Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide

by Ben White

Overview

* Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2012*

Since its release in 2009 Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide has become an essential primer for undergraduate students and activists getting to grips with the Palestine/Israel conflict for the first time. Ben White skilfully distills the work of academics and experts into a highly accessible introduction.

This new updated and expanded edition includes information on the Israeli blockade and attacks on the Gaza Strip since 2008, new policies targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel and the growth of the global Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign.

Packed with vital information, quotations and resources, Israeli Apartheid never loses the human touch. The book is rooted in the author's extensive personal experience in Palestine and includes testimonies by Palestinians describing how Israeli apartheid affects their daily lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783710270
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	02/20/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Ben White is a journalist and analyst, who has been visiting and writing about Palestine for over a decade. His books include Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide (Pluto, 2014), and Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel (Pluto, 2018). His articles have been published by the Guardian, Independent, Newsweek Middle East, and many others. Ben is a frequent guest expert on Al Jazeera, and is a contributor for Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Israeli Independence, Palestinian Catastrophe

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.

Moshe Sharett, Israel's second prime minister

'Ben-Gurion was right ... Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.'

Benny Morris, Israeli historian

In August 1897, in the Swiss city of Basle, a meeting took place that would have profound and disastrous consequences for the Palestinians – though they were not present at the event, or even mentioned by the participants. The First Zionist Congress, the brainchild of Zionism's chief architect Theodor Herzl, resulted in the creation of the Zionist Organization (later the World Zionist Organization) and the publication of the Basle Programme – a kind of early Zionist manifesto.

Just the year before, Herzl had published 'The Jewish State', in which he laid out his belief that the only solution to the anti-semitism of European societies was for the Jews to have their own country. Writing in his diary a few days afterwards, Herzl predicted what the real upshot would be of the Congress:

At Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said this aloud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive this.

Herzl's Zionism was a response to European anti-semitism and, while a radical development, built on the foundations of more spiritually and culturally focused Jewish settlers who had already gone to Palestine on a very small scale. At the time, many Jews, for different reasons, disagreed with Herzl's answer to the 'Jewish question'. Nevertheless, the Zionists got to work; sending new settlers, securing financial support and bending the ear of the imperial powers without whose cooperation, the early leaders knew, the Zionist project would be impossible to realise.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Palestine was around 4 per cent Jewish and 96 per cent Palestinian Arab (of which around 11 per cent were Christian and the rest Muslim). Before the new waves of Zionist settlers, the Palestinian Jewish community was 'small but of long standing', and concentrated 'in the four cities of religious significance: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron'. As new Zionist immigrants arrived, with the help of outside donations, French experts were called upon to share their experience of French colonisation in North Africa.

An early priority for the Zionists was to secure more land on which to establish a secure, expanded, Jewish community. In 1901, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) was founded, an organisation 'devoted exclusively to the acquisition of land in Palestine for Jewish settlement'. The JNF was destined to play a significant role in the history of Zionism, particularly as the land it acquired, by definition, 'became inalienably Jewish, never to be sold to or worked by non-Jews'.

The land purchased by the JNF was often sold by rich, absentee land-owners from surrounding Arab countries. However, much of the land was worked by Palestinian tenant farmers, who were then forcibly removed after the JNF had bought the property. Thousands of peasant farmers and their families were made homeless and landless in such a manner.

The Zionists knew early on that the support of an imperial power would be vital. Zionism emerged in the 'age of empire' and thus 'Herzl sought to secure a charter for Jewish colonization guaranteed by one or other imperial European power'. Herzl's initial contact with the British led to discussions over different possible locations for colonisation, from an area in the Sinai Peninsula to a part of modern day Kenya. Once agreed on Palestine, the Zionists recognised, in the words of future president Weizmann, it would be under Britain's 'wing' that the 'Zionist scheme' would be carried out.

The majority of British policy-makers and ministers viewed political Zionism with favour for a variety of reasons. For an empire competing for influence in a key geopolitical region of the world, helping birth a natural ally would reap dividends. From the mid nineteenth century onwards, there was also a tradition of a more emotional and even religious support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine amongst Christians in positions of influence, including Lord Shaftesbury and Prime Minister Lloyd George.

Britain's key role is most famously symbolised by the Balfour Declaration, sent in a letter in 1917 by then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild. The Declaration announced that the British government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people' and moreover, promised to 'use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object'. At the time, Jews were less than 10 per cent of Palestine's population.

In the end, the role of the imperial powers proved crucial. For all the differences between some in the British foreign policy establishment and members of the Zionist movement – as well as the open conflict between radical Zionist terror groups and British soldiers – it was under British rule that the Zionists were able to prepare for the conquest of Palestine. Ben-Gurion once joked, after visiting the Houses of Parliament in London, 'that he might as well have been at the Zionist Congress, the speakers had been so sympathetic to Zionism'.

Differences between the Zionist leaders of various political stripes were essentially tactical. As Ben-Gurion explained, nobody argued about the 'indivisibility' of 'Eretz Israel' (the name usually used to refer to the total area of the Biblical 'Promised Land'). Rather, 'the debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal'. In 1937, Weizmann told the British high commissioner that 'we shall expand in the whole country in the course of time ... this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years'.

A LAND WITHOUT A PEOPLE ...

There is a fundamental difference in quality between Jew and native.

Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president

The Zionist leadership's view of the 'natives' was unavoidable – 'wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in an Arab Palestine' could only lead to the development 'of a racist state of mind'. Moreover, Zionism was conceived as a Jewish response to a problem facing Jews; the Palestinian Arabs were a complete irrelevance.

In the early days, the native Palestinians were entirely ignored – airbrushed from their own land – or treated with racist condescension, portrayed as simple, backward folk who would benefit from Jewish colonisation. One more annoying obstacle to the realisation of Zionism, as Palestinian opposition increased, the 'natives' became increasingly portrayed as violent and dangerous. For the Zionists, Palestine was 'empty'; not literally, but in terms of people of equal worth to the incoming settlers.

The early Zionist leaders expressed an ideology very similar to that of other settler movements in other parts of the world, particularly with regards to the dismissal of the natives' past and present relationship to the land. Palestine was considered a 'desert' that the Zionists would 'irrigate' and 'till' until 'it again becomes the blooming garden it once was'. The 'founding father' of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in 1896 that in Palestine, a Jewish state would 'form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism'.

Many British officials shared the Zionist view of the indigenous Palestinians. In a conversation, the head of the Jewish Agency's colonisation department asked Weizmann about the Palestinian Arabs. Weizmann replied that 'the British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes and for those there is no value'.

Winston Churchill, meanwhile, explained his support for Jewish settlement in Palestine in explicitly racist terms. Comparing Zionist colonisation to what had happened to indigenous peoples in North America and Australia, Churchill could not 'admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place'.

The Zionist movement was passionately opposed to democratic principles being applied to Palestine, for obvious reasons. As first Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion admitted in 1944, 'there is no example in history of a people saying we agree to renounce our country'. At the beginning of British Mandate rule in Palestine, the Zionist Organization in London explained that the 'problem' with democracy is that it

too commonly means majority rule without regard to diversities of types or stages of civilization or differences of quality ... if the crude arithmetical conception of democracy were to be applied now or at some early stage in the future to Palestinian conditions, the majority that would rule would be the Arab majority ...

As late as 1947, the director of the US State Department Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs warned that the plans to create a Jewish state 'ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule', an opinion shared by 'nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems'.

THE 'TRANSFER' CONSENSUS

'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its realization.

Tom Segev, Israeli journalist and historian

If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land.

Menahem Ussishkin, chairman of JNF, member of the Jewish Agency, 1930

There was a logical outcome to the Zionist view of the indigenous Palestinians. As Israeli historian Benny Morris described it, 'from the start, the Zionists wished to make the area of Palestine a Jewish state'. But 'unfortunately' the country already 'contained a native Arab population'. The 'obvious and most logical' solution was 'moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out of its prospective territory'.

How this ethnic cleansing was achieved is described later on, but for now, it is important to realise just how central the idea of 'transfer' (the preferred euphemism) was to Zionist thinking and strategising. The need to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its native Arabs was understood at all levels of the Zionist leadership, starting with Ben-Gurion himself. More than a decade before the State of Israel was born, the Zionist leader told the 20th Zionist Congress that 'the growing Jewish power in the country will increase our possibilities to carry out a large transfer'.

Forcing out the Palestinians was only a problem for Ben-Gurion in terms of practicalities, as he did 'not see anything immoral' in 'compulsory transfer'. By 1948, Ben-Gurion was 'projecting a message of transfer', and had created a consensus in favour of it. A few months after becoming Prime Minister of the new state, Ben-Gurion said that 'the Arabs of the Land of Israel' had 'but one function left – to run away'.

Ben-Gurion was not the only leader explicit about the need to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Joseph Weitz, JNF Director of Land and Forestry for 40 years, was passionate about the need for transfer. In a meeting of the so-called 'Committee for Population Transfer' in 1937, Weitz pointed out that:

the transfer of Arab population from the area of the Jewish state does not serve only one aim – to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second, no less important aim which is to evacuate land presently held and cultivated by the Arabs and thus to release it for the Jewish inhabitants.

Weitz was a key influence on pre-state Zionist 'thinking and policy', 'well-placed to shape and influence decision-making regarding the Arab population on the national level and to oversee the implementation of policy on the local level'. Others with powerful positions in the Zionist movement expressed their support for transfer, such as the director of the Jewish Agency (JA)'s immigration department, who told a JA Executive meeting in 1944 that the 'large minority' (the Palestinian Arabs) set to be inside Israel 'must be ejected'.

That almost 'none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer – or its morality' should not be a surprise: 'transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism – because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state'. It explains the 'virtual pro-transfer consensus' in the JA Executive, and indeed, the support for transfer amongst the Zionist leadership's leading lights in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

In fact, the historical evidence that we do have regarding the Zionist desire for 'transfer' probably only represents a fragment of the total amount. Early on, Zionist leaders learned that 'under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required the expulsion of the Arabs' since 'this would cause the Jews to lose the world's sympathy'. Thus while in public, 'discretion and circumspection' were necessary, 'in private, the Zionist leaders were more forthcoming'.

Sometimes, there was more overt self-censorship. For example, the Jewish press coverage of the 20th Zionist Congress 'failed to mention that Ben-Gurion, or anyone else, had come out strongly in favour of transfer', and when the Zionist Organization published the official text of the addresses given at the Congress, 'controversial' sections were omitted. Those taking minutes in meetings of Zionist organisations could be asked to 'take a break' 'and thus to exclude from the record discussion on such matters' such as 'transfer'.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

By the time that Britain had decided to get out of Palestine and hand the problem over to the United Nations, the Zionists were ready for the revolutionary moment they knew was necessary to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Effective Zionist lobbying, particularly in the USA, combined with an ineffective strategy from the Arabs, meant that when it came to the vote, 33 nations voted in favour of partition, 10 abstained and 13 rejected the plan.

Partition was not the reasonable compromise it can sound like. The Palestinian Arabs were more than two thirds of the population of Palestine, and were a majority in all but one of the 16 subdistricts (Figure 2). Jews owned around 20 per cent of the cultivable land, and just over 6 per cent of the total land of Palestine.

Despite the fact that Jews were a clear minority in terms of both population and land ownership, the Partition Plan handed over 55.5 per cent of Palestine to the proposed Jewish state (Israel would later increase that by strength of arms to 78 per cent). The Palestinian Arabs would make up almost half the population of the new Jewish state, territory even set to include the Negev which was 1 per cent Jewish. The Jewish state would include prime agricultural land and '40 percent of Palestinian industry and the major sources of the country's electrical supply'.

Given that the indigenous Palestinians, without their consultation, were set to lose more than half their country to a settler population who explicitly wished to alienate the land from the Arabs forever, it has taken quite a feat of propaganda to represent the Palestinian rejection of 'Partition' as inflexible and irrational.

At the time, there were a few dissenting voices, Jews who opposed the violent conquest of Palestine and instead favoured sharing the land with the Palestinian Arabs. But by the time of the unilateral declaration of Israeli statehood in May 1948, the vast majority of the Zionist leadership was prepared for the forced 'transfer' they knew was necessary for the old propaganda slogan of a 'land without a people' to become a darkly self-fulfilling prophecy.

Far from being weak and outnumbered, a British military intelligence assessment in 1947 had 'estimated that an embryonic Jewish state would defeat the Palestinian Arabs' even if they were secretly helped by neighbouring Arab states. Throughout the war, in fact, Jewish forces 'significantly outnumbered all the Arab forces' sometimes by nearly two to one.

THE NAKBA (CATASTROPHE)

The dismantling of Palestinian society, the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages, and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians ... was a deliberate and planned operation intended to 'cleanse' (the term used in the declassified documents) those parts of Palestine assigned to the Jews as a necessary pre-condition for the emergence of a Jewish state.

Henry Siegman, New York Review of Books

Another prominent left-winger stated: 'I don't have any problem with the fact that we threw them out, and we don't want them back, because we want a Jewish state.'

Cited by Meron Benvenisti, in Sacred Landscape

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Israeli Apartheid"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Ben White.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Maps, Figures and Photographs
Acknowledgements
Foreword by John Dugard
Preface to the Second Edition
Introducing Israeli Apartheid
Part I: Israeli Independence, Palestinian Catastrophe
Part II: Israeli Apartheid
Part III: Towards Inclusion and Peace – Resisting Israeli Apartheid
Frequently Asked Questions
Glossary
Israeli Apartheid: A Timeline
Resources
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

''A highly commendable effort to throw light on a fraught subject" - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
"An excellent guide for understanding the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Palestinians and the nature of their present suffering and oppression."- Ilan Pappe, University of Exeter, UK, and author of""Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto, 2010)
"An essential guide for understanding Israeli apartheid - both the history, and the day to day reality." - Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land (2007)

From the Publisher