22 December 2023

Why my Palestinian father is silent on Gaza


 

By Seraj Assi

July 1995. A small Palestinian village in Israel.

It was a Friday prayer. The imam took to the pulpit, and announced, with a sad face and tearful eyes, that thousands of fellow Muslims had been massacred somewhere in Bosnia.

That day, the local newspaper, an Arabic weekly named the Voice of Justice and Freedom, published horrific photos on its front page under the headline: Genocide against Muslims.

I was fourteen when the Srebrenica massacre unfolded, and I remember it all in vivid detail.

People in the village erupted in anger. They put together homemade protest signs, and marched in the streets in the hundreds. People donated blood and money to our Muslim brothers in Bosnia. Women parted with their jewelry. Families registered to adopt newly orphaned Bosnian children. It was a genuine outrage, and quite surprising, considering how far Bosnia was.

It was an amazing spectacle of brotherly solidarity, or what historian Benedict Anderson terms “imagined community.” A surviving photo shows me parading alongside my father. The signs behind us read: “Stop war crimes in Bosnia.” “Muslims in genocide camps.” “From the hell of war to the hell of genocide.”

Three decades on, history would repeat itself in Gaza, but not in our village.

Since the genocide in Gaza unfolded, my father has stayed home. Despite his deep Palestinian roots, and while the genocide in Gaza has reaped three times more victims in Gaza than it did in Bosnia, my Palestinian father, like many Palestinians inside Israel, has remained silent on Gaza.

My father is not numb to Palestinian suffering. He harbors great sympathy for his Palestinian brothers across the border. But he is simply afraid to speak up. And for a fairly good reason.

Since October 7, Israel has imposed a sort of martial law on its Palestinian citizens, banning any form of solidarity or sympathy with fellow Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli police have cracked down on any peaceful protest against the war in Gaza. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the state put in place a new law that threatens to strip Palestinians of their citizenship and residency over solidarity with Gaza.

This was the greatest existential threat made by Israel against its Palestinian citizens in decades: To those Palestinians, losing their Israeli citizenship amounts to a second Nakba.

In the span of ten weeks, Israel has turned itself into a policy state, an increasingly authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. It has put in place a series of new emergency laws specifically targeting its Palestinian citizens. A Likud minister formulated emergency regulations to imprison citizens who “harm national morale” and “undermines the morale of Israel’s soldiers and residents in the face of the enemy,” allowing the Israeli police to arrest, expel, and seize the property of civilians opposing the war or showing solidarity with Gaza. The head of the Israeli police declared a “zero tolerance” policy for anti-war protestors, threatening to “send them to Gaza.” Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi brought to the Knesset a new legislation that would give him the authority to take broadcasts off air and confiscate broadcasting equipment suspected of damaging national security or public order, or contributing to “enemy propaganda.”

As a result, a culture of ethnic intimidation, harassment, and surveillance has been brewing inside Israel. Embarking on a state-wide censorship and suppression, the Israeli police have relentlessly targeted and persecuted Palestinian citizens in the name of national security. Hundreds have been arrested for “incitement and support for terrorism.” These include teachers, artists, students, activists, and politicians. Alarmed by the rise of ethnic violence, Arab civil society organizations in Israel have established a joint emergency network to respond to threats, especially in mixed cities and on campuses.

Anti-Palestinian McCarthyism is not new in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than sixty basic laws that clearly disenfranchise and discriminate against Palestinian citizens. These include the Jewish Nation-State Law, which enshrines Israel as the “national nation-state of the Jewish people only,” and officially designates Arab Palestinians, who constitute more than 20 percent of the population, second-class citizens. Israel also has a “Nakba Law,” which bans the commemoration of the Nakba by Palestinian citizens.

The unprecedented crackdown on Palestinian citizens has been years in the making. For decades, senior Israeli politicians have portrayed Palestinian citizens as enemies from within, a demographic time bomb, a fifth-column population. Ethnic transfer plans abounded. The so-called Lieberman Plan, hatched by former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, proposed exchanging land populated by Palestinian citizens for Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Senior Israel politicians, including Lieberman and Benjamin Netanyahu, have on several occasions proposed imposing loyalty tests for the Palestinian minority, threatening to deny citizenship to those who failed.

The prospect of disenfranchisement and ethnic transfer has a deep psychological effect on Palestinian citizens like my father, who would rather stay silent than risk expulsion.

But their fears run even deeper and have a long and deep-seated history of oppression. For many of those Palestinians, the current political climate brings back the ghosts of the Military Government period (1948–1966), a regime of martial law imposed by Israel on its Palestinian citizens after the Nakba, which, among other things, suspended most of their civil rights and legal protections, including freedom of movement, speech, press, and association. 

My father thus belongs to a second generation of Palestinians in Israel who were raised in the shadow of the military regime, and who remain haunted by the ghosts of the Nakba.

Nearly three decades ago, my Palestinian father marched against the Bosnian genocide. Now he is afraid to march for his own people in Gaza. His story embodies the political predicament and tragic irony of being a Palestinian in Israel today.


03 December 2023

Who is afraid of the g-word?

By Seraj Assi


Genocide is a crime. It’s unfolding in Gaza before our eyes as we speak. Genocide experts like Jewish scholar Raz Segal have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a textbook for genocide.” UN experts have warned: “We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide. Time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

Yet the mainstream media has been reluctant to call out Israel’s genocide, despite all the evidence on the ground, much of which has been provided by Israeli officials themselves, who have not been shy of their genocidal intentions. Why?

The word genocide carries a tremendous moral weight that implies grave consequences for those who commit it. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who wanted to create a word that would carry high moral salience. Ultimately, he succeeded far beyond his expectations: for most people today, the word genocide conveys the worst crime humanity can inflict on a group of people.

This perhaps explains why Israeli officials have been vocal about their genocide mission in Gaza, while at the same time refusing to state it directly or call by its name.

Instead, they use other euphemisms. One common euphemism is “second Nakba.” As one Israeli lawmaker put it at the star of Israel’s war in Gaza, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” Or as Israel’s Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter, referring to the unfolding mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza, has brashly put it: “We are rolling out Nakba 2023.”

Another related euphemism is “finish the job,” which also implies conducting a new nakba to “finish the unfinished job of 1948.” As Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, once told Palestinians: “You are here by mistake, it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Other common euphemisms include “mowing the grass,” “turning Gaza into a soccer field,” “wiping Gaza off the map,” “erasing Gaza from the face of the earth,” and, to cite Benjamin Netanyahu’s chilling phrase, “thinning out the Gaza population to a minimum.” Or as Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told Army Radio, “At the end of this war, not only will Hamas no longer be in Gaza, but the territory of Gaza will also decrease.”

Threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, as did Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, also qualifies as a genocidal threat. You may call it atomic genocide.

Sometimes, astonishingly, an official would issue a whole genocidal statement without evoking the word genocide, as when Eliyahu boasted on social media: “North Gaza is more beautiful than ever. Razing and blowing up everything is amazing to see. When finished, we will hand over the lands of Gaza to soldiers and settlers who lived in Gush Katif.”

Denying the existence of civilians in Gaza is a recipe for genocide. So is depicting the people of Gaza as “human animals” and “Children of Darkness.” Or as an Israeli lawmaker warned from the Knesset podium: “the children of Gaza have brought it against themselves.”

And genocide is not confined to killing. Mass displacement and transfer also qualifies as genocide. There have been a flurry of official Israeli proposals explicitly calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. According to a document revealed by local Israeli sources, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence has recommended the forcible and permanent transfer of Gaza's 2.2 million Palestinians to the Sinai desert, and the repopulation of Gaza with Jewish settlers. An Israeli think tank with close ties to the Israeli government suggested that the war in Gaza presents a “unique and rare opportunity” to permanently expel Palestinians from Gaza and repopulate it with Jewish settlers.

Since October 7, Israel has killed more Palestinians in Gaza than it did in all Palestine during the Nakba. It has displaced twice as many. If what happened in 1948 was ethnic cleansing, as Israeli founders themselves would admit, then what do you call what’s happening in Gaza now?

So call it what you may, it’s genocide. Or perhaps it’s time to start calling the thing by its name. 

 

03 November 2023

How Israel was founded on terrorism: Part I


By Seraj Assi

On July 22, 1946, a group of operatives from the Zionist group Irgun, disguised as Arab waiters, delivered milk cans filled with 500 pounds of high explosives to the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The 'milkmen' set a timer to detonate the explosives thirty minutes later.

Menachem Begin, the group's leader who later became Israel's prime minister and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, later boasted: "Twelve thirty-one, thirty-two. Zero hour drew near. The half-hour was almost up. Twelve-thirty-seven… suddenly the whole town seemed to shudder."

The explosives, which detonated beneath a public café at the peak of the lunch hour, shattered the entire wing from the hotel and collapsed its six stories into the basement. Nearly 100 people were killed and 100 more wounded in the explosions, including Britons, Arabs, and Jews.

While they were met with global outrage, the attacks did achieve their goal. The following year, the British Mandate withdrew from Palestine, and shortly after, Israel declared independence.

Following the British withdrawal, the Zionist groups directed their terrorist tactics against Palestinians, which included countless bombings of civilian targets.

On December 12, 1947, the Irgun parked a car bomb opposite the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, killing 20 people. On 4 January 1948, the Lehi detonated a lorry bomb near Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Palestinians and wounding 100 others. On January 6, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 24 civilians. The next day, Irgun members in a stolen police van rolled a barrel bomb into a large group of Palestinian civilians waiting for a bus near the Jaffa Gate, killing 20 of them. On February 18, a bomb planted but the Irgun detonated in the Ramla market, killing scores of Arab residents. On 28 February, the Palmach launched a bombing attack on a garage in Haifa, killing 30 Palestinians.

Come the spring, the Zionist forces would take their terrorist tactics to a large-scale, systemic, and all-out ethnic cleansing campaign, which included collective executions, mass expulsion, and wholesome destruction of Palestinian towns and villages.

On April 9, 1948, about 130 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi groups stormed into Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, and massacred over 200 Palestinians, men, women and children. An Israeli soldier later described the Zionist tactic bluntly: “We're putting in explosives and running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there anymore."

On May 23, the IDF'S Alexandroni Brigade rounded over 200 Palestinian villagers in Tantura near Haifa, a village of roughly 1500 residents, and massacred them in cold blood. A Jewish eyewitness later recalled. "It was one of the most shameful battles fought by the IDF. . . they did not leave anyone alive."

On July 11, in what is known as the Lydda Death March, Israeli forces stormed into the Arab town of Lydda, where they massacred hundreds of residents, and expelled some 70,000 Palestinians. During Operation Danny, as Israel dubbed the massacre, 89th Israeli battalion mounted on armored cars and jeeps and raided the city "spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved," to cite Israeli historian Benny Morris.

On October 29, the IDF's 89th Commando Battalion, which was composed of former Irgun and Lehi forces and commanded by Moshe Dayan, invaded the Palestinian village of Dawayima, killed hundreds of civilians, and raped dozens of women. In a horrifying testimony by an Israeli soldier eyewitness: "There was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs, including women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. There was not a house without dead."

Describing the Zionist tactics in Dawayima, the former soldier added: "In the town were left male and female Arabs, who were put into houses and were then locked in without receiving food or drink. Later explosive engineers came to blow up the houses."

In one horrifying episode, "One soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and afterwards shot her. An Arab woman with a days-old infant was used for cleaning the back yard where the soldiers eat. She serviced them for a day or two, after which they shot her and the infant."

On October 30, the IDF'S 7th Brigade, under the command of General Moshe Carmel, stormed into the northern Palestinian village of Saliha and butchered 100 Palestinians. On October 31, the Zionist forces executed more than eighty villagers in the nearby village of Hula.

In the nearly 70 massacres committed by Israel in 1948, hardly a Palestinian village was spared. These massacres and mass expulsions culminated in what Palestinians call the Nakba. The Zionist atrocities sent shock waves across Palestinian towns and villages, and left an indelible mark of horror in Palestinian memory. Shocked and terrorized, Palestinians had no resistance left in them. By the end of 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians had been killed, and nearly one million expelled.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was underway.

27 October 2023

A Colonial History of Gaza: Part I

By Seraj Assi



*

The history of Gaza over the past century reads like a continuous struggle against foreign rule: the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Zionist invasion, and the Israeli occupation.

 We know a good deal about the last one, but little about the first two. So today, I will focus on the British occupation of Gaza as told by Palestinian historian Aref al Aref.

Al Aref is an interesting figure. He was made in the image of his people: Moving from one exile to another, his life spanned the late Ottomans, the British Mandate, the Zionists, and the Israelis.

His journey from Ottomanism to Arabism, and from Arabism to Palestinian nationalism, embodies the story of national awakening in Palestine.

In WWI, he served in the Turkish Army on the Russian Front. He was captured by the Russians, and freed by the Bolsheviks. From his exile in Siberia he escaped eastward to China, embarking on a long journey through Japan and India.

He then broke up with the Ottomans, and joined the cause of the Arab Revolt in Hejaz.

Back in Palestine, he supported armed resistance against the British occupation. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the British. He was later pardoned, and offered government posts in northern and central Palestine, including Jaffa, Nablus and Jenin.

While in service, he conspired with secret nationalist societies to mobilize Palestinians against both the Zionists and the British. As he writes in Diary, "I was compelled to appear in two contradictory guises: by day serving the British, and by night conspiring with Arab nationalists to clip the claws of the colonizers and their tails."

He was transferred to Amman, where he served for three years as Chief Secretary in the Government of Amir Abdullah, which was controlled by the British. He continued his covert activity against the British while serving in the government.

He then returned to Palestine to serve as the District Officer in the southern subdistrict of Beersheba. He stayed there for ten years, where he helped conduct the first population census among the local Bedouin tribes. 

From Beersheba, he moved to Gaza, serving there for four years (from 1939 to 1943). Gaza was closer to his heart. As he writes in his Gaza Diary, "the city was greener, more developed, and more playful, thanks to its closeness to the sea."

He then served in Ramallah until the end of the Mandate in 1948. During the fifties, he served as the mayor of East Jerusalem, and a minister in the Jordanian government.

He died in Al-Bireh on July 30, 1973. 

Aref left a rich legacy that includes books on the history of every city he governed: The History of Beersheba, the History of Gaza, the History of Askalan, and the History of Jerusalem. He also left a seven-volume history of the Nakba.

His historical corpus, which includes more than twenty books, offers an alternative narrative on the history of Palestine to the official Zionist and British narratives.

His History of Gaza, from which I will be reading today, is an epitome of the modern Palestinian odyssey: It is a fascinating tale of conquest and national awakening, hope and disenchantment, promise and betrayal, victory and defeat.

 *

Gaza has always been a battlefield for foreign conquerors. Its strategic location as a crossroad and trading center for three continents made it a tempting prize for invading armies. The city was coveted by every rising empire along the Mediterranean, from the ancient Philistines to the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Turks, and the British. Alexander the Great led three bloody battles to capture it. The Roman General Pompey made it a Roman polis, a free city. Napoleon called it "the Kings' Tunnel and the Gate between Africa and Asia."

Throughout history, generals and commanders who wished to conquer Palestine were guided by a common military axiom: to conquer Palestine, start with Gaza; if Gaza falls, the rest of Palestine follows.

The strategy proved useful:

- Gaza was the first Palestinian city to be conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century.

- It was the first city to be captured by the Turks in the sixteenth century.

- It was the first city to be conquered by Ibrahim Pasha during his military campaign in Palestine, which lasted for ten years (between 1831 and 1841).

- And it was the first Palestinian city to fall to the British army during WWI.

*

Seizing Gaza was not easy. The British made three attempts to capture it. The road to Jerusalem, they believed, rightly so, began in Gaza. For them, Palestine was not only a tempting prize, but a decisive blow to their traditional enemy, the Ottoman Empire.

On December 7, 1916, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George sent a letter to General Edmund Allenby, the Commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force: "We must have a decisive victory in the East", he wrote, referring to Palestine. In early 1917, the War Cabinet in London approved a military plan to occupy Palestine– a decision which set into motion a series of dramatic fights in southern Palestine, known as the Battles of Gaza.

These Battles opened a new chapter in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the Middle Eastern Theatre of WWI, which pitted the British Empire against the Turks and their German allies. It started with an Ottoman attempt to occupy the Suez Canal in 1915, and ended with the Armistice of Mudros in 1918, which formally ended the hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies, and de facto placed Palestine under British rule.

The first British attempt to capture Gaza was made in late March 1917:

British forces were led by General Charles Dobell, the commander of the Eastern Force, who was tasked with the capture of the city by Archibald Murray, the commander of British forces in Palestine and the Middle East.

By the time of the campaign, the British had already occupied the surrounding cities of El-Arish, Rafah and Khan Younis. The capture of the Sinai Peninsula brought the British forces within striking distance from Gaza. Dobell led the attack from his central command in Rafah.

The Turkish-German alliance was led by General Enver Pasha on the Turkish side, and Commander Kress von Kressenstein on the German side.

In a prophetic manner, the Turks and their German allies realized that the fall of Gaza would create a domino effect in Palestine. So they built a strong defense line from Gaza to Beersheba, doubled their forces, and fortified the city from all directions.

On March 26, British troops marched towards Gaza. A joint infantry and mounted infantry from the Desert Column, a component of the Eastern Force, attacked the town from the north.

"British forces were met with fierce Turkish resistance," writes Al Aref. "Before sunset, the British were in full retreat. They resumed the fighting the next day, but were dealt a decisive defeat."

Despite the victory, the Turks were alarmed. In the words of Al Aref, "It was a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat".

Fearing a second attack, the Ottoman garrison was backed with new forces from Istanbul. Trenches and ambushes around the city were reinforced against a frontal attack. The defense line was manned with strong redoubts that extended eastwards across the road to Beersheba.

"Gaza," writes the Palestinian historian, "was transformed into a big modern fortress."

The second attempt to capture Gaza began on April 17: The British attacked with three infantry divisions, backed by two mounted divisions. The following day, British troops were only two miles away from Gaza.

"There was a bloody encounter on the ground", recalls Al-Aref. "Cavalry soldiers were forced to dismount their horses and fight on foot. From the sea, the British artillery bombarded the city for a day long, from five in the morning to eight in the evening" (sounds familiar?)

On April 19, however, British forces were pushed out of Gaza. "It was a glorious victory," rejoices Al Aref, "once again, the Turks displayed a heroic defense of the city."

Following the second defeat, Charles Dobell was removed from his post, and General Murray was replaced by Lord Edmund Allenby.

Allenby was given carte blanche in Palestine. He doubled his forces, ordered large amounts of ammunition and supplies, extended the water pipelines from the Nile across the desert, and expanded the railway line all the way to Deir al-Balah.

Allenby was a military mastermind. He understood that it would be impossible to capture Gaza before Beersheba. So in late October, after a hot summer, he led his forces to Beersheba, stormed through the Turkish defense, and captured the city.

On November first, British forces advanced towards Gaza. The Third Battle of Gaza was underway. "Gaza was shelled by day and by night," writes Al-Aref. "British bombs and machine-gun fire rained down for seven days. Houses and mosques were destroyed. The city was deserted and emptied of its inhabitants as thousands fled northwards."

On November 7, the Turks left Gaza, and the city surrendered.

The British forces then broke the Gaza-Beersheba defense and began marching towards Jerusalem, which they captured on December 9, 1917. On December 11, Allenby, dismounted his horse and entered the Old City on foot through the Jaffa Gate.

From Jerusalem, British troops advanced northwards through Palestine. Within a year, the old prophesy fulfilled itself, and the rest of Palestine fell to the British. By September 1918, following the defeat of the Turkish forces at the Battle of Megiddo, the four-century-long Ottoman rule in Palestine was over. Palestine, including Gaza, was placed under British military rule.

Three years later, in 1923, General Allenby returned Gaza to launch the British War Cemetery, built by the British after the war to bury their soldiers. In his opening speech, he hailed the capture of Gaza for paving the way for the British occupation of Palestine. "From the down of history", he said, "Gaza has been the gate of conquerors to Palestine."

*

The war had devastating effects on Gaza. Its population declined by more than 30 percent– perhaps the highest in its history. Many fled northwards to the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa. Many others fled to Syria. Most of these refugees never returned.

I come from Jaffa. Many people would tell you that Gaza has a large number of refugees who fled Jaffa in 1948. Only few know that there are in fact more Gazan refugees in Jaffa than there are Jaffan refugees in Gaza.

Historically, more people lived in Gaza than in Jerusalem. But from the mid-nineteenth up the early twentieth century, Gaza's population declined dramatically, thanks to three waves of migration:

The first was in 1840, during the military campaign led by Ibrahim Pasha. Many also fled during the Peasants' Revolt of 1834, which broke out against Egyptian conscription and taxation policies.

The second was in 1905, during the severe drought and famine that hit Palestine.

The third, the most devastating, was during the war. There were two waves of migration here: the first when Turkey declared General Emergency (النفير العام) as it prepared to attack the Sues Canal; the second when the British attacked Gaza.

"Gaza suffered more than any other Palestinian city," writes Al Aref. "Its people were the victim of mutual devastation: The British shelled and destroyed the city to force the Turks out, and the Turks demolished houses and cut down trees to build barricades."

Aref's narrative is confirmed by Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner in Palestine. On September 27, 1920, he sent a letter to Earl Curzon, British Secretary of State. It was entitled (guess what) Rebuilding Gaza. Samuel writes:

"The town of Gaza suffered probably more from Military action during the war than any other town in the theatre of operations. Almost all its buildings have been destroyed, and its present appearance is comparable only to that of the devastated areas in France and Belgium. Gaza was, before the war, in respect of population (40,000), the third largest town in Palestine. The original population has now dwindled to something like one third of its number, and in the present ruinous conditions of the town there is little to attract the remainder of its inhabitants to return or a fresh population to settle there. The town is completely uninhabitable."

This letter could have been written today.  

 *

Why did Gaza fall to the British?

This is the main question that preoccupies Al Aref. Besides the obvious military reasons, he recognizes one key factor: Arab nationalism.

According to the Palestinian historian, Arab nationalism had already become a rising force by the time of the war. Triggered by the rise of Turkish nationalism, it was seen as the natural outcome of the Young Turks Revolution of 1908, which ended the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Aref describes the Revolution as a period of high hopes for the Arabs, followed by a bitter disillusionment. "Thanks to the spread of Turkification after the Revolution," he writes, "the brief honeymoon between the Arabs and the Turks came to an unhappy end."

As a result, the Arabs began to cultivate a strong desire for independence. Arab secret societies, such as the Young Arab Society Al-Fatat, flourished throughout the 1910s, extending across Istanbul, Paris and the Arab provinces, including branches in Jerusalem. These societies were originally calling for Arab-Turkish unity within the Ottoman Empire.

What followed, however, was a brutal Turkish campaign against the Arab movement in Syria and Palestine. The Turks began to enforce Ottoman uniformity, impose the Turkish language, and suppress the local autonomy in the Arab provinces of the Empire. The campaign was led by Jamal Pasha, known among the Arabs as as-saffah (the Blood Shedder) for his public execution of many Arab personalities in Damascus and Beirut during the war. His repressive policies in the Arab provinces fueled Arab alienation. 

It is within this context, Al Aref reminds us, that the Arabs embraced the Great Arab Revolt in the Hejaz, initiated by Sheriff Hussein of Mecca in 1915– a movement which set into motion a series of dramatic events that hastened the fall of Turkish rule in the Arab provinces.

During the war, the British were already negotiating with Sharif Hussein over the prospect of Arab independence from the Turkish administration after the war. In his famous correspondence with Hussein, Henry McMahon, then the British high commissioner in Egypt, promised a British support for the establishment of an Arab state between Egypt and Persia, in exchange of Arab assistance in the war against Ottomans and their German allies.

Al Aref himself belonged to a generation of Arab and Palestinian intellectuals whose Ottoman loyalty was disrupted by the war. "It was a period of high hopes for the Arabs," he writes. "Ultimately, a sense of Arabism prevailed over that of Ottomanism."

In Palestine, resentment for the Ottoman government was based on other key factors: Palestinians believed that the Ottomans had lax landownership laws against land purchases by the Zionists. In 1890, Muslim and Christian notables from Gaza flocked to Jerusalem to join a group of Palestinian notables: together, they marched into the Sublime Porte and submitted a petition to the Ottoman Grand Vizier demanding a ban on selling lands to Zionists.

During that period, the Sublime Porte was bombarded with telegraphs from Palestine protesting land sales to the Zionists.

The expansion of Jewish settlements was a source for bitter resentment among Palestinians. Many believed the Ottoman government was weak on the Zionists. Palestinians were also alarmed by Ottoman relaxed laws against Jewish mass immigration in Palestine, which began in the first decade of the century.

The Ottoman also imposed heavy taxes on the local population. They forced mandatory conscription on adult males, depriving many families of their breadwinners. They confiscated food supplies and means of living, and destroyed trees to build railroads. Local populations were constantly displaced as the Turks prepared for the war.

The Ottomans also restricted freedoms in Palestine. Local newspapers like Filistin, which mobilized Palestinians against the Zionists, were closed.

Writing twenty years after the fall of Gaza, Al Aref reflects: "The Turks wouldn't have been defeated in Gaza if the Arabs' hearts were with them. By the end of Ottoman rule, Arab aspirations had been fixed on independence. During the war, a large number of Arab officers and soldiers deserted the Turkish Army, either to join Allenby's forces, or the Arab Northern Army led by Emir Feisal bin Hussein, who was fighting the Turks alongside Allenby's forces."

Aref backs his conclusion with a host of firsthand testimonies.

One is given by Otto Liman von Sanders, the German general who served as an adviser and military commander to the Turkish Army during War. In his memoirs Five Years in Turkey, Sanders speaks of hundreds of Arab soldiers who deserted the Turkish army during the Gaza campaign, and who joined the Great Arab Revolt led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca."

Besides discontent with the Ottomans, there was a great deal of British propaganda.

On October 3, 1917, Allenby wrote to his wife from Gaza: "The Arab rebellion is spreading well, and the Turkish communications will be difficult to guard against their raids. The enclosed photograph of the Shereef of Mecca, and the proclamation by him, is one of the means we have of inducing the Arabs to desert the Turks. We drop these papers and packets of cigarettes over the Turkish lines from airplanes. The proclamation is an appeal from the Shereef to the Arabs to leave the Turks and join in the war against them for the freedom and independence of Arabia. A good many come in, as a result of our propaganda."

Of course, this is not to suggest that Palestinians or Gazans were looking for some kind of British protectorate. In fact, Palestinians never truly trusted the British. They feared that a British victory in Palestine would pave the way for Zionist takeover of the country. And it won't be too long before they realize that their fear was justified. They even have a name for it: the Balfour Declaration.

*

The British Mandate for Palestine began in 1917, before a civil administration, headed by Herbert Samuel, replaced a military rule in 1920.

Under the Mandate, Palestine was divided into four administrative districts and eighteen sub-districts. These were the Southern District, which included the Beersheba and Gaza sub-districts; the Jerusalem-Jaffa District; the Samaria District, and the Northern District.

The Mandate, which was formally granted to Britain by the League of Nations in 1922, was based on the paternalistic assumption that Palestinians were unable to govern themselves, and hence must be ruled by a more "advanced" and "civilized" nation like Great Britain. 

The Mandate was yet another blow to Arab dreams of independence as envisioned in the Hussein–McMahon correspondence of 1915-16. By the time it was founded, it had become clear to many Arabs that an independent Arab state between Egypt and Iran was now a distant mirage.

Even during the secret correspondence, the British were secretly negotiating with the French over a postwar division of the Ottoman Empire into imperial "spheres of influence", which led to the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. The agreement was to grant the Britain a control over Iraq and the region surrounding the Persian Gulf, while the French were to rule over Syria and Lebanon, leaving part of Palestine under a joint Allied government.

This was followed by the revelation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised to establish in Palestine a "national home for the Jewish people." In the words of historian Tom Segev, "The Promised Land had, by the stroke of a pen, become twice-promised."

The Arabs felt betrayed. A series of popular uprisings against the British and the Zionists broke out in Palestine. These included the Nebi Musa or the Jerusalem riots of 1920, the Buraq Uprising of 1929, and the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-9.

Gazans never spared effort rise against what they viewed as the twin enemy: the British and the Zionists. They never trusted Herbert Samuel, whom they viewed as a devout Zionist.

In 1920, they welcomed his arrival in Palestine with the establishment of a Muslim-Christian Association. These forms of association were founded in all major Palestinian cities, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nablus. They later formed the Palestine Arab Congress, which served as a nationalist body and a platform for Palestinian resistance to both Zionism and British rule. It called for Palestinian independence, and opposition to the Balfour Declaration, the idea of Jewish National Home in Palestine, and to mass Jewish immigration.

Gazans also took a leading part in the six-month general strike of 1936, which inaugurated the Revolt of 1936-1939. The strike broke out in the northern city of Nablus, and expanded into the rest of Palestine, all the way to Gaza in the south.

British patrols were attacked in Gaza. The railway was destroyed to halt military supplies. Gazans declared mass strike and raised black flags over their houses. They attacked the British military airport in the eastern part of the city.

The British responded with excessive force. They imposed a martial law. New troops were brought in from England. Special Night Squads of Zionist and British soldiers were formed to attack villages.

Thousands of Palestinians were imprisoned. Hundreds were executed. Over 5000 houses were dynamited and demolished. It was a collective punishment [sounds familiar?]

Palestinians paid a heavy price for the uprising. By the time it ended, five thousands were dead and thousands more injured. 10 percent of adult males were imprisoned. Causalities per capita were higher than the two intifadas combined (1987 and 2000).

That is when Palestinians, including Gazans, realized that the British and the Zionists were two sides of the same coin. And for good reasons:

They saw Arab activists being hanged, while Zionist militants, who operated against the British, were spared;

They saw the Zionists win concessions that would have been unthinkable under Ottoman rule;

They saw Jewish population increase over tenfold as a result of massive waves of immigration:

Before the Mandate, Jews in Palestine represented 7 percent of the population (mostly not Zionists), and 2 percent of the privately owned land. By the end of the Mandate, the Jews had become one third of the population, and owners of more than 7 percent of the land.

Due to the expansion of the Jewish settlements, many Palestinian peasants were displaced. Arab workers were expelled to accommodate Jewish newcomers. The dispossession of Palestinian villagers and peasants from their land became a rallying call for Arab nationalism in Palestine.

The 1936-9 uprising was therefore a struggle against two colonial powers: the British occupation and Zionist colonization. It was crushed by a global superpower who, by the time of the uprising, controlled over one-fifth of the world population and a quarter of its total land area.

*

To be sure, Gazans' resistance to the British and the Zionists did not begin with the 1936 Revolt. It is older than the formal Mandate itself.

In the words of Al Aref, "the British were never welcome in Gaza".

Here I would like to conclude with a revealing story told by Al Aref, which was originally told by Major Jarvis, the British Governor of Sinai.

In 1921, Winston Churchill, who was then the Colonial Secretary, visited Jerusalem. He was accompanied by a large number of representatives and officials, and their families.

On his way up by train from Kantara, Churchill expressed his desire to see a battlefield of Gaza. The train was stopped at Gaza, and due to the distance from the battlefield, the whole party had to get off and walk up the sandy lane leading from the station to the town.

Jarvis writes: "The inhabitants of Gaza, a somewhat turbulent community in ordinary times, were most hostile to the Zionist party in Palestine, although so far it had not affected them in the slightest degree, for there were no Jewish immigrants or settlers at that time in any part of this old Philistine area."

This is a failure of imagination on the British Governor's part: he failed to see that Gazans– like Nabluses and Jaffans and Jerusalemites– were also Palestinians, not only Gazans.

"The Gazawis," he continues, "like their relations in Nablus, farther north, are always grateful for an excuse for a demonstration [In a sense, he was right. Gazans gave the British a hard time in Palestine]. So that day, they lined the road as their leaders walked by, and together, they began shouting hostile remarks against the British".

Their pugnacious attitude was quite lost on one lady of the party, for she remarked to Churchill: "Isn't delightful to be met with such an enthusiastic gathering and to have such a warm welcome as this with gratitude to us on every smiling face?"

Churchill, however, had a very shrewd idea that the smiles of welcome on the faces of the crowd were in reality gains of rage and he turned to Lawrence (the famous Lawrence of Arabia), who was walking just behind.

"I say, Lawrence," he asked, " are these people dangerous"? They don't seem to be pleased to see us. What are they shouting?"

Lawrence said he did not think they were actually dangerous, but the words they were shouting were not exactly expressions of welcome as being translated. They were: "Down with the British, down with the Zionists, and down with the Balfour Declaration."

*

Part II: The Israeli occupation of Gaza ...

 

14 July 2022


Israel is not an apartheid state. It’s much worse   

By Seraj Assi

In 2004, during the second intifada, Ronnie Kasrils, a leading member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era and a former government minister, visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effects of the Israeli occupation. He observed:

“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

Two decades later, other international observers agree. In April this year, Human Rights Watch became the latest international rights group to charge Israel with imposing an apartheid rule over Palestinians. In a damning report, the HRW stated:

“Throughout most of this area [historic Palestine], Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy.  In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

Today, about 6.8 million Jewish Israelis occupy over 85% of historic Palestine, while 6.8 million Palestinians are confined to the rest in apartheid-like conditions, either under siege in Gaza, or under occupation in the West Bank, or in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as second-class citizens in Israel, not to mention the six million Palestinian refugees living in exile. (Israel’s Law of Return gives Jews anywhere the right to come and live in Israel and to gain Israeli citizenship, while depriving this right to millions of Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes by Israel.) For decades, Israel has created a segregationist apparatus aimed at uprooting Palestinians and erasing their national existence as a people––a multilayered apartheid system that seeks not only to segregate Palestinians from Jewish settlers, but to divide Palestinians themselves into “West Bankers,” “Gazans,” “Israeli citizens,” “Jerusalemites,” and “refugees.”

And the system has worked, so far. 

Today, about two million Palestinians, most of them refugees, live under siege Gaza, subject to a lawless blockade that has been in place for nearly fifteen years. The UN still defines Gaza as an occupied territory, because Israel still has total control over it, by land, sea, and air. This total control has rendered the tiny Strip a target of Israel’s endless attacks. In its latest campaign of brutal bombing of Gaza this month, Israel killed 219 Palestinians, including more than 60 children, and displaced thousands more, triggering ethnic cleansing and war crimes accusations.

In the West Bank, over two million continue to live in segregated cantons behind Israel’s “apartheid wall” and newly constructed “Apartheid Road,” in towns and cities penned between Jewish settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, security barriers, and military installations. For Palestinians who live there, apartheid signals not merely segregation, but the inhumanity of life under occupation: the beatings, shootings, killings, assassinations, curfews, military checkpoints, house demolitions, forced evictions and deportations, uprooting of trees, mass arrests, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial.

In Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, nearly 40 percent of the city’s population, live in a stateless limbo, while facing the daily prospect of forced displacement and expulsion. For decades Israel has unilaterally declared Jerusalem its “eternal and unified capital.” Israel continuous claims to exclusive rights over the city has emboldened its settlers population to new violent extremes, while allowing Israel to pursue policies aiming at displacing and dispossessing Palestinians in the city, including a recent attempt to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood where they have lived for decades.

In Israel, about two million Palestinians continue to live as second class citizens, thanks to an unending series of racist Jewish-only laws, including the notorious Jewish Nation-State law, which officially degrades Palestinian citizens a status inferior to Jewish citizens. Arab disenfranchisement in Israel goes beyond the Nation-State Law. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than fifty basic laws that disenfranchise and discriminate against Arab citizens. Together, they bear a striking resemblance to the Jim Crow South, where Black political participation was treated as an existential threat. No wonder many Palestinian citizens in Israel view their citizenship as a mere political fiction.

A new chapter of ethnic violence against Palestinians in the country is taking place as we speak. For weeks, in a brutal campaign of collective ethnic retaliation masquerading as “operation law and order,” the Israeli police have been carrying out mass arrests of Palestinian citizens to “settle scores” following massive protests in the country in solidarity with fellow Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. Meanwhile, Jewish extremists have been marching through Arab streets in Israel, spreading terror and violence, shouting “Death to Arabs,” and attempting lynching of Palestinians, and threating an ethnic civil war between Arabs and Jews. Incited by right-wing politicians, dozens Jewish supremacist groups have taken to social media to openly coordinate direct attacks on Palestinian citizens.

The ongoing violence against Palestinian citizens was not created in a political vacuum. For decades, senior Israeli politicians have portrayed Arab citizens as enemies from within, a demographic time bomb, a fifth-column population, and a legitimate transfer target. The so-called Lieberman Plan, hatched by former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, proposes transferring territory in Israel populated by Arabs to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for territory in the West Bank populated by Israeli settlers. Lieberman has also proposed imposing loyalty tests for the Arab minority, threatening to deny citizenship to those who failed.

Israel’s racist policies towards its Palestinian citizens are rapidly shifting into a system of internal apartheid, where a rapid yet steady process of Judaization in Israel’s so-called mixed cities has rendered Arab-Jewish coexistence a mere fantasy.

The brutal irony is that labelling Israel’s rule over Palestinians as an apartheid system was not invented by Palestinians and their supporters, but by Israel itself. For decades, Israeli officials have employed the Hebrew term Hafrada (“separation” or “segregation”) to describe Israel’s governing policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and even inside Israel itself, which involves keeping Palestinians apart from both the Israeli population and the Jewish settler community in the occupied Palestinian territories. The so-called West Bank Barrier, known in Hebrew as “Gader Ha-Hafrada” (which translates as the “Separation Fence,” or indeed the “Apartheid Wall”), was built in accordance with this Hafrada vision. The wall, which runs deep into Palestinian lands, displacing Palestinian communities and cutting off their towns and villages from one another, has created a two-tiered system that provides full constitutional rights and privileges to Israeli settlers while depriving Palestinians of basic human rights.

It’s no surprise, then, that Israel supported apartheid South Africa for decades. But history teaches us that apartheid regimes are untenable and unsustainable, however long they may linger. The South African anti-apartheid movement evolved over three decades, building on massive popular and grassroot resistance, international solidarity, boycott movements and sanction campaigns––perhaps an inspiring precursor of what we’re witnessing in Palestine today.

 * The original version of this article was published in May 2021. 

Seraj Assi is the author of The History and Politics of the Bedouin. He writes for Jacobin and Haaretz.