and politician, who worked out a comprehensive plan of restoration and a detailed project for Jewish settlement of Gilead east of the Jordan; of Edward Cazalet, who proposed equally detailed projects – all were broached and propagated against a background of widespread Christian support.

By the middle of the century, the concept of Jewish restoration began to be considered in responsible quarters in Britain as a question of practical international politics. In August 1840, the Times reported that the British government was feeling its way in the direction of Jewish restoration. It added that “a nobleman of the Opposition” (believed to be Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury) was making his own inquiries to determine:

1. What the Jews thought of the proposed restoration.
2. Whether rich Jews would go to Palestine and invest their capital in agriculture.
3. How soon they would be ready to go.
4. Whether they would go at their own expense, requiring nothing more than assurance of safety to life and property.
5. Whether they would consent to live under the Turkish government, with their rights protected by the five European powers (Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, Austro-Hungary).

Lord Shaftesbury pursued the idea with Prime Minister Palmerston and his successors in the government and was incidentally instrumental in the considerable assistance and protection against oppression that Britain henceforth extended to the Jews already living in Palestine.

The Crimean War and its aftermath pushed the ideas and projects into the background, but they soon came to life again. In 1878, the Eastern Question reached its crisis in the Prusso-Turkish War, and the Congress of Berlin gathered to find a peaceful solution. At once reports spread throughout Europe that Britain’s representatives, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) and Lord Salisbury, were proposing as part of the peace plan to declare a protectorate over Syria and Palestine and that Palestine would be restored to the Jews.

Though these reports were unfounded, the idea again caught the imagination of political thinkers in Britain. It was widely supported in the newspapers, which saw it as both a solution to the Jewish problem and a means of eliminating one of the perennial causes of friction between the powers. So popular was the idea with the British public that the weekly Spectator on May 10, 1879, in criticizing Beaconsfield for not having adopted it, wrote:

“If he had freed the Holy Land and restored the Jews, as he might have done instead of pottering about Roumelia and Afghanistan, he would have died Dictator.”

No less significant is the fact that the idea of Jewish restoration, when it was presented in the form of practical projects, was not rejected by the Moslem authorities. In 1831, Palestine was conquered from the Turks byMehemet Ali, who ruled it from Egypt for the next nine years, introducing a comparatively pleasant interlude in the life of the country. It was at this time that Sir Moses Montefiore began developing his practical plans. In 1839, he visited Mehemet Ali in Egypt and put forward a large-scale scheme for Jewish settlement that would regenerate Palestine. Mehemet Ali accepted it. Montefiore was in the midst of discussing practical details with him when Mehemet was forced to withdraw from Palestine, which returned to Turkish rule.

Forty years later, the Turks themselves were presented with practical plans for Jewish colonization and autonomy in a part of Palestine. The most important of these plans was that carefully and conscientiously worked out by Laurence Oliphant, who demonstrated to the Turks that it was in their own interest, as well as in Britain’s, to help fulfill a Jewish restoration in Palestine. His detailed plan for the settlement of Gilead was supported and recommended to the Turkish government by the leading personalities in Britain: The Prime Minister Lord Beaconsfield, the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury, and even the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). The French government, through its Foreign Minister Waddington, also added its encouragement.

The Sultan showed considerable interest in the plan; the Turkish Foreign Office even proposed some amendments for further discussion. But again events intervened. In 1880, a general election drove Beaconsfield – considered by Turkey as her friend – from office, to be replaced by William Ewart Gladstone. To the Turks, Gladstone was an enemy. The Oliphant scheme, based on Turko-British cooperation as well as a similar scheme proposed by the British industrialist Edward Cazalet, were shelved and faded into history. By now the effervescence among the Jewish people began to find its outlets.

Jewish organizations were now launched. The result was a wave of immigration, to be known later as the First Aliyah, which laid the solid foundation of the new Jewish agriculture. The advent of Theodor Herzl was only fifteen years away, and with it the beginning of the modem political frame for the return to Zion: the World Zionist Organization.

Throughout the ages, and now in the nineteenth century, when the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine and the restoration of Palestine to the Jewish people was discussed in growing intensity, when scores of books and pamphlets and innumerable articles published in Europe, America, and Britain put forward both ideological motivation and practical projects for the consummation of the idea, never once was it suggested openly or covertly that the Holy Land could not, or should not, be restored to the Jews because it had become the property of others. There were many who disliked the Jews; there were Christians who objected on theological grounds to the very idea of reversing the “edict” of exile. Imagine what would happen to the Catholic dogma of the inadmissibility of Jewish restoration if a Jewish state were suddenly to arise! They had enough reason to seek grounds and means of resistance to the spread of the idea. Yet nothing led anyone to believe or to suggest that there was any other nation that had a claim, or had established an affinity or connection, or had made such a contribution in sweat or in blood, to have and to hold the country for its own.

No such nation existed, nor any such claim. The claim of historic association, of historic right, of historic ownership by the Arab people or by a “Palestinian entity” is a fiction fabricated in our own day. After the Jews had been absent as a nation for eighteen centuries, this was a self-evident truth, which is also part of the historic record.

“No nation has been able to establish itself as a nation in Palestine up to this day,” wrote Sir John William Dawson in 1888, “no national union and no national spirit has prevailed there. The motley impoverished tribes which have occupied it have held it as mere tenants at will, temporary landowners, evidently waiting for those entitled to the permanent possession of the soil.”

There was another fact that gave immediate practical impact to the logic and justice of Jewish restoration. Palestine was a virtually empty land. When Jewish independence came to an end in the year 70, the population numbered, at a conservative estimate, some five million people. (By Josephus’ figures, there were nearer seven million.) Even sixty years after the destruction of the Temple, at the outbreak of the revolt led by Bar Kochba in 132, when large numbers had fled or been deported, the Jewish population of the country must have numbered at least three million, according to Dio Cassius’ figures. Seventeen centuries later, when the practical possibility of the return to Zion appeared on the horizon, Palestine was a denuded, derelict, and depopulated country. The writings of travelers who visited Palestine in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century are filled with descriptions of its emptiness, its desolation. In 1738, Thomas Shaw wrote of the absence of people to till Palestine’s fertile soil.

In 1785, Constantine Francois Volney described the “ruined” and “desolate” country. He had not seen the worst. Pilgrims and travelers continued to report in heartrending terms on its condition. Almost sixty years later, Alexander Keith, recalling Volney’s description, wrote:

“In his day the land had not fully reached its last degree of desolation and depopulation.”

In 1835, Alphonse de Lamartine could write: Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void, the same silence…as we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam…a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country… the tomb of a whole people.

Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, wrote of what he saw as he traveled the length of the country:

Desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse. . . . A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely. We never saw a human being on the whole route.

And again:

There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

So overwhelming was his impression of an irreversible desolation that he came to the grim conclusion that Palestine would never come to life again. As he was taking his last view of the country, he wrote:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Palestine is desolate and unlovely….Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland.

By Volney’s estimates in 1785, there were no more than 200,000 people in the country. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the estimated population for the whole of Palestine was between 50,000 and 100,000 people.

It was the gaping emptiness of the country, the spectacle of ravages and neglect, the absence of a population that might be dispossessed and the growing sense of the country’s having “waited” for the “return of her banished children,” that lent force and practical meaning to the awakening Christian realization that the time had come for Jewish restoration. What is the Arab historical connection with Palestine? What is the source of their fantastic claims?

The Arabs’ homeland is Arabia, the southwestern peninsula of Asia. Its 1,027,000 square miles (2,630,000 square kilometers) embrace the present-day Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrein, Qatar, Trucial Oman on the Persian Gulf, Muscat and Oman, and South Yemen. When in the seventh century, with the birth of the new Islamic religion, the Arabs emerged from the desert with an eye to conquest, they succeeded in establishing an empire that within a century extended over three continents, from the Atlantic Ocean to the border of China. Early in their phenomenal progress, they conquered Palestine from the Byzantines.

Purely Arab rule, exercised from Damascus by the Omayyad dynasty, lasted a little over a century. The Omayyads were overthrown in 750 by their bitter antagonists, the Abbasids, whose two centuries of government was increasingly dominated first by Persians, then by Turks. When the Abbasids were in turn defeated by the Fatimids, the Arabs had long had no part in the government of the empire, either at the center or in the provinces.

But the Arabs had one great lasting success: Throughout a large part of the subjugated territories, Arabic became the dominant language and Islam the predominant religion. (Large scale conversions were not on the whole achieved by force. A major motive in the adoption of Islam by “nonbelievers” was the social and economic discrimination suffered by non-Moslems.) This cultural assimilation made possible the so-called golden age of Arabic culture.

“The invaders from the desert,” writes Professor Philip K. Hitti, the foremost modem Arab historian, “brought with them no tradition of learning, no heritage of culture to the lands they conquered….They sat as pupils at the feet of the peoples they subdued.”

What we therefore call “Arabic civilization” was Arabian neither in its origins and fundamental structure nor in its principal ethnic aspects. The purely Arabic contribution in it was in the linguistic and to a certain extent in the religious fields. Throughout the whole period of the caliphate, the Syrians, the Persians, the Egyptians, and others, as Moslem converts or as Christians or Jews, were the foremost bearers of the torch of enlightenment and learning.

The result was a great volume of translation from the ancient writings of a host of cultures in East and West alike, from Greece to India. Most of the great works in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy were rendered into Arabic and, in many cases, were thus saved for Europe. The translation period was followed by the even brighter glow of great original works in Arabic on all these subjects as well as on alchemy, pharmacy, and geography.

“But when we speak of ‘Arab medicine’ or ‘Arab philosophy’ or ‘Arab mathematics’,” notes Hitti, “we do not mean the medical science, philosophy or mathematics that are necessarily the product of the Arabian mind or developed by people living in the Arabian peninsula, but that body of knowledge enshrined in books written in the Arabic language by men who flourished chiefly during the caliphate and were themselves Persians, Egyptians or Arabians, Christian, Jewish or Moslem.”

“Indeed, even what we call ‘Arabic literature’ was no more Arabian than the Latin literature of the Middle Ages was Italian…. Even such disciplines as philosophy, linguistics, lexicography and grammar, which were primarily Arabian in origin and spirit and in which the Arabs made their chief original contribution, recruited some of their most distinguished scholars from the non-Arab stock.”

Whatever the precise definitions of the cultural historians, the Arab Empire certainly ushered in a cultural era that illuminated the Middle Ages. In this golden age, Palestine played no part at all. The history books and the literature of the period fail to reveal even a mention of Palestine as the center of any important activity or as providing inspiration or focus for any significant cultural activity of the Arabs or even of the Arabic-speaking people. On the contrary: Anyone seeking higher learning, even in specifically Moslem subjects, was forced to seek it at first in Damascus, later in the centers of Moslem learning in various other countries. The few known Palestinian scholars were born and may have died in Palestine, but they studied and worked in either Egypt or Damascus.

Palestine was never more than an unconsidered backwater of the empire. No great political or cultural center ever arose there to establish a source of Arab, or any other non-Jewish, affinity or attachment. Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo – these were the great, at times glittering, political and cultural centers of the Moslem Empire. Jerusalem, where a Moslem Holy Place was established on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, never achieved any political or even cultural status. To the Arab rulers and their non-Arab successors, Palestine was a battleground, a corridor, sometimes an outpost, its people a source of taxes and of some manpower for the waging of endless foreign and internecine wars. Nor did a local non-Jewish culture grow. In the early Arab period, immigrants from Arabia were encouraged, and later they were given the Jewish lands. But the population remained an ethnic hodgepodge.

When the Crusaders came to Palestine after 460 years of Arab and non-Arabic Moslem rule, they found an Arabic-speaking population, composed of a dozen races (apart from Jews and Druzes), practicing five versions of Islam and eight of heterodox Christianity.

“With the passing of the Umayyad empire . . . Arabianism fell but Islam continued.” The Persians and the Turks of the Abbasid Empire, the Berbers and the Egyptians of the Fatimid Empire, had no interest at all in the provincial backwater except for what could be squeezed out of it for the imperial exchequer or the imperial army.

To the Mamluks who, in 1250, followed the Crusader Christian interregnum, Palestine had no existence even as a subentity. Its territory was divided administratively, as part of a conquered empire, according to convenience. Its variegated peoples were treated as objects for exploitation, with a mixture of hostility and indifference. Some Arab tribes collaborated with the Mamluks in the numerous internal struggles that marked their rule. But the Arabs had no part or direct influence in the regime. Like all the other inhabitants of the country, they were conquered subjects and were treated accordingly.

Their state did not improve under the Ottoman Turks. The fact of a common Moslem religion did not confer on the Arabs any privileges, let alone any share in government. The Ottomans even replaced Arabic with Turkish as the language of the country. Except for brief periods, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had cause to dislike their Turkish rulers just one degree less than did the more heavily taxed Jews.

The Arabs did, however, play a significant and specific role in one aspect of Palestine’s life: They contributed effectively to its devastation. Where destruction and ruin were only partly achieved by warring imperial dynasties – by Arab, Turkish, Persians, or Egyptians, by the Crusaders or by invading hordes of Mongols or Kharezmians – it was supplemented by the revolts of local chieftains, by civil strife, by intertribal warfare within the population itself. Always the process was completed by the raids of Arabs – the Bedouins – from the neighboring deserts. These forays (for which there were endemic economic reasons) were known already in the Byzantine era. Over fifteen centuries, they eroded the face of Palestine.

During the latter phase of the Abbasids and in the Fatimid era, Bedouin depredations grew more intense. It was then that Palestine east of the Jordan was laid waste.

Starting in the thirteenth century, with the entry of the Mamluks, all the instruments of ruin were at work almost continuously. The process went on even more colorfully under Ottoman misrule. Bedouin raiders, plundering livestock and destroying crops and plantations, plagued the life of the farmer. Bedouin encampments, dotting the countryside, served as bases for highway attacks on travelers, on caravans carrying merchandise, on pilgrim cavalcades. Count Volney, describing the Palestinian countryside in 1785, wrote:

The peasants are incessantly making inroads on each other’s lands, destroying their corn, durra, sesame and olive-trees, and carrying off their sheep, goats and camels. The Turks, who are everywhere negligent in repressing similar disorders, are the less attentive to them here, since their authority is very precarious; the Bedouin, whose camps occupy the level country, are continually at open hostilities with them, of which the peasants avail themselves to resist their authority or do mischief to each other, according to the blind caprice of their ignorance or the interest of the moment. Hence arises an anarchy, which is still more dreadful than the despotism that prevails elsewhere, while the mutual devastation of the contending parties renders the appearance of this [the Palestinian] part of Syria more wretched than that of any other….This country is indeed more frequently plundered than any other in Syria for, being very proper for cavalry and adjacent to the desert, it lies open to the Arabs.

Neither history books nor reports of travelers, whether Christian, Moslem, or Jewish, report on any other permanent feature of the Arabs’ historical relationship with Palestine. In the tenth century, the Arab writer Ibn Hukal had written:

“Nobody cares about building the country, or concerns himself for its needs.”

This was a mild foretaste of the ruination of a country, carried out over hundreds of years. There is no reason to blame the handful of Arabs who were part of the medley of peoples that made up the settled population of Palestine. They were merely subject residents, usually downtrodden, of this or that village or this or that town. The remote central authority in Constantinople stretched out its conscripting hand to take away their sons, the local tax farmer sucked them dry, the village over the hill, and the rival tribe, had to be guarded against or fought in a cycle of mutually destructive retaliation. The Bedouin nomads tore up their olive trees, destroyed their crops, filled their wells with stones, broke down their cisterns, took away their live-stock – and were sometimes called in as allies to help destroy the next village.

Thus it was that by the middle of the nineteenth century, when hundreds of years of abuse had turned the country into a treeless waste, with a sprinkling of emaciated towns, malaria-ridden swamps in its once-fertile northern valleys, the once-thriving south (Negev) now a desert, the population too had dwindled almost to nothing.

There was never a “Palestinian Arab” nation. To the Arab people as a whole, no such entity as Palestine existed. To those of them who lived in its neighborhood, its lands were a suitable object for plunder and destruction. Those few who lived within its bounds may have had an affinity for their village (and made war on the next village), for their clan (which fought for the right of local tax-gathering), or even for their town. They were not conscious of any relationship to a land, and even the townsmen would have heard of its existence as a land, if they heard of it at all, only from such Jews as they might meet. (Palestine is mentioned only once in the Koran, as the “Holy Land”— holy, that is, to Jews and Christians.)

The feeling of so many nineteenth-century visitors that the country had been waiting for the return of its lawful inhabitants was made the more significant by the shallowness of the Arab imprint on the country. In twelve hundred years of association, they built only a single town, Ramleh, established as the local subprovincial capital in the eighth century. The researchers of nineteenth-century scholars, beginning with the archaeologist Edward Robinson in 1838, revealed that hundreds of place-names of villages and sites, seemingly Arab, were Arabic renderings or translations of ancient Hebrew names, biblical or Talmudic. The Arabs have never even had a name of their own for this country which they claim. “Filastin” is merely the Arab transliteration of “Palestine,” the name the Romans gave the country when they determined to obliterate the “presence” of the Jewish people.

Sir George Adam Smith, author of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land, wrote in 1891:

“The principle of nationality requires their [the Turks’] dispossession. Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who … have given to Palestine everything it has ever had of value to the world.”

This blunt judgment was entirely normal; it aroused no objections and offended no one. It was a simple statement of a unique and irrefutable fact. The Arabs’ discovery of Palestine came many years later.

Beginning To Restore The Land

Posted on Mon, November 15, 2010 at 03:23 am CET

Mon, Nov 15, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

"The meeting founding Tel-Aviv 1908" (source: Avraham Soskin, Tel Aviv, 1926). The lottery of housing plots for the Ahuzat Bayit suburb took place on April 11, 1909. Soskin’s familiar photograph of that event quickly achieved iconic status. Avraham Soskin, on his most famous photograph: “One day, it was in 1909, I was roaming with the camera in one hand and the tripod on my other arm, on my way from a walk through the sand dunes of what is today Tel Aviv to Jaffa. Where the Herzliah Gymnasium once stood I saw a group of people who had assembled for a housing plot lottery. Although I was the only photographer in the area, the organizers hadn’t seen fit to invite me, and it was only by chance that this historic event was immortalized for the next generations.” Avraham Soskin, from a newspaper interview with the journalist Israel Ginzburg (Ha-Boker, November 10, 1961), quoted by Guy Raz in “Soskin’s Theater,” in Avraham Soskin: A Retrospective (2003). (Text source: Stanford university)

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

Beginning To Restore The Land

This article is the fifth chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the fourth chapter: The Jewish Presence In Palestine. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

The land, unloved by its rulers and uncared for by most of its handful of inhabitants, whose silences Lamartine had likened to those of ruined Pompeii, and which Mark Twain had compassionately consigned to the world of dreams, began to come to life again with the blossoming of Jewish restoration in the nineteenth century. Now, instead of having to adapt the pattern of their living, as they had done for centuries, to the frozen mold of Ottoman stagnation, the Jewish immigrants were able to put down their own fresh roots. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, under the pressure and inspiration of the European powers —especially Britain and France, who were supporting, the Sultan’s regime against collapse and his empire against Russian penetration – the Ottoman government introduced a series of reforms. Though imperfectly implemented, they restored a degree of law and order in the country and introduced a revolutionary change in the communal law: Non-Moslems were henceforth to enjoy equality before the law with Moslems.

This reform was bitterly opposed by the Moslems. Non-Moslems had always been second-class citizens under Moslem rule, and Moslems regarded as sacred the inequality in their favor. It was considered natural law that Moslems should be treated as superior beings. During the middle of the century, in protest against the new equality, there were many anti-Christian outbreaks, even massacres, in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. In Lebanon, French troops came in, and at Jidda, French and British warships had to be sent to intervene on behalf of the victims.

Empty coffers in Constantinople brought about a reform of even more far-reaching consequence: It became possible to buy land from the Sultan. Tracts of land, mostly in Syria, much of it altogether unworked, were bought by a small number of families.

Hence the renewal of Jewish agriculture. Land could be bought from the new landowners. The Turkish government, however, after the brief flicker of hope of cooperation in 1880, became antagonistic to the Jewish restoration. Faced with the organized movement Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), an Eastern European forerunner of the Zionist Organization, preaching and practicing immigration and settlement in Palestine, the Turks imposed a dual prohibition on Jews: They forbade their entry for permanent residence in the country and their purchase of land. The growing number of immigrants thus came into the country as pilgrims, while land was usually acquired by subterfuge and at appreciably higher prices. The ravaged desolation of the land caused many of its non-Jewish inhabitants to leave it, thus bringing on more desolation and denudation. For the returning Jews, it held a challenge and a call for care and love.

The struggle of that generation of pioneers in the 1880s and the two generations that followed them was carried on in a harsh climate, on toughened, treeless soil, while waging an often losing battle with malaria, which came up from the swamps and the undrained rivers, and resisting Bedouins, whose marauding habits persisted even into the twentieth century. The process of reviving the country was to be a long one; it continues to this day. But by 1914, Jewish villages dotted the countryside. As for the towns, the Jews became a majority in Jerusalem by mid-century, then they developed the city outside the walls. They began to give new shape to Haifa, Safed, and Tiberias, and in 1909, expanding the borders of Jaffa, they founded what was to become the first modem all-Hebrew city: Tel-Aviv.

The non-Jewish inhabitants of the country were the passive beneficiaries of these developments. The Ottoman reforms were followed by the opening up of the area to European and American influences. The Christian Churches established schools in Syria and Lebanon, of which both Christians and Moslems took advantage. The new Jewish immigrants directly or indirectly helped to improve their peasant neighbors’ farming methods and to raise their standard of living.

Thus, at the eleventh hour, with the onset of the new century, the long process of flight and disintegration of the non-Jewish population in Palestine was halted. With the founding of the Zionist Organization in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, the longing for the return to Zion achieved a serious and comprehensive political frame of reference for the first time in over seventeen centuries. Herzl’s logical policy of working directly and openly for an arrangement with the Sultan’s government to create the legal instrument for Jewish colonization on a large scale failed in his short lifetime. Equally unsuccessful were later efforts to establish rapport with the revolutionary Young Turks. Zionism’s political progress was blocked, but the physical movement of immigration and restoration continued in the face of endless difficulties erected by the decrepit, backward, and corrupt administration and the physical hardships and perils presented by the ravaged country.

The war that broke out in 1914 provided the most striking confrontation between the passionate Jewish affinity to Eretz Israel and the absence of any awareness of Palestine in the consciousness of the Arab people in general or the Arab community in the country itself.

To the new and young exponents of the Zionist dream, the meaning of Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of Germany was clear from the outset. It was a historic opportunity: Defeat of the Turkish Empire could break its hold on Palestine. The Jews, they decided, must range themselves on the side of Turkey’s enemies, to help bring about the dismemberment that would make possible Jewish restoration. In the result, the Jewish people played a part far beyond its weight and size in winning the war. The Jews had no sovereign power and no national base of operations, they were a collection of minorities scattered over the world, and they were in fact fighting as citizens in all the armies on both sides. Yet out of the vast panorama of the First World War and its carnage, and the range of peoples that took part in it, there emerged the phenomenon of an additional, superimposed contribution, a unique voluntary engagement, and a willing sacrifice that sprang from the Jewish passion for Eretz Israel and a now urgent hunger for independence.

The Zionist effort in its various ramifications was spread far and wide. It revolved primarily around the work of three men: Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, and Aaron Aaronson. Each independently came to the conclusion that Jewish restoration could be built only on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Each in his own way sought to provide Britain and her allies with help to win the war.

The question of taking sides was not simple for the Jewish people at large. Considerable numbers of Jews lived in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Their condition was tolerable, certainly incomparably better than the state of the Jews in Russia; Tsarist Russia – the ally of Britain and France – was unspeakably, endemically anti-Semitic. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, it played the role that a generation later was filled, more directly and thoroughly and scientifically, and with devastating effect, by Nazi Germany. Not the least of the factors weighing in the United States and in its Jewish community for neutrality in the war, or even for support for Germany, was the deep and widespread disgust for the Russian regime and the knowledge that a victory for the Allies would mean a victory for tsarist tyranny.

Moreover, there was now a substantial Jewish population in Palestine as well as sizable communities in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. All these would be potentially in jeopardy if the Jewish people were to be identified as anti-Turkish. The disadvantages and the dangers of identification with the Allied cause were clear. Fear of Turkish reprisals and hatred of Russia were overcome, however, by a more powerful emotion – the urge to national regeneration.

Under Weizmann’s lead, the Zionists developed a consistent pro-Allied propaganda in the United States. The issue was crucial – no more and no less than bringing influence to bear in the United States for the government to abandon its neutrality and to join the Allies in the war against Germany. This was amplified, as soon as Turkey entered the war, by the campaign launched by Jabotinsky to form a Jewish Legion in the British Army to fight for the liberation of Palestine. Though the idea of a Jewish military unit inevitably met with considerable opposition both from timid and assimilated Jews and from the British, it prevailed in the end. A Jewish auxiliary unit, the Zion Mule Corps, took part in the Gallipoli campaign. Jewish battalions, consisting of volunteers from Britain, the United States, Canada, and Palestine itself, took part in the latter stages of Allenby’s campaign. They played an especially, notable part in the defeat of the Turks on the Jordan River and in driving the Turks out of eastern Palestine (Transjordan).

The Australian general, Sir Edward Chaytor, told the Legionnaires: By your gallant capture of the Umm Es Shert Ford and defeat of the Turkish rearguard I was enabled to push my mounted men over the Jordan and so you contributed materially to the capture of Es Salt and Amman, the cutting of the Hedjaz Railway and the destruction of the Fourth Turkish Army, which helped considerably towards the great victory won at Damascus.

Aaron Aaronson, the only one of the three leaders to live in Palestine at the time, made a major contribution to the conduct of the Allied campaign in Palestine. A brilliant and versatile man, Aaronson by 1914 had won worldwide fame as a scientist, especially as the discoverer of wild wheat. He was chosen by the Turkish government to direct the campaign against the plague of locusts that ravaged the country during the first year of the war. Soon after the war began, Aaronson was afforded details of the extermination in cold blood by the Turks of some two million Armenian subjects of their empire. By this time, the Jews in Palestine were already being subjected to terrorization, despoliation, and deportation. Under the circumstances, it seemed impossible to fight against the Turks. The leaders of the still modest Jewish community bowed their heads to the storm. Aaronson, convinced that a British victory was vital for the Jewish future, organized the Nili group – an intelligence service for the British behind the Turkish lines. He himself managed to find his way to Egypt, where, in addition to directing and maintaining contact with Nili, he became probably the most important adviser at British HQ for the forthcoming invasion of Palestine under the Commander-in-Chief, General Allenby.

Aaronson’s encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain in all its aspects – population, climatic vagaries, water problems, transport problems – was unique. In addition, a stream of essential current military information came from the Nili organization. The price paid by Aaronson’s group was high. In an attempt to reach Egypt overland by way of the Sinai Desert, Aaronson’s chief collaborator, Avshalom Feinberg, was killed by Bedouins. In September 1917, the Turks exposed the Nili network. Two of its leaders, Naaman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky, were hanged in Damascus; many of the others were imprisoned and tortured. Among these was Aaronson’s sister Sarah, who had served as his deputy. During a respite from torture, she succeeded in shooting herself. Literature on Aaronson, who died in a plane crash in 1919, is sparse. See a recent biography by Eliezer Livneh, Aaron Aaronson Ha’ish Uzemano [Aaron Aaaronson, The Man and His Times]. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik 1969.

The Nili intelligence proved indispensable. British General Gribbon expressed the opinion that in the crucial battle for Beersheba alone, it had saved 30,000 British lives. Even more explicit were Allenby’s own words on Aaronson:

“He was mainly responsible for the formation of my Field Intelligence Organization behind the Turkish lines.”

The significance of that intelligence service was summed up by Sir George Macdonogh, Director of British Military Intelligence, in a professional lecture after the war:

You will remember Lord Allenby’s great campaign in Palestine in that year and you may have wondered at the audacity of his operations. It is true that in war you cannot expect a really great success unless you are prepared to take risks, but these risks must be reasonable ones. To the uninitiated it may sometimes have appeared that Lord Allenby’s were not reasonable. That however was not the case because Lord Allenby knew from his Intelligence every disposition and movement of the enemy. Every one of his opponent’s cards was known to him, and he was consequently able to play his own hand with the most perfect assurance.

In those circumstances victory was certain. The Nili underground was surrounded by an atmosphere of perpetual terrorization by the Turkish authorities. From the very beginning of the war the governor, Djemal Pasha, had treated the Jews of Palestine as a potential enemy, since he realized that to the Jews the Turks were the alien occupiers of their country and that Zionism was now an active force in the world.

In response to the practical manifestations of Jewish collaboration with the Allies – the Zion Mule Corps in Gallipoli 1915, the campaign in Britain to create Jewish regiments, the Zionist pro-Allied campaign in the United States and elsewhere – Djemal became ever more fierce in his repressions. Police brutality, economic discrimination, arbitrary arrests, and deportations were the constant companions of the Jews throughout the war. Of a population estimated at some 90,000 at its outbreak, less than 60,000 remained when it ended.

The Arabs living in Palestine did not protest Turkish overlordship. When war came, they fought to perpetuate Turkish imperial rule. The Arabs of Palestine made no response to the call of Sherif Hussein of Hejaz, the one zone where Arab action against the Turks developed, and they contributed nothing to even that marginal Arab contribution to the downfall of Turkey. Even when the British forces under Allenby, their path eased and smoothed by the Nili intelligence, finally swept into Palestine, there was no Arab rising behind the lines to help them rout the Turks.

Thus Djemal, commanding the Turkish force which in 1915 made its way through Sinai to attack the British on the Suez Canal, was able in his memoirs to emphasize the spirit of solidarity displayed by the Arab soldiers.

“I can have no greater duty,” he wrote, “than to offer a respectful tribute to these heroes…. In this force, composed of men of Arab and Turkish stock, a fine feeling of brotherly affection prevailed. This first campaign against the Canal was a brilliant revelation of the fact that the majority of the Arabs stood by the Khalifate with heart and soul. The Arabs, who composed the entire 25th division and the whole of the L. of C. Organization, did their duty with the greatest zeal and devotion.”

Even after the defeat of the Turks, the Arabs were unable to hide their feelings. British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen recorded in his diary on December 2, 1917:

The Arabs of Ramleh gave us an amusing incident yesterday which accurately reflects their attitude towards us. A large batch of Turkish prisoners were being marched through the village, but they were not preceded by their British Guard. The Arabs, thinking it was the return of the Turkish Army, turned out in force, yelling with delight and waving Turkish flags. [Middle East Diary, p. 7]

After the war and at the beginning of the British Mandatory regime in Palestine, Arabs, among themselves and in trying to engage the sympathies of the Moslem world, emphasized how loyal they had been to the Turks. Writing to the Mufti of Jerusalem on a visit to India in 1923, the Mufti of Haifa noted:

We found repugnance by every Moslem towards anyone who was called Arab…They took him to be like the Sharif Husain of whom they say that he betrayed Islam…We began to rebut this notion and to show all that Palestine had done in giving total aid to the Turkish army and how she fought to the end.

This attitude and behavior were, in fact, natural and 1ogical. Even in 1914 there were no more than the faintest glimmerings of any Arabic national consciousness. After 1908 – the year of the Young Turkish revolution – an opposition had come into existence in the empire against the Young Turks’ excessive administrative centralization and cultural Turkification. These oppositional groups worked for decentralization and for a recognized status for the Arabic language, but they made no impact on the population: Throughout the area the membership of all the groups totaled 126. Of these, 22 were from Palestine.

There was no sign of anything remotely resembling a national movement, of a sense of nationality, of “ownership” of the country they lived in, of rejection of the Turks. As late as March 1917, T. E. Lawrence – the last person in the world to understate the Arab case – wrote in a confidential report in the Arab Bulletin:

The words Syria and Syrian are foreign terms. Unless he had learnt English or French, the inhabitant of these parts has no words to describe all his country . . . Sham is Arabic for the town of Damascus. An Aleppine always calls himself an Aleppine, a Beyrouti a Beyrouti, and so down to the smallest villages. This verbal poverty indicates a political condition. There is no national feeling. [Secret Despatches, pp. 77-78]

The Arab leaders, before they became involved in the intrigues launched to resist the Jewish restoration, gave unequivocal recognition to the Jewish bond with Palestine and the Jewish right.

The Emir Faisal I, son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, who initiated the Arab Revolt, briefly King of Syria and later King of Iraq, signed a treaty with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in February 1919. In this treaty, they outlined the relations between “the Arab state and Palestine.” There was no mention of mutual “recognition” – in the context of the treaty it was superfluous. That an Arab state was about to arise (as it did) was taken for granted. It was equally taken for granted that Palestine was to be a Jewish state.

Before signing the 1919 treaty with Weizmann, Faisal had told Reuter’s Agency:

“Arabs are not jealous of Zionist Jews and intend to give them fair play, and the Zionist Jews have assured the nationalist Arabs of their intention to see that they too have fair play in their respective areas” (London Times, December 12,1918).

What was the Zionist area? In a letter to Felix Frankfurter (March 3, 1919), Faisal wrote:

“We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement. Our delegation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference and we regard them as moderate and proper.”

These proposals had called for the establishment of a Jewish state and specified its boundaries in detail. These took in all of Galilee (including the area up to the Litany River, later torn out of Palestine and transferred to the French zone of interest in Lebanon), the territory east of the Jordan (later torn out of Mandatory Palestine to become finally the Arab Kingdom of Transjordan), and part of the Sinai Peninsula. The treaty itself was couched in simple language: The Arab State and Palestine in all their relations and undertakings shall be controlled by the most cordial goodwill and understanding and to this end Arab and Jewish duly accredited agents shall be established and maintained in the respective territories. In the establishment of the Constitution and Administration of Palestine all such measures shall be adopted as will afford the fullest guarantees for carrying into effect the British Government’s (Balfour) declaration of 2 November 1917.

All necessary measures shall be undertaken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land. The treaty further envisaged Jewish aid to the Arab state. The Zionist Organization undertook to place at the disposal of the Arab state a commission of experts to study economic possibilities and to try to obtain economic help.

A year earlier Faisal’s father, Hussein (who in his negotiations with the British on the rewards for his revolt had demanded all the Asian territory ever included in the Moslem Empire, except Turkey, and who had been promised most of it – excepting Palestine), had written or inspired an article in the Mecca newspaper Al Qibla, which is most revealing on the relative affinities of Arabs and Jews to Palestine. It appeared on March 23, 1918, while the war was still in progress, two months after Hussein had been officially informed of the British government’s Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of the Jewish Home in Palestine.

Hussein called upon the Arab population in Palestine to welcome the Jews as brothers and to cooperate with them for the common good.

The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes could not escape those who had the gift of a deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons [abna’ihi-l-asliyin], for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles [Jaliya] to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades, and in all things connected with toil and labor.

In that same year, the leaders of the Moslem community in Palestine itself had an opportunity to give formal expression to their attitude toward the movement of Jewish restoration and its recognition by the British government. On July 24, 1918, the foundation stones of the Hebrew University were laid on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Christian and Moslem notables attended. The religious leader of the Moslems, Kamil el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, laid one of the stones and signed the parchment buried under it. There the date was given as the twenty-first year after the first Zionist Congress and the first year of the Balfour Declaration “promising to grant a national home to the Jewish people in Palestine.”

The twilight months of the end of the First World War were a dramatic moment in the history of Eretz Israel. As the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire, crumbling to its fall, released its hold on the country, it brought to a close the long succession of its foreign and – except for the Crusaders – imperial absentee rulers. For nearly two thousand years, though the Jews were powerless to prevent it, no other people had made Palestine its national home. And now Christians and Moslems, whatever resentments they might harbor, however much they might dislike or fear the Jewish return to the land – all now joined in recognition of the title of the Jewish people to be the land’s master.

The myth of an Arab historic claim to the country was born later.

A Garland Of Myths

Posted on Tue, November 16, 2010 at 03:07 am CET

Tue, Nov 16, 2010 | shmuelkatz.com | By Shmuel Katz

Palestinian armed fedayeen fighters kept a watch on the surroundings of the Ajloun castle where they had taken up position, on December 22, 1970, during the fights between the Jordanian army and Palestinian Fedayeen in the so-called Black September events. Armed conflict lasted until July 1971 and caused the death of thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of the PLO and thousands of Palestinian fighters to Lebanon. (Photo: AFP)

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

A Garland Of Myths

This article is the sixth chapter from the book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz. Yesterday, we published the fifth chapter: Beginning To Restore The Land. In the next few days, we will publish the rest of the chapters from this book as part of a series of facts, fantasy and myths concerning Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East. For all the chapters of the book, click Here.

The distortion of history, ancient and modern, basic to the Arab-British resistance to Jewish restoration, had been fully articulated by 1948. After 1948, the Arabs added greater depth and vehemence in presentation and with it a theme of hatred of the Jews, comparable only to the demonology of medieval Christianity or the excesses of German Nazi propaganda in our own age. Inevitably, the propaganda became even more intense and unrestrained after the Six Day War. As Hitler and Goebbels, the arch-propagandists of the century, discovered and taught, the greater the lie, the more likely it is to be believed.

The Arabs’ version of history, of their and the Jews’ relationship to Palestine, is not uniform. It is often accommodated to the tastes or prejudices of the audience. It not only fabricates, it also ignores the known recorded facts and unblinkingly replaces the picture of public knowledge of even a year ago with a completely imagined substitute.

Thus, one of the versions in its bold outline goes: Palestine was the Arab homeland even before the Arab-Moslem conquest in the seventh century. The Arabs were the original inhabitants and rulers of the country. The Canaanites were, in fact, Arabs; the Philistines were Arabs; the Amorites were Arabs. The Jews for their part were, in fact, the rulers of the country only briefly – for some eighty years in the days of David and Solomon. In any case, they disappeared and were subsequently swallowed up by the Arabs. The modern Jews are not the descendants of the ancient Jews. This version has not yet reached the point of suggesting that the modem Jews do not exist.

The Western powers – so goes the Arab version – as an act of recompense for the Christian persecution of the Jews, brought them to Palestine, where they drove out the Arab possessors of the country. The Western powers did this by promulgating the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate at the end of the First World War or, alternately, after the Nazi campaign of extermination during the Second World War.

The most startling item in the Arabs’ propaganda is their usurpation of the Jewish patrimony of Jerusalem. Arab political propaganda claims that Jerusalem is an “Arab city,” has been an Arab city for many centuries, and is a holy city in Islam. There is only one small grain of truth in this claim, which on the whole is as false as the quite common description of Palestine as “a land holy to three faiths.”

It is possible to call Palestine a land holy to two faiths: to Christianity as well as to Judaism. It was certainly never holy to Islam. Mohammed no doubt turns in his grave at the ignorant suggestion that Islam has a “holy land” other than Arabia. Palestine has no significance in the Moslem religion. It never existed as a country under Arab or any of the other Moslem administrations. Jerusalem does contain a place holy to Islam (and this too was borrowed from Judaism), but the city as such has no significance in Islam.

The known facts are fascinatingly simple. Mohamed, in establishing Islam in Arabia, hoped that both Jews and Christians would adopt the new religion. He called on them to accept him as the successor of both Moses and Jesus, whose original authority and sanctity he respected. To emphasize the affinity and religious continuity between the two older religions and Islam, he at first ordered that when praying the Moslem should adopt the Jewish custom of turning his face to Jerusalem (at that time still under Christian rule). When, however, there was no response by Christians or Jews to his claim or to his appeal, he rescinded the order eighteen months later. Moslems at prayer have ever since turned their faces to Mecca.

It was presumably the recognition by Mohammed of the sanctity of the Holy City of Judaism that gave birth to the Moslem tradition that the Temple Area was the site of his ascent to the seventh heaven. The Koran itself relates only that Mohammed in a single night was transported to heaven by Buraq, a horse with wings, a woman’s face, and a peacock’s tail. He was first taken to what the Koran called the “uttermost mosque” – il masjad al aksa. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the story, and there was, of course, no mosque in Jerusalem. After Mohammed’s death, the tradition – which did not pass unchallenged by an opposing school of thought – laid it down that the “uttermost mosque” meant the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

It was not Mohammed’s dream that conferred sanctity on the Temple Mount. On the contrary, it was the existing sanctity of the place – it had been holy to the Jews for nearly two thousand years before Mohammed – that inspired the weavers of the legend to choose it as lending a fittingly awesome station for Mohammed’s ascent. The Buraq, as the Moslems call the site, is thus in fact a permanent memorial to Islam’s recognition of the Jewishness of the Holy Place.

On this legend rests the Moslem claim to the Jewish Temple Mount as a Moslem Holy Place. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were subsequently built on the Mount. This, called Haram-A-Sharif, became the third holiest place in Islam (after Mecca and Medina). It is not known that Mohammed in fact ever set foot in Jerusalem. Here begins and ends the religious significance of Jerusalem to Islam. It is fascinating to reflect what the Christian reaction would be if the Moslem theologians had chosen to declare the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the station for Mohammed’s ascent, then renamed it Buraq, and claimed the site as Moslem property. Christopher Sykes has put it pithily:

“To the Moslems it is not Jerusalem, but a certain site in Jerusalem which is venerated…the majestic Dome of the Rock. To a Moslem there is a profound difference between Jerusalem and Mecca or Medina. The latter are holy places containing holy sites. Apart from the hallowed rock, Jerusalem has no major Islamic significance.”

Nor were the Moslems overly impressed with Jerusalem’s importance when they ruled in Palestine. When, on the fall of the city to the Crusaders in 1099, a Moslem delegation arrived in Baghdad, then the capital of the empire, to seek aid against the invading Christians, the Baghdadis shed tears and expressed sympathy but offered and took no action to help in the recovery of Jerusalem.2 The city never played any part in the Arabs’ political life. While in turn Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo glittered with the luster of an imperial capital, Jerusalem stagnated as a remote provincial townlet. It never served even as a provincial capital, not even a subprovincial capital (an honor reserved for Ramleh). No less significantly, it was never a Moslem cultural center. No great school of Islamic lore was established nor any religious message proclaimed there. To the Moslems, Jerusalem, though the site of a Holy Place, was a backwater.

Nor did the Arabs attach any importance to living in Jerusalem. Even when the Moslems ruled, for long periods the majority of the population was Christian.

After the middle of the nineteenth century, soon after modern Jewish reconstruction began, the Jews attained a majority, which they have never relinquished. Successive Arab attacks, encouraged or permitted by the British, from 1920 onward, gradually squeezed the majority of the Jews out of the Old City and into the New. In 1948, when their ammunition ran out, the final remnant and the handful of defenders surrendered to the Jordanians. That was when the city was divided.

The Arabs’ slight and superficial relationship to the city has only recently been expanded into a claim of an uncompromising, even exclusive, ownership. Just as they originally borrowed the sanctity of the Jewish Holy Place, they have now, in our generation, tried to simulate something of the unique and mystic passion of the Jewish people for their ancient and incomparable Holy City.

In the war of 1948, Abdallah’s Arab League, under British guidance, captured the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City. The one significant change in the subsequent nineteen years of Jordanian rule was the attempt to obliterate the Jewish presence and the signs of Jewish identity. All the synagogues were destroyed. In the rains of the most famous of them – the Hurvah – an enterprising Arab citizen put together a small stable for his ass or his goat. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Old City, was torn up, some of its tombstones being used for paving and some for lavatory seats in Jordanian army camps. The Arabs avoided hurting any Christian susceptibilities and, as a result, the many Christian witnesses in the Old City kept silent about acts of desecration and destruction perpetrated against Jewish sites. Then, suddenly for the first time in history, the Arabs discovered and revealed to the world the vehement, passionate, almost desperate, accents of a deep-rooted, longstanding, and undying attachment to Jerusalem.

This fabrication of an emotion which can after all so easily and manifestly be exposed has yet, again because of the very intensity of its presentation, made at least some impression throughout the world. But it may be helpful in demonstrating a national characteristic of the Arabs, which has assumed central importance in the confrontation between the Jewish and Arab peoples: the admitted capacity of the Arabs to manufacture facts, to deceive themselves into accepting them, and to work themselves up into a public passion over what is in fact a nonexistent emotion.

“What a people believes,” writes Hitti about the Arabs, “even if untrue, has the same influence over their lives as if it were true” (p. 88).

What is commonly called the Oriental imagination has long been recognized. It is only in our day, however, that it has played a striking part in shaping world events. The amplifying effects of modern communications media-radio and television – and the willing involvement of powerful world interests have presented the Oriental imagination with unprecedented influence. The use of lies in our time as a primary weapon of state policy by the two most powerful totalitarian states the world has known-Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union-has, moreover, set an example. It also introduced techniques whose application has sharpened the Oriental imagination into a highly effective political weapon.

Al-Ghazzali, the great eleventh-centuryMoslem theologian, wrote:

“Know that a lie is not haram [wrong] in itself, but only because the evil conclusions to which it leads the hearer, making him believe something that is not really the case….If a lie is the only way of obtaining a good result, it is permissible….We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results.”

Students of Islam and the Arabs – not least Moslem and Arab scholars – have devoted much attention to the significance and the consequences of the application of this precept.

“Lying,” writes the Arab sociologist Sania Hamady, “is a widespread habit among the Arabs and they have a low idea of truth….The Arab has no scruples about lying if by it he obtains his objective….He is more interested in feeling than facts, in conveying an impression than in giving a report. The Arab language, moreover, provides its users with the tool, for assertion [tarokid] and exaggeration [mubalong]. The result has been the creation of colorful rules in communication.”

“The Arabs are forced,” writes another Arabic scholar, Eli Shouby, “to overassert and exaggerate in almost all types of communication, lest they be misunderstood. If an Arab says exactly what he means without the expected exaggeration, his hearers doubt his stand or even suspect him of meaning the opposite.”

Falsifying history is not a new Arab art, and it was never confined to the marketplace. According to the whimsical description given by Hitti,

“The Arabian genealogist, like his brother the Arabian historian, had a horror vacui and his fancy had no difficulty in bridging gaps and filling vacancies; in this way he has succeeded in giving us in most instances a continuous record from Adam or, in more modest compass, from Ishmael and Abraham” (p. 91 ).

As a major political weapon, however, complex fabrication has developed organically among the Arabs in the two generations of the struggle for Palestine. In their first encounter as a group with the modem world, the Arab leaders discovered how avidly foreign imperialists and other interested parties who were not Moslems and who were not Arabic-language specialists were ready to encourage, and exploit for their own ends, Arab fantasies and exaggerations. The Sherifian Arabs in the First World War and in its aftermath had the great good fortune to be allied with a British agent interested in precisely the kind of fabrication their own culture and custom encouraged. T. E. Lawrence found the appropriate partners for his historic adventure in mendacity.

Thus, for example, the Emir Faisal, in addressing the Paris Peace Conference in February 1918, turned the few train wreckings by his Bedouins into an “advance of 800 miles by the Arab army.” The army (of 600 men) did, in fact, move about 800 miles northward, but most of the advance took place only after the British, Australian, and French forces (and in the latter stage a Jewish force) had already driven out the Turks. The size of the army, Faisal claimed, was 100,000, and it had suffered 20,000 casualties. To top it all, his army, he declared, had taken 40,000 prisoners. This tale, however, so suited the British interests at the time that it was only eighteen years later that the British Prime Minister, who had been present at Faisal’s speech, described his figures as “Oriental arithmetic.” At the time the statement was woven into the fable, disseminated by the British, and accepted by the world at large as a measure of the scope and impact of the “Revolt in the Desert.”

The profit to the Arabs of the Laurentian fraud was not calculated to encourage them to restrain their own national failing, and it made its continuous impact on the history of Palestine. It was brought home in incredible drama to millions of citizens throughout the world in June 1967.

The Arabs’ account of the events of the Six Day War consisted of a counterpoint utterly different to the events themselves. Their reports bore only minimal relation to what was happening–except for the two facts that a war was in progress and that its scene was the Middle East.

Even the identities of the combatants were distorted. The Egyptians, and the other Arab states in their wake, repeatedly proclaimed the completely imaginary participation of American and British pilots and planes in the attacks on their airfields. The Egyptian Air Force – which, in fact, never left the ground – was said to be wreaking havoc in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, in Natanya. The Israeli Air Force (which came through the six days with a loss of nineteen planes on all fronts) lost, according to Arab communiques, 160 planes on the first day alone. Gigantic tank battles in the Sinai Desert, with huge Israeli losses, were waged in the Arab reports two and three days after the Israeli forces had overwhelmed the mass of Egyptian armor, and while tens of thousands of Egyptian soldiers were giving themselves up as prisoners or fleeing toward and across the Suez Canal.

Some skeptical, case-hardened newspaper readers and television viewers, remote from the scene of conflict, were convinced that after allowing for wartime exaggeration, the war was going very well for Egypt and Jordan and badly for Israel. It could surely not all be untrue. Though it was no doubt untrue that Haifa and Natanya were in flames, they must have suffered some damage. If the Arabs claimed that Tel Aviv had suffered heavy casualties from bombing, some casualties there must no doubt have occurred. Allowing for exaggeration, twenty or thirty Israeli planes had surely been downed. In fact, neither Haifa nor Tel Aviv, nor any other city, received a single bomb or any other attack by Egypt. Two shells were fired into Tel Aviv from the Jordanian front; a single bomb was dropped in the neighborhood of Netanya by an Iraqi plane.

These allowances for the Oriental imagination were made by the sophisticated, the cynics, the optimists. To large numbers of more credulous people throughout the world, it seemed certain by the second day of the war that Israel was on the brink of defeat. Thereafter the balance was restored, but it was only by the end of the six days that the realization of the magnitude of the Arab defeat made its full impact.

The effect of the Arab reports was not achieved without the assistance of foreign news media which, credulously or in wishful eagerness, spread them. The Russians, whose own original contribution to the mendacities of the age had precipitated the war (early in May they had given Nasser unfounded information that Israel had massed forces for an attack on the Syrian border), gave their own enthusiastic intonation to the news of Israeli disasters. They were themselves completely deceived, and, in consequence, delayed the call for a ceasefire by the Security Council lest too early a cessation might prevent the complete defeat of Israel.

The British Broadcasting Corporation served as a main instrument of the Arab information services, publicly repeating even the most improbable of their reports and severely censoring the only version of events – from its reporter in Jerusalem – that corresponded to the truth. Many hours after the officer commanding the Israeli Air Force had announced the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force, British newspapers were still debating whether Britain could stand aside and see Israel destroyed.

The very brevity of the war, the concentration of events, sharpened the exposure in men’s minds of the magnitude of the Arab fabrications. Indeed, it awakened many thoughtful Arabs to the dangers to themselves of their imagination. Deception was, after all, the obverse of self-deception. When President Nasser claimed that British and American planes had bombed Egyptian airfields and that Egyptian planes had bombed Israeli cities, he was misleading not only the world, but also the Arabs. He was probably misleading himself because his military chiefs were lying to him. He certainly misled King Hussein of Jordan. Hussein’s decision to attack Israel – and to persist in the attack even after the Israeli Prime Minister had urged him to desist to avoid a clash – was probably based on his belief in Egyptian reports of havoc and destruction in Israel.

For it is a well-known part of the character of Arab fantasy that the inventor of a story comes to believe it himself. A charming little tale from Arab folklore tells of a man whose afternoon nap was disturbed by the noise of children playing in the courtyard below. He went out to the balcony and called, “Children, how foolish you are! While you are playing here, they are giving away figs in the marketplace.” The children rushed off to collect their figs, and the man, pleased with his invention, went back to his couch. But just as he was about to drop off, a troublesome thought aroused him: “Here am I, lying around, when there are free figs to be had in the marketplace!”

Their misrepresentations of the Six Day War harmed the Arabs most of all. In the years that have followed, a far more complex web of fiction has victimized the Jewish people. The fiction of the so-called Palestine revolution, or the “Palestine Liberation” movement, could have results no less dangerous than those of the Cairo-Khartoum school’s workings after 1918.

The Arab terrorist organizations, operating without a Lawrence, adapted the tone and content of their propaganda to prevailing political currents in the world and made effective use of the modem mass media.

They disseminated so plausible a statement of their motives, so lively a version of their fighting methods and achievements, that the average person, with little opportunity or interest to make a study, naturally tended to accept them. Many people were thus persuaded to believe that the Arab terrorist organizations were daring bands of partisan or guerrilla fighters, springing out of the Arab population of Palestine, determined to regain a lost homeland, and suffering an alien and cruel occupation. These fighters, it was maintained, sallied forth by day and by night from the underground bases provided by the sponsorship of the “Palestine nation”; they boldly engaged occupying Israeli army units, with their always superior numbers and with their tanks and their planes. Large numbers of these were thus “destroyed,” and very many Israeli soldiers were “killed.” No less regularly these brave guerrillas were depicted as penetrating the heart of Israel, where they attacked military installations and inflicted untold damage.

The terrorists’ propagandists exploited recent history to suggest that the French Maquis, the Scandinavian undergrounds, or Tito’s partisans in the Second World War had come to life again in the exploits of the Fatah and its sister organizations. They were pictured more specifically as the latest reincarnation of Castro’s guerrillas in Cuba, as bloodbrothers to, Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, as the tactical disciples of Mao Tse-tung, of the Algerian rebels against French rule, of the Viet Cong. This is, of course, the type of story that Europeans and Americans expect to hear, attuned as they are to the taut heroic drama of liberation movements, underground or open, that have captured the public imagination during the past thirty years. The Arabs’ action stories have, moreover, often been retailed and given added verisimilitude by the dispatches of eager American and European news correspondents on the spot. They were permitted to visit “secret guerrilla headquarters” and enabled to talk (and to tape-record) participants in “attacks” or, “raids,” both before and after; they were even permitted to take photographs. The picture thus presented of the purpose of the Arab terrorist organizations, of their origin and background, and of the nature of their activities, was a sophisticated, modern fulfillment of Al-Ghazzali’s permissive philosophy: It was a mixture of exaggeration and wishful thinking. It was spread abroad with great intensity by the worldwide labors of a large team of propagandists, some frankly professional, many planted as students at universities in Europe and the Americas, all maintained or subsidized by a vast budget.

In fact, the Fatah and its rival organizations have never carried out or tried to carry out an attack of any significance on any unit of Israel’s army, air force, or navy. Such engagements as have occurred have been initiated by the Israeli forces. These, patrolling border areas or carrying out a search, have encountered Fatah groups, infiltrated across the Jordan River or in the mountains of Galilee at the Lebanese frontier.

Fatah operations have been directed almost exclusively against civilian targets. Except for attempts to sabotage the Israel Water Carrier – the national pipeline carrying water from the comparative abundance of the Lake of Galilee to the semiarid Negev – and mining a border road used by children on their way to school along which Israeli military patrols might be expected to travel, they have, insofar as they have succeeded in operating within Israel, tried to destroy civilian property and to kill civilians. In these operations, they have confined themselves almost exclusively to two weapons: explosives with a time mechanism, and hand grenades. The explosives have been planted, with becoming intrepidity, in a shopping basket in a crowded supermarket, in a package in a university students’ restaurant, under an apartment house at night, and in waste baskets during the rush hours at a bus terminal.

These operations, involving penetration into Israel’s population centers and in some cases a momentary mingling with the intended victims, have not been numerous. The Israeli security forces have in nearly all these instances caught the perpetrators, and the cells to which they belonged have been eliminated. By far the greater number of Fatah operations have been executed from outside Israeli territory: mainly across the Jordan River, but also to a lesser degree in the mountains of Galilee straddling the dividing line with Lebanon. Across these borders, at a safe distance, the fighters of Fatah have carried out hundreds of light-artillery attacks.

Such attacks across borders have provided the most picturesque locations for conducted visits by foreign correspondents. Here the missing ingredients of stark military confrontation and of guerrilla valor could be added at will. Journalists and television teams were, for example, taken at night to the banks of the Yabbok River in the heart of Transjordan. Facing each other across the river, two groups of Fatah fighters exchanged artillery fire with careful imprecision. The following day, Scandinavian television viewers were shown the Yabbok River, now identified as the Jordan, and the battling forces, one of which was now described as the Israeli Army. The picture of the battle was accompanied by a commentary on the casualties probably inflicted on the Israeli Army and the certain destruction of specific Israeli military targets. Those news-hungry journalists, ignorant of local geography, no experts in battleground reporting, bemused by the night and the noise, unconscious of the Arabs’ infinite capacity for invention – what reason did they have to doubt the authenticity of the connection between what their eyes saw and what their hosts were telling them?9 Why should even an experienced newspaper correspondent at the always secret guerrilla headquarters, amid the noise of nearby exploding shells, speaking to warriors returning to their base, disbelieve their story of a daring crossing of the Jordan River into Israeli-held territory and the successful demolition of Israeli tanks or guns? How could he know that they had in fact merely lobbed shells over the river and then given the suitable texture of battle grime to their face and hands and uniform? Why should the reader of the illustrated newspaper in Paris or the television viewer in Cincinnati doubt the evidence provided by the picture of that begrimed Arab guerrilla and the caption composed by the reporter?

The targets of attacks from across the border were invariably the Israeli border villages – their men and women and children, their domestic animals, their little houses. As in the days before 1967, when they were harassed nightly by Syrian artillery fire pouring down from the Golan Heights, there are children in many villages on the Jordan who do not know what it is to sleep in their own cots; they spent their childhood nights in underground shelters. The routine may be varied by a daylight attack with Katyusha missile throwers on a school bus – described in the Fatah community as a successful attack on Israeli Army transport.

The scope and nature of the operations of the Fatah is marked by a characteristic unique in the history of liberation movements, underground or open. Hundreds of members of Fatah and other terrorist organizations – most of them described as Palestinian Arabs, the rest from the Arab states – are in Israeli detention. During the four years after the Six Day War, they were tried and convicted for taking part in or planning sabotage activities, or for organizing or recruiting for the terrorist organizations. A minority was caught during or following an operation; the rest were denounced by their comrades. As soon as they were questioned, sometimes even earlier, captured officers supplied the names of their subordinates, rank-and-file members gave away their officers. In some cases, prisoners reconstructed their operations for the Israeli police, explaining the part played or due to have been played by each of the participants.

There were, of course, exceptions. Some young Arabs kept their lips sealed and showed defiance to their captors and judges. They served to provide an occasional break in the gray picture of so-called freedom fighters prepared, once caught, to jeopardize and indeed torpedo their movement and the cause they claim to be fighting for. It was not to save their lives that they were so free with the freedom of their comrades and the continuation of their struggle. The Israeli military courts do not impose the death penalty, and there is no torturing of prisoners. The advantage to be gained therefore was at most the lightening of a prison sentence.

Nor is this yet the full measure of the masquerade. Fatah and its sister organizations were not born after or as a result of the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. They came into existence some ten years earlier, when three quarters of a million Arabs in Samaria and Judea lived under Arab rule from Jordan and three hundred thousand lived in the Gaza Strip under Egyptian Arabic rule.

They did not enjoy the independence which the Fatah propagandists claim to be the breath of life to them, and they seemed quite oblivious to its absence. For those nineteen years, there was no talk of independence nor any action to secure it. In those years as well, Israel was the target of Fatah’s activities – Israel in its cramped partition borders. Then, too, Fatah acted in the name of the “Palestinian people”–presumably the Arab – ruled Arabs of Hebron and Jenin and Nablus as well as the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa and Nazareth in Israel.

Yet the cardinal fact about the Fatah and its campaign against Israel is that it did not spring from the Arabs of Palestine, whom it claims to represent and for whom it claims to be living and dying. It was not welcomed in their midst or given a minimum of help and of comfort.

Fatah was not founded in Palestine. Throughout the years of non-Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria, it did not have its headquarters there and did not conduct its operations from there. It was founded in Lebanon in the late 1950s. Its first official offices were opened in 1963 in Algiers, in a building placed at its disposal by the Algerian government. Compelled to leave Algeria because of internal Algerian frictions, it established new headquarters in Beirut. In mid-1965, Fatah headquarters were moved to Damascus, where they remained until the Six Day War.

Yasser Arafat, its leader, is not uncharacteristic of the Fatah membership. His claim to have been born in the Old City of Jerusalem may well be true. It is certain that he was brought up and educated in Egypt, after his parents had emigrated there from Palestine. They were not “refugees” or exiles, they had simply moved house in the 1920s, twenty years or more before the State of Israel came into existence. Arafat is said to have served in the Egyptian forces during the invasion of Palestine in 1948. He certainly qualified in Egypt as an engineer and worked there for some time.

He moved to a job in prosperous Kuwait and there began to agitate against Israel. Henceforward, his political activity dictated his mode of life. From Kuwait he went to live in Beirut, then in Algiers, then back in Beirut, and then in Damascus. Though he was a frequent traveler, in all the nineteen years of Jordanian Arab rule, he did not set foot, let alone try to live, still less naturalize his movement, in Judea or Samaria, not even in the city he claims as his birthplace. He gave Palestine and the people who lived there a wide berth.

Fatah operations against Israel, first launched in 1965, were planned in Syria. The fighters first crossed into Jordan or sometimes into Lebanon and from there infiltrated directly into Israel. All the attacks were hit- and-run raids on civilian targets, and seldom did they stray far from the border. For Fatah members could not expect shelter from the Palestinian Arabs, whether in Jordan-occupied Judea and Samaria or in Israel. With few exceptions, the “Palestinian people” were not involved at all, nor did they offer any substantial cooperation, even passive, in these operations.

After the Arab defeat in the Six Day War and Israel’s gaining of Judea and Samaria, the Fatah put its pretensions to the test. A month after the Six Day War, Yasser Arafat left his headquarters in Damascus and infiltrated into Palestine, setting up a clandestine headquarters in the market area in Nablus. Later he moved to Ramallah.

Several hundred members of the Fatah recruited in Syria, Algeria, and in European universities were infiltrated into Palestine, some of them taking advantage of the Israeli government’s policy of “open bridges” across the Jordan. They succeeded in smuggling in substantial quantities of arms and military equipment.

Assuming that Israeli military occupation rule would be harsh and oppressive, inspired by doctrines culled from the Algerian rebellion against French rule, and applying the tactics of the Viet Cong in the South Vietnam countryside, Arafat sent agents into the Arab towns and villages of Judea and Samaria to recruit members for the organization and to establish local cells throughout the areas. He planned gradually to build into the Arab population an armed force that would sally forth from safe billets to carry out guerrilla attacks, then fade back into the population. Into the Jewish towns and villages he would send teams of saboteurs to wreak death and destruction. His cells, moreover, were to oversee the Arab population; he would set up an underground “government” that would dominate the Arab countryside and population, at least by night. To this end, leaflets were distributed clandestinely among the population calling for a boycott of Israeli economic, cultural, and judicial institutions, even of the Israeli radio and newspapers. The leaflets contained instructions for the execution of various simple acts of sabotage, such as rolling rocks down from the hills to block roads, or pouring sand into the gas tanks of Israeli vehicles.

The adoption of these ideas, whatever their validity in North Africa or South Vietnam, proved only that Yasser Arafat, true to tradition, was the victim of his own fantasies. Arafat’s plans did not work out, not only because the Jews in Palestine were not foreign colonists, but also because he apparently knew little about Palestinian topography, still less about “his own” people, and nothing at all of the outlook and methods of the Israelis whose “occupation” of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is extremely liberal. (Fatah appeals dated September 1, 1967, at last “warned” the Arab population against the “soft ways” of the Israelis designed to “weaken our resistance.”) When the agents Arafat sent to mobilize the Arabs in the countryside reached their destination, they told their hosts tales of their daring in making their way through the mountains and in outwitting ubiquitous Israeli Army patrols. The townsmen, even the villagers, were not impressed. They listened to the stories politely. They were the kind of stories expected from heroes. They themselves knew that there were no restrictions on movement in the area in the daytime. One did not have to move in byways and mountain paths. The Israeli government early laid down and pursued a policy of letting the life and occasions of the Arab population go on with a minimum of interference. All that Arafat’s agents had to do in order to travel from one town to the next was to board a bus and pay the fare.

A handful of young Arabs, understandably fired by the promise of an early expulsion of the Israelis, did join the Fatah. A few traveled into Jewish towns to carry out acts of terror. The Arab population as a whole, though certainly willing to see the Israelis disappear, turned a deaf ear to appeals for active cooperation. They refused, moreover, to provide billets for their liberators. Instead of safe bases deep in the homes of the population, the terrorists had to make their way to the hills and maintain themselves there. The season was in their favor; the Palestinian summer is well suited for living in the open. By the autumn of 1967, Fatah changed its plans. After barely three months among his “own people,” a presumably sobered Arafat, narrowly escaping capture by the Israeli Army, returned to Syria and briefly established his headquarters in Damascus, later moving to Transjordan. Neither Fatah nor any of the other “Palestinian” organizations made any serious renewed effort in the years that followed to establish a base within the “occupied territory.”

The discrepancy between the propaganda and the reality of the “Palestinian Revolution” is most clearly demonstrated in the almost complete failure of the self-styled revolutionaries to win the physical participation of the “people” that is supposed to be yearning and fighting for its “freedom.” The terrorist organizations are not, in fact, nor have they been, an arm of the allegedly homeless Palestine Arabs. Each of them has been the instrument of one or more or all of the Arab states. When the Fatah, after seven years of talk and discussion and much traveling by its founders, in 1965 finally planned a few actual sabotage operations from Syria, it was because the Syrian government had taken the organization under its wing. It remained a client of the Syrian government, which supplied money and training facilities until after the Six Day War. The Syrian affiliation of the Fatah placed strict limits on its size: Its membership was drawn exclusively from those elements among the “refugees” who had Syrian sympathies and associations. It was opposed by other Arab leaders for reasons of their own and, therefore, by their followers among the “refugees.” Nasser of Egypt and, in his wake, the leaders of the other Arab states, argued that guerrilla action was untimely.

The status of the Fatah, the powers driving it on, and the resources at its disposal changed drastically after the Six Day War. The Arab states, defeated and not yet able to resume a direct attack on Israel, began to promote “popular” terrorist activity on a large scale.

They turned to Fatah as the potential instrument of preparatory attrition, and set up additional terrorist organizations of their own. From time to time after June 1967, a new body with an explosive-sounding name announced its birth, but of the thirty-odd that did so, only twelve appear to have had any real existence. Of these, only four or five made any impact. Each of them enjoyed the all-embracing patronage of one or more or all of the Arab states.

The largest contributions in cash came from the fabulously wealthy oil states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. Training facilities were provided by Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. A wide range of arms poured in from all the Arab states. Instructors were provided by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. An army of recruiting officers was set up by the Arab states and sent out to mobilize “Palestinian refugees”–that is, young men on the UNRWA lists who were working or studying in one or another of the Arab states or in European universities.

The origin, direction, and scope of cooperative action among the Arab states in the “Palestine Revolution” are illustrated in the story of Ahmed Arshid (known as Sword). Classified as a refugee, he enrolled as a student of industrial economics at Karlsruhe University in West Germany in 1960. In 1965, a Syrian agent enrolled him nominally in Fatah, and he became its organizer among the Arabic students of Karlsruhe.

In June 1967, after the Six Day War, still a student, he and 120 other students were sent to a training camp at Balida in Algeria, where for three weeks they were trained in the elements of sabotage, physical fitness, fieldcraft, and marksmanship using a Chinese revolver and a French rifle, and battle practice with a Sten submachine gun and Russian and Chinese bazookas. The instructors were Algerian officers.

At the end of the course on July 20, Arshid and thirty-eight other students were flown to Syria. In Damascus they were given more field training, this time with Czech light arms. They were also given a course in theory on the struggle against Israel and on liberation movements in the world, with special reference to China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Algeria.

Now qualified for action, Arshid was appointed a staff officer in the command of the Fatah in the Jenin district of Samaria. He was provided with an identity card belonging to an Arab resident of the area and taken by Syrian Army Intelligence to the village of Hama on the border with Jordan. There he transferred to an Iraqi Army vehicle, which took him to Amman. He reported to a Jordanian Army officer named Assad Shibli on the orders he had been given in Damascus.

Shibli gave him a permit for crossing into western Palestine. He succeeded in crossing the Jordan and made contact with Fatah headquarters in the Jenin district. This was in August 1967, during the brief period when Fatah headquarters were in Palestine itself. Shortly after his arrival, Arshid was arrested by Israeli security officers.

Between his recruitment in Karlsruhe and his capture in Palestine, he had been mobilized, transported, trained, indoctrinated, armed, and provided with maintenance by the war machines of four Arab states. Only the Palestinian Arabs, the alleged objects of all this activity, proved unwilling to cooperate in achieving the liberation offered them by Arshid. He shared his experience with several hundred other “guerrillas” who made their way into western Palestine that summer. His story is typical of the “Palestine Revolution” and the Palestine “Liberation Movement.”

Rebuffed by all but a few of the Palestine Arabs and unable to carry on the only kind of struggle that might conceivably create a basis for the claim of a popular war, unable even to provide some grain of truth to support the stupendous tales of fiction with which the Arab propaganda crowded the communications media throughout the world, Arafat and his colleagues dismissed the episode of their rebuff and its implications. Their pan-Arab sponsors accepted the situation philosophically. They may have been disappointed at the refusal of their Palestinian brothers to make any serious effort at liberating themselves or to allow others to make the effort to liberate them from the “cruel Israeli occupation.” They may have felt that Arafat, like Kaukji in 1937-1938, should have imposed his will on the population by force and intimidation. In fact, the Palestinian Arabs were not essential to the objectives.

The Arab states adapted themselves to the new circumstances, even intensifying their cooperation with Fatah. Its sabotage operations within Israel never exceeded limited proportions or rose above the simplest and most primitive techniques, such as firing into a busload of tourists or leaving a few sticks of dynamite in a paper parcel in a school playground. The main force of Fatah was now concentrated in Jordan, with a lesser force in Lebanon. Large rear bases were set up as well as a series of forward bases along the Jordan.

An extensive new range of arms, especially field weapons including katyushas of 132 and 240 mm and light and heavy mortars, poured into these camps. Thus armed – indeed, equipped like a regular army, with guidance and sometimes fire cover given them by nearby Jordanian Army units – the Fatah carried out a daily artillery barrage against Israel, that is, against sitting-duck targets: the villages along the Jordan’s West Bank.

Substantial damage was inflicted on the villages. Many houses were hit. Work in the fields was repeatedly interrupted. Daily life and household routine were restricted. Children could not play or run about. There was gloom in the air. Beyond this, the results were meager. Nobody ran away. There was no evacuation. No village was abandoned. From the rest of Israel, moreover, came volunteers – veterans of 1948, high-school students, new immigrants – for a stint of labor and guard duty in the harassed villages.

Again, the events themselves carved out a yardstick of confrontation between one kind of devotion to the land and another. When the Israeli Army and Air Force took retaliatory action against the Fatah bases across the Jordan, the Arab farmers in the neighborhood ran away. Though their villages, unless they actually included a base, were not attacked, the Arabs abandoned them all, leaving their houses and fields to seek shelter in the interior of the country. It was not long before the Jordan valley east of the river was emptied of its inhabitants.

Nor did the Fatah persevere in maintaining its permanent forward bases or artillery emplacements. They now continued their attacks from mobile artillery units, which were moved down to the river bank as required and withdrawn after use. The operational bases followed the civilians into the interior of Jordan.

It was precisely after the Fatah found out, and demonstrated that it had no political roots in the Arab population of Palestine, that it reached the peak of its fame and its popularity. It now developed its capacity for propaganda and exploited the receptiveness of many elements in the West. ne heroic image it created for itself was disseminated throughout the world. Its primary impact was, of course, in the Arab countries.

Around the essential fact that operations against Israel were indeed being carried out was built a larger glittering structure of the imagination. The minor terrorist attacks were translated into an awesome campaign that instilled terror into the hearts of all Israel and inflicted such heavy losses on her armed forces that she must surely soon surrender. Operations of great boldness were reported, complete with statistics of the enemy’s casualties and of his losses in guns and tanks and even planes. On occasion, even accidents and mishaps in Israel were pressed into the eager service of Arab propaganda: When the Israeli Minister of Defense, General Moshe Dayan, an amateur archaeologist, was severely injured in a fall of earth, the Fatah claimed to have wounded him in a “commando” attack; when Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died after an illness in Jerusalem, the Fatah proclaimed that he had been killed in a Fatah attack on his home in Degania on the Jordan.

Arab pride soared, and volunteers poured in. They were all absorbed: There was no lack of money or facilities in this liberation movement de luxe, financed as it was by the treasuries of some of the richest states in the world. The number of members in the terrorist organizations in the period 1968-1970 may have reached 10,000, all maintained “in the field” as fall-time soldiers, that is, with all their needs provided for.

The Fatah did in fact take on the aspect of an army on leave. Foreign correspondents in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon at this time reported large numbers of these young members of the “liberation movement” in their picturesque green-spotted field uniforms, swaggering about in the towns, inviting the admiration of less heroic civilians for vaguely wonderful deeds of valor.

There was much movement of jeeps and guns on the roads of Jordan and Lebanon.

As for the leaders, much of their arduous underground labor resisting and outwitting the Israeli defense forces had to be performed in aircraft flying between the cities of the Middle East, in automobiles racing along highways in Syria or Egypt or Algiers, at much photographed conferences in Cairo, and in the first-class hotels. They often also worked hard at being interviewed and photographed at one of their always “secret” headquarters “just before” or “just after” an operation.

“Each one of us,” later declared Abu Ayad – the pseudonym of Salah Halef, the Fatah leaders’ second-in-command – “rode around in an automobile with three or four bodyguards. We attached undue importance to processions, to demonstrations and applause. Let us turn our backs on all this. Let us disregard the cameras. All this must come to an end.”

He made this confession at a meeting in a refugee camp in Lebanon on January 3, 1971 (reported in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz on January 5, 1971).

By this time, a drastic change had overtaken the fortunes of the terrorist organizations. Yet another of their bluffs had been called. The chief agent of their decline and their exposure was the Jordanian government.

The Fatah first clashed with the Jordanian government soon after its concentration in Jordan. It was proper for the Jordanian Army to help Fatah agents and saboteurs to cross the Jordan for the common purpose of harassing the Israelis and perhaps persuading the Palestine Arab population to rise in revolt. It was also proper to give intelligence support to their artillery units firing across the river. It was another matter when the Israeli artillery and Air Force retaliated and the farmers of the Jordan valley, the most fertile zone in the country, deserting their homes and their farms, deprived the people of Jordan of crops essential to their economy. No decision of the Jordanian government brought this about; the area bordering on the Jordan River simply passed out of its control. Ordinary civilian life all but disappeared as it became a military enclave dominated by the Fatah. With Fatah establishing permanent bases all over the interior of the country, moreover, Israeli Army and Air Force retaliation spread far over the Jordanian countryside.

Nor was this all. The Fatah now also began to ignore the laws of the land and its authorities, arrogating to itself the rights of a regular army responsible only to its own commanders. They accepted as volunteers young citizens of Jordan who were evading enlistment in the Jordanian Army. They set up roadblocks, checking the credentials of law-abiding civilians; they imposed a tax, backed by threats and force, on businessmen; they set up courts not only for their own members, but for trials of Arabs from western Palestine accused of spying; they set up the beginning of a state within a state.

The “liberation” movement was shifting the focus of its activities. The propaganda campaign abroad continued to mobilize considerable sympathy in the larger world. Consequently, there was much less need for actual operations in Israel–especially as these became ever more difficult. Moreover, the smaller terrorist organizations discovered a way of fighting Israel with the maximum of publicity and the minimum of risk: They began to attack Jewish institutions in faraway Europe and, particularly, to hijack civilian planes, Israeli and others, bound to or from Israel. These attacks, which resulted in the murder, maiming, or detention of men, women, and children travelers, and with their overtones of sensation and drama, concentrated universal public attention. At the same time, the main object of Fatah activities became the Kingdom of Jordan, and the conflict between the terrorist leaders and Hussein ripened.

From the beginning of his independent activities in Jordan, and in anticipation of a clash with the government, Arafat had succeeded in mobilizing the support of substantial sections of the population. He was particularly successful with the many Arabs from western Palestine who, as “refugees” or otherwise, had moved across the Jordan in the years between the wars. He could also depend on the backing of the other Arab governments, notably Egypt and Syria, who brought pressure to bear on Hussein to stretch the laws of the country for the “liberation” fighters. As early as November 1967, Hussein signed an agreement with the terrorist organizations which, while not giving them the degree of freedom they demanded, accorded them extralegal recognition. They issued their own identity cards, which exempted their members from carrying Jordanian cards. They were not to be allowed to arrest or question people independently, but they could do so in coordination with the government authorities.

Though they were not to carry out attacks on Israel from the East Bank of the Jordan, the local commanders of the Jordanian Army would help them if they crossed the river to attack.

The Fatah honored the agreement more in the breach than in the observance. But the Jordanian government, while trying from time to time to put a brake on its activities within the country, succumbed to the pressures of the Fatah’s Arab League sponsors and held back from a serious clash. Periods of mutual recrimination were characteristically followed by periods of demonstrative fraternity and declarations of Hussein’s utter devotion to the cause of the “fedayeen.” “We are all fedayeen,” he once said.

The clash came in September 1970, sparked by the boldest stroke ever carried out by the smaller left-wing organization, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In one day, it hijacked four planes of different international airlines, demanding the release from prison in Europe of a number of its members sentenced or awaiting trial for previous attempts at hijacking – some of them with lethal consequences – as well as a number of prisoners in Israel. The European governments involved accepted their terms. The Israeli government was able to avoid this problem because the attempt to hijack an Israeli airliner had failed.

In the worldwide agitation that accompanied the tense human drama, little attention was paid to the implications of the episode for the Jordanian government.

Three of the hijacked planes had been landed near Zerka in Jordan. While the terrorists warned the world that the planes would be blown up with their passengers, the Jordanian Army stood helplessly by; Hussein and his government were powerless to interfere. This severe humiliation – which indicated that Hussein was no more than a figurehead presiding over an anarchic state – proved to be the last straw.

The Jordanian Army launched a widespread attack on the bases of Fatah and other organizations throughout Jordan. A large-scale military clash developed. After eleven days of fighting, the terrorist organizations were defeated.

Amman, the capital of Jordan, had become the center of the terrorist organizations. For eleven days, both the center of the city and its suburbs – where Fatah had established bases in the refugee camps – served as a battleground. The foreign newspaper correspondents, from whose reports one might expect to be able to form a reasonably coherent picture, were immobilized in a hotel in the heart of the city.

What the world learned of these events – from the fragments the correspondents were able to piece together, from the statements of the two embattled sides, and from other Arab sources-had to be sifted and measured with very special care for grains of truth. The total number of dead, for example, was estimated by the Jordanian Army at 1,500, but the Egyptian press, drawing on terrorist sources, placed it at 30,000. The Jordanian Army’s figure was actually close to the truth.

The battle, in which the army made great use of tanks, was fought with the utmost ferocity. The damage to buildings was considerable, and the bodies of the killed lay in the central streets of the city, thickly intermingled with the bodies of the wounded. Many of these died in the late-summer heat, for neither side tried to arrange a truce for their evacuation.

Amman was not the only battleground. The terrorist organizations had established themselves in strength in other towns, especially in the north near the border with Syria. It seems that much of their arms and equipment came from Syria. Jarash and Irbid served at once as staging posts to Amman and as bases for artillery attacks across the northern sector of the Jordan. The Jordanian Army mounted its attack on these bases at greater leisure and continued them well beyond the signing of the truce.

The Arabian governments sponsoring the Fatah adopted an equivocal attitude while they brought pressure to bear on the Jordanian government to stop what the terrorist organizations described as a slaughter; they did not press too hard until it was clear that the terrorists had been substantially weakened. The only sign of physical intervention came from Syria, whence, at a late stage, a force of fifty tanks arrived at Irbid. This force, grandiloquently described as a Fatah unit, aroused the expectation that the tide of battle would turn, but it turned tail and went back to Syria. (Various explanations have been advanced for the withdrawal: the threat of Israeli intervention, United States diplomacy, Egyptian disapproval.)

The battle now came to an end. The Jordanian government stopped short of an effort to crush the terrorist organizations completely. There followed a series of negotiations and agreements which, in turn, were broken by one side or the other. Reports continued to appear of mopping-up operations against the terrorists in the north and of exchanges of fire here and there. In fact, a new arrangement was reached, uneasy and marred by the bitter memory of September. It was achieved with the help of a “conciliation committee” set up by the Arab states; it reflected approximately the requirements of King Hussein and his government and the somewhat reduced demands of the terrorist organizations.

The Arab states allowed the Jordanian government to weaken the Fatah and the other organizations because they had got out of hand and needed to be disciplined. Nasser and his counterparts could tolerate the worldwide propaganda that projected the image of the terrorist organizations as the most important, the strongest, the most dynamic, and altogether the superlative Arab factor in the world. This image had great advantages: It emphasized the Palestinians as the objects of Arab concern and struggle. But an intolerable situation was created when Arafat and his junior rivals began to believe the propaganda themselves so far as to threaten the sovereignty of an Arabian government by bringing one of the hijacked planes to Egypt and blowing it up there. By their uninhibited threats to achieve by force at least the dissolution of the State of Israel and the elimination of at least part of its Jewish population (a moderated version of earlier threats), they were further interfering with Egyptian and Jordanian policy, developed in the latter half of 1970, of achieving that dissolution in stages, the first step being diplomatic pressure to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice lines.

The pretensions and arrogance of the Fatah and the other organizations had, therefore, to be reduced and the Arab states welcomed Hussein’s initiative. Once the organizations had been taught their place, they were expected to resume their role in conformity with the schemes laid down by Egypt and the other Arab states.

Hussein and his advisers, however, exploited their advantage to the hilt. They continued by a combination of guile and force to harass and reduce the terrorists.

Progressively they eliminated them from Amman and its neighborhood. Against a remnant entrenched near the Syrian border at Jarash and Irbid, Hussein moved effectively in the spring and summer of 1971. The Fatah fought back, but their troops were routed. Many fled into Syria, some were arrested, and still others were hunted down and killed.

Now followed a most significant episode in the history of the Fatah, lighting up through the fog of propaganda the truths about their pretensions and their illusions. In their extremity, they evoked sympathy and pity in all the Arab countries as well as among the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. There developed a sharp crisis between Jordan and the other Arab states. Hussein was denounced by most of them, with Libya in the lead, for the ferocity of his onslaught on the terrorists. Pleas for him to desist alternated with threats of boycott, sanctions, and elimination.

None of this actually helped the Fatah. Some of the terrorists now grasped the ironic reality of which they were the victims and swiftly made a choice. They set out westward to seek sanctuary among the only people whose practical compassion and reasonable humanity they could trust. Every day for a week, groups of Fatah called out from the East Bank of the Jordan to Israeli Army patrols and were enabled to cross the river and surrender. About a hundred succeeded. Many others were not so fortunate. Alerted Jordanian Arab Legion units intercepted them on their way to the river and shot them down.

The debacle does not necessarily mean the end of Arab terrorist organizations or of renewed attempts to harass Israel. The Arab states will no doubt have need of them again. Whatever their future, by their success in disseminating the story of a “Liberation” movement and the hoax of the “revolution” of the “Palestinian nation,” they rendered incalculable service to the Arab states. They mobilized the sympathy of many honestly ignorant people throughout the world who thus unwittingly helped the pan-Arab war effort against the restoration of the Jewish people to its homeland.

Greater Israel aka Palestine

Monday, November 9, 2015

“Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” written by Shmuel Katz - The Origin Of The Dispute

The Origin Of The Dispute

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The War Before The Six Day War

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The War Before The Six Day War

Arab Refugees

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

Arab Refugees

The Origin Of The Dispute

The Jewish Presence in Palestine

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

The Jewish Presence in Palestine

Beginning To Restore The Land

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

Beginning To Restore The Land

A Garland Of Myths

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine

A Garland Of Myths

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