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[historyfixation]

Paul Nabil Matthis has put together a 67-page timeline of anti-colonial struggle in Palestine (1770–1949).

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Background on Deir Yassin in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

Quotes about Deir Yassin from chapter 3, "The first wave: the Arab exodus, December 1947 – March 1948," in Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004, Cambridge UP).

"In the early months of the war [December 1947 to March 1948]...several villages conducted formal peace agreements with neighbouring settlements or urban neighbourhoods. The notables of Deir Yassin on 20 January 1948 met with the leaders of Jerusalem's Jewish Giv'at Shaul neighbourhood and agreed to mutual non-belligerency. Deir Yassin took upon itself to keep out bands of [Arab] irregulars and if, nonetheless, some appeared, to inform Giv'at Shaul of their presence." (p. 91)

"[In early January 1948,] Deir Yassin's inhabitants had a firefight with a roving band of irregulars who wanted to use their village as a base to attack west Jerusalem. One villager was killed and the village ‘women burst into cries and screams.' Just before 28 January, 'Abd al Qadir, at the head of a band of 400 armed men, encamped near Deir Yassin. Apparently they tried to recruit villagers. The village elders ‘were opposed,' and the band moved off to Beit Jala. Deir Yassin's mukhtar [village chief] was summoned by AHC [Arab Higher Committee] representatives in Jerusalem to be questioned about the village's relations with the Jews. The mukhtar said that ‘the village and the Jews lived in peace.' A fortnight later, on 13 February, an armed band entered Deir Yassin bent on attacking nearby Giv'at Shaul. ‘The villagers opposed this and the gang's reaction was to slaughter all the village's sheep...' A month later, on 16 March, an AHC delegation composed of two men and (unusually) a woman visited the village and asked that it host a group of Iraqi and Syrian irregulars ‘to guard the site.' The villagers refused and the delegation left empty handed. Deir Yassin's notables registered a similar refusal on 4 April." (p. 97)

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Re: From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters

Paul, James. 1985. "‘The Scope of the Fraud Was Huge.'" Middle East Report 136/137.

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The basic policy goal [of the Israeli delegation to the Lausanne Conference of 1949] remained as it had been: a homogeneous Jewish state with the smallest possible Arab minority in the largest possible area of Palestine. Consequently, Israeli opposition to the repatriation of the refugees remained sharp and consistent. [...] Repatriation would have impeded the settle­ment of the conquered Arab areas by the large number of Jews who had immigrated since the end of World War II. Lands in these areas had already been confiscated. [...] As Dov Joseph, a member of the Israeli cabinet, told the PCC: "They left; you can't bring back the past."

— Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), p. 223-4

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Book Recs: Israeli Myths and Realities

I’m nearly done with Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappé (2017). I don't recommend it — one gets the sense that Pappé just wanted to publish something for the 50th anniversary of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Dates and proper nouns fly; it’s hard to read unless you’re already well-versed Israeli/Palestinian history — but in that case, who’s the intended audience? And I wish that Pappé included more excerpts from primary sources. Like, if you’re going to debunk, get in there and debunk!

The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan (1987) is more like it! Flapan gets in there, quoting liberally from first Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s war diaries and the declassified minutes of meetings inside the incipient Israeli government. All of the detail makes it indispensable. Unfortunately, I think it’s out of print; I read a scan on the Internet Archive.

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The Iron Wall & Theodor Herzl's Correspondence with Yousef al-Khalidi

This picks up where my post Theodor Herzl's Diary in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine left off. All page numbers refer to the 2021 trade paperback edition of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi.

In "The Iron Wall" (1923), militant Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky chides, "To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that [the Palestinian Arabs] will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system."

This reminds me of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl's response to Jerusalem mayor Yousef al-Khalidi's 1899 letter. In it, al-Khalidi objects to the Zionist plan for Palestine, pointing out that, while the Jews have a historic claim on the country, it is "already inhabited by a population that w[ill] not agree to be supplanted" (p. 5).

In response, Herzl argues that "Jewish immigration would benefit the indigenous people of Palestine" (p. 6), writing that, given the immigrants' "financial acumen and their means of enterprise...no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result" (qtd. p. 7). But, as Jabotinsky points out, immigration "is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews." Palestinian Arabs in general and al-Khalidi in particular understood this and were not fooled.

Herzl's reply also raises a topic that al-Khalidi hadn't: Palestinian expulsion. Herzl continues, "You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?" (qtd. p. 7). Of course, the person who had thought of that was Herzl himself! In addition to writing in his diary about "spirit[ing] the penniless population across the border" (qtd. p. 4), he would go on to write a charter for the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company that included "the removal of inhabitants of Palestine to 'other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire'" (p. 7).

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The Iron Wall

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. …[I]t is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. […] Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. […] Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel." […] There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding". The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want. […] Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach. That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.

— Ze'ev Jabotinsky, "The Iron Wall" (1923)

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Theodor Herzl's Diary in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

I'm currently reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi (2020), and I wanted someplace to take notes; hence, this tumblr.

Khalidi is descended from a prominent Palestinian family, and the book, which is intended for a non-academic audience, makes use of his family's archive in Jerusalem. In the introduction, he shares letters between his great-great-great uncle Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi and Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who is regarded as the father of modern political Zionism. In February 1896, Herzl had published Der Judenstaat, or The Jewish State, a pamphlet arguing that European antisemitism was insurmountable and that the solution was an independent Jewish state in either Palestine or Argentina (Zionists had started immigrating to Palestine in 1881, but the Jewish Colonisation Association, founded by the German financier and philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch in 1891, was also supporting Jewish immigration to Argentina). Just over a year later, in August 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, which agreed on a goal for the movement: "to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law."

Khalidi introduces the 1899 exchange of letters between Yusuf Diya and Herzl with a June 1895 diary entry from Herzl:

He [Herzl] had already begun to give thought to some of the issues involved in the colonization of Palestine, writing in his diary in 1895: 'We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.' (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, 2021 trade paperback edition, p. 4)

This quotation is a little controversial because Herzl does not specify Palestine or Arabs in it; when he wrote it, he may have assumed that Hirsch's financial backing would dictate the creation of a Jewish state in South America. But regardless of whether the Zionist movement would coalesce around Palestine or Argentina, Herzl recognized that it needed to plan for the removal of at least some of the native population.