The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

Rashid Khalidi

Created: Almost 2 years ago

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resolution. Subjected to similar bombardments and attacks on poorly defended civilian neighborhoods, the sixty thousand Palestinian inhabitants of Haifa, the thirty thousand living in West Jerusalem, the twelve thousand in Safad, six thousand in Beisan, and 5,500 in Tiberias suffered the same fate. Most of Palestine’s Arab urban population thus became refugees and lost their homes and livelihoods.
Led by the dominant political figure in the yishuv, David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist movement presciently foresaw the shift in the global balance of power. The key event in this realignment was the proclamation in 1942 at a major Zionist conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York of what was called the Biltmore Program.9 For the first time, the Zionist movement openly called for turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state: the exact demand was that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.” As with the “national home,” this was another circumlocution for full Jewish control over the entirety of Palestine, a country with a two-thirds Arab majority.
The setbacks that followed, in the negotiations at Madrid, Washington, Oslo, and thereafter, were thus to a large extent rooted in the PLO’s epic miscalculation over Kuwait.
1935 alone, more than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants came to Palestine, a number greater than the entire Jewish population of the country in 1917
What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.
Leaders of other anti-colonial movements were invariably vilified by their colonial masters in similar terms—terrorists, bandits, and murderers—whether they were Irish, Indian, Kenyan, or Algerian. Similarly, Israel’s demonization of the PLO as “terrorist” served as a justification for its eradication.
With the new checkpoints and walls and the need for hard-to-obtain Israeli permits to pass through them, with Israel blocking free movement among the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and with the introduction of roads forbidden to Palestinian travel, the progressive constriction of Palestinian life, especially for Gazans, was underway. ‘Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO leadership, who sailed through the checkpoints with their VIP passes, did not seem to know, or care, about the increasing confinement of ordinary Palestinians.
Thanks to Ambassador Goldberg’s maneuver to delay implementation of the June 9 cease-fire resolution for a few extra hours, the Israeli advance into Syria did not stop, and it continued until the following afternoon.
We later learned that this breakthrough was the result of the opening of an undisclosed negotiating track that was completely separate from the secret Oslo talks and has never received the same degree of fame. This was only one of several tracks that Rabin authorized while keeping the existence of each one hidden from those involved in the others.
The social and economic institutions founded by the early Zionists, which were central to the success of the Zionist project, were also unquestioningly understood by all and described as colonial. The most important of these institutions was the Jewish Colonization Association (in 1924 renamed the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association). This body was originally established by the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch and later combined with a similar organization founded by the British peer and financier Lord Edmond de Rothschild. The JCA provided the massive financial support that made possible extensive land purchases and the subsidies that enabled most of the early Zionist colonies in Palestine to survive and thrive before and during the Mandate period.
Until 1991, great numbers of Palestinians had worked in Israel without hindrance and without requiring a special permit. One could travel in a car with West Bank or Gaza license plates anywhere in Israel and in the Occupied Territories.
The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival.
the basis of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO that was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. By this agreement, Israel recognized the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people and the PLO recognized the state of Israel.
The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 specifies that American-supplied weapons must be used “for legitimate self-defense.”36 Given this provision, the line offered by US officials from the president down—describing Israel’s operations in Gaza as self-defense—may be the product of legal advice to avoid liability and potential prosecution for war crimes, alongside the Israeli officials who issued the orders and the soldiers who dropped the bombs.
When they arrived in Madrid, none of the other members of the Palestinian delegation knew of Gerald Ford’s 1975 explicit commitment to Rabin to avoid presenting any peace proposals of which Israel disapproved, and nor did I.
forces were much stronger than the Arab armies in 1967, and the country was never in any danger of losing a war, even if the Arabs had struck first
“The use of force,” Rabin said, “including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces.”
Although Jaffa was meant to be part of the stillborn Arab state designated by the 1947 Partition Plan, no international actor attempted to stop this major violation of the UN resolution.
The small minority of Palestinians, about 160,000, who had managed to avoid expulsion and remained in the part of Palestine that had become Israel were now citizens of that state.
On that Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed and flattened dozens of buildings, including a sports stadium near the Fakhani neighborhood, on the pretext that they housed PLO offices and facilities. The intense bombardment of targets in Beirut and the south of Lebanon that continued into the next day were the prelude to a massive ground assault starting on June 6, which ultimately led to Israel’s occupation of much of Lebanon. The offensive culminated in a seven-week siege of Beirut that finally ended with a cease-fire on August 12. During the siege, entire apartment buildings were obliterated and large areas devastated in the western half of the already badly damaged city. Nearly fifty thousand people were killed or wounded in Beirut and the rest of Lebanon, while the siege constituted the most serious attack by a regular army on an Arab capital since World War II. It was not to be equaled until the US occupation of Baghdad in 2003.
the United States supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes mandated by American law. Sharon explicitly forewarned US officials that this would happen. According to Draper’s later recollections, after he and Habib met with Sharon in December 1981, he reported to Washington that in Israel’s planned attack “we were going to see American-made munitions being dropped from American-made aircraft over Lebanon, and civilians were going to be killed.”
When we first saw the text of what had been agreed in Oslo, those of us with twenty-one months of experience in Madrid and Washington grasped immediately that the Palestinian negotiators had failed to understand what Israel meant by autonomy. What they had signed on to was a highly restricted form of self-rule in a fragment of the Occupied Territories, and without control of land, water, borders, or much else. In these and subsequent accords based on them, in force until the present day with minor modifications, Israel retained all such prerogatives, indeed amounting to virtually complete control over land and people, together with most of the attributes of sovereignty. This was exactly what our PISGA proposal had sought to avoid by attributing robust jurisdiction over people and land to an autonomous, elected Palestinian authority. As a result of their failure to see the importance of these vital assets, the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo had fallen into trap after trap that we had managed to avoid. In effect, they ended up accepting a barely modified version of the Begin autonomy plan, to which both the Shamir and Rabin governments held firm.
Our daughters, and later our son, were born in Beirut in the midst of the war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government and some others, as were Mona and I.
Most revealingly, the letter addresses a consideration that Yusuf Diya had not even raised. “You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?”12
The reports that the council received from the UN truce observers were starkly different, not only from Israeli government statements but also from the skewed coverage in the American media.
registers (meaning that it decided who had residency rights and who could live where
After Draper mildly challenged Sharon on another claim involving “terrorists,” Israel’s defense minister flatly said, “So we’ll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them. You are not going to save these groups of the international terrorism [sic].”
These objectives would change rapidly with shifting circumstances and the transformations of Palestinian politics after 1964. With the takeover of the PLO by Fatah and the other resistance groups in 1968, the national movement formulated a new objective, advocating the idea of Palestine as a single democratic state for all its citizens, both Jews and Arabs (some iterations referred to a secular democratic state). This was meant to supersede the aims laid down in the National Charter, recognizing that Israeli Jews had acquired the right to live in Palestine and could not be made to leave.
no avail.
Writers and poets both throughout the Palestinian diaspora and living inside Palestine—Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Fadwa Touqan, and Tawfiq Zayyad, together with other gifted and engaged artists and intellectuals—played a vital role in this renaissance, culturally and politically. Their work helped to reshape a sense of Palestinian identity
If Sharon’s forces did not carry out the actual slaughter, they had nonetheless armed the LF to the tune of $118.5 million, trained them, sent them to do the job, and illuminated and facilitated their bloody task with flares.
Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921
Because of this knowledge, because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians.
On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”
Since from the Zionist vantage point the name Palestine and the very existence of the Palestinians constituted a mortal threat to Israel, the task was to connect these terms indelibly, if they were mentioned at all, with terrorism and hatred, rather than with a forgotten but just cause.
With the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, the Palestinian cause appeared to have been gravely weakened, and Sharon seemed to have achieved all of his core objectives. However, the paradoxical result of these events was gradually to shift the center of gravity of the Palestinian national movement away from the neighboring Arab countries, where it had been relaunched in the 1950s and 1960s, moving it back inside Palestine. It was there that the First Intifada broke out five years later, in December 1987, with results that shook both Israeli and world public opinion.
The regard for prisoners in Palestinian society is very high, and over 400,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated by Israel since the occupation began.
More seriously, on political rather than moral or legal grounds, he questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel. He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.
This strategy was explained in 2008 by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, then head of Northern Command (and thereafter Israeli chief of staff): What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.34
Notwithstanding the widely accepted assertion that the Israeli army was dwarfed by seven invading Arab armies, we know that in 1948 Israel in fact outnumbered and outgunned its opponents. There were only five regular Arab military forces in the field in 1948, as Saudi Arabia and Yemen did not have modern armies to speak of. Just four of these armies entered the territory of Mandatory Palestine (the minuscule Lebanese army never crossed the frontier); and two of these—Jordan’s Arab Legion and Iraq’s forces—were forbidden by their British allies from breaching the borders of the areas allocated to the Jewish state by partition, and thus carried out no invasion of Israel.44
Between 1880 and 1920, the American Jewish population grew from a quarter of a million to four million, with the majority of new immigrants coming from Eastern Europe.46
Triggered by the 1994 massacre inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron of 29 Palestinians by an armed settler, between 1994 and 2000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad had pioneered the use of suicide bombers inside Israel as part of their campaign against the Oslo Accords, killing 171 Israelis in 27 bombings. By
Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.
Rabinovich was an ideal choice for this position. His appointment led to what he himself described as “some progress” with the Syrians, although in the end the two sides could not come to terms, separated mainly by a disagreement over the disposition of a few strategic square miles of the shoreline on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee. This fairly uncomplicated but weighty problem was considerably amplified by the intense opposition in several quarters in Israel (and among its most fervent supporters in the US) to any withdrawal from the Golan Heights, a step which Rabin was prepared to contemplate.
Meanwhile, the creation of a Jewish state was no longer the outcome sought by Britain. Infuriated by the violent Zionist campaign that had driven it from Palestine, and not wishing to further alienate the Arab subjects of its remaining Middle Eastern empire, Britain abstained in the partition resolution vote. From the 1939 White Paper onward, British policymakers had recognized that their country’s predominant interests in the Middle East lay with the independent Arab states and not with the Zionist project that Britain had nurtured for over two decades.
The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or Oslo II as it is known, was agreed upon by the two sides in 1995 and completed the ruinous work of Oslo I. It carved both regions into an infamous patchwork of areas—A, B, and C—with over 60 percent of the territory, Area C, under complete, direct, and unfettered Israeli control. The Palestinian Authority was granted administrative and security control in the 18 percent that constituted Area A, and administrative control in the 22 percent of Area B while Israel remained in charge of security there. Together, Areas A and B comprised 40 percent of the territory but housed some 87 percent of the Palestinian population. Area C included all but one of the Jewish settlements. Israel also kept full power over entering and leaving all parts of Palestine and held exclusive control of the population registers
As it prepared in 1967 for a first strike against the Arab air forces, its leaders were determined to get prior American approval for their action, which they indeed obtained. A crucial exchange took place at a meeting in Washington on June 1, 1967, during which Major General Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency, told Secretary of Defense McNamara that he was going to recommend to his own government that Israel launch an attack. He asked the secretary for assurances that the United States would not react negatively. According to Amit, McNamara replied “All right,” said he would tell the president, and asked only how long the war would last and what Israeli casualties might be.20 Johnson and McNamara had already heard from their military and intelligence advisors that the Arabs were not going to attack, and that in any case Israel was likely to win an overwhelming victory. The Israeli military now had the green light it needed to launch a long-planned preemptive strike.21
Glossing over the fact that Zionism was ultimately meant to lead to Jewish domination of Palestine, Herzl employed a justification that has been a touchstone for colonialists at all times and in all places and that would become a staple argument of the Zionist movement: Jewish immigration would benefit the indigenous people of Palestine.
Much earlier, the King-Crane Commission, sent out in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson to ascertain the wishes of the peoples of the region, had come to similar conclusions as those of Jabotinsky. Told by representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the course of turning Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms,” and all considered that a force of “not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to execute this program. In the end, it took the British more than double that number of troops to prevail over the Palestinians in 1936 through 1939. In a cover letter to Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”82
After a month of escalating unrest, in January 1988, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the security forces to use “force, might, and beatings.”3 His “iron fist” policy was carried out through the explicit practice of breaking the demonstrators’ arms and legs and cracking their skulls, as well as beating others who aroused the soldiers’ ire.
October 1953, Israeli forces in the West Bank village of Qibya carried out a massacre following an attack by feda’iyin that killed three Israeli civilians, a woman and her two children, in the town of Yehud. Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.70 The raid, which was condemned by the UN Security Council,71 was launched despite the unceasing efforts of Jordan (then in control of the West Bank) to prevent armed Palestinian activity, which included imprisoning and even killing would-be infiltrators. Jordanian troops were often deployed in ambushes against Palestinian militants, and were under orders to fire on anyone attempting to enter Israel.72
The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a watershed in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It was the first major war since May 15, 1948, to mainly involve the Palestinians rather than the armies of the Arab states.
Among the literary figures whose ideas and images played a major role in the revival of Palestinian identity, Kanafani was perhaps the most prominent prose writer and the most widely translated.30 His five novellas, notably Men in the Sun (1963) and Return to Haifa (1969), are widely popular, perhaps because they depict so vividly the dilemmas faced by Palestinians: the travails of exile and the pain of life in post-1967 Palestine, now entirely under Israeli control. The novellas encouraged Palestinians to confront their dire predicament and forcefully resist the powers that oppressed them. Return to Haifa stressed the importance of armed struggle while at the same time poignantly depicting an Israeli Holocaust survivor living in the home of a Palestinian family that returns to visit after 1967.
Given the USSR’s support for the PLO and the Arab bloc, President Nixon and his national security advisor and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, expended great efforts to weaken the Soviet Union’s links to what they saw as its Arab clients in the Middle East. The centerpiece of this Cold War strategy was the American attempt to prise Egypt away from the USSR, align it with the US, and induce it to agree to a separate peace settlement with Israel. When this American-led initiative finally succeeded in the late 1970s, under the Carter administration, it had the effect of splitting the (nominally) unified Arab front and leaving the Palestinians and other Arab actors to face Israel in a much weaker position.
During its first decades, however, Israel did not receive the massive levels of American military and economic support that came to be routine starting in the early 1970s.
As the occupying Israeli troops swept through the Gaza towns and refugee camps of Khan Yunis and Rafah in November 1956, more than 450 people, male civilians, were killed, most of them summarily executed.
HE POLITICAL IMPACT of the 1982 war was enormous. It brought about major regional changes that affect the Middle East to this day. Among its most significant lasting results were the rise of Hizballah in Lebanon and the intensification and prolongation of the Lebanese civil war, which became an even more complex regional conflict
Rabin’s orders to “break bones” set the tone, but the excessive violence was also rooted in constant societal anti-Palestinian indoctrination, grounded in the dogmatic idea that Israel would be overwhelmed by the Arabs if its security forces did not deter them by force, since their supposedly irrational hostility to Jews was otherwise uncontrollable.9
The PLO leadership pushed to stop these attacks at all costs to keep the limping Oslo process going. To that end, the PA security apparatus—largely made up of Fatah militants who had served time in Israeli jails—used torture on Hamas suspects just as freely as Israeli interrogators had used it on them. Such experiences engendered deep fratricidal hatred on both sides, which was to erupt in the open PLO-Hamas split starting in the mid-2000s.
Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.42
one of the best-known of these works, Emile Habibi’s The Pesssoptimist, a brilliant novella that traces the tragicomic tale of its protagonist, Sa‘id, using his fate to portray the plight of the Palestinians and their resilience
The culmination of this thinking about the objectives of the Palestinian struggle was articulated in the National Charter (al-mithaq al-watani), adopted by the PLO in 1964. The charter stated that Palestine was an Arab country where national rights belonged only to those residing there before 1917 and their descendants. This group included Jews then resident in Palestine, but not those who had immigrated after the Balfour Declaration, who would therefore be obliged to leave.
Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country
in 1989, Rabin had made clear his commitment to Begin’s Camp David approach, including autonomy but no independent state for the Palestinians.46 Six years later in October 1995, less than a month before he was assassinated, Rabin told the Knesset that any Palestinian “entity” to be created would be “less than a state
The Jewish state, Herzl wrote, would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
To most people in the Arab world, however, the stark contrast between Arab normalization with Israel and the misery that its colonization and occupation inflicted on the Palestinians inevitably undermined any faith in an American-sponsored peace process.26
After President Harry Truman endorsed the goal of a Jewish state in a majority Arab land in the post-war years, Zionism, once a colonial project backed by the declining British Empire, became part and parcel of the emerging American hegemony in the Middle East.
Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population.
One of the few surviving members of the old guard of the Fatah Central Committee that had long dominated the PLO, ‘Abbas was neither charismatic nor eloquent; he was not renowned for personal bravery or considered a man of the people. Overall, he was one of the least impressive of the early generation of prominent Fatah leaders.
There was palpable disappointment within the Palestinian delegation, and in Tunis, when we realized that Israel’s change of government did not herald a substantive change of views.
Oslo I also involved the most far-reaching modification, which was the decision to enlist the PLO as a subcontractor for the occupation—this was the actual meaning of the security deal Rabin made with ‘Arafat, which my colleagues and I had announced to the American diplomats in June 1993. The key point was always security for Israel, for its occupation and settlers, while offloading the cost and liability of subjugating the Palestinian population.
decades before my father’s meeting with King ‘Abdullah. David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later the second president of Israel, had spent several years at the end of World War I working for the Zionist cause in the United States, where Golda Meir had lived since childhood. Meanwhile, no members of the Palestinian leadership had ever visited the United States
If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1925, “you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf.… Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”81 At
While Rabin had done something no other Israeli leader had ever done by formally conceding that there was a Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as their representative, and opening negotiations with it, obtaining in return its recognition of the state of Israel, this exchange was neither symmetrical nor reciprocal. Israel had not recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one. This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it.
By 1976, however, alienation had intensified. Any expression of nationalism—flying the Palestinian flag, displaying the Palestinian colors, organizing trade unions, voicing support for the PLO or any other resistance organization—was severely suppressed, with fines, beatings, and jail. Detentions and imprisonment usually featured torture of detainees. Protesting the occupation publicly or in print could lead to the same result or even to deportation. More active resistance, especially that involving violence, invited collective punishment, house demolitions, imprisonment without trial under the rubric of “administrative detention” that could last for years, and even extrajudicial murder.
2002, with its heavy weapons causing widespread destruction, the Israeli army reoccupied the limited areas, mainly cities and towns, that had been evacuated as part of the Oslo Accords.
Rabin proved to be constrained by his limitations and biases: an ingrained preoccupation with security, which in the Israeli lexicon has an all-encompassing meaning of complete domination and control of the adversary
The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.
Yet all of these efforts had severe limitations. Among them were the PLO’s failure to devote sufficient energy, talent, and resources to diplomacy and information, despite the gains made in these areas. Nor did the PLO work hard enough at understanding their target audiences, the most crucial of them being the United States and Israel. There, the PLO ultimately failed to overcome a more effective competing narrative generated by Israel and its supporters that equated “Palestinian” with “terrorist.”39 The PLO’s incapacity to understand the importance of these two vital arenas started with its top leadership. Respected Palestinian-American academics in the United States, notably Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Walid Khalidi, Hisham Sharabi, Fouad Moughrabi, and Samih Farsoun, repeatedly tried to impress on Palestinian leaders that they needed to take American public opinion into account and devote to it sufficient resources and energy, but to no
By the mid-1930s, the JNF was annually collecting $3.5 million for the colonization of Palestine in the United States alone, part of much larger sums it regularly channeled from all over the world to support the Zionist project.21
The men and women bound for an uncertain exile, some for the second or third time in their lives, were seen as heroes by many Beirutis for having stood up for ten weeks—with no external support to speak of—to the most powerful army in the Middle East.
In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes.
In an August 5 letter to Ronald Reagan, Begin wrote that “these days” he felt as if he and his “valiant army” were “facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.”19
As Washington knew, Israel’s military in 1967 was far superior to the militaries of all the Arab states combined, as it was in every other contest between them.
IKE A SLOW, seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months. Its first stage, from November 30, 1947, until the final withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948, witnessed successive defeats by Zionist paramilitary groups, including the Haganah and the Irgun, of the poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them. This first stage saw a bitterly fought campaign that culminated in a country-wide Zionist offensive dubbed Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948.33 Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.
Ben-Gurion believed that only the unremitting application of force would oblige the Arab states to make peace on Israel’s terms.
The deteriorating situation of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories after Oslo since the mid-1990s has been in large measure the result of the choice of envoys whose performance at Oslo was inept, and of ‘Arafat and his colleagues’ willingness to sign the defective agreements they drew up.55
It soon became impossible to do what I and many Palestinians had done regularly and without difficulty: drive to Ramallah from Jerusalem in under half an hour, or travel quickly to Gaza from the West Bank.
What we had witnessed that day was evidence of a new Middle Eastern axis in action—the armored spearheads on the ground were Israeli, while the diplomatic cover was American. It is an axis that is still in place today, over a half century later.
March 1955, Ben-Gurion proposed a major attack on Egypt and the occupation of the Gaza Strip.74 The Israeli cabinet rejected the proposal, only to acquiesce in October 1956 after Ben-Gurion replaced Sharett as prime minister and his militant ethos won out. Transmitted through acolytes such as Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon, Ben-Gurion’s belligerent policies have pervaded the Israeli government’s dealings with its neighbors ever since.
F THE BALFOUR Declaration and the Mandate constituted the first declaration of war on the Palestinian people by a great power, and the 1947 UN resolution on the partition of Palestine represented the second one, the aftermath of the 1967 war produced the third such declaration. It came in the form of SC 242, a resolution crafted by the United States and approved on November 22, 1967
This important shift resulted from the lesson Rabin had learned from the intifada: that Israel could no longer control the Occupied Territories solely by the use of force. In consequence, he was willing to do some things differently than Begin and Shamir while continuing the military occupation and the colonization of what remained of Palestine (indeed, spending on the settlements was curbed under Rabin’s government but overall settlement activity increased).