Blaming the Victims

Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

Edited by EDWARD W. SAID and CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

                                                                                                       

The horrific massacre (most of the world say, Genocide) of Palestinians by Israel in  what is  called the “Gaza war” following the killing of 1200 Israelis by the Hamas militants on 7 October, 2023,  has once again focused attention of the world to the continued occupation of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinians by Israel.   Despite appeals from nations and leaders across the world, Israel has refused to heed these appeals and continues its macabre assaults on Palestine.  The world wonders what the aim of Israel  is in continuing the war, which has widened now to an invasion of Lebanon with a stated aim of vanquishing the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, which an influential presence (it is a political party and had been a part of its government in that country in the past) in that country.

This book traces the support base of Israel for its narrative, through scholars and British and American governmental backing.  Firstly, it considers the arguments of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial which  documents  the increase in Arab population as owing to massive illegal Arab immigration into thie Jewish-settled areas of Palestine during the British mandate years (1920-48). Her thesis is that a significant portion of 700,000 Arabs residing in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1949 had only recently settled there, and that they had immigrated to Palestine because of the economic opportunities generated by Zionist settlement. The author of this essay says that such an increase is due improved sanitary conditions and hygiene.  By the figures quoted by Joan herself, the increase of Arab population was a naturally demographic  and cannot be by a proportion of 1  (Jew) to 1000 (Arabs) when the Jewish immigration was taking pace.

The book also debunks the claim of Zionists about disproportionate Arab immigration by quoting statistics.   For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314; in 1936, Jewish numbers had had gone up to 384,078 and the total to 1,366,692; in 1946 there were 608,225 Jews in a total of 1,913,1 12. 4 In all these statistics, 'natives' were easily distinguishable from the arriving colonists. But who were these natives? Most of them were Sunni Muslims, although  a minority among them were Christians, Druze, and Shi'ite Muslims. All of them spoke Arabic and considered themselves Arabs. Approximately 65 per cent of the Palestinian Arabs were agriculturalists, living in some five hundred villages where grains as well as fruits and vegetables were grown. The principal Palestinian cities - Nablus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, Jaffa, Jericho, Ramlah, Hebron, and Haifa - were built in the main by Palestinian Arabs who continued to live in them, even after the expanding Zionist colonies encroached upon them. Also in existence by that time were: a respectable Palestinian intellectual and professional class, the beginnings of modern industry, and a highly developed national consciousness. Modern Palestinian social, economic and cultural life was organized around the same issues of independence and anti-colonialism prevalent in the region, but the Palestinians had to contend with the legacy of Ottoman rule, then the Zionist colonization, then British mandatory authority (after World War I) - more or less all together. Almost without exception, Arab Palestinians felt themselves to be part of the great Arab awakening stirring since the last years of the nineteenth century, and it is this feeling that gave encouragement and coherence to an otherwise disruptive modern history. Palestinian writers and intellectuals such as Muhammad Izzat Darwazeh, Khalil Sakakini, Khalil Baydas, and Najib Nassar; political organizations such as the Futtuwa and Najjada, the Arab Higher Committees; and the League of National Liberation (which argued that the Palestinian question could only be solved by Arabs and Jews together) all these formed great national blocs among the population, directed the energies of the 'non-Jewish' Palestinian community, and created a Palestinian identity opposed equally to British rule and to Jewish colonization; an identity strengthened by a sense of belonging to a distinct national group with a language (the Palestinian Arab dialect) a a specific communal sense (threatened particularly by Zionism) of its own.

The root of the present day Arab-Israel conflict could be traced to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which espoused the twin Zionist objectives of building up Jewish presence while undermining Arab presence in Palestine.  In one brief paragraph it spoke of a commitment to establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine and made the Arabs who constituted more than ninety per cent of the population at the time inconsequential by calling them the 'non-Jewish communities'. This doctrinal annihilation of the Palestinian people was reinforced by a system of colonial government that belittled the Palestinian people demographically, economically, and culturally, in effect making them aliens in their own homeland. The Mandate for Palestine (1922-48) required the mandatory power not only to facilitate Jewish immigration and the transfer of land, but also to place 'the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home'. Article 4 of the Mandate authorized a Jewish Agency to the share in the administration of the country. The translation of these provisions into policies during the nearly thirty years of British Mandate over Palestine brought about the tragic and unique mutation that eventually turned Palestine into Israel. Demographically, Jewish immigration, imposed without the consent and against the explicit opposition of the indigenous community by a foreign colonial power, increased the ratio of alien settlers from one in ten in 1918 to one in two in 1947. The proportion of native population rapidly diminished from an overwhelming majority to a much smaller and continually dwindling one. In 1948, the Zionists took advantage of the outbreak of war and completed the process, thus achieving their long-standing aim of creating a Jewish majority in the country. Arab Palestine became Jewish Israel as a consequence of a 'demographic purge' of a kind unique in modern history. By the end of the following year (1949), only 130,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in the territory controlled by Israel within the 'Armistice Lines'; some 780,000 had become displaced persons either in residual parts of Palestine where they joined their compatriots, orin the immediately adjacent host countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. As Palestine was subjected to this process of demographic transformation, it suffered under a cognate economic mutation. The transfer of land to Zionist settlers was always (and still is) a major objective of the Zionist movement. This was necessary not only to accommodate the massive immigration of Jewish settlers but also to ensure the destruction of the economic foundations of a predominant agrarian Arab society. The Zionist policy of land acquisition was transforming Palestinian society into a community of landless peasants. The deterioration of the quality of life available to the Palestinian Arabs as a direct consequence of Zionist colonization was documented and reported as early as 1930 by the British government to Palestine.

In the Essay, “Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System”  Noam Chomsky shows the deep-rooted ideological and diplomatic support that America extends to Israel in its onslaught of both Palestine and neighboring middle eastern countries. Chomsky also points out the hypocrisy involved in calling attacks of militants in Palestine/Lebanon resulting in death of 10-15 Israelis/Americans as “acts of terrorism while turning a blind eye to acts by American supports right wing groups in Latin America where 100s of Nicaraguan and other government officials are killed. 

Unless America rethinks its unabashed support for Israel with military and diplomatic support, the expanding sphere of Israel’s war in the Middle East would continue to expand resulting in death and destruction.