1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (4 page)

These petitioners sensed that the initial trickle of settlers was but the thin edge of the wedge and would be followed by masses of European Jews who, backed by the Jews' reputed legendary wealth, would Judaize the country. They were vaguely aware of the anti-Semitism that was propelling the Jews to Palestine (indeed, some of them shared the prejudice). But they saw no reason why they should host Europe's expellees or pay any price for the plight of Europe's Jews. And they failed to acknowledge the Jews' historic ties to the land, denying these Russian-speaking, strangely appareled immigrants any innate rights or just claims.

In this sense, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, Jerusalem's mayor, was highly unusual. In a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, he wrote that the Zionist idea was, in theory, "natural, fine and just.... Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is really your country." But in practice, he was as opposed to Zionism as the rest of the Palestine notables. The land was already inhabited, and Zionist immigration would spark resistance; Palestine could be reclaimed only by the sword. Better that the Jews reestablish themselves elsewhere. "In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace," he wrote in March 1899.8 Kahn passed on al-Khalidi's letter to Herzl, who replied on 19 March. Herzl reassured al-Khalidi that the Zionists, with their vast wealth, expertise, and initiative, would bring benefit to all of Palestine's inhabitants, Arab and Jew. The Jews, he averred, were not "warlike," and there was no reason to fear their influx.9

But al-Khalidi and his fellow notables were not persuaded. Indeed, in 19o5 an exiled anti-Semitic Lebanese Arab nationalist, Negib Azoury, voiced what was probably on the minds of Palestine's politically conscious notables when he wrote that the Jews were bent on reconstituting their ancient state in the whole territory stretching from Mount Hermon to the Arabian Desert in the south and the Suez Canal in the west. The Jews, he added, were destined to clash, in a fight to the finish, with the emergent Arab national movement.10

However, Istanbul, while periodically issuing restrictive orders, never effectively clamped down on Jewish immigration, land purchases, and settlement. The Turks no doubt were misled by the apparent negligibility of the ongoing enterprise. But there was, too, Ottoman inefficiency and venality; almost everyone in the administration had a price. Bribes were routinely paid for entry permits and their extension, land deals, building rights. Slowly, the Zionists planted roots. Although the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe made tracks for North America and the British dominions-well over two million of them by 1914-a hard, resolute cadre reached Palestine, bought land, and settled. By 1914, there were some four dozen settlements (including the bare beginnings of Tel Aviv, in the windswept dunes north of Jaffa, and the first kibbutz, Degania, in the marshes just south of the Sea of Galilee, both founded in 1909) and sixty thousand to eighty-five thousand Jews, about two-thirds of them vigorous, idealistic Zionists, in Palestine.

The Zionists encountered little Arab violence in the first two and a half decades of settlement. The Arabs lacked political, nationalist awareness and were thoroughly disorganized. The Turks ruled the land and, though generally sympathetic toward their coreligionists, often backed the settlers in disputes over land or settlement. Intercession by local Western and Russian consuls with Ottoman administrators and by ambassadors in Istanbul also benefited the settlers.

But there were occasional acts of violence. Until 1908 -1909, they were mostly of a "criminal" nature or appeared to be routine feuds between neighbors. An Arab with a knife, bent on robbery, would waylay a settler on an isolated footpath, as happened to David Ben-Gurion in August 1909 near Sejera in the Lower Galilee (Ben-Gurion emerged with a wound in the arm and a deep-seated suspicion of "the Arabs");` or a group of Arabs would harass a Jewish couple strolling along the beachfront, as happened in Jaffa in March 1908 (the attack triggered a wider Jewish-Arab melee in the town cen ter); or settlers and their Arab neighbors would quarrel over farming rights and land usage in newly acquired tracts, as happened in Petah Tikva (Melabbes) in 1886, in Rehovot in 1892 and 1893, and in Gedera (Qatra) in 18871888. Despite an acknowledgment of Arab resentment or antagonism, the settlers and Zionist spokesmen were wont to dismiss such "brawls" as "common" among Arabs, "between one tribe and another, or one village and another." 12

But in 1909-1914 the violence increased and took on a clearer "nationalist" flavor. During those six years, Arabs killed twelve Jewish settlement guards-the preeminent symbols of the Zionist endeavor-and Jewish officials increasingly spoke of Arab nationalist ferment and opposition. Already in 1907 Yitzhak Epstein, a Zionist educator, had published an article, "The Hidden Question," in which he acknowledged the emergence of a national conflict between Zionism and the Arabs. "We have forgotten one small matter," he berated the Zionist leadership. "There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it.... We are making a great psychological error with regard to a great, assertive and jealous people ... we forget that the nation that lives in [Palestine] today has a sensitive heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like every man, is tied to his native land with strong bonds." Zionism, he warned, would have to face, and solve, the "Arab Question," and he urged the settlers to get to know the Arabs, their culture, and their language to facilitate dialogue.'-'

In 1910-1911 Arabs in the north tried to resist the Zionist purchase of and settlement in a large tract of land in the Jezreel Valley. Ironically, the opposition focused on the tenant farmer village of Fula, built on and around the ruins of La Feve, a Crusader fortress Saladin had conquered in 1187. Henceforward, Arab spokesmen were regularly to identify the Zionists as the "new Crusaders." Arab notables sent off a stream of appeals to Istanbul, shots were traded, and an Arab and a settlement guard were killed. But nothing availed. The authorities upheld the purchase, Fula was evacuated, and within months, a Jewish settlement, Merhavia, took root on the site.

Arab anti-Zionist rhetoric flourished. The Zionists were now regularly charged with aiming to "kill, pillage, and violate Muslim women and girls"; explicitly anti-Semitic images were mobilized. The blind Muslim cleric and politician Sheikh Suleiman al-Taji al-Faruqi in November 1913 published a poem in the recently founded Arabic newspaper Falastin, declaring:

The outbreak of World War I, pitting Britain and its allies, chiefly France, Russia, and later the United States, against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, temporarily halted Arab-Zionist violence. But the war was to refashion the Middle East and significantly advance both the Zionist cause and Arab nationalist aspirations.

From the first, Palestine was on the front line. It served as the Ottoman army's base for two unsuccessful cross-Sinai offensives against British-ruled Egypt, in 1915 and 1916, and was in turn invaded by a British army from Egypt. Throughout, under Ottoman martial law, both Arab and Jewish inhabitants had been subjected to systematic confiscations, principally of agricultural produce and farm animals, and repression by the Turkish soldiery; worried by possible pro-Allied "nationalist" subversion behind the lines. In October-December 1917 the invading British army, under General Edmund Allenby, conquered the southern half of the country, including Jerusalem. The following September, after smashing the Turkish lines north of Jaffa, the British took Samaria and Galilee and then pushed on to Damascus and Aleppo, forcing a Turkish surrender and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The British had been assisted, from summer 1916, in a minor way, by a well-remunerated revolt ofArab tribes in Hijaz, led by the Hashemite family; their camel-borne army drove northward through Transjordan in parallel with Allenby's northward advance through Palestine. Britain had promised the Hashemites sovereignty over the Arab-populated areas of the expiring Ottoman Empire.

But Palestine was ambiguously omitted from the future Arab domain (in the letter of a4 October 1915 from Henry McMahon, Britain's high commissionerin Egypt, to the Hashemite sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali). Instead, it was alternatively vouchsafed for future Anglo-French condominium (in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 3 January 1916) and, more vaguely, as a Jewish "national home" (in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917). That one-sentence declaration by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour-"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country"-was to be seen by the Zionist movement, which had vigorously lobbied for it, as a historic breakthrough and a basis for its future sovereignty over Palestine. And indeed, the British, including Balfour, and despite the avoidance of the word state, regarded the embodied promise as necessarily leading to self-determination. "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish State. It is up to them now; we have given them their opportunity," Balfour was to say three months later.'-' The Arabs, who greeted the declaration with "bewilderment and dismay," came to regard it as a (negative) milestone, an act of betrayal.16 Thereafter, no matter what the British did to the contrary, the Arab world was to regard London as the protector and facilitator of Zionism.

The British had been driven by Zionist lobbying, spearheaded by the able, charming Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had made Britain his home. But Weizmann had been preaching to the converted to the extent that many in the imperial cabinet, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Balfour himself, had long been philo-Zionists, for Protestant religious and humanitarian reasons. To be sure, there had also been imperial concerns: a British-created Jewish state might help guard the eastern approaches to that vital waterway, the Suez Canal, only recently imperiled by the Turks. And empowering the Jews in Palestine might reap rewards among the Jews of the United States and Russia, whose goodwill the British wanted, against the backdrop of World War I, either to acquire or sustain.

Without doubt, the British had ignored the will of Palestine's Arab inhabitants. But imperial powers at the time generally took no note of the wishes of third world peoples. And there were specific extenuating circumstancesthe Arabs of Palestine, like the majority of those outside Palestine, had supported and were still supporting the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire in its war against the (Christian) Allied powers; and there was, at the time, no Palestinian Arab national movement nor any separate Palestinian Arab national consciousness. Indeed, "Arab" national awareness, with concomitant political aspirations, was barely in its infancy among the elites in the neighboring Arab centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. Moreover, the primary agents of Arab independence during the war, the Hashemite leaders of the desert revolt, appeared not to be averse to Jewish rule over Palestine. When Weizmann met Faisal, Hussein ibn Ali's son and the commander of the Hashemite army, in a wadi in southern Transjordan in June 1918, the two men got on famously-and Faisal, interested in Zionist support for Hashemite ambitions, endorsed Zionist colonization of Palestine.

When the dust had settled, Faisal was installed by the British as ruler in Syria while his brother, 'Abdullah, was given a separate emirate in Transjordan. In March 1920 Faisal declared himself "King of Syria and Palestine." But in July 1920, partly in response, the French, already masters of Beirut, invaded Syria and conquered Damascus, ejecting Faisal. The British then re installed Faisal as king of Iraq, which he and his offspring were to rule for almost forty years.