History of the Palestinians in Israel
www.adalah.org/ | 21.10.2003 00:03 | Anti-racism | Repression | Social Struggles | World
Despite all odds and ethnic cleansing of 70% of natives in 1947-1949, remained in what became Israel. They were kept under martial law until 1966 and are now (separate and unequal) citizens of Israel. "Adalah's main goals are to achieve equal individual and collective rights for the Arab minority in Israel in different fields including land rights; civil and political rights; cultural, social, and economic and rights; religious rights; women's rights; and prisoners' rights."
History of the Palestinians in Israel
Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise close to 20% of the total population of the country, numbering over 1,000,000. They live predominantly in villages, towns, and mixed Arab-Jewish cities in the Galilee region in the north, the Triangle area in central Israel, and the Naqab (Negev) desert in the south. A part of the Palestinian people who currently live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Diaspora, they belong to three religious communities: Muslim (81%), Christian (10%), and Druze (9%). Under international instruments to which Israel is a state party, they constitute a national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority.
In 1947, the Palestinians comprised some 67% of the population of Palestine. On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was established. During the Arab-Israeli war that immediately followed, approximately 780,000 of the pre-1948 Palestinian population fled or were expelled, forced to become refugees in the neighboring Arab states and in the West. Of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the new state, approximately 25% were displaced from their homes and villages and became internally displaced persons as the Israeli army destroyed over 400 Arab villages. As a result of the war, the Palestinian population in Israel found itself disoriented and severely weakened. They had been effectively transformed from members of a majority population to a minority in an exclusively Jewish state. They lacked political as well as economic power, as their leadership, as well as their professional and middle classes, were refused the right to return and compelled to live outside of the state.
From the state's inception, the Jewish majority viewed the Palestinians who remained within the state suspiciously and frequently with hostility - as part of the Arab world, as a potential fifth column, and oftentimes simply as enemies of the state. From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians in Israel lived under military rule applied only to them, despite the fact that they were formally declared citizens of the state in 1948. Military rule placed tight controls on all aspects of life for the Palestinian minority. These measures of control included severe restrictions on movement, prohibitions on political organization, limitations on job opportunities, and censorship of publications. For example, in 1956, the Israeli army killed 49 Palestinian farmers in Kufr Kasem for "violating" the curfew imposed on their village. Unaware that a curfew had been ordered, the farmers were returning home from working their agricultural lands when they were killed. Substantial demonstrations on the anniversary of the massacre in 1957 marked the first time that Palestinians in Israel had organized on a large scale to protest the state's repressive policies. Up to 1965, attempts by the Palestinian community in Israel to form political parties to run for the Knesset, such as the El Ard (The Land) Movement, were forcibly stopped and their associations outlawed.
The Israeli authorities also confiscated massive amounts of Palestinian-owned lands. As the majority of the Palestinian community traditionally relied on agriculture as their main source of income, state expropriation of lands forced Palestinians to seek work as wage-labors and thus become primarily dependent on the Israeli economy. Prior to 1948, the Jewish community owned just 6-7% of the land. During the next four decades, 80% of lands owned by Palestinians living in Israel were confiscated and placed at the exclusive disposal of Jewish citizens. Today, 93% of all land in Israel is under direct state control.
Military rule was lifted in 1966. One year later, following the war in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Jerusalem. As a result Palestinians in Israel regained contacts with Palestinians in these areas. From this time and throughout the first Intifada (1987-1993), Palestinian citizens of Israel confined their struggle to a civic one and restricted their national effort to events in the Occupied Territories. Other struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s included long strikes organized by mayors of Arab municipalities to protest paltry budget allocations for basic services and demonstrations over land confiscations. Of particular importance was the call for a general strike in 1976, following a wave of land expropriations in the Galilee area. These expropriations were part of the governmental plan to expand the existing Jewish settlements and to establish new ones in order to reach a "demographic balance" in areas where Palestinians constituted a majority. Protests erupted in the Galilee, during which Israeli security forces killed six Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more. Every year on 30 March, Land Day, Palestinians in Israel commemorate their collective struggle against land confiscation and dispossession.
Israel never sought to assimilate or integrate the Palestinian population, treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state practiced systematic and institutionalized discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture, and political participation. Successive Israeli governments maintained tight control over the community, attempting to suppress Palestinian/Arab identity and to divide the community within itself. To that end, Palestinians are not defined by the state as a national minority despite UN Resolution 181 calling for such; rather they are referred to as "Israeli Arabs," "non-Jews," or by religious affiliation. Further attempts have been made to split the Palestinian community into "minorities within a minority" through separate educational curricula, disparate employment and academic opportunities, and the selective conscription of Druze and some Bedouin men to military service. Israeli discourse has legitimated the second-class status of Palestinian citizens on the basis that the minority population does not serve in the military; however, the selective conscription of Druze and some Bedouin has not prevented discrimination against them.
Despite historical marginalization and overwhelming disparities, many Palestinian citizens believed that their situation would improve with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, the 1990s brought many shifts in the political atmosphere which affected the situation of the Palestinian minority. Under Labor-led governments, Arab political parties held a balance of power, and the government occasionally accounted for those Palestinian concerns that did not challenge the structure of the state. When the Likud or unity coalition governments held power, Palestinian citizens were faced with decreasing budgets, special programs exclusively established for Jewish communities and institutions, and heightened institutional discrimination.
These political shifts have been exacerbated by the problems that the Palestinian minority has faced post-Oslo. The promise and hopes that were briefly raised have not been met with concrete benefits for Palestinian citizens of Israel. In fact, the widely-held view that the peace process would act as a springboard to alleviating or at least addressing the problems of the Palestinian minority did not materialize. Palestinians in Israel found themselves excluded from the peace process, and their civic and socio-economic status unilaterally neglected. Indeed the Oslo Accords have redefined and limited the "Palestinian question" to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, excluding Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as the entire refugee population in the Diaspora from any substantive dialogue.
The realization that their concerns would not be met through the Oslo process brought an increase in political protest on the part of the Palestinian minority. Palestinians demonstrated in large numbers in 1998 in Umm al-Sahali following the court-ordered and state-executed demolition of Palestinian homes, and in Umm al-Fahem after the army attempted to expropriate Palestinian land for use as a military training area. Both protests resulted in violent clashes with the police. As a result of the events in Umm al-Fahem, which went on for three days, hundreds of Palestinians including students, were injured by tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition after the police stormed the high school. Students also protested at universities, demonstrating on numerous issues such as tuition increases and other academic issues; violence against the Palestinian community; and national identity concerns.
The post-Oslo period has also been characterized by a substantial decline in economic stability of the Palestinian minority. The Palestinian community already faced a high rate of unemployment: as of July 2000, the localities with the highest rates of unemployment were all Arab, and the situation has worsened since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. The ongoing high rate of unemployment compounds the ill effects of discrimination. The poverty statistics for the Palestinian minority are equally chilling, as after social security payments, 37.6% of Palestinian citizens of Israel remained below the poverty line in 1998-1999.
In September 2000, two months after the failed Camp David accords, Ariel Sharon, then a Member of the Knesset (MK), visited the Haram al-Sharif compound, site of the al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. Over the course of the next two days, Israeli security forces killed and injured tens of Palestinian worshippers and demonstrators throughout the Occupied Territories. The uprising that began with Sharon's provocative visit to assert Israeli sovereignty over the disputed area and the resulting demonstrations throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories has become known as the al-Aqsa Intifada. Following these events in the Occupied Territories, Palestinians in Israel called for a general strike in early October to express solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians demonstrated in massive numbers in Arab towns and villages throughout the country, resulting in more than 1,000 arrests, with hundreds indicted and detained without bail until the end of trial, many of whom were minors. During street demonstrations in early October 2000, Israeli police used live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas against the unarmed protestors; hundreds were injured and 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed. The al-Aqsa Intifada events marked the first time in decades that such brutal violence was used by Israeli police against Palestinian citizens of the state.
In November 2000, the Israeli government, headed by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, announced the establishment of a three-member Commission of Inquiry ("the Commission"), in accordance with the Commissions of Inquiry Law (1968). The mandate of the Commission is to investigate the clashes between the security forces and Arab and Jewish citizens, which culminated in the death and injury of Israeli citizens starting from 29 September 2000. It further calls for an investigation into the behavior of the inciters, organizers and participants in the events from all sectors, and the security forces. The Commission sets a precedent in Israeli legal history. This is the first time a Commission has been established to investigate police violence against the Palestinian minority, although the Palestinian community has demanded such commissions in the past. As a result of the Commission, serious questions have been raised regarding the credibility of the police force as a whole. Testimonies heard by the Commission to date shed important light on the relationship between Palestinian citizens and the state, and Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. As it stands, the state-sanctioned use of force against Palestinian citizens calls into question Israel's commitment to democracy, and highlights the problems of Palestinian engagement with state institutions.
Along with the establishment of the Commission, the February 2001 direct election of MK Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister was another pivotal moment for the Palestinian minority. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the choice between Barak and Sharon afforded no political option, as both candidates touted a Zionist agenda that explicitly and implicitly relegated Palestinians to second-class citizenship and continued the policies of occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. For the first time, most of Palestinian community boycotted the election (only 23% voted, less than a third of the typical turnout by the community) by staying home from the polls or submitting blank ballots. The unity government subsequently created by Sharon is facing the end of the Oslo process, as political negotiations have broken down and massive violence rages in the Occupied Territories.
Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise close to 20% of the total population of the country, numbering over 1,000,000. They live predominantly in villages, towns, and mixed Arab-Jewish cities in the Galilee region in the north, the Triangle area in central Israel, and the Naqab (Negev) desert in the south. A part of the Palestinian people who currently live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Diaspora, they belong to three religious communities: Muslim (81%), Christian (10%), and Druze (9%). Under international instruments to which Israel is a state party, they constitute a national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority.
In 1947, the Palestinians comprised some 67% of the population of Palestine. On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was established. During the Arab-Israeli war that immediately followed, approximately 780,000 of the pre-1948 Palestinian population fled or were expelled, forced to become refugees in the neighboring Arab states and in the West. Of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the new state, approximately 25% were displaced from their homes and villages and became internally displaced persons as the Israeli army destroyed over 400 Arab villages. As a result of the war, the Palestinian population in Israel found itself disoriented and severely weakened. They had been effectively transformed from members of a majority population to a minority in an exclusively Jewish state. They lacked political as well as economic power, as their leadership, as well as their professional and middle classes, were refused the right to return and compelled to live outside of the state.
From the state's inception, the Jewish majority viewed the Palestinians who remained within the state suspiciously and frequently with hostility - as part of the Arab world, as a potential fifth column, and oftentimes simply as enemies of the state. From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians in Israel lived under military rule applied only to them, despite the fact that they were formally declared citizens of the state in 1948. Military rule placed tight controls on all aspects of life for the Palestinian minority. These measures of control included severe restrictions on movement, prohibitions on political organization, limitations on job opportunities, and censorship of publications. For example, in 1956, the Israeli army killed 49 Palestinian farmers in Kufr Kasem for "violating" the curfew imposed on their village. Unaware that a curfew had been ordered, the farmers were returning home from working their agricultural lands when they were killed. Substantial demonstrations on the anniversary of the massacre in 1957 marked the first time that Palestinians in Israel had organized on a large scale to protest the state's repressive policies. Up to 1965, attempts by the Palestinian community in Israel to form political parties to run for the Knesset, such as the El Ard (The Land) Movement, were forcibly stopped and their associations outlawed.
The Israeli authorities also confiscated massive amounts of Palestinian-owned lands. As the majority of the Palestinian community traditionally relied on agriculture as their main source of income, state expropriation of lands forced Palestinians to seek work as wage-labors and thus become primarily dependent on the Israeli economy. Prior to 1948, the Jewish community owned just 6-7% of the land. During the next four decades, 80% of lands owned by Palestinians living in Israel were confiscated and placed at the exclusive disposal of Jewish citizens. Today, 93% of all land in Israel is under direct state control.
Military rule was lifted in 1966. One year later, following the war in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Jerusalem. As a result Palestinians in Israel regained contacts with Palestinians in these areas. From this time and throughout the first Intifada (1987-1993), Palestinian citizens of Israel confined their struggle to a civic one and restricted their national effort to events in the Occupied Territories. Other struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s included long strikes organized by mayors of Arab municipalities to protest paltry budget allocations for basic services and demonstrations over land confiscations. Of particular importance was the call for a general strike in 1976, following a wave of land expropriations in the Galilee area. These expropriations were part of the governmental plan to expand the existing Jewish settlements and to establish new ones in order to reach a "demographic balance" in areas where Palestinians constituted a majority. Protests erupted in the Galilee, during which Israeli security forces killed six Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more. Every year on 30 March, Land Day, Palestinians in Israel commemorate their collective struggle against land confiscation and dispossession.
Israel never sought to assimilate or integrate the Palestinian population, treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state practiced systematic and institutionalized discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture, and political participation. Successive Israeli governments maintained tight control over the community, attempting to suppress Palestinian/Arab identity and to divide the community within itself. To that end, Palestinians are not defined by the state as a national minority despite UN Resolution 181 calling for such; rather they are referred to as "Israeli Arabs," "non-Jews," or by religious affiliation. Further attempts have been made to split the Palestinian community into "minorities within a minority" through separate educational curricula, disparate employment and academic opportunities, and the selective conscription of Druze and some Bedouin men to military service. Israeli discourse has legitimated the second-class status of Palestinian citizens on the basis that the minority population does not serve in the military; however, the selective conscription of Druze and some Bedouin has not prevented discrimination against them.
Despite historical marginalization and overwhelming disparities, many Palestinian citizens believed that their situation would improve with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, the 1990s brought many shifts in the political atmosphere which affected the situation of the Palestinian minority. Under Labor-led governments, Arab political parties held a balance of power, and the government occasionally accounted for those Palestinian concerns that did not challenge the structure of the state. When the Likud or unity coalition governments held power, Palestinian citizens were faced with decreasing budgets, special programs exclusively established for Jewish communities and institutions, and heightened institutional discrimination.
These political shifts have been exacerbated by the problems that the Palestinian minority has faced post-Oslo. The promise and hopes that were briefly raised have not been met with concrete benefits for Palestinian citizens of Israel. In fact, the widely-held view that the peace process would act as a springboard to alleviating or at least addressing the problems of the Palestinian minority did not materialize. Palestinians in Israel found themselves excluded from the peace process, and their civic and socio-economic status unilaterally neglected. Indeed the Oslo Accords have redefined and limited the "Palestinian question" to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, excluding Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as the entire refugee population in the Diaspora from any substantive dialogue.
The realization that their concerns would not be met through the Oslo process brought an increase in political protest on the part of the Palestinian minority. Palestinians demonstrated in large numbers in 1998 in Umm al-Sahali following the court-ordered and state-executed demolition of Palestinian homes, and in Umm al-Fahem after the army attempted to expropriate Palestinian land for use as a military training area. Both protests resulted in violent clashes with the police. As a result of the events in Umm al-Fahem, which went on for three days, hundreds of Palestinians including students, were injured by tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition after the police stormed the high school. Students also protested at universities, demonstrating on numerous issues such as tuition increases and other academic issues; violence against the Palestinian community; and national identity concerns.
The post-Oslo period has also been characterized by a substantial decline in economic stability of the Palestinian minority. The Palestinian community already faced a high rate of unemployment: as of July 2000, the localities with the highest rates of unemployment were all Arab, and the situation has worsened since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. The ongoing high rate of unemployment compounds the ill effects of discrimination. The poverty statistics for the Palestinian minority are equally chilling, as after social security payments, 37.6% of Palestinian citizens of Israel remained below the poverty line in 1998-1999.
In September 2000, two months after the failed Camp David accords, Ariel Sharon, then a Member of the Knesset (MK), visited the Haram al-Sharif compound, site of the al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. Over the course of the next two days, Israeli security forces killed and injured tens of Palestinian worshippers and demonstrators throughout the Occupied Territories. The uprising that began with Sharon's provocative visit to assert Israeli sovereignty over the disputed area and the resulting demonstrations throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories has become known as the al-Aqsa Intifada. Following these events in the Occupied Territories, Palestinians in Israel called for a general strike in early October to express solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians demonstrated in massive numbers in Arab towns and villages throughout the country, resulting in more than 1,000 arrests, with hundreds indicted and detained without bail until the end of trial, many of whom were minors. During street demonstrations in early October 2000, Israeli police used live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas against the unarmed protestors; hundreds were injured and 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed. The al-Aqsa Intifada events marked the first time in decades that such brutal violence was used by Israeli police against Palestinian citizens of the state.
In November 2000, the Israeli government, headed by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, announced the establishment of a three-member Commission of Inquiry ("the Commission"), in accordance with the Commissions of Inquiry Law (1968). The mandate of the Commission is to investigate the clashes between the security forces and Arab and Jewish citizens, which culminated in the death and injury of Israeli citizens starting from 29 September 2000. It further calls for an investigation into the behavior of the inciters, organizers and participants in the events from all sectors, and the security forces. The Commission sets a precedent in Israeli legal history. This is the first time a Commission has been established to investigate police violence against the Palestinian minority, although the Palestinian community has demanded such commissions in the past. As a result of the Commission, serious questions have been raised regarding the credibility of the police force as a whole. Testimonies heard by the Commission to date shed important light on the relationship between Palestinian citizens and the state, and Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. As it stands, the state-sanctioned use of force against Palestinian citizens calls into question Israel's commitment to democracy, and highlights the problems of Palestinian engagement with state institutions.
Along with the establishment of the Commission, the February 2001 direct election of MK Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister was another pivotal moment for the Palestinian minority. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the choice between Barak and Sharon afforded no political option, as both candidates touted a Zionist agenda that explicitly and implicitly relegated Palestinians to second-class citizenship and continued the policies of occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. For the first time, most of Palestinian community boycotted the election (only 23% voted, less than a third of the typical turnout by the community) by staying home from the polls or submitting blank ballots. The unity government subsequently created by Sharon is facing the end of the Oslo process, as political negotiations have broken down and massive violence rages in the Occupied Territories.
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The Politically Motivated Mythology of the 'Palestinians' - Meaning 'Migratory'
21.10.2003 02:03
Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian
identity serves only tactical purposes. The
founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool
in the continuing battle against Israel ...
-- Zuheir Muhsin, late Military Department head
of the PLO and member of its Executive
Council, Dutch daily Trouw, March 1977
The claim that Arab-Muslim "Palestinians" were "emotionally tied" to "their own plot of land in Palestine" -- based upon a "consistent presence" on "Arab" land for "thousands of years"2 -- is an important part of that recent mythology.
It was contrived of late in a thus far successful Orwellian propaganda effort-an appeal to the emotions that would "counter Zionism" and that "serves" tactical purposes as a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel," as the late PLO official Muhsin stated candidly in an interview, quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
In order to understand how that tool, aided by a general near-ignorance of the "unrelenting past," has distorted the perception of the present, a look at the "yesterday" of "Palestine" is necessary.
The inspection will be focused upon completing a circle-tracing the actual conditions and events that have been glossed over or omitted from the dialogue about the Arab-Israeli conflict; they are conditions and events that shaped the real political, economic, and demographic circumstances in the area. Those circumstances in turn critically affected what "justice" really consists of-for the Jewish and Arab refugees, or the "Palestinian Problem"-for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Illuminating that situation reveals and fills in the chasm between the documented facts and the Arab claims, and gives perspective to those contentions and assumptions that have become key in interpreting what is "just" for the population in question today.
"The only Arab domination since the Conquest in 635 A.D. hardly lasted, as such, 22 years...," the Muslim chairman of the Syrian Delegation attested in his remarks to the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919.3
The British Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1937 that "it is time, surely, that Palestinian 'citizenship' . . . should be recognized as what it is, as nothing but a legal formula devoid of moral meaning."4
That the claim of "age-old Arab Palestinian rights to Arab Palestine" is contradicted by history has been pointed out by eminent historians and Arabists.
According to the Reverend James Parkes, "The Land was named Palestina by he Romans to eradicate all trace of its Jewish history..."
It may seem inappropriate to have devoted so much time to "a situation which passed away two thousand years ago." But it is only politically that the defeat by Rome, and the scattering of the Jewish population, made a decisive change in the history of The Land. That which had been created by more than a thousand years of Jewish history [a thousand years before A.D. 135] remained, as did that which was beginning to be created in the thoughts of the young Christian Church.5
Many authorities have addressed the misconceptions surrounding the word Palestine. The name derived from "other migrants from the northwest, the Philistines. Though the latest arrivals, and though they only exercised control over the whole country for a few uncertain decades, they had been the cause of its name of Palestine. These Philistines were an Aegean people, driven out of Greece and Aegean islands around about 1300 B.C.E. They moved southward along the Asiatic coast and in about 1200 attempted to invade Egypt. Turned back, they settled in the maritime plain of southern 'Palestine', where they founded a series of city-states."6
According to Bernard Lewis, an eminent authority, "The word Palestine does not occur in the Old Testament. . . . Palestine does not occur in the New Testament at all."
The official adoption of the name Palestine in Roman usage to designate the territories of the former Jewish principality of Judea seems to date from after the suppression of the great Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in the year 135 C.E.... it would seem that the name Judea was abolished ... and the country renamed Palestine or Syria Palestina, with the ... intention of obliterating its historic Jewish identity. The earlier name did not entirely disappear, and as late as the 4th century C.E. we still find a Christian author, Epiphanius, referring to "Palestine, that is, Judea."
As many, including Professor Lewis, have pointed out, "From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.7 [See the map of "Ancient Palestine" in Appendix I"
In other words, it appears that Palestine never was an independent nation and the Arabs never named the land to which they now claim rights. Most Arabs do not admit so candidly that "Palestinian identity" is a maneuver "only for political reasons" as did Zuheir Muhsin. But the Arab world, until recently, itself frequently negated the validity of any claim of an "age-old Palestinian Arab" identity.
The Arabs in Judah-cum-Palestine were regarded either as members of a "pan-Arab nation," as a Muslim community, or, in a tactical ploy, as "Southern Syrians."8 The beginning article of a 1919 Arab Covenant proposed by the Arab Congress in Jerusalem stated that "The Arab lands are a complete and indivisible whole, and the divisions of whatever nature to which they have been subjected are not approved nor recognized by the Arab nation."9 In the same year, the General Syrian Congress had the opposite view; it expressed eagerness to stress an exclusively Syrian identity: "We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine . . .'10 The Arab historian George Antonius delineated Palestine in 1939 as part of "the whole of the country of th name [Syria] which is now split up into mandated territories..."11 As late a the 1950s, there was still a schizoid pattern to the Arab views. In 1951, the Constitution of the Arab Ba'ath Party stated:
The Arabs form one nation. This nation has the natural right to live in a single state and to be free to direct its own destiny ... to gather all the Arabs in a single independent Arab state.12
A scant five years later, a Saudi Arabian United Nations delegate in 1956 asserted that "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria."13 In 1974, Syria's President Assad, although a PLO supporter, incorporated both claims in a remarkable definition:
... Palestine is not only a part of our Arab homeland, but a basic part of southern Syria." 14
The one identity never seriously considered until the 1967 Six-Day War -- and then only as a "tool" -- was an "Arab Palestinian" one, and the absence was not merely disregard. Clearly there was no such age-old or even century-old "national identity." According to the British Palestine Royal Commission Report,
In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest Palestine has virtually dropped out of history.... In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the main stream of the world's life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modem civilization. Its last state was worse than its first.15
1 . P.J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (London, 1978), p. 254.
2. Thames Television Series, London, "Palestine," aired in the United States January February, 1979.
3. Minutes of the Supreme Council, in D.H. Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, 22 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. 14, p. 405
4. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Command Paper # 5479,1937, p. 120, para. 14.
5. James Parkes, Whose Land? (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 31.
6. Ibid., p. 17.
7.Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, a Historical Approach," Commentary, January 1975, p. 32-48.
8. Yehoshua Porath, "Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement," in Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, M. Milson, ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 101, 107, 119.
9. Marie Syrkin, "Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal," in Michael Curtis et al., eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 200. Syrkin found that Haj Amin al-Husseini-the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem himself - "originally opposed the Palestine Mandate because it separated Palestine from Syria." Ibid.
10. Ibid. According to Neville Mandel, Arabs and Zionism Before World War I (Berkeley, 1976), p. 152, n. 49: "After World War 1, when the nature of an independent Arab state and it's component parts were being discussed, the term 'Greater Syria' was advanced to embrace the Fertile Crescent and its desert hinterland. Palestine, as an integral part of that area, was dubbed 'Southern Syria.' But these terms were not in use in 1913 and 1914, when very few nationalists contemplated complete Arab independence."
11. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening. The Story of the Arab National Movement (Philadelphia, New York, Toronto: J.B. Lippincott, 1939), p. 15, n.1; also see Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, pp. 151-153.
12. The Balath Party "describes itself as a 'national, popular revolutionary movement fighting for Arab unity, Freedom and Socialism,"' in 1951. Syrkin, "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians; p. 200; also see Menahem Milson, "Medieval and Modem Intellectual Traditions in the Arab World," in Daedalus, Summer 1972, particularly pp. 24-26; Michel Aflaq, prominent Ba'athist and Christian, on Arab Nationalism, cited in Milson, above; also see Aflaq, Fi Sabil al Baath (Arabic) Beirut, 1962 (3rd printing), cited in Milson, p. 26; also see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London: Oxford, 1962), particularly p. 301.
13. Ahmed Shukeiry, as head of the PLO, to Security Council on May 31, 1956, cited by Syrkin in "Nationalism," in Curtis et al., Palestinians, p. 201.
14. President Hafez Assad of Syria, Radio Damascus, March 8, 1974.
15. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Chapter 1, p. 6, para. 11.
Arafitler
Nice job Arafitler
27.10.2003 19:36
Flaming Sword