Palestine introduction 2: The mandate years and the Nakba. Image of Palestinian refugees.
The mandate and the nakba

This is part 2 of our introduction articles. We highly recommend reading them in order.

As we learned in the previous article, the fall of the Ottoman empire, the birth of the Zionist movement, and the declaration of Palestine as a British mandate, all contributed to birthing the Palestinian question. Even before Palestine was officially declared a mandate in 1922, British policies and preferential treatment of the Zionist colonists helped create a volatile political climate.

While Zionist settlement in Palestine predates the mandate years, the newly found British sponsorship, whether tacit or explicit, provided the perfect cover for the Zionist movement to ramp up its colonization efforts. For all intents and purposes the Jewish Yishuv became a proto-state within an existing nation. Aiming to establish an exclusive Jewish ethnocracy, the Yishuv had to contend with the fact that the entirety of the land was inhabited by the native population. This is where the settler “logic of elimination” came into play. Coined by scholar Patrick Wolfe, this means that the settlers needed to develop not only moral justifications for the removal of the natives, but also the practical means to ensure its success. This could take the form of ethnic cleansing, genocide or other gruesome tools of ethnocide.

If you’re at all familiar with Zionist talking points, you can see this logic of elimination in motion. “A land without a people for a people without a land“, “there is no such thing as a Palestinian“, “Israel made the desert bloom” and many other talking points illustrate this perfectly. The settlers would never admit that the Palestinians constituted a people, but rather viewed them as disconnected communities at best, and wandering rootless vagabonds at worst. Such arguments would form the basis for legitimizing the dispossession of the natives. This is hardly unique to Zionist settler-colonialism. For example, you can immediately see how denying the existence of Palestinians resembles the Terra Nullius argument used by colonists all over the world [You can read more about this here].

Historically, Palestine has always been a place of refuge for many populations fleeing war and famine; it is home to Palestinians of diverse origins, such as Armenian, Bosnian and even Indian Palestinians. They all came to Palestine for different reasons, and to this day form an integral part of its society. The issue was never with the idea of Zionists moving to Palestine, but rather that from the onset, the Zionist movement was not interested in coexistence. There is ample evidence -recorded by the Zionist pioneers themselves- that the native Palestinian population was welcoming of the first Zionist settlers. They worked side by side, and the Palestinians even taught them how to work the land, despite Zionists seeing the Palestinians as inferior and uncivilized. Only after it became clear that these settlers did not come to live in Palestine as equals, but to become its landlords, as the Jewish National Fund Chairman Menachem Usishkin said, did Zionism come to be perceived as a threat. For example, Zionist leadership went out of its way to sanction settlers employing or working with Palestinians, calling Palestinian labor an “illness” and forming a segregated trade union that banned non-Jewish members.

Consequently, as with every colonial situation, there was resistance by the native population; in this context, some of this resistance was aimed at the British and some at the Zionist settlers themselves. A prominent example of this is the 1936 revolt.

As colonial overlords, the British were exceptional record-keepers. Backed by empirical data, they compiled report after report in an attempt to monitor the tensions erupting all over Palestine. These reports showed that the distrust between the Palestinian and Zionist populations intensified after the British military administration of Palestine and the issuance of the Balfour declaration. The Haycraft report, for example, concluded that despite Zionist accusations the actions of the Palestinians were not at all motivated by antisemitism, but rather by the British military administration favoring the Zionist settlers to the detriment of the Palestinians. The Shaw report stated that there had been no such tension for nearly a century prior.

By the end of the mandate, in spite of the Zionist efforts to purchase as much land as possible and maximize the number of European Zionist settlers, they barely controlled 5-6% of the land in mandatory Palestine and constituted only a third of the population. This population had only just arrived, and did not amount to a clear majority in any region of Palestine. This population distribution would make establishing an exclusivist Zionist state in Palestine impossible.

It is under these circumstances that calls for partitioning Palestine into an Arab-Palestinian and Zionist-Jewish states started to gain traction in some circles.

The partition of Palestine

When partition is brought up it is not surprising that most tend to think of the 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution. This resolution recommended the partition of Palestine into an Arab-Palestinian state and a Zionist-Jewish state at the end of the British mandate. This was seen by some as a solution to the escalating tensions and violence during the mandate years.

However, this was not the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919, for example, the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all the territory which would become mandatory Palestine, as well as parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state would not have even reached 2-3% of the total population. Naturally, such a colonial proposal would be unjust regardless of the population disparity, but it is an indication of the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area they had no claim to, and where they were so utterly outnumbered.

1947PartitionEdit The bulk of the Zionist population arrived in Palestine during the 4th and 5th Zionist immigration waves -Aliyot- (Between 1924-1939). That means that the majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at the most. To make matters worse, the UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Zionist state, including most of the fertile coastal region.

The Palestinians, of course, rejected this. They were being asked to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers. The rejection of this ridiculous premise is still cited today as the Palestinians being intransigent and refusing peace. This is often negatively contrasted with the claim that the Yishuv agreed to the 1947 partition plan, which is portrayed as a showing of good will and a readiness to coexist with their Palestinian neighbors. While this may seem true on the surface, a cursory glance at internal Yishuv meetings paints an entirely different picture. Partition as a concept was entirely rejected by the Yishuv, and any acceptance in public was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding.

While addressing the Zionist Executive, Ben Gurion, leader of the Yishuv and Israel’s first Prime Minister, reemphasized that any acceptance of partition would be temporary:

“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”

This was not a one-time occurrence, and neither was it only espoused by Ben Gurion. Internal debates and letters illustrate this time and time again. Even in letters to his family, Ben Gurion wrote that “A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning” detailing that settling the rest of Palestine depended on creating an “elite army”. As a matter of fact, he was quite explicit:

I don’t regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim.

Chaim Weizmann, prominent Zionist leader and first President of Israel, expected thatpartition might be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to twenty-five years”.

So even ignoring the moral question of requiring the natives to formally green-light their own colonization, had the Palestinians agreed to partition, they most likely still would not have had an independent state today. Despite what was announced in public, internal Zionist discussions make it abundantly clear that this would have never been allowed.

However, the problems with the United Nations partition plan go even deeper than this. To be clear, the resolution did not partition Palestine. It was in fact a partition plan, which was to be seen as a recommendation, and that the issue should be transferred to the Security Council. The resolution does not obligate the people of Palestine to accept it, especially considering the non-binding nature of UNGA resolutions.

For its part, the Security Council attempted to find a resolution based on the UNGA recommendation, but could not arrive at a consensus. Many concluded that the plan could not be enforced. Israel was unilaterally declared a state by Zionist leadership while the Security Council was still trying to arrive at a conclusion. The plan was never implemented.

However, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.

This argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council, do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during the discussions on the matter. Furthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This issue was raised by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:

“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”

This is a direct admission that the creation of a Zionist national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. However, even if it had been within their power to do so, and had it not ran counter to their charter, the UN still had no right to force the Palestinians to tear their homeland in half.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine

The demographic realities in Palestine had always troubled the Zionist movement. Despite their consistent sloganeering of “A land without a people for a people without a land”, they were acutely aware of the reality on the ground. Even from its earliest days, Zionist leaders spoke about removing the native population to make room for the colonists who would utilize the land in much more “civilized” and “advanced” ways [You can read more about this here]. Towards the end of the mandate, it would become clear that there would be no voluntary exodus of the native Palestinians.

It is within this context that Plan D (Tochnit Dalet) was developed by the Haganah high command. Although it was adopted in May 1948, the origins of this plan go back a few years earlier.  Yigael Yadin reportedly started working on it in 1944. This plan entailed the expansion of the borders of the Zionist state, well beyond partition, and any Palestinian village within these borders that resisted would be destroyed and have its inhabitants expelled. This included cities that were supposed to be part of the Arab Palestinian state after partition, such as Nazareth, Acre and Lydda.

Ben Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion wrote that:

In internal discussions, in instructions to his men, the Old Man [Ben-Gurion] demonstrated a clear position: it would be better that as few a number as possible of Arabs would remain in the territory of the [Jewish] state.”.

Although it could be argued that Plan D did not outline the exact villages and cities to be ethnically cleansed in an explicit way, it was clear that the various Yishuv forces were operating with its instructions in mind.

It is important to stress that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began before the 1948 war, and before even a single regular Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. This is important to understand because many still erroneously argue that the Nakba -Arabic for catastrophe- was a byproduct of the Arab war on the fledgling Israeli state. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled through ethnic cleansing campaigns before the onset of war or the end of the mandate. These campaigns were accompanied by massacres and war crimes, even against villages that were neutral and had non-aggression pacts with the Zionist Yishuv. The ethnic cleansing of the village of Deir Yassin demonstrates this perfectly [You can read more about this here].

For many reasons, the Arab states, mainly Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, were not interested in a war. However, after the monstrous ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Palestinians, they finally reluctantly intervened. However, an aspect that is often ignored is the inter-Arab rivalries and disunity that were among the chief causes for the intervention in 1948. Barely coming out from under colonialism themselves, their actions during the war showed that they never really joined the war with eliminationist intent, as the popular narrative goes. The Jordanians were more interested in acquiring the West Bank as a stepping stone to their real ambition, which was greater Syria. As a matter of fact, there is ample evidence of collusion between the Israelis and Jordanians during the 1948 war, with deals under the table pretty much gifting parts of the West Bank to Transjordan in return for not interfering in other areas.

The Egyptians joined in an attempt to counter the Hashemite power-play that could change the balance of power in the region. For these reasons, the Arab armies generally intervened in the territories of the mandate destined to be part of the Palestinian Arab state according to the 1947 partition plan, and with very few exceptions, stayed away from the area designated to be part of the Zionist-Jewish state. Yes, support for Palestine and Palestinians played a large role in the legitimization of such interventions, but they were never the real reason behind them. As per usual when it comes to international relations, interests are always at the center of any maneuver regardless of the espoused noble and altruistic motivations.

Map showing the 1949 armistice line which was cemented at the end of the war, many of the territories seized by Israel were outside its proposed borders according to the UN partition plan. Despite their propaganda and rhetoric, the Arab states sought different secret opportunities to avoid and end the war with Israel. Some offers went as far as to agree to absorb all Palestinian refugees. These were all rejected by Israel with the goal of maximizing its land-grabs [You can read more about this here]. For example, when it became clear that Israel would ignore all negotiations regarding partition and unilaterally declare its independence, there were enormous efforts behind the scenes aimed at avoiding war, not to mention ending it early when it did eventually break out. These efforts were heavily sponsored by the United States, who asked in March 1948 that all military activities be ceased, and asked the Yishuv to postpone any declaration of statehood and to give time for negotiations. Outside of Abdallah of Transjordan, the Arab states accepted this initiative by the United States. However, it was rejected by Ben Gurion, who knew that any peaceful implementation of the partition plan meant that the refugees he had expelled earlier would have a chance to return, not to mention that war would offer him a chance to conquer the lands he coveted outside the partition plan. 

This followed a long series of Zionist rejection of overtures by the native Palestinians. In 1928, for example, the Palestinian leadership voted to allow Zionist settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state, despite them being a minority who had barely just arrived. This was faced with Zionist rejection. Even after this, in 1947 the Palestinians suggested the formation of a unitary state for all those living between the river and the sea to replace the mandate to no avail. There were many attempts at co-existence, but this simply would not have benefited the Zionist leadership who never intended to come to Palestine to live as equals.

By the end of the war, 800,000 Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed from approximately 530 villages and communities. Israel would be established on the rubble of these villages, and their settlers would come to call the emptied abodes that once housed Palestinian families home. To this day, these 800,000 and their descendants are still scattered all over the world in refugee camps, and Israel refuses their right to return home. The ethnic cleansing operations continued well into the 1950s, years after the end of the war.

The post-war armistice line would come to be known as the green line, and it marked the de facto borders of the Israeli state, though official borders have never been declared. The areas that Israel did not conquer, i.e. the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would come to be ruled by Jordan and Egypt respectively. It is estimated that around 80% of the Palestinian population within the green line were expelled. The remaining 20% would live under martial law for decades to come, and have their communities turned into segregated, heavily controlled enclaves surrounded by barbed wire.

These early years would prove formative to the discriminatory regime of laws that govern Israel to this very day. This period will be discussed in the next part of our introduction series.

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