The Erasure of Palestine: Colonialism and a Century of Struggle
Painting of Jerusalem by David Roberts, 1839, in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. CC BY 4.0
At its height, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse states in history, subsuming hundreds of discrete language and cultural groups. To control such vast swaths of diverse territory and so many ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities for roughly 600 years required incredible flexibility and adaptability to local conditions.[1] But Ottoman power waned dramatically in the decades preceding World War I. The Empire had already given up control of many of its territorial possessions, losing almost half of its land from the middle of the nineteenth century to the eve of the first world war. The Ottomans had suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Russian Empire in 1878, and they lost further ground to nationalist movements and British and French colonial projects. The Ottoman Empire entered World War I having lost its grip over vast swaths of territory in the Balkans, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia.
The territorial shape of post-war West Asia was first established through an agreement negotiated in secret by the British and the French, the Sykes-Picot Agreement (ratified in May of 1916), named for Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, the diplomats who represented Britain and France respectively. The agreement remains an important object of study for several reasons, and it represents the characteristic duplicity of the Western imperial powers. To both Britain and France, it was a “foregone conclusion” that the Arab regions that had been under Turkish rule were not prepared to govern themselves, and thus that they should govern these regions either directly as colonies or in some advantageous partnership with local elites. But the British had made a series of promises to Arab leaders who were seeking to establish an Arab nation-state after the Ottoman Empire was defeated. On the strength of Britain’s guarantees, the region erupted in the Great Arab Revolt, which began in June of 1916, during the bloodiest year of World War I. Under the Sykes-Picot agreement,
Britain would get complete control over an area of “Mesopotamia” starting north of Baghdad and extending through Basra all the way down the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. France would get complete control over an area extending along the Mediterranean coast from Haifa to southern Turkey and inland to a part of Anatolia.
There is clear and direct continuity between the colonial ambitions of Britain and France during this period and the founding of Israel as a European colonial outpost on the Arab Mediterranean. While the Sykes-Picot Agreement made Palestine an area of international administration due to its cultural and religious importance, Britain had always taken a special interest in Palestine as a key strategic location, and the Agreement made special exceptions for British control of the ports at Haifa and Acre. Again emerges British duplicity: the following year, in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary famously issued the Balfour Declaration, a statement of the British government’s official support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The French perceived this promise of Palestine, which was supposed to be treated as a neutral international zone, to the Zionist cause as a breach of the Sykes-Picot terms and a brazen attempt to consolidate more permanent control of Palestine. The French were of course correct about British designs for the region, and the Balfour Declaration had laid the foundation for the Mandate for Palestine.
In April of 1920, the Entente powers met in San Remo, Italy to divide control over certain Arab territories, creating mandates for the government of areas that were deemed incapable of governing themselves. The allies agreed at that meeting that the occupying British should take on the Mandate for Palestine, and this condition was later stamped with League of Nations approval. Implementation of the Balfour Declaration was incorporated in the League of Nations mandate itself. It is, at this point, regrettably necessary to underscore the fact that the local populations of Palestine were not consulted on whether they wanted their homeland handed from one empire to another, to then be given away without their input. Under British rule, Palestinian institutions had no real power, just as they have no real power under Israeli rule today. If any nationalist movement had a legitimate claim to Palestine, it was that of the Arab people. The remarkable feature of the story of Palestine during and after World War I is the absence of Arab people themselves from the committees and legal instruments we’ve been discussing. But in the logic of empire, the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian people from the decisions about their lives on their own lands requires no explanation: the Mandate of Palestine was a hard-won spoil of war for the British Empire at a time when access to the Suez Canal and control of trade routes in the area were in the highest order of strategic value. The last thing anyone wanted to do was hear from the locals.
The assumption was so perfectly crystallized in the Sykes-Picot agreement: we will divide your lands amongst ourselves in secret and govern you as we see fit. The early leaders of Zionist thought and action understood this, the colonial nature of Zionism. They had known that if it were to come, the Jewish state would need the help of a major colonial power like Great Britain. As the mere advocacy of the idea that the Jewish people are a nation deserving of self-determination and their own sovereign state, Zionism is perhaps unobjectionable. While the author doesn’t have much use for nations or states, there are good reasons that the Jewish people might want their own country. As a matter of practice, however, Zionism has never been something so innocuous. Theodor Herzl, among the Zionist movement’s founding fathers, spoke of the Jewish state as being “a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” All colonial endeavors require this framing: we are bringing them western civilization and a superior culture, and we have a duty to rule; they’ll be happy to have progress and prosperity, and they’ll forget about self-determination. An apartheid system was always at least implicit in these goals, as the end result of a white Jewish colony in Palestine was always fundamentally incompatible with democracy and the recognition of Palestinians’ political rights. But the hope of dignity and autonomy is never lost or forgotten, and Palestinians have long beaten the odds and held on for freedom.
As Jews throughout the world have pointed out for over a century, the proponents of the Zionist worldview do not speak for the world’s Jewish people, who construe their Jewish identity in a diverse range of ways, based factors such as country of origin, ethnic or racial identity, languages spoken, religious movement, social class, and level of educational attainment. Jewish people live in almost every country in the world; they speak hundreds of languages and worship in a variety of different ways. They hold views of Zionism that are positive, negative, and ambivalent. But in no way does the idea of Zionism as we find it practiced by the State of Israel hold sway over the entire global Jewish community. There are dozens of Jewish groups around the world that oppose Zionism. But today even many who had positive views of the Zionist project and the State of Israel have come to see the treatment of Palestinians as an unacceptable violation of the most basic human rights.
Just as the State of Israel could not have been created in Palestine absent imperial sponsorship and protection, its current apartheid regime and ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians could not be maintained without the sustained support of the United States. The United States is without equal as a dealer of death and destruction; it is far and away the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of weapons, accounting for more than 40 percent of global arms sales between 2019 and 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (the Institute’s data was last updated in March of this year). And Israel has received more money from the United States than any other country in the world. A report by the Congressional Research Service, published in March of 2023, indicates that “total U.S. aid to Israel obligated from 1946-2023 is an estimated $260 billion.” Just days ago, Israel announced that it has secured another $8.7 billion in military assistance from the United States, so it can continue its campaign of terror against Palestinians and now the Lebanese.
Germany has long been second to the United States in giveaways to Israel: “in 2023 Germany was the second largest supplier of ‘major conventional arms’ to Israel, responsible for 47% of Israel’s total imports.” German society’s relationship with the memory of its Nazi past is so malformed and filled with contradiction and confusion that the country is making another version of the same hideous mistake. Its deference toward the Israeli regime’s brutal massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is akin to the “just following orders” defense in that it allows the actor to disburden himself of personal responsibility and accountability—he is a mere means, a tool used by someone with the power to make decisions. But as humans, we all have the capacity to think critically and make decisions, and horrors such as those unfolding in Gaza today are the inevitable results of attempts to suppress or outsource this human capacity. In Germany today, as in every other country that provides weapons and other assistance to Israel, there is a large and growing bottom-up movement to halt the transfer of money and arms. Earlier this year, in February, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced, “Any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately.” The UN experts added: “The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then.”
By design, few in the West have any real sense of the cruelty and brutality that have been constant features of everyday life for decades for millions of Palestinians. The cultivated hatred of Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, is deep and common in many circles of American culture. Today, even the slightest signal of sympathy for Palestinians is frequently met with scorn and vitriol, and the most benign celebration of Palestinian art or culture is castigated. This is by design, for if Palestinians were seen as fellow human beings, a number of facts would start to glare at us. We would have to ask why it is acceptable for Israel to confine Palestinian bodies, subjecting them to some of the most severe restrictions on movement in the world, even relative to other authoritarian regimes. We would have to ask why Palestinians are politically disenfranchised on their own land. We would have to ask why we simply accept the permanent legal, political, social, and economic inequality of Palestinians. In 2018, the apartheid nature of the regime was made explicit and awarded a central place in the Israeli legal landscape. The Knesset enacted a new Basic Law stating, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” The Balfour Declaration had at least paid lip service to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” But for the strain of Zionism that became dominant, there could not be a productive collective life for the Palestinian people that did not present an intrinsic challenge to Jewish cultural, religious, political, and social supremacy. It may be that there are versions of Zionism that do not necessarily entail this, but the version that has motivated the state of Israel in policy terms as a historical and empirical matter has been this one. In the logic of empire, Palestinians are uncivilized barbarians—they are terrorists and our permanent enemies. The governments of the United States and Israel need you to see Palestinians as some lesser category of human. Imperialist thinking is thus deeply connected historically with Eurocentrism, and though it remains under-appreciated, Eurocentrism is at the very heart of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as in Palestine more generally. As economist Samir Amin explained in his 1998 classic Eurocentrism:
Eurocentrism is a culturalist phenomenon in the sense that it assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical paths of different peoples. Eurocentrism is therefore anti-universalist, since it is not interested in seeking possible general laws of human evolution. But it does present itself as universalist, for it claims that the imitation of the Western models by all peoples is the only solution to challenges of our time. Eurocentrism is a specifically modern phenomenon, the roots of which go back only to the Renaissance, a phenomenon that did not flourish until the nineteenth century. In this sense, it constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern capitalist world.
Tensions between the Jewish settlers and the locals goes back to the Ottoman period. But as historian Gudrun Krämer wrote in her 2011 book, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, “This had nothing to do with anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic sentiment, but with politics. The Ottoman authorities perceived the immigrants not primarily as Jews, but rather as Europeans, or more precisely, as Russians, and therefore as members of a hostile power against which the Empire had just fought a war.” This insight continues to be important for understanding the current state of affairs in Palestine: the State of Israel (and its pre-1948 antecedents) is a European colonial project, created by and for Europeans who did not merely relocate and settle on the land, but stole it from Arabs of all religious traditions. Contemporary commentary has tended to vastly overstate the significance of religion to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which is fundamentally political and economic in character. Religion is a salient aspect of the politics of the region, but it is not religious difference alone but an imposed class hierarchy based on race and religion, that underlies the violence. Jews who were actually from the region—that is, Arab Jews—saw the clear connection between the prejudices and discriminatory treatment both they and Palestine’s Muslims were subjected to. Historically, Arab Jews have “been victims of the same kind of anti-Arab ideology that is wielded against the Palestinians.” To the Jews of European ancestry who make up Israel’s majority and ruling class, Arab Jews are often cast as a racialized other with the rest of the native Arab population. The founders of the State of Israel were seldom shy about sharing their anti-Arab hatreds and prejudices; these were part of the core of their ideology, and they were often explicit in their desire to rid their new home in the Arab world of Arabs. The explicit goal of the Zionist movement, from the time of the determination that Palestine would be the site of the Jewish state, was to manufacture a political system in which Arab Palestinians would either be either nonexistent or relegated to a position of permanent second-class status. “The leaders of the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine imagined it as empty of its Arab population, which is the cornerstone of the subsequent ethnic cleansing policy.”[2]
The displacement of the Palestinian people from Palestine “[took] the form of demographic elimination or demographic riddance,” accomplished through “brute violence” and a program of geographical and cultural erasure that meant the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and systematic attacks of Palestinian cultural and religious sites and practices.[3] What is ultimately desired by the Zionist movement is a thoroughgoing ethnic transformation in Palestine: it must go from brown majority to white majority, from Muslim majority to Jewish majority, from Arab majority to European majority. All the ideological window dressing in the world can’t change the fact of mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. In November of 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a plan to partition Palestine, creating independent Arab and Jewish States, with a Special International Regime for Jerusalem. Consistent with the trend, Arabs had not been consulted on the plan, and it amounted to a massive transfer of their land, whereby more than 55 percent of Palestine would fall under the Jewish State. This is the start of an enduring pattern in which the interventions of the “international community” consistently lead to Palestinian losses in terms of territory and political sovereignty and self-determination. But by the end of the war in 1949, the Partition Plan was effectively abandoned, with Israel conquering and holding about 78 percent of Palestine. In the years between 1947 and 1949, between 750,000 and 1 million Palestinians were expelled from their homes in terror and bloodshed, with at least 15,000 losing their lives to Israeli mass killings. During this period, in what Israel characterized as a defensive program, hundreds of towns were destroyed and thousands of place names were Hebraized (in Israel, there is a whole government committee for changing the names of places).
Today, of course, there is no corner of Palestine that is not strictly and systematically watched and controlled under the most brutal permanent occupation, the illegality of which is widely recognized among international observers and scholars. For some time, arguably, Americans could not be blamed for not knowing this, as American media outlets have long refused to report on Israel’s manifold violations of international law. Most American supporters of Israel seem to have no understanding of or curiosity about what it might have taken to create a majority white, European, and Jewish state in an area of huge cultural and historical importance in the Southern Levant. What we are being asked to believe is that the people fighting for the bare minimum of humanity on their own land against a nuclear-armed, U.S.-backed power are the terrorists. To this point, the United States and Israel have been able to manage the storyline deftly and successfully, comfortably insulated from serious scrutiny by the corporate press. As Alain Gresh observed earlier this year, Israel lies “[w]ith an added advantage that other states lack: Western officials and media start from the assumption that Israel tells the truth.” But despite the expert narrative control and consent manufacture, the number of people willing to believe the official story is shrinking rapidly—too rapidly for the U.S. and Israel, both now desperately seeking ways to better control what comes across our screens. People around the world are looking at their phones, sick from gruesome images coming out of Gaza. They are beginning to understand that they haven’t been told the truth, and they have questions. Try as they might, the United States and Israel are losing the information war. The global community cannot ignore what is right in front of their eyes.
In May of this year, the University Network for Human Rights, in partnership with Boston University, Cornell University, the University of Pretoria, and Yale University, published the most thorough and comprehensive legal analysis to date of the question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. The authors of the report “conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention.” The report finds “that Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.” The report goes on to point out that Israel killed more children during the first four months of its onslaught in Gaza than had been killed in all global wars over the past four years. The majority of the dead in Gaza have been women and children; indeed, according to recent analysis from Oxfam, “More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.”
The University Network for Human Rights report also notes that the massacre in Gaza has been “the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded.” Investigations conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists “showed at least 116 journalists and media workers were among” those killed by Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Aid workers, too, have found themselves in Israel’s crosshairs. In August of this year, on World Humanitarian Day, Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), observed, “At least 289 aid workers including 207 UNRWA team members & 885 health workers lost their lives.” “The war in Gaza broke all existing rules of war,” the UN experts said in their statement. Last month, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied territories, said that Israel risked becoming a pariah in the world due to its “continuous, relentless vilifying assault” on UN personnel and aid workers. She and other UN experts questioned the ongoing integrity and legitimacy of the UN as an institution if Israel’s actions pass unchallenged. Israel kills with impunity—it can even get away with killing American citizens. The United States seems to be willing to unravel its own global order to continue its support of Israel’s genocidal campaign.
As I write, Israel has begun its ground invasion of Lebanon, on the heels of several high-profile assassinations, including that of Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for over 30 years. According to reports, Iran has responded by launching missiles into Israel. Many in Washington and Tel Aviv have long wanted a full-blown war with Iran, and it now seems close at hand. If the United States government were helmed by responsible, competent people, they would use its still considerable might to deescalate the region and open a way for peace. There are at least 41,000 people dead in Gaza; that Israel and the United States still don’t think they’ve made their point reveals much about the version of Zionism that emerged victorious.
Notes.
[1] Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton University Press 2011), 39.
[2] Adel Manna, Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956 (University of California Press 2022), 4.
[3] Nadim N. Rouhana, “Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism: Obscuring Settler Colonialism” in Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadim N. Rouhana, eds., When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021), 60.
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