Neil Rogall on Truman supported Jewish immigration to Palestine after WWII

By 1945 the US government fully supported the Zionists.  They knew how important oil had been in war and were keen to have reliable allies in the Middle East.  The news of the death camps in Germany led to worldwide sympathy for the Jews.  The Zionists used this to bolster their demands.  President Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman put pressure on the British to allow all Jewish holocaust survivors to be sent to Palestine.  The British refused.  This wasn’t sympathy on Truman’s part.  Most camp survivors wanted to go to the USA. But Truman was an openly racist and anti-Semitic politician who had only been chosen as Roosevelt’s running mate to placate southern 'Dixiecrats.'  Truman was opposed to letting Jewish refugees into the US. However, in 1947, the Zionists won a key propaganda battle.  The Exodus, a packed refugee ship was sent back from Palestine to Germany.  Much western opinion saw this as an inhuman act.

~ Neil Rogall, "Making the Palestinians the scapegoats for Nazi crimes," rs21, October 9, 2014

Harry Truman with Israeli President Chaim Weizmann

Neil Rogall on UN partition plan and King Abdullah's secret plan to divide Palestine with the Zionists

The UN general assembly voted on November 29th.  The UN today has 193 member states...  

The Jewish population owned less than 6% of the land and comprised a third of the population but they were to be given more than half the country.  The Arab delegates stormed out declaring the resolution invalid.  But that was mostly bluster.  We now know thanks to Avi Shlaim‘s ‘Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine’ that the Hashemite monarchy in Transjordan had secretly negotiated a deal with the Zionists to divide Palestine between them. 

The Zionists were ecstatic that the UN had voted for a Jewish state, yet they didn’t support the plan.  Ben Gurion’s view was that the Jewish state’s borders "will be determined by force and not the partition resolution…there are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish state."  That was written on 7 October 1947, some 7 weeks before the UN vote.  Israel to this day has not declared its borders. 

~ Neil Rogall, "Making the Palestinians the scapegoats for Nazi crimes," rs21, October 9, 2014

1988

Neil Rogall on Palestinian landownership under Ottoman and British rule and rise of conflicted Palestinian leadership

Palestinian fellahin (peasants) viewed the land they cultivated as their birthright.  They might not formally own it but that was somewhat beside the point.  Landlordism had only really taken off in Palestine with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858.  Many peasants failed to register their land under the new laws.  They often couldn’t afford the registration fee or didn’t want their names on government documents for fear of conscription into the Ottoman army.  In these cases the land was registered in the name of the local notable.  The fellahin believed that this way they would hold onto ‘their’ land.  Elsewhere the Ottoman government simply seized land claiming it was needed for security reasons or that it wasn’t being cultivated properly.  Such land was then put up for sale and often bought by wealthy men from Beirut.

City of Bethlehem during the Ottoman Empire, 1880

The result was that many cultivators lost control of their land.  The dispossessed ended up as sharecropping tenants on what had been their own land.  When Zionist settlers purchased such land from the landlords, they evicted the fellahin.  As early as 1883, peasants were attacking these new Jewish settlements.  This affected not just the fellahin but also the nomadic Bedouin who were no longer able to graze their animals on what had been seen as common land.  In response the Ottoman government often called out the army to remove peasants who had occupied their old lands or were refusing to leave.  Such resistance continued into and throughout the entire period of British rule. 

Peasant unrest pushed the local elite into protesting about Zionist immigration.  Such protests were pretty feeble, and began to undermine the relationships between the notables and their followers.  Many of these elite figures hoped that Palestine would be incorporated into Syria following the end of the war.  When this didn’t happen, a distinctive Palestinian nationalism begins to develop.

[...]

In reality none of the notables were able to play an effective role as a nationalist leadership.  They were far too compromised.  Some had good jobs in the colonial government.  They couldn’t defend the peasants from the settlers who were evicting them from their land because it was they, the a’yan who were selling the land to the Zionists.  Nor could they offer any political progress to their supporters, as the British were hostile to any democratic reforms that would relegate the Jewish settlers to a minority position.  They were totally incapable of providing any serious leadership to ordinary Palestinians faced with the growing settler threat. 

Colonial policies helped ruin the countryside.  The drive to commercial agriculture, the encouragement of land sales to the settlers and the sheer greed of landlords wretched rural Palestine. 

By 1930 some 30% of all Palestinian villagers were landless, while as many as 75% to 80% of the remainder didn’t have sufficient land to meet their needs.  On top of this, colonial taxation policies hit Palestinian peasants far harder than the Jewish agricultural enterprises.  Such taxes were of course used to pay for British rule and its support of the settlers.

[...]

The impoverishment of the rural Palestinian population accelerated with the global depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash.  This was made worse by the increasing number of settlers who arrived following Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933 and the growth of an increasingly deadly anti-Semitism in Poland.  Peasant indebtedness led to many selling their land to pay their debts.  Simultaneously the big landlords made huge killings selling their estates to the Jewish National Fund.

The bankruptcy of the notables’ policies was therefore increasingly apparent: they had made no progress toward achieving national independence, and were incapable of stemming the Zionist tide of increasing population, land settlement and economic development.

In these circumstances the a’yan class themselves splintered.  The Nashashibi family clan turned against the policies of the Arab Executive, dominated by the Husseini family.  The Nashashibis called for compromise with the British and the settlers.  This followed from their class interest: the Nashashibis were the wealthiest landowners, the largest citrus exporters and greatest sellers of land to the settlers.

~ Neil Rogall, "The birth of Palestinian Resistance and the 1936 uprising," rs21, September 12, 2014

Neil Rogall on the British defeat of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine

But by the summer of 1939 the British had crushed the uprising.  The infamous Munich agreement, between Nazi Germany and Britain was signed on the 30th September 1938.  More Imperial troops were now available to send to Palestine to put down the rebels.  By 1939 the authorities had 30,000 trained soldiers fighting the insurgents.  The RAF bombed Palestinian villages.  A policy of collective punishment was implemented.  If one member of a village was involved in armed rebellion the whole community was punished.  The Israelis of course, continued this vicious policy. 

Throughout the rebellion the settler community, the Yishuv collaborated with the British.  The Mandate authorities formed the Jewish Settlement police.  By 1939, one in twenty of the settler community was a member, some 21,000 people in all.  Orde Wingate, a British officer, organised a counter-insurgency force of Jewish fighters, the Special Night Squads.  They terrorized villagers and guarded the oil pipeline.  Internally the Yishuv expanded the Haganah, secretly imported arms and set up factories to manufacture weapons. 

The revisionist militia, the Irgun, began a terrorist campaign in May 1938.  They threw bombs into crowded Palestinian market places or left them hidden in carts.  Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa were all targeted.  Some estimates suggested that up to 250 Palestinians were killed in these barbaric attacks.  When Zionists talk about Palestinian suicide bombers, it is worth remembering who began bombing civilians in Palestine. 

[...] 

There were up to 6,000 Palestinians killed in the uprising, and 6,000 more in detention.  2,000 homes had been destroyed.  The British hanged 100.  The Palestinians had suffered an enormous defeat, any leadership they had was dead, in exile or driven out of politics.  They could no longer play an independent role.  In future they became disastrously dependent on other Arab states for leadership.  They still had not recovered from the defeat when the crisis of 1948 hit.  It wasn’t until the 1960s that an independent Palestinian leadership was to re-emerge with Yasser Arafat and El Fatah.

~ Neil Rogall, "The birth of Palestinian Resistance and the 1936 uprising," rs21, September 12, 2014

British soldiers and Palestinian prisoners during the 1936 revolt