In this insightful and authoritative new book, leading journalist Jonathan Cook examines the many different guises in which these experiments on the Palestinians are being carried out. Accessible and comprehensive, this is a powerful analysis of one of the most enduring and entrenched conflicts in contemporary world politics.
In this insightful and authoritative new book, leading journalist Jonathan Cook examines the many different guises in which these experiments on the Palestinians are being carried out. Accessible and comprehensive, this is a powerful analysis of one of the most enduring and entrenched conflicts in contemporary world politics.
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Overview
In this insightful and authoritative new book, leading journalist Jonathan Cook examines the many different guises in which these experiments on the Palestinians are being carried out. Accessible and comprehensive, this is a powerful analysis of one of the most enduring and entrenched conflicts in contemporary world politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136496 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 680 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Disappearing Palestine
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair
By Jonathan Cook
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Jonathan CookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-364-8
CHAPTER 1
The Road to Dispossession
For thousands of years, we Jews have been nourished and sustained by a yearning for our historic land. I, like many others, was raised with a deep conviction that the day would never come when we would have to relinquish parts of the land of our forefathers. I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, address to US Congress, 24 May 2006
The argument that the Palestinians never existed as a people draws on the earliest Zionist thinking. In Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland (1902), which imagined a future in which Palestine had become a Jewish state and which became one of the founding Zionist texts, the natives are undistinguished and indistinguishable 'Arabs', referred to as 'dirty', living in 'blackened villages' and looking 'like brigands'. Their anonymity, barbarity and criminality are contrasted to the nobility of the European Jews who in 'restoring' their connection to the Promised Land bring with them a civilization that supposedly benefits the natives too. The one Arab character with a name, Reschid Bey, calls Zionism a 'blessing for all of us'. When asked why he does not regard the Jewish settlers as intruders, he replies: 'Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them?'
Herzl's predictions about the 'Arab' experience of Jewish settlement in Palestine offered a reassuring colonial narrative for the early Zionists, which included several related themes. First, it suggested that the natives had no genuine ties to the land, but were themselves recent intruders or at best 'brigands', descendants of those who had stolen the land from its rightful owners 2,000 years before. This was the argument of a notorious academic hoax, Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, published in the mid-1980s and unmasked a decade later by Norman Finkelstein in his book Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict. Second, the Jews were presented as a nation waiting for its homecoming, an act of restoration that would return the Promised Land to its former glory as the cradle of civilization. Only a Jewish presence could drag the region out of its primitiveness. Or, as Herzl put it in his earlier book Der Judenstaat (1896), a Jewish state was 'the portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism'. And, third, the unavoidable implication of these two other principles was that, should the Arabs' reject the civilizing influence of the Jews, it would be proof not only of their incorrigible barbarity and unfitness for the land they had usurped but also of their anti-Semitism.
For most later Zionists, these themes had solidified into a political philosophy by the time of Israel's birth. The problem of two nations claiming the same land could be safely ignored as long as one of the nations had no right to consider itself a nation and consequently no right to ownership of the land. According to these Zionists, the Palestinians did not exist as a people because they were simply Arabs', part of a much larger nation that had been given many other states across the Middle East. As the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has noted of this argument, 'if the Palestinians did not constitute a distinct separate nation [separate from the Arab nation] and were not an integral part of the country and were without historical ties to it, then they could be transferred to other Arab countries without undue prejudice.' The Jews, on the other hand, had a unique historical connection to the territory now known as Palestine, where they had lived long ago as a nation before their forced exile. Were further proof needed, the Zionists argued, it should be remembered that the Palestinians had never enjoyed statehood in this territory – unlike the Jews.
Zionism's Denial of History
In order to bolster their claim to the Promised Land, the Zionists, even secular ones, sought historical justifications in the Bible. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor of psychology at Haifa University, points out:
The historization of the Bible is a national enterprise in Israel, carried out by hundreds of scholars at all universities. ... The Israel Defence Ministry has even published a complete chronology of Biblical events, giving exact dates for the creation of the world, the killing of Abel and the exodus from Egypt.
Or, as peace activist and former Knesset member Uri Avnery observes, the Bible was soon being treated 'as if it were a history book. ... That is the history that all of us [Israelis] learned in school, the foundation upon which Zionism was built.' It is no surprise, then, that many leaders of Labor Zionism, despite its professed socialist and progressive outlook, zealously pursued biblical archeology. Israel's first president, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, and feted generals like Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin took a passionate interest in uncovering ancient artefacts they believed were the Jewish people's title deeds to Israel. When asked what he was looking for in his many digs, Dayan answered: 'The ancient land of Israel. Everything that ancient Israel was. Those who lived there then. ... I sometimes feel I can literally enter their presence.'
Even were it possible to treat the Bible as documented 'history', why would the fact that the Jews were a nation 2,000 years ago in an ancient Israel confer on their descendants a right to dispossess the Palestinians now? Or as the Israeli sociologist and peace activist Jeff Halper concludes about the Zionist narrative: 'Although the ancient Israelites and Judeans had sovereignty over the country for only 1,300 of its 10,000 years of recorded history (and a third of which was under Babylonian, Greek or Roman suzerainty), in Zionist thought our claims trump any others, including the 1,300 years of Muslim rule.' But, in fact, the concerted efforts of Israeli historians and archeologists to find the physical evidence necessary to prove that the Bible is a genuine record of the Jewish people's history have failed dismally, as a growing number of Israeli academics have conceded. Ze'ev Herzog, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, caused a storm in 1999 when he admitted that archeology had failed to find evidence that an ancient Jewish nation ever existed:
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.
In fact, Herzog's research, and that of other archeologists, suggests that, when a historical entity called Israel briefly did emerge, it was pagan and Jerusalem was not its spiritual centre. Herzog says of the response in Israel to his findings: 'Any attempt to question the reliability of the biblical descriptions is perceived as an attempt to undermine "our historic right to the land" and as shattering the myth of the nation that is renewing the ancient Kingdom of Israel.' On cue, Tommy Lapid, at the time a member of the Israeli parliament and later a justice minister and leader of the avowedly secular Shinui Party, responded to Herzog's conclusions: 'The attempt to prove that the Bible is wrong is really an attempt to prove that Zionism is wrong and Israel is wrong.'
So who were the ancient Israelites, if not, as the Bible tells us, one of three rival ethnic nations, along with the Canaanites and the Philistines, living in Palestine? Another professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, Israel Finkelstein, argues that the Israelites were not in reality a people apart but themselves Canaanites, possibly pastoral hill shepherds who eventually broke away over religious differences. According to Niels Peter Lemche, a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, 'the real difference between the Canaanites and the Israelites would be a religious one and not the difference between two distinct nationals.'
Another controversy flared in early 2008 when Shlomo Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, published a book in Hebrew called When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? According to a sympathetic review by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, Sand debunks Israel's official history that today's Jews are descendants of the Jewish community in Palestine 2,000 years ago, a community that was supposedly exiled by the Romans in 70 ad. He argues instead that most of the Jews and Christians in the region converted to Islam several hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Palestine. Interestingly, this view was shared by at least two of Israel's founding fathers, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi and David Ben-Gurion. They believed that many modern Palestinians were descended from the region's Jews. In the 1920s the pair even dabbled with a plan to convert the native Palestinians back to Judaism, only abandoning the idea when confronted a decade later with an intensification of Palestinian resistance to Zionism during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39.
How, then, does Sand explain today's widely dispersed Jewish Diaspora if there was no exile? These Jews, he argues, are in fact the descendants of non-Jews who converted to Judaism, thereby explaining the great ethnic diversity to be found among the modern Jewish population. In Sand's view, Judaism was a proselytizing religion that competed for converts with the new upstart faiths of Christianity and Islam. It had most success among pagan populations, particularly the Berber tribes located in north Africa, the Arabs of southern Arabia, and Turks in south Russia, who converted from the fourth century ad onwards. 'The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread', Sand observed in an interview.
Judaism started to permeate other regions – pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.
Only later, it seems, did the Jews become a closed ethnic and religious group.
Most damagingly to the Zionist idea of a Jewish 'return', Sand argues that Ashkenazi Jews, the first immigrants to Palestine following the pogroms in eastern Europe and today's ruling class in Israel, have no historic connection to Palestine. Sand and other scholars believe they were originally Khazars, a Turkic people who created a kingdom 1,000 years ago in what is now southern Russia. The Khazar king, says Sand, converted himself and his subjects to Judaism. In partial support of this theory, Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv University argues that Yiddish – generally assumed to be a Germanic tongue – is, in fact, a Slavic language. Sand admits his research is likely to damage his academic career in Israel, adding: 'The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea [ancient Israel] would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. ... There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.'
The Clash of Nationalisms
In 1969, Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, made an infamous observation during a newspaper interview:
There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
Meir's analysis intentionally ignored the recent history and colonial experience of the Middle East, as well as distorting commonly understood political realities. The idea of the nation-state, which ties the sovereignty of a group to a particular piece of territory, is a relatively modern political development even in Europe, where it has been the basis for relations between peoples for little more than two centuries. Nationalists claim that some groups have an inherent or primordial right to live as a 'nation' in a state of their own because they share a common ancestry, ethnicity or destiny. Most modern scholars, however, view nationalism in a different light, seeing it as an attempt to create an 'imagined community' based on myths, language and culture – and exploiting the means of mass communication made possible by industrialization – to construct a national identity and consciousness. For this reason, the claim by peoples to nationhood is often contested; ideas of nationality, rather than being immutable, change and adapt over time. Even well-established nations face internal challenges from groups claiming a right to separate nationhood, from the Scots in Britain to the Basques in Spain.
In the Middle East, long part of the Ottoman Empire, a different system of governance existed: the region was ruled from Turkey as a series of separate provinces, defined by geographical features and the culture and language of the inhabitants. Peoples within the empire regarded themselves as primarily tied to a religious or ethnic community, as had Europeans before the arrival of nationalism, and further defined their identity in relation to a particular area, language or culture rather than a state. only when the ottoman Empire collapsed at the beginning of the twentieth century did the European imperial powers, particularly Britain and France, step in to impose the nation-state model on the region. However, they did so in ways that suited their interests: they largely ignored the informal territorial boundaries established by the region's ethnic or religious communities and instead created weak and fractious nation-states by including these potentially hostile communities within the same borders. Iraq, an amalgam of Sunni, Shia and Kurdish groups, was a typical example. This ensured that the newly 'independent' regimes would still need the support of their colonial patron to survive.
Britain, committed as we shall see to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, had every reason to suppress any sign of an awakening Arab or Palestinian nationalism following the demise of Ottoman rule. Nonetheless, in the face of an aggressive Jewish nationalism being advanced by the Zionists in Palestine, a fledgling Palestinian nationalism was evident from the early 1930s. The very first Palestinian intifada (uprising), usually referred to as the Arab Revolt, against Britain's rule and its support for the Zionists, was launched in 1936 and lasted three years. The revolt began as a sixth-month general strike and boycott of the British- and Zionist-controlled parts of the economy, in what the historian Rashid Khalidi observes 'was the longest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps the longest ever'. According to Khalidi, the strength of Palestinian opposition required savage force from the British to quell, with more than 10 per cent of the Palestinian population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled as a result. Britain, facing the aggressive ambitions of Germany and Italy for control of the Mediterranean, was forced reluctantly to divert a huge number of soldiers into Palestine during this period.
The repression of the revolt had an impact not only on the populace, but also on the Palestinians' ability to fight thereafter, and on the already fractured capabilities of their national leadership. A high proportion of the Arab casualties included the most experienced military cadres and enterprising fighters.
In contrast to its treatment of the Jewish community in Palestine, Britain also prevented the emergence of any national institutions for the Palestinians. As Khalidi notes,
successive British governments simply were not prepared to countenance any progress toward Palestinian self-determination, or toward the linked principle of representative government, that would enable the country's overwhelming Arab majority to place meaningful obstacles in the way of the Zionist project. They were committed to holding fast to such a position at least until Jewish immigration brought about a Jewish majority, at which stage it would become a moot point and perhaps democracy could be admitted.
In other words, unlike the situation in the other Mandates of the Middle East, where power was slowly being transferred to Arab leaders, Palestinians were denied any experience of self-rule or any hope of eventual statehood. In contrast, the Jews were given communal autonomy within British rule and the chance to build national institutions, one of the reasons they were in a position to declare statehood the moment Britain departed Palestine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Disappearing Palestine by Jonathan Cook. Copyright © 2008 Jonathan Cook. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
MapsPreface
Introduction
Part 1
1. The Road to Dispossession
2. Greater Israel's Lure
3. Dunam after Dunam
4. Disappearing Palestine
Part 2
5. Zionism and its Meanings
6. Life under Occupation
7. Compromised Critics
8. Our Embedded Media
9. Anti-Semitism and its Abuses
Afterword: Two-State Dreamers
Bibliography