Land

The acquisition of land in Palestine was essential to the Zionist settlers’ dream: “A land without people for a people without land.” (United Nations: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestinian Problem Part I: 1917-1943). In 1901, the Fifth Zionist Congress established the Jewish National Fund (JNF), founded by Theodor  Herzl, to buy land in what was then Ottoman Syria. Some individuals bought land for themselves, but a bigger portion was bought by the JNF. This was the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land on which it then settled Jewish immigrants, spearheading the Zionization of Palestine throughout the years of the Palestine Mandate.

Having purchased the land, JNF would then lease it to individual Jews, who were forbidden to sublease or employ non-Jews (Eyal Benvenisti & Eyal Zamir, Private Claims to Property Rights in the Future Israeli-Palestinian Settlement: The American Journal of International Law Vol. 89, No. 2: Apr 1995, pp. 295-340). As a result, Arabs were displaced, though they were compensated; but Herzl believed that taking land and the expulsion of Arabs were complementary aims if Zionism were to succeed in achieving its primary goal (Tracy Wilkinson, Toughest Phase of Mideast Peace Talks Underway. Los Angeles Times, Sep 14, 1999).

Still, the JNF’s best efforts in land acquisition fell far short of its goals. Available financial resources were limited, Palestinian resistance was fierce, and British policies had become restrictive. By 1936, the Arabs began to organize both violent and non-violent groups aimed at halting the immigration and land purchases by Jews. In retaliation, Zionist military groups like the Haganah and Irgun emerged, raiding Arab villages, planting bombs, and causing civilian deaths. The result was that by the end of the Mandate in 1948, the Zionist movement had been able to purchase only 5.8 per cent of the land in Palestine (John Quigley, Palestine, and Israel: A Challenge to Justice: 1990).

Meanwhile, as the storm clouds of World War II massed, there was a sharp rise in the Jewish population in Palestine. Between 1922 and 1944, it grew from 83,790 to 528,702 (“A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. Volume 1,” Printed by the Government Printer, Palestine, 1946, p. 185). The Hitler-directed holocaust and Europe and North America’s unwillingness to harbour and shelter Jews fuelled a wave of emigration to Palestine. The new immigrants were European Ashkenazi Jews, liberals who believed in assimilation in Europe, but who were virtually driven out of what they considered their home by the Europeans.

In May 1948, Israel became independent. During the next four years, about 739,000 Jews came to live in Israel. Some 377,000 of them came from various Muslim-majority countries, and another 340,000-plus came from Europe - 303,000 of whom were from the Warsaw Pact countries and Yugoslavia.

In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly took note of the matter. UN Resolution 181 called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a separate entity to be governed by a special international regime. The resolution was considered by the Jewish community in Palestine to be a legal basis for the establishment of Israel, but it was rejected by the Arab community. Violence followed almost immediately.

Europe’s Jewish Question: Some Ironies

History shows that the Palestine Mandate, the Balfour Declaration, and the Zionist movement were the instruments used by the Europeans, supported by the West, to drive the Jews out of Europe. At the height of the anti-Semitic violence initiated in Europe by Nazi Germany and some other countries, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for an international conference. The 1938 Evian Conference was attended by 32 nations, who met in Evian, France, to address the growing Jewish refugee crisis in Europe. What followed at that conference was an eye-opener.

Of the 32 nations, only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept Jewish immigrants. The Americans noted that Congress would have to approve any change in the nation’s immigration laws - legislation that set a limit on the number of immigrants the United States would accept from each country each year (The Evian Conference: Facing History & Ourselves: Materials for Teaching Holocaust and Human Behavior). America’s policy of not issuing visas to Jewish refugees is perhaps best known in its breach: Vice Consul Hiram “Harry” Bingham IV’s work - in defiance of US policy - to help some 2,500 Jews escape Vichy France was dramatized in the 2023 Netflix serial “Transatlantic.”

The Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary around that time: “We must… seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.” Mackenzie King was not unique in his thoughts about keeping the Jews out of Canada. The author of the Balfour Declaration, Arthur Balfour, who laid the foundation for the national homeland for the Jewish people, made evident that he did it because he saw Zionism as not just a blessing for the Jews, but for Europe as well. In his 1919 introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism, he wrote that the Zionist movement would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Interestingly, those who emigrated to Israel in the early days were predominantly European Ashkenazi Jews - liberal Jews, who believed in assimilation, identified with Europe and Western civilization, and were aware of who would be their protector in an alien land. (The status and treatment of Mizrachi Jews - mainly Jews from southern Asia and northern Africa - was an appendix).

Theodor Herzl, for instance, a European and a Zionist, watched the world with his European eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the section of his book, “Palestine or Argentina,” in which he weighs the pros and cons of each of these two locations as alternative sites for the Judenstaat. Palestine is his clear preference, and he muses: “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” He continues: “We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which should have to guarantee our existence” (Unasking Europe’s Jewish Question: Brian Klug, Sep 16, 2021, University of Notre Dame).

Klug points out that Herzl wove Europe into the very fabric of Israel. He also cites the testimony of David Ben-Gurion, leader of the democratic socialist political party Mapai, the first Prime Minister of Israel. Writing to George Antonius, the Arab nationalist, Ben Gurion clarified what the intentions of the Zionist movement were: “We want to return to the East only in the geographic sense, for our objective is to create a European culture …” When Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister, quotes this remark in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, he comments: “Ben-Gurion was expressing the core essence of Zionism, not merely a personal view.”

Not only the first prime minister of Israel but also the present prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, holds these views. While urging European leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia to help him undermine a provision of a European Union trade agreement in 2017, Netanyahu was caught on a hot mic saying: “We are part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe” (Netanyahu Tells European Leaders Concern for Palestinian Rights is “Crazy”: Robert Mckey, July 19, 2017: The Intercept).

After UN Resolution 181

The 1948 War. Before the official partition date, the British had begun to withdraw from Palestine during the intensification of violence between the newly arrived Zionists and Arabs. While the Arabs would not permit the organized intrusion by the European Jews, the Zionists, victims of Nazi Germany’s holocaust, considered Palestine as their birthright. The British withdrawal from Palestine on May 15, 1948, left a power vacuum. Immediately after the proclamation of the state of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq sent troops to join with Jordanian forces to defend the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

However, the attacks were uncoordinated, and the Jewish forces were able to exploit the political and military differences among the Arab armies. By the end of May 1948, Israel fielded a mobile army of 25,000 front-line troops, a number that would grow to nearly 80,000 by the end of that year. The Jewish militias exploited their military advantage to consolidate control over their allotted areas, as well as to entrench themselves in some strategic areas allocated to the Arabs of Palestine. In effect, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war led to the defeat of the Egyptian army.

What followed the defeat of the ill-prepared Arab attack on Israel is what the Arabs call al-Nakba - the catastrophe - which saw the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Arab inhabitants of Palestine, most of them from the areas designated by the UN to become the future Jewish state. The 1949 armistice agreements between Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria demarcated the Green Line, leaving the new State of Israel in control of more than 78 per cent of Palestine. Israel did not allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, despite UN Resolution 194 on the matter, known as the Palestinian’s Right of Return.

The Palestinians and Israelis have two different versions of how these people became refugees. The Palestinian position is that the expulsion was part of a carefully crafted Israeli plan to drive the Arabs from Palestine. The contrary Israeli position is that the Palestinians were told to leave by their Arab leaders.

The 1967 War

There are many views on why the sudden war in 1967, known as the Six-Day War, erupted. There is little doubt that the Arabs were smarting from the disaster caused by their defeat in 1948, but many observers point to other reasons as well. The 1967 war started on June 5 morning, led by a surprise attack by the Israeli Air Force, which devasted Egypt’s air force. Without air cover, the Egyptian ground forces in the Sinai collapsed before the Israeli offensive and quickly retreated toward the Suez Canal in complete disarray. At the same time on the eastern front, which had opened when Jordan began offensive operations to aid its ally, Israel captured the West Bank and Jerusalem, after dealing a similarly severe blow to the enemy air force. The confrontation between Israel and Syria did not start until June 9, after victory was secured on the other two fronts. It resulted in the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights (The strategic and political consequences of the June 1967 war: Dimitrios Machairas: Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK).

The 1967 war reshaped the Middle East, with far-reaching implications in the political sphere on both the domestic and international levels. This short-term war witnessed the further expansion of Israel and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the remaining two parts of the original Palestine Mandate. According to a 2013 United Nations report, roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees are living in the West Bank and an additional 1.2 million living in the Gaza Strip (UNRWA in Figures, report, July 1, 2013). Though Gaza is no longer under formal occupation, it is still subjected to military strikes by the Israeli military because of the security threat to Israel posed by Hamas militants based there. Beyond that, Machairas points out, the war helped Israel to occupy vast tracts of land. It brought Israel’s borders within striking distance of 110 km from the capital of Egypt (Cairo), 50 km from the capital of Jordan (Amman), and 60 km from the capital of Syria (Damascus) - three formidable Arab nations.

In addition, the conquest of vast territories internally, including the biblical homeland, had a multidimensional impact on Israel. It boosted Israelis’ self-confidence and strengthened the Jewish element of their national identity. It also brought demographic and economic growth for Israel, with consequential beneficial effects on the conquered communities as well, decreasing unemployment and raising the standards of living in the Gaza Strip, due to the new interrelationship between the Israeli and the local economies (A. Bregman: Israel’s war: A history since 1947: 2010: Routledge., pp. 92–93).

(To be concluded…)