Palestine

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PALESTINE

Arabic Filastin, from the Greek; Hebrew Peleshet; "historical" Palestine today is the Palestine of the British Mandate after the separation of Transjordan, the area east of the Jordan River. It encompassed the state of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Politically, Palestine today consists of the projected Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip whose true status is reflected in the name by which it is more usually known, the Occupied Territories.

Palestine derives its name from the Philistines who arrived in what was then Canaan in the fourteenth century b.c.e. and eventually occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain from Jaffa to the Sinai.

In 135 c.e. the Romans changed the name of their province Syria Judaea, the southern part of the province of Syria, to Syria Palaestina. The name was also used by seventh-century Arab armies, who conquered what they called Filastin from the Byzantine Empire. Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans from 1517 until World War I as part of the region known as Syria, or Greater Syria, covering the area between Turkey and Egypt, from the Mediterranean to the Syrian Desert. It was contained in several provinces and administrative districts, none named Palestine or coterminous with the territory known by that name; it had never been a discrete political entity or claimed precisely defined borders.

British forces occupied Palestine in 1917–1918. In 1920, the postwar San Remo Conference ratified the agreement between the French and British to divide the Ottomans' Arab territories between them. The French received a Mandate for Syria, including Lebanon; Britain was given Palestine/Transjordan and Iraq. The borders of these territories were all created by the British and French, with these borders and Mandates approved by the League of Nations in 1922. Britain set up a civil government in Palestine in 1920 and separated Transjordan in 1921–1922, closing Transjordan to Jewish immigration.

Zionists had been establishing colonies in Palestine since 1878, and during World War I the World Zionist Organization (WZO), established in 1897, was particularly successful in lobbying the British government for support of its project to establish a Jewish state. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration the British made a commitment to the WZO to create a "national home for the Jewish people," and the British Mandate for Palestine was written to permit the Zionists to take over the whole territory. The Mandate referred to the indigenous population of Palestinian Arabs as "non-Jewish communities," but in 1918 the population of native Palestinian Jews and European Zionist immigrants numbered roughly 66,000 people, or only about 10 percent of the populace.

Opposition to European Jewish immigration and suspicion of Zionist intentions had grown before the war, but with the advent of the Mandate and the massive postwar immigration and economic changes it brought, Jewish occupation grew to become the major theme of Palestinian politics. Zionists were buying land which, once purchased, was under restriction for use and resale only to Jews. Organizations such as the Muslim-Christian Association, founded in 1918, and the Arab Executive, founded in 1920, tried—largely through attempts at personal persuasion by the leadership—to convince the British to curtail both land purchases and immigration, and to encourage policies leading to Palestinian independence. Palestinian leaders consistently rejected British proposals for political representation in a legislative assembly, since all the proposals fell short of true self-government and required Palestinians to accept the legitimacy of the Mandate with its built-in promotion of the Zionist project. For their part, the Zionist leaders either rejected or reluctantly agreed to these same solutions because they wanted to put off resolution until they had achieved a majority.

Displeasure with the situation led to rioting in 1920, with 47 Jews and 48 Palestinians killed in Jaffa, and again in 1929, with the Western Wall Disturbances claiming 133 Jewish and 116 Palestinian lives in Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere. Commissions of inquiry, including a League of Nations commission, the British Shaw Commission, and the Hope-Simpson Commission, studied aspects of the Zionist-Palestinian problem in 1929–1930. Because of these studies, the British government issued the Passfield White Paper recommending changes to the Mandate favorable to the Palestinians. By 1929 the Jewish population in Palestine was over 156,000—about 16 percent of the population—and under pressure from the Zionists and their allies, the proposed changes were rejected by the government in the MacDonald Letter of 1931.

From the beginning the Zionists, with much help from abroad, had successfully engendered strong, flexible, well-organized civic and political institutions. Palestinian organizations, in contrast, operated according to the customs of late Ottoman politics: the notables—prominent, influential members of the social and economic elite, often from wealthy landowning or merchant families—attempted to discuss matters in private with the authorities and reach a private agreement. The Western Wall episode and its aftermath proved to be a catalyst for more modern political organizing, as well as for more radical and sometimes violent opposition. Several political parties were founded in the years after 1929. The Istqlal (Independence) Party, formed in 1932 by Awni Abd al-Hadi and others, was the first, calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses; and in 1933 a general strike called by the Arab Executive led to violence in which 24 people died. In 1935, Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had fought the French in Syria and had a following among the poor and recently landless Palestinians in Haifa, took an armed group of eight hundred dispossessed peasants to the mountains near Jenin to begin a revolt. He became a martyr when he was killed by British forces.

A series of violent incidents followed, and in early 1936 a shipment of arms to a Zionist group was discovered. In April 1936 Palestinians in Nablus formed a "national committee" and called for a general strike, demanding the suspension of Jewish immigration and the establishment of a democratic national government; similar Palestinian committees were soon formed all over the country. At this point, the Jewish population was about 370,000—28 percent. Prominent leaders of the political elite formed the Arab Higher Committee, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, head of the Supreme Muslim Council, to coordinate and control the strike. At first it was nonviolent, but when the British announced that they were raising the Jewish immigration quota, the strike escalated into a general insurrection known as the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, in which over 5,000 people were killed, over 14,000 wounded, 5,600 put in detention and thousands forced into exile. Some Zionists formed guerrilla groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang, to attack and terrorize Palestinians. The strike was called off after six months, and the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate the causes of the uprising. In July 1937 the commission recommended the partition of Palestine.

Under the Peel plan, the Zionists would be awarded one-third of the country, including the most fertile and prosperous part, Galilee, where there were few Jews. The Zionist areas would become a self-governing state, while Palestinian areas would be annexed to Transjordan, with Palestinians subject to "compulsory" resettlement if necessary. The Palestinians found this unacceptable, and there was universal anger over this proposal. The violence, which had died down when the general strike ended, resumed.

In September the British district commissioner for Galilee was assassinated, leading the British to impose severe repressive measures against the Palestinians, including collective punishments such as house demolitions and mass detentions in camps. Most of the Arab Higher Committee either was arrested and deported or fled into exile. In 1938 the Woodhead Commission, created to study the partition issue, reported that the Peel Commission's plan was impractical, and the British government announced that it would reexamine the entire question. In March and April 1939 a conference was held in London attended by Zionist, Palestinian, and Arab leaders; it was not a success, but in May the government issued the MacDonald White Paper, which rejected partition and the idea of a Jewish state (although not the "national home" idea), proposed a limit to Jewish immigration and land purchase, and favored the creation of a single independent Palestinian state after a ten-year transition period. The Zionists rejected this plan since it was still their intention to create a Jewish state out of Palestine; the Palestinians rejected it because there were no guarantees regarding statehood; and Hajj Amin, Great Mufti of Jerusalem and the most prominent Palestinian leader, then in exile, did not trust the British to keep their word. A substantial segment of the Palestinian public, however, believed that the White Paper should have been accepted, because the terms represented a serious change of heart by the British. By 1939 the Jewish population in Palestine was 445,456, almost 30 percent of the populace.

During World War II the British banned political activity. The Palestinians were politically disorganized in any case, and Hajj Amin had fled from Lebanon to Iraq to Germany—apparently hoping to find support from the enemies of the British, he collaborated with the Germans in attempting to raise a Muslim army in the Balkans. When the Arab League was being formed in 1946, it appointed Musa al-Alami as Palestinian representative and took control of Palestinian nationalist affairs, including refounding the Arab Higher Committee. Although Hajj Amin was named to head it, the British would not permit him to return to Palestine. By 1946 the Jewish population of Palestine in was roughly 608,000, or 33 percent.

At the Biltmore Conference in New York in 1942, the WZO had for the first time publicly committed itself to establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine, although it later was willing to consider partition. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1945–1946 recommended establishing a single unpartitioned state, an end to restrictions on land purchases by Jews, and the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe. The British felt that they had lost control of the situation after the war and announced their intention to give up the Mandate, turning the problem over to the United Nations. In 1947 the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended partition based on "a realistic appraisal of the actual Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine." The population at that time was approximately 1,131,000 Palestinians and 508,000 Jews, with Jews owning seven percent of the land; the UNSCOP plan called for a Zionist state on 55 percent of the territory—with a substantial Palestinian minority population—a Palestinian state on 40 percent—with a few thousand Jews—and five percent—the city of Jerusalem and suburbs—as an international zone under UN trusteeship. The Zionists accepted the plan; the Palestinians and other Arabs opposed it, but were without power, organization, unity of purpose, or an effective strategy to prevent its adoption. The proposal was passed by the UN Security Council as Resolution 181 in November 1947. The UN vote caused public outrage in Palestine and was followed by another outbreak of communal violence and guerrilla warfare.

In December Palestinian leaders made an effort to revive the "national committees" that had run the 1936 general strike, but it was too late; the Zionists had a modern, well-equipped army, paramilitary organizations, and an entire well-organized, well-run and well-funded state structure that had been building for several decades. After several months of fighting, Israel declared its statehood on 14 May 1948. The next day the Arab states declared war, but the Palestinian guerrillas, allied with the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, were no match for the Israelis. Moreover, the Arabs were not truly united; Abdullah I, although ostensibly part of the Arab coalition, had previously come to a secret agreement with the Zionists to refrain from fighting with them in territory allotted to them by the UN with the understanding that he would annex to Jordan the territory allotted to the Palestinians. The 1948–1949 War ended with Israel occupying 78 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, all but the West Bank and Gaza Strip; nearly 750,000 Palestinians expelled from Israeli territory became homeless refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; the obliteration of more than 350 Palestinian villages; Jordan's annexation (formalized in 1950) of the West Bank; the destruction of the Palestinian political community; and the permanent presence in Palestine of a European settler state regarded by most Arabs as a tool of Western imperial power. The 1948–1949 War, known to Palestinians as al-Nakba, the Catastrophe, was the end of Palestine; since then Palestinians have resisted and struggled to reconstitute their community and to recreate a true Palestinian state.