Welcome to our first session on Palestine prior to partition (a land with a people), and British imperial designs to take over Palestine and promise it as a Jewish homeland. Feel free to post below any reflections or questions you have before the session as you’re reading or reviewing the materials in the toolkit. (You’re also welcome to post after the session if a thought rises for you then.) Of course, please keep your post respectful, and consider whether you’d like to post anonymously or perhaps with your first name only.
11/7 Sumud: Colonial Conspiracy & Palestine Prior to Partition
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5 responses to “11/7 Sumud: Colonial Conspiracy & Palestine Prior to Partition”
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I so appreciate Khalidi’s framing of the fundamental problem in Israel/Palestine as “settler colonialism.” This is hard for many Quakers to accept, however. As one Friend in my meeting recently asked, “Is it accurate to use the term ‘settler-colonialism’ when a historically persecuted people seeks safety by moving its most threatened members to a part of the world that their ancient ancestors had once called home.”
This question was a big part of the deliberations at the Annual Sessions of Illinois Yearly Meeting where I was a keynote speaker. At their June gathering, these midwestern Friends endorsed the joint Quaker statement “A Different Future Is Possible,” but put off a decision on the Apartheid-Free Pledge for six months in order to discuss the settler-colonialism question in more depth.
One Friend spoke for several in attendance when he said he was actually ninety percent there. He agreed that the Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories live under an apartheid regime enforced by a permanent military occupation. He even agreed that “settler-colonialism” is a fair description of the unrelenting growth of illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967. His hesitation was that the term “settler colonialism” might also imply that there was something unjust or colonial about the early Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
In my plenary talk that night, I agreed with this Friend that Israel did begin implementing a settler-colonial strategy in the remaining Palestinian territories it conquered in 1967. Indeed, while knowing it was against international law, and that many Israelis opposed it, the State of Israel immediately began transferring a growing number of Jewish Israeli citizens into Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem to build settlements and dispossess Palestinians.
During the June 2023 Friends United Meeting’s fact-finding delegation to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, I saw the fruits of this policy. On that trip, co-led by North Carolina Quakers Max and Jane Carter, we saw many examples of annexation, land and water theft, home demolitions, mass incarceration, Israelis burning Palestinian crops and shooting at Palestinian farmers, and violent Israeli settler and soldier attacks against hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. My message to Illinois Yearly Meeting was that this is more than enough to name Israel’s policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories “settler-colonialism.”
At the same time, I also shared my conviction that Israel’s settler-colonialism has roots that go back to the early years of the Zionist movement and did not just emerge out of thin air in 1967. To explain my view, I shared what I had learned about three prominent Zionist leaders. The first was Theodore Herzel, a Jewish intellectual living in Vienna who is widely viewed as the founder of the Zionist movement. He earned this reputation by writing the movement’s 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State, and organizing the first World Zionist Congress in 1897, which was attended by over 250 Jewish ethno-nationalists from 15 different countries.
At that Congress, this tiny group of Jewish activists addressed an issue of concern to the vast majority of European Jews–the very real problem of anti-Jewish bigotry, which in the late 1800s included serious legal and social discrimination in Western Europe and violent pogroms against Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Their proposed solution was that European Jews should organize themselves to gain Great Power support for Jews leaving Europe in mass and creating a militarized, Jewish state in Palestine, where the Jewish population at the time made up less than five percent of the Palestinian people. At the time, this proposal was opposed by the vast majority Jews in Europe and the United States.
A big part of the Jewish push-back against the Zionist movement was because it was, in Herzel’s own words, “somewhat colonial.” Even before publishing his manifesto, Herzel admitted in his diary that Zionist Jews will need to displace and dispossess Palestinians to create his envisioned “Jewish State.” The corporate charter Herzl co-wrote for the new movement’s Jewish-Ottoman Land Company also explicitly included the goal of displacing Palestinians to “other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire.” To be fair, though, Herzel was not a violent man and he hoped that his settler-colonialist objective could be achieved through Great Power pressure, persuading more Jews to join the Palestine Jewish Colonial Association, and providing financial incentives to “the indigenous population” to leave Palestine to make way for a new Jewish majority.
Other Zionist leaders were more hard-nosed and militaristic. A good example is the Russian Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who in 1925 proclaimed that, “Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed force.” Why? As Jabotinsky explained:
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”Jabotinsky was on the extreme right-wing of the Zionist movement, and was opposed by many Jews, but his settler-colonial outlook was shared by more moderate Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, who became the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Ben-Gurion also believed that ethnic cleansing and the subjugation of the Palestinian people was necessary to create a viable Jewish State whose population would be at least eighty percent Jews. In 1937, he wrote a letter to his son, saying “the Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Jabotinsky’s and Ben-Gurion’s hoped-for war was launched by armed Zionist militias ten years later and it soon escalated into a wider regional war through most of 1948. The Zionists called it the War of Independence, but the Palestinians called it the Nakba, which is Arabic for “catastrophe.” For all the positives that emerged for the Jewish immigrants to Palestine during and after the Nazi years, the founding of the State of Israel was certainly a catastrophe for Palestinians. They ended up paying the price for Europe’s crimes and for the US and British refusals to allow mass immigration of Nazi-persecuted Jews into their countries. The impact was staggering. Fifteen thousand Palestinians were killed during the Nakba, over 500 Palestinian villages and towns were wiped off the map, and three quarters of the Palestinian population that used to live in what became Israel were expelled to the remaining twenty-two percent of historic Palestine and surrounding countries.
After the newly declared “Jewish State” of Israel won the war in 1948, the 750,000 displaced Palestinian refugees were not allowed to return to their homes, farms, and businesses in what had become Israel. This was true even though their right of return was guaranteed under international law and specifically authorized by UN resolution 194 and, later, by resolution 3236. In addition, the small minority of Palestinians remaining in what became the State of Israel were placed under military rule and not allowed to become voting citizens until 1966. Even then, they faced severe legal restrictions that made them second class citizens.
Today, of course, we cannot change what happened in the past. Yet, as citizens of the United States–the main global power supporting the State of Israel’s policies since 1948–we have a moral responsibility to push for a just political settlement where all the people living “between the River and the Sea” enjoy security, equality, human rights, and self-determination. As a Palestinian village priest in the West Bank explained to our Quaker delegation, “It does not matter if your name is Moshe, Mohammad, or Mathew, all are precious in the sight of God.” That is the essence of the Apartheid-Free Communities Pledge and why I believe it deserves our support.
I think studying Rashid Khalidi’s powerful book is an important next step for Friends seeking moral clarity on Israel/Palestine.
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Please do not take the following comment as in any way condoning what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian population in the occupied territories over the past almost 60 years, what it did to the Palestianian communities in Lebanon in the 1980s, or what it has done in Gaza in the past 13 months.
Assuming that at least one important reason we are studying this history is not just to understand how we got here, but how, if at all, not forgetting the past, and perhaps not forgiving the past, the parties can nevertheless move forward in full acknowledgment of the past.
One of the issues discussed last week was the conditions that European Jews found themselves in in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that motivated the desire for a safe haven homeland of their own. We like to think that the antisemitism of that period is history, but just witness what happened in Amsterdam only a few days ago. I fully recognize that the Israeli fans were boorish and enaged in their own inappropriate hatemongering, but subsquent actions of others in the streets shows that antisemitism is alive and well. In thinking about what solutions might ever be viable, we need to keep in mind this ongoing threat that continues to percolate below the surface, ready to emerge when provided a provocation.
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Thanks for your reflection, Alan! This study is absolutely the space for sharing, especially on tough issues. I appreciate that you raised this one. One thing that strikes me about the general discourse on the violence in Amsterdam last week is how it ties together Zionism and Judaism. Several thousand Jews live peacefully and securely in Amsterdam. Was this a clash between locals and Jews, or between locals and Zionist supporters of the Maccabi club who happen to be Jewish?
A lot of the Western media coverage of the clashes was quick to label the violence as “antisemitic” and a “pogrom” against Jews. This labeling seems intended to conjure a certain emotion from viewers and conflate Zionism with Judaism. And yet mainstream media mostly left out of their reports any mention of the violence before the match leading up to the clashes — namely when Israeli Maccabi hooligans harassed Arab/Muslim (or perceived Arab/Muslim) people on the streets, beat Arab taxi drivers, damaged property, ripped down Palestinian flags from homes, and chanted racist/genocidal slogans like “F*** you Palestine” and “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.”
Of course, none of this justifies in any way the violent clashes following the game or the attacks on Maccabi fans. Violence must be condemned because violence only begets more violence. Nor is this to deny in any way the very real antisemitism in Europe (and the U.S.), often fostered by fascist right-wing movements. But I think it does point to the fact that the recent violence by all parties in Amsterdam was not at its core about antisemitism, but rather Zionist racism.
It may be helpful here to recall a concern voiced by many Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration — that Zionism could place Jews who live outside of Israel (e.g., in Europe) in danger by associating them with the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine and framing them as not truly belonging in their countries.
It is due to this tying together of Judaism and Zionism that Jews are arguably not only less safe around the world today, but also in Israel/Palestine. When extreme violence is used to impose an ethno-nationalist/supremacist ideology on a shared land, no one is truly safe — neither the ideology’s victims nor its beneficiaries. Violence only begets violence.
By contrast, Jewish safety — and the safety of all — seems best secured by building inclusive nationalisms and democratic institutions, and by respecting the rights of all. That applies in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv/Yafa, and New York City. Otherwise, without working for justice, I’m afraid it is not so realistic to expect peace. How does that old civil rights slogan go again? Oh right, no justice … no peace!
I watched a clip this weekend with a Dutch Jewish demonstrator at a rally for Palestinian rights that the police were breaking up (Dutch authorities controversially banned Palestine demonstrations after the soccer game). This Dutch Jewish demonstrator says how frustrating it was for her to have the peaceful movement she and so many other anti-Zionist Jews are a part of labeled antisemitic, falsely tying her Jewishness to Israel.
Thank you again for sharing, Alan, and looking forward to more discussion.
ADDITION: I recommend this commentary with Dutch Jewish, Arab, and other perspectives: Was the Official Response to Amsterdam Riots Biased and Islamophobic?, Inside Story, Nov. 13, 2024, https://youtu.be/PiBIM3zVgeY?si=fnunOOk_8p6nmdFB
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I will never cease to be shocked by the concern about percived antisemitism while we watch the greatest humanitarian crime in modern times, maybe in all time in real-time. If you go outside mainstream media, you watch people being burned alive, children left for dead under rubble, headless and organless children, emaciated starving children and a landscape that looks worse than the apocalypse, yet we feel the problem is the possibility of antisemitism.
I’m at the point where I feel that I can no longer connect with other humans who watch all of this but dare not criticize the perpetrators.
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