With a new Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, raging in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the question "Can there ever be peace?" looms unanswered. To understand the current crisis, it is necessary to examine its roots.
The "father" of political Zionism, the idea of a Jewish state, was Theodore Herzl. The idea of a Jewish state was a response to the growing anti-Semitism in Europe in the late 19th century, particularly the Dreyfus case in France. But for Herzl and other Zionists, the answer for Jews suffering from oppression was not to fight that oppression but to retreat from it by leaving their respective countries and uniting with other oppressed Jews to form a Jewish state. The idea of a return to Zion, the Holy Land, has a significant place in Judaism, but it is merely religious, not political. Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Palestine in the late 1800s to form religious communities, not a state.
When the Zionists embarked on their project to found a Jewish state, they didn't allow any religious commitment to Palestine get in their way; in the first years after Herzl founded the World Zionist Organization, the Zionists considered other locations such as Uganda, Angola and North Africa.{1} Herzl himself suggested Argentina in his pamphlet, the Jewish State.{2}
After World War I, Britain gained control of Palestine. In order to appeal to religious Jews, the Zionists chose Palestine as the site for their future state and began to lobby the British government. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann argued that, "A Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in respect to the Suez Canal."{3} This option became increasingly attractive to Britain; by establishing a social base of colonists, it would help Britain counter rising Arab nationalism as well as the threat from other imperialist powers in the region. (The British had already used a similar strategy successfully in Ireland, importing Protestants from Scotland to form a pro-British base in the native population in Northern Ireland.)
In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. While it didn't create a Jewish state, it encouraged a new influx of Jewish immigration into the region. But contrary to Zionist propaganda that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land," it was the most densely populated area of the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1882, Palestine had a population of 24,000 Jews and 500,000 Arabs. By 1922, after two decades of Zionist sponsored immigration, the country had a population of almost 760,000, 89 percent of it Palestinian Arab.{4}
In the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in Europe and in Germany in particular, massive numbers of Jews fled their homes. The Western powers, which claimed they were fighting Nazism in World War II, closed their borders to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, fuelling immigration into Palestine. The Holocaust was the last blow; what more evidence for the Zionist assumption that Jews and non-Jews could not live together peacefully was needed? The Zionists understood that Nazism would further the Zionist cause and cynically used this unforeseen opportunity. A member of the Haganah, the Zionist militia, delivered this message to the German SS in 1937:
Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the
radical Germany policy, since the strength of the Jewish
population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby
that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon
numerical superiority over the Arabs.{5}
Numerous Zionist organizations lobbied against changes in the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe which would've allowed more Jews to find refuge in these countries. As David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, put it in 1938:
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children
in Germany by bringing them over to England and only
half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael [greater
Israel], then I would opt for the second alternative.{6}
Zionists today make the claim that they and the state of Israel represent the best interests of all Jews. In reality, the Zionist movement exploited the Holocaust and Jewish persecution for their own ends.
In the period between the Balfour Declaration and Israel's declaration of independence in 1948, Zionist organizations purchased land from absentee Arab landowners and forced Palestinian peasants off the land. Settlements were constructed, complete with a separate economy and government under British auspices. The British aided the Zionists in their task by allowing them privileged access to water and other essential resources and by ignoring Zionist violence against the Palestinian Arabs. They helped establish a Zionist militia and paid Jews higher wages than Arabs for equal work. From the 1920s onward, the British used the Jewish settlers to help suppress mass demonstrations against landlessness, unemployment and for independence. Between 1936 and 1939 Palestinian resistance to British rule and Zionist encroachment peaked: taxes were withheld, there was a general strike of several months, incidences of civil disobedience and even minor insurrections. In response, the British declared martial law and resorted to repression, relying heavily on the Zionist militias. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed or assassinated, thousands were imprisoned and thousands more had their homes demolished.{7}
At the end of the Second World War, Britain was greatly weakened and withdrew from Palestine, leaving the United Nations to decide Palestine's fate. The UN agreed drew up a partition plan, granting the Zionists (who were only 1/3 of the population) control of 55 percent of Palestine and left the Palestinian majority with 45 percent of their own land! But for the Zionists, this was not enough. In 1938, Ben-Gurion declared:
After we become a strong force as the result of the
creation of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand
to the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in
the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the
ground for our expansion. The state will have to preserve
order with machine guns.{8}
The Zionist project could only be completed at the expense of the local population, the Palestinians. Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department [sic!] put it this way in 1940:
There is no room for both peoples in this country... And
there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from
here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them;
not one village, not one tribe should be left.{9}
Another document, the Koening Report, was even more blunt:
We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land
confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid
the Galilee of its Arab population.{10}
In 1948, these words were transformed into deeds. Zionist paramilitary units carried out massacres at Deir Yassin in April and other villages - massacres designed "rid the Galilee of its Arab population", i.e., expel the Palestinians from Palestine. According to a Christian missionary, the Zionist militia, Haganah, had loudspeaker vans and radio broadcasts that repeated the theme, "Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate".{11} A book publicly endorsed by Ben-Gurion described the attack on Lydda on July 11, 1948, carried out under the command of Yigael Alon by official Israeli forces:
[They] drove at full speed into Lydda, shooting up the
town and creating confusion and a degree of terror among
the population its Arab population of 30,000 either fled
or were herded on the road to Ramallah. The next day
Ramleh also surrendered and its Arab population suffered
the same fate. Both towns were sacked by victorious
Israelis.{12}
To justify the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land and the massacre of Deir Yassin, Zionists point to the invasion by the armies of Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria later that year (the invasion occurred in May after the state of Israel was declared).{13} The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was not the result of blind rage or revenge for atrocities committed against Jews during the Arabs' invasion, it was part of the Zionist plan for Palestine. The Haganah drew up a plan in case the Arab states invaded:
Mounting operations against enemy population centers
located inside or near our defensive system in order to
prevent them from being used as bases by an active
armed force. These operations can be divided into the
following categories:
Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and
planting mines in the debris), especially those population
centers which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the
following guidelines: encirclement of the village and
conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance,
the armed force must be destroyed and the population must
be expelled outside the borders of the state.{14}
The Zionists planned to use the Arab invasion to kick out the Palestinians and grab the rest of Palestine that the U.N. had not assigned them. The Zionists didn't even wait for this pretext to carry out their plan in Deir Yassin.
By the time the war ended, the Zionists held more than 77 percent of Palestine, including 95 percent of the good agricultural land. The state of Israel stole 80 percent of privately owned Palestinian land and more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers.{15} For this reason the Palestinians refer to 1948 as al-Nakbah ("the Catastrohpe").
Was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians the logical outcome of Zionism or merely a mistake on the part of some Zionists? Judah L. Magnes, president of the Herbrew University of Jerusalem and supporter of a bi-national Arab and Jewish state, argued in 1947:
A Jewish state can only be obtained, if it ever is, through
war... You can talk to an Arab about anything, but you
cannot talk to him about a Jewish state. And that is
because, by definition, a Jewish state means that Jews
will govern other people, other people who are living in
this state.{16}
The Arabs who remained became second-class citizens, while those who fled lived in the squalid refugee camps of various Arab nations throughout the Middle East. While Israel passed "the Law of Return", allowing any person of Jewish descent to immigrate to Israel, it didn't allow the Palestinians to return to their own homeland.
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- Lance Selfa, "Zionism: False Messiah", International Socialist Review #4, p. 9
- "The Arab-Israel Reader", Document 3, an excerpt from Herzl's pamphlet states, "two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentina."
- Phil Gasper, "Israel: Colonial-Settler State", International Socialist Review #15, p. 25
- Selfa, op. cit., p. 14.
- Gasper, op. cit.,. p. 25
- Ibid.
- Gasper, op. cit.,. p. 26
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- "The Arab-Israel Reader", Document 34, p. 48, from an article published by Irish journalist Erskine Childers.
- Ibid.
- Chronology of Palestinian History. http://www.palestineremembered.com/ChronologyOfPalestinianHistory.html#1948
- Mideast Web, http://www.mideastweb.org/Pland.htm The official document is called "Plan Dalet".
- Selfa, op. cit., p. 15.
- Maxime Rodinson, "Israel: a Colonial-Settler State?", p. 68.