Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State
352
Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State
352Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
For the next two decades Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government's fundamental dilemma: how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. More confounding was the tension between the opposing aspirations of Palestinian political activists. Was it the end of Jewish privilege they were after, or national independence along with the rest of their compatriots in exile? As Shira Robinson shows, these tensions in the state's foundation—between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion—continue to haunt Israeli society today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804788007 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2013 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 1,030,365 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Citizen Strangers
PALESTINIANS AND THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL'S LIBERAL SETTLER STATE
By Shira Robinson
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8654-6
CHAPTER 1
FROM SETTLERS TO SOVEREIGNS
THE STRUCTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE ISRAELI STATE and the paradoxical status of the Palestinian Arabs who managed to remain in or return to the country after 1948 are rooted in the struggle for sovereignty over the six decades that preceded its creation. Drawing largely on secondary sources, this brief chapter examines how the development of the Jewish settler movement, British Mandatory law, and Arab nationalism converged in such a way as to harden the political and legal identities of Palestine's inhabitants. It also traces how and why the League of Nations, and its post-World War II successor, the United Nations, singled out the Zionist movement for exceptional treatment in comparison to the European settler populations that it sought to constrain in Africa—a status that shifted over time from a privilege to a burden. At no time did the contradiction between popular democracy and Jewish statehood haunt Yishuv leaders more than in November 1947, when the section of Palestine that the UN had voted to allocate to them included nearly as many Arabs as Jews. Thanks to years of political and military preparation, the rapid descent into war enabled the Zionist movement to reverse the minority status of Palestine's Jews.
* * *
Zionist settlement in Palestine began in 1882, the first political expression of a tiny proto-nationalist movement emerging in Eastern Europe in response to waves of anti-Jewish attacks and a mounting socioeconomic crisis. Although, at the time, Ottoman Palestine was divided into two administrative districts, it had for centuries featured as a single, discrete place in the minds of its inhabitants and neighbors. An estimated twenty-four thousand Jews already lived there, comprising 5 percent of the total population. Concentrated in four major cities, they consisted of a small class of Arabic- and Ladino-speaking merchants and a large community of Yiddish speakers who had come during the previous centuries to live and die in the Holy Land. Palestine's indigenous Jews lived alongside half a million Muslim and Christian Arabs, whose production and export of textiles, olive oil, soap, tobacco, and citrus fruits wove intricate social, economic, and political networks between city and countryside and across provincial borders. In 1914, roughly 10 percent of the native Arab majority belonged to various Christian denominations; of the rest, most were Sunni Muslims.
The first Zionist colonies established in Palestine consisted of a handful of farms modeled on the racial division of labor in Algerian vineyards, where Eastern European Jewish planters oversaw underpaid local Arab employees with capital from Western European Jewish philanthropists. Because living conditions were tough and settlers could not compete with the abundant supply of low-paid farmers, their farms failed to turn a profit. By the turn of the century, at least one-third of the new immigrants had left. The growing depletion of the Yishuv prompted many leaders of the nascent national movement to fear the demise of their ultimate goal of statehood. Over time, they gradually changed strategies and adopted a program of national and "pure" colonial settlement. Instead of coercing or exploiting the labor of indigenous Palestinians, the Zionist leaders would work to displace them.
One of the first institutions created by the Zionist Organization (established in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland) to implement its new colonial strategy was a body to coordinate all land purchasing and settlement work. The founding charter of the Jewish National Fund prohibited "non-Jews" from leasing (and soon, working on) any holdings it acquired. The Fund's creation in 1901 quickly escalated tensions between foreign settlers and indigenous Palestinians because it changed the rules of the game. Since the 1880s, conflicts had erupted whenever the contracts of Jewish land purchases (usually from absentee owners) included a proviso to evict the existing Arab tenant farmers. These tensions usually subsided, however, when planters hired the farmers to work on the colonies or allowed them to lease back certain parcels. The new mission to "conquer" the land and labor market from indigenous farmers and workers foreclosed these options. Indeed, despite exhortations to cultivate "brotherly relations" with Palestinians in subsequent decades, labor and settlement leaders came quickly to view their project as a zero-sum game.
Over the next few years, reports of peasant dispossession began to capture the attention of Arab urban elites, communal authorities, and Palestine's budding professional class. The concerns they expressed were not entirely new. Since the 1880s a handful of notables had been petitioning the Ottoman authorities about the ruinous intentions of Jewish settlers, but new outlets for popular opposition opened up after 1908, when the Young Turk Revolt restored the constitutional parliament in Istanbul and lifted repressive press restrictions at home. In the final years before World War I, denunciations of the settler movement in the local Arabic (and in some cases Ladino) press, along with political appeals by elected Arab deputies in Istanbul, began to make it harder for Zionist leaders to sustain the fiction that Palestine was for all intents and purposes an empty land.
Like the European colonists in North America, Africa, and Australasia with whom they often identified, Zionism's luminaries believed that their rights to Palestine exceeded those of its "natives." Although the movement's leadership could not deny that the land was full of people, it portrayed Palestinians as a "mixture of races and types," a "multitude" distinguished not by their shared history or national character but by their inferior human "quality." This belief, which enabled them to see the local population as merely another part of the landscape to be tamed, enabled movement leaders in Palestine to blind themselves to the political conflict that their project was likely to sow. Among them was a young activist named David Ben-Gurion, who rose to the top of the social-democratic Jewish Workers' Party shortly after he immigrated from Poland in 1906. As he told an audience of potential immigrant recruits in New York in 1915, the Yishuv needed more pioneers to fight "wild nature and wilder redskins."
THE PURSUIT OF PRIVILEGE
Early on in World War I, as the European Allies began to deliberate over the future dispensation of the Ottoman provinces they hoped to conquer, Zionist leaders close to the British government lobbied intensively for its patronage. They had chased this prize for nearly two decades, enlisting several prominent evangelical parliament deputies along the way. It was not until the Ottomans appeared to be on their last legs, however, that enough policymakers were persuaded that the cost of sponsoring a European settler community in Palestine was in the geostrategic interests of the British Empire. Six weeks before British troops marched into Jerusalem in December 1917, the Foreign Secretary announced the government's pledge, in the eponymous Balfour Declaration of November 2nd, to facilitate "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The Balfour Declaration prompted immediate demonstrations and petitions throughout the Middle East. As Lord Balfour would later admit, Britain's commitment to the Zionists contradicted its prior (and secret) pledge to support the postwar independence of most of Ottoman Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Greater Syria. "Zionism," he explained in 1919, "be it right or wrong, good or bad, is ... of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
For the Arabs of Palestine, the problem with Britain's endorsement ran deeper than its diplomatic duplicity. More important was that it violated the lofty principle of national self-determination that US President Woodrow Wilson had unwittingly popularized in Asia and Africa after introducing the concept during his famous congressional address in January 1918. In particular, Arabs in Palestine pointed to the Balfour Declaration's express delineation between the national rights that Britain would accord to Jews (still a tiny, and largely foreign-born, minority) and the nonpolitical "civil and religious" rights of the "non-Jewish communities" (the overwhelming native majority, defined in the negative and more diminutive plural), whom Britain would strive "not to prejudice" As Ben-Gurion acknowledged at the time, this formulation ran counter to democracy and negated their national existence. Warning that the Yishuv sought to drive them out of the country, Palestinian leaders forecasted the bloodshed this mission would produce at home and the instability that Muslim resentment would wreak in British-ruled South Asia.
Arab stakes in convincing the Great Powers that calamity would strike the region if Jewish colonization were to gain broader Western sanction rose sharply at the end of the war, when the Ottoman Empire relinquished all future claims to its provinces outside of Anatolia. As urban notables, secular nationalists, and communal figures pressed for united sovereignty with their neighbors in Syria, Zionist leaders lobbied for a British administration in Palestine that would fulfill Balfour's pledge. This debate took a sharp turn in 1919, when the Allied war victors announced their plan to establish a new colonial formation in the territories now severed from Ottoman and German control. Because, they claimed, the inhabitants of these areas were "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world," the fledgling League of Nations would "mandate" selected Western powers to tutor them in the ways of self-rule. Suddenly, after working to establish a constitutional republic based in Damascus, the most the former Ottoman citizens of Greater Syria (of which Palestine was a part) could hope for was a choice among a handful of imperial overlords. In July 1919, an American commission traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean to survey their wishes. Apart from the Zionists themselves, the overwhelming majority of those polled reiterated the demand for unified independence and an end to Jewish colonization. If immediate sovereignty was off the table, the only mandatory power they would accept was the United States, which lacked the stain of imperial interference in the region.
As peace talks continued in Paris, Zionist boosters worked to dismiss Arab prophesies of national dispossession. Before the war, their promotional literature had generally avoided mention of Palestine's indigenous population, but the patent contradiction between Jewish colonization and the Wilsonian slogan of self-rule was rendering this silence untenable. For this reason, movement emissaries adopted a two-pronged strategy. In public forums, they began to highlight the humanitarian burden they were undertaking to bring prosperity and civilization to the backward peoples of the Holy Land. Behind the scenes they lobbied aggressively to block the formation of a US mandate—their fear of which derived from a simple numerical formula. Despite the near doubling of their demographic ratio since the 1880s, Jews still comprised less than 10 percent of Palestine's population. As the Zionist Organization in London explained at the time, the possibility that the United States might facilitate the birth of a constitutional republic in Palestine anytime soon would make "the task of ... developing a great Jewish Palestine ... infinitely more difficult" As it turned out, their fears were overblown. The final report of the American commission was quickly buried and forgotten.
Racializing a People
Over the next three decades, the conflict between democratic principles and demographic realities dogged Zionists leaders, Palestinian nationalists, and Britain, which inaugurated its colonial administration in Palestine in 1922. The inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the Palestine Mandate's preamble and second article imposed a uniquely challenging mission on the colonial administration from the outset. Quite simply, British officials did not know how they would balance their obligation to shepherd the people of Palestine to self-rule against their simultaneous duty to facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home. Of course all of the postwar Arab successor states were haunted by the inherent conflict between colonial occupation and national state building. Access to their new parliaments was limited to wealthy and conservative male elites, whose own power was severely circumscribed by their imperial overseers. Still, it mattered that the European mandatory regimes in the Middle East were expected to "trade ... in words and not arms"; to offer more legitimacy than the ferocious violence they unleashed to quash early uprisings; and that they were obliged, in theory, to guarantee the well-being and national development of their subjects. Because of these constraints, the legislatures in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan all created narrow wedges of maneuver that nationalist politicians and local citizens managed occasionally to pry open. In Palestine, the contradiction carved into the edifice of the administration made this task much harder.
The central impediment to Palestinian state building during the interwar years was the Mandate's recognition trap. The Arab Executive, for instance, the committee of Palestinians who assumed the leadership of the national struggle in the 1920s, refused to participate in any forum that would signal consent to their inferior legal status or recognition of a regime that refused even to mention them by name. Other Palestinians, such as businessmen and municipal authorities, adopted a more flexible stance toward agencies and bodies when they believed their participation would make a difference to the public's well-being by providing much-needed technical expertise or bureaucratic experience. Ultimately, however, Palestinians' unequal access to the colonial administration as a result of its partnership with the Zionist movement sharply limited their impact.
Not surprisingly, the recognition trap that gridlocked Palestinian political efforts served the Yishuv's effort to build national institutions that could steer government policy in their favor. Most important was the Histadrut, established in 1920 as a federation of Jewish trade unions attached to a fledgling underground settler militia called the Haganah ("defense" in Hebrew). Under the leadership of Ben-Gurion and other labor leaders, by the end of the decade the organization transformed itself into the Yishuv's single largest banker, employer, insurance agent, manufacturing engine, and provider of housing and social services. Until 1929, when the Jewish Agency was established as the Zionist movement's official representative to the administration, the Histadrut was the Yishuv's most powerful mediating agency in Jerusalem. Throughout the twenty-five years of the Mandate, it labored tirelessly to pressure public- and private-sector employers to hire more Jews and to pay them "civilized rates," as opposed to what Palestinian Arabs earned.
The insistence of Zionist labor leaders that Palestine's European working class was culturally entitled to privileged wages had an explicitly racial overtone. Although Jewish settlers were not identified formally as belonging to a distinct "race" before the Mandate, Britain's dual imperative gave birth to a subtle yet fatal shift in the way the government classified them—and in turn the indigenous Arab majority. This process began with the Mandate itself, which, in order to facilitate the naturalization of Jewish settlers, became the only colonial regime in the region to include a specific nationality clause. Three years later, Palestine earned another distinction as the sole post-Ottoman mandate whose citizenship law was enacted in the metropole. That statute also made Palestine one of just two Arab successor states where native-born residents living abroad could acquire automatic citizenship even if they "differ[ed] in race from the majority of the population."
In international law at the time, the terms race and culture often appeared interchangeably with nation and people. The slippery boundaries between these categories reflected the prominence of race thinking in European liberal thought and imperial expansion since the late eighteenth century. Notably, the practice of tying political citizenship to an imagined cultural essence had no Ottoman precedent until the early twentieth century. The imperial state had no citizens per se until 1869; before then, the only political ties that had bound all subjects were their fidelity to the sultan and their payment of taxes. Although the empire had privileged Muslims in certain spheres of social and political life, its system of "institutionalized difference" had not been rooted in notions of biological destiny. Not only had the sultan granted substantial autonomy to non-Muslim communities, but he had also made no demands on them to speak a single language, to assume a singular identity, or to assimilate to a "majority" culture. Unlike the French or British approach to emancipated Jews, for instance, the Ottoman state had not needed to "tolerate" non-Muslims because there had been no norm from which they had appeared to depart. There had been, to be sure, periodic eruptions of violent communal conflict, but these had been exceptions to the norm. Overall, the Ottoman Empire's laissez-faire approach to culture had enabled group boundaries to remain relatively fluid and had been the key to its survival for five centuries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Citizen Strangers by Shira Robinson. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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