May 24 2008
The Nakhba sixty years on – no cause for celebration
Piers Mostyn looks at the bloody truth behind the creation of the Israeli State and its legacy of war, racism, ecological devestation, national oppression and poverty. This article will be in the next issue of Socialist Resistance due out next month.
On the 14th of May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed. Its foundational myths are that the Zionist colonisers were Davids fighting a Goliath, compelled by the Holocaust to carve out a haven of safety, with no desire to force out the indigenous Palestinians who departed voluntarily.
But that falsity has been exposed. The opening up of official records under the 30 year rule led to a thorough re-examination by Israel’s “revisionist” historians - like Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris - who revealed that 1948 was in fact a brutal act of mass ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians call 1948 the Nakhba (catastrophe). Its roots stretching back to the end of the 19th century, it involved driving the Palestinian people off their land, to make way for a colonial settler state acting as a regional agent for imperialism. That war continues today.
The first Zionist migrants arrived in Palestine in 1882 and the first Zionist Congress was held 15 years later. But Zionism before World War I was a very small movement, marginal even among Jewish refugees fleeing the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Eastern Europe; the vast majority settling in the West where they helped energise the rising tide of the left.
Aware of their weak position, Zionist leaders sought sponsorship from the imperial powers, initially the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Czar and the German Kaiser. Britain became the preferred option when it filled the vacuum left by the break up of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. After World War II the USA took the mantle.
Two key events triggering the Nakhba were the formation of a special committee by the United Nations (UNSCOP) in February 1947 to formulate recommendations on future status and a British announcement in September 1947 that Britain’s “Mandate” to run Palestine since 1923 would end on the 15th of May 1948.
The majority of UNSCOP recommended partition into two states. It conceded that this contradicted the principle of self determination; a cornerstone of international relations and widely held as applicable to Palestine following the disintegration of Ottoman rule.
At the time Jews comprised one third of the population, owning 7% of the land. Despite this UNSCOP proposed that the Jewish state occupy 58% of the British mandate territory with the Palestinian two thirds majority, owning 90% of the land, getting the rest.
Not surprisingly the Palestinians rejected partition as totally unacceptable. The UNSCOP minority, favouring one federal state, warned of the long term dangers.
The main movers behind partition at the UN were the USA and USSR. Their cynical support for Zionism was motivated by cold war jockeying for position and a desire to hegemonise the oil rich region. Despite abstaining, Britain soon became a stalwart supporter. The support of the social democratic and Stalinist leaderships significantly undermined the prospects for building international solidarity with the Palestinians in the decades that followed.
Zionist militias, active for nearly two decades, had been preparing. Within a fortnight of UNSCOP’s recommendations being adopted by the UN in November 1947 the first expulsions of Palestinians began. By March 1948 the Zionist military campaign had begun in earnest.
In the first phase urban Palestine was targeted. Militias occupied Jaffa, Haifa and nine other mixed Arab-Jewish towns, expelling the Palestinian population. The second phase, beginning in May 1948, focussed more on rural areas. Aerial bombardment and heavy shelling of civilian areas combined with the destruction of hundreds of villages by the Zionists led to further deaths and ethnic cleansing.
Most notorious among the atrocities was the April 1948 massacre of 120 inhabitants of Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang. Such events served notice on Palestinian villagers thinking of resistance, many of whom fled in terror at the advance of the militias.
Ilan Pappe recounts events in Tantura, an old Palestinian village, “On the night of 22 May, the village was attacked from four sides . . . The captives were moved to the beach. There, the men were separated from the women and children, who were expelled to nearby Fureidis (Some families were reunited eighteen months later). Two hundred men between the ages of 13 and 30 were massacred by the Alexandroni and other Jewish forces. . . . There were similar incidents in many other locations, the details of which still await the research of future scholars.” (A Modern History of Palestine)
More than 531 Palestinian villages (out of 1000) were destroyed, depopulated and taken over. Some three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees - 90% of those who had been living on what was designated as the Jewish state.
In December 1948 the new Israeli government retrospectively legalised land seizures and forbade victims from claiming any compensation. And the “Law of the Lands of Israel” stated that lands acquired by Zionist purchase would be leased in perpetuity on the condition that such lands would only be given to Jews. On this basis Israel’s remaining Arab citizens and their descendants were denied access to 95% of its land.
Zionist war success was such that by its end Israel had blatantly flouted even the UN partition plan by seizing 78% of Palestinian territory. What had been a Jewish minority of one third had driven out the majority and occupied over three quarters of the territory.
Nonetheless in May 1949 the UN General Assembly approved Israel’s membership of the UN, resolving that “Israel is a peace-loving state which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations”.
Since then, a state backed settlement expansion programme on top of the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has left Palestinians with a miserable 8% of the former Palestinian territories. This territory is supposed to comprise the Palestinian side of the “two-state solution” currently hawked by Israel and the West.
Sixty years on, almost 75% of the Palestinian people are displaced - three quarters in forced exile and one quarter in the West Bank and Gaza. The 4.2 million dispersed across the Middle East and other parts of the world are the world’s largest and longest standing unresolved refugee case.
The Arab minority within Israel is subject to a regime of legal, political, social, economic and cultural state racism. And hundreds of thousands of Bedouins have been expelled from the Negev and other parts of the country adding to the displaced refugee population.
What’s left of the Palestinian population has been crushed into poverty stricken Bantustans surrounded by the Israeli army, laced with roads reserved for Zionist settlers, peppered with hundreds of settlements that take the water and best land and carved up by the “apartheid wall”.
The drive to contain resistance has involved killing tens of thousands with many more being detained, often without charge. In 2006, the Palestinians elected a Hamas government that sought to resist this set up - its MPs and ministers were jailed. The main Hamas stronghold, in Gaza, has been subject to two years of military assaults and economic blockade, leaving its 1.4 million inhabitants on the verge of famine.
Far from confronting these strategies, the USA and Britain have used them as a model for the occupation of Iraq. And Britain’s political establishment has celebrated the sixtieth anniversary. But this is nothing new.
In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in 1915-6, a senior British diplomat promised British support for Arab independence in exchange for support for the allied war effort to bring down the Ottoman regime.
The USA, under Woodrow Wilson, announced a doctrine of self determination for the post World War I order. This was endorsed by the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 whose goals included “the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks and the setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations”.
In 1919 the Covenant of the League of Nations enshrined the doctrine of self determination. The establishment of the “mandate” system under which Britain ruled Palestine was then presented merely as a temporary stepping stone to independent statehood in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the Allied Powers and Turkey.
But these commitments were duplicitous. In 1916 the Sykes-Picot Agreement, secretly signed between Britain and France, had divided the Ottoman Empire between the two states, with Palestine reserved for British control. And in 1917 Britain endorsed the Balfour Declaration - a letter from the Foreign Secretary to the British Zionist Federation granting recognition of and support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.
The British encouraged Zionist colonisation and suppressed a series of Palestinian uprisings, including the “Great Revolt” of 1936-9 in co-operation with Zionist militias. The first phase of the Nakhba occurred whilst Britain had responsibility for security and its officials looked on.
So what is the balance sheet of the Israeli state sixty years on? An out-runner for neoliberal capitalism, Israel has the biggest gap between rich and poor in the industrialised world. 1.25 million people, 40% of them working, are below the poverty line.
It has created an environmental disaster story, particularly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - with water levels plummeting, toxic waste abounding, fields and olive trees destroyed.
And rampant racism against the so-called “Oriental” Jews - the backbone of the Israeli working class - has exposed the fallacy behind claims of a “home for the Jewish people”.
Israel’s much vaunted image of military prowess has been undermined. The spectacular failure of the Lebanon invasion in 2006 has been followed by the current resurgence of Hezbollah and the failure to crush Hamas.
Seemingly endless wars and invasions have sparked mass internal opposition. Whilst this is mainly tied to support for the Zionist state, it has brought to the surface decades of division over the nature of the project and how it relates to those it oppresses and expropriates.
Thousands of young people have become “Refusniks” - conscripts refusing to take part in the oppression of the Palestinians. Over 280 have been court-martialled and jailed for up to 35 days.
One consequence has been a substantial emigration of Jews. As of mid 2004 760,000 Israeli Jews were living abroad. An increase of 40% since 2000.
A primary factor in this crisis has been the unrelenting opposition of the Palestinian people. A resistance largely based on grass roots activism and in spite of a bloated, corrupt leadership; betrayal by the reactionary Arab states and disunity fomented by the imperialist states.
In the circumstances, it is unlikely Israel would be contemplating a 60th anniversary but for its complete dependence on the imperialism whose regional interests it serves. Since the 1950s 18% of Israel’s GDP has derived from individuals, organisations and states abroad (chiefly the USA). Official figures valuing US aid since 1973 at $100 billion (a third of its foreign aid budget) are reckoned to be as little as a sixteenth of the true figure.
This financial, military and political underpinning and the historic responsibility of the USA, Britain and the EU in their support for Israel needs to be exposed and opposed. On its foundations is built the “legality” of the 1948 state - through their domination of UN and other international institutions. A far more difficult task than that of opposing apartheid, 1948 teaches us that the ruling ideology of the imperialist age and its state backers have to be confronted, not simply its reactionary outposts.