It is a widespread belief that the Zionist Jews came
to ‘Palestine’ to dispossess and oppress the Arabs who lived there. The
truth, however, is that the Jews came to buy land from anyone who wanted
to sell, and that the Arabs in ‘Palestine’ have only ever been
oppressed by other Arabs.
I shall make my case by quoting extensively from an
anti-Zionist historian: Nathan Weinstock. Why? Because if the data collected
by an anti-Zionist (despite his loud protestations) shows the Zionist Jews to
be innocent, then the case against the Zionist Jews falls on its face.
First, let us get a picture for how the Arabs
oppressed the Arabs in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’
Arabs oppress Arabs in British Mandate ‘Palestine’
_________________________________________________
According to Nathan Weinstock in Zionism: False
Messiah, what he calls “the Palestinian Arab national movement”
before WWII was not in fact a popular movement: “the leadership,”
Weinstock explains, “was in the hands of the big landowners of the a’yan
stratum (urban notables).”[1] To see what these
landowners were like, consider that elsewhere in his book (p.59) Weinstock
explains that the a’yan stratum is synonymous with the effendis. What
were they like?
“At the summit
of the social pyramid, which was characterized by a rigid, traditional
structure, was the effendi group, that special phenomenon of the
Middle East, the ‘city notable, an absentee landlord whose main function is
to provide credit and who does not interest himself at all in farming.’ They
belonged to the handful of leading families who derived their incomes from
the estates cultivated by the fellahin and from usury. Not that they turned
their noses up at property speculation. The indifference they showed for the
lot of the peasantry, their economic activities (investments) and their
parasitic role therefore made them akin, to a certain degree, to the
comprador bourgeoisie of the colonial countries.”[2]
Above Weinstock compares the effendis to “the
comprador bourgeoisie.” Weinstock is a Marxist and this is part of his
jargon: “In Marxist terms, comprador bourgeoisie exist in developing
countries and act in their own economic interests, often sacrificing national
interests and the interests of their country’s proletariat in order to do
so.”[3] A
comprador bourgeois, in other words, is a pitiless exploiter of the poor. So,
according to Weinstock, “the Palestinian Arab national movement” was led by
people who were specialists in the oppression of the common Arab folk.
We may wonder, however, whether “comprador
bourgeoisie” is really the proper term for a social scientist to use when
making reference to the Arab ruling class in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ The
term used for European absentee landlords who were not much interested in the
productivity of agriculture but lived off the land worked by serfs who didn’t
own their parcels, and who were in a perpetual state of debt-slavery due to
the usury of the same landlords, is feudal lords. I see no reason to
apply a different term when the exact same structure is repeated in the
Middle East. So, where Weinstock refers to this arrangement as
“quasi-feudal,” I would take the “quasi” out.[4]
Weinstock explains that the Arab poor, who were
referred to as fellahin, “formed the mass of the population (nearly 70
per cent), living in the country’s 850 Arab villages,” and Weinstock remarks
on “the fierce exploitation which they suffered at the hands of the
landowners and usurers.”[5] Says
Weinstock:
“The fellahin,
attached to the land, were mercilessly exploited by the big landowners, and
burdened with levies and taxes. In the village, the peasant was at the mercy
of the sheikh, the governor, the farmer-general to whom the taxes were
farmed out, and the merchants and usurers who vied with each other for the
prize of crushing him. Traditionally the villager had only one means of
escaping this misery: nomadism, the peasant’s last resort.”[6]
Elsewhere he remarks:
“In 1936...the
average debt run up by an Arab peasant family -- £25-30 a year -- was
equivalent to or in excess of its annual income. In these conditions there
was hardly any hope of escaping recurrent indebtedness. ...Interest rates,
usually 30 per cent, sometimes went as high as 50 per cent. In such
conditions, and taking into account the parasitic mentality of the landowners
who considered their lands above all as a speculative investment, Arab
farming remained refractory to technical progress.”[7]
In other words, the peasant Arabs, the fellahin,
were abused serfs.
The main point is this: since “the landed
aristocracy had practically undivided control over political life,”[8] we
should expect that what Weinstock calls “the Palestinian Arab national
movement” was a cynical ploy by the Arab feudal landlords to increase the
value they were getting from oppressing the common Arab folk. And, indeed,
this is precisely what Weinstock documents.
The “Palestinian Arab national movement” -- a terrorist racket run by
the Arab feudal lords
__________________________________
How did the big Arab landowners react to Zionist
immigration? Weinstock explains:
“When the
question of the acquisition of land by the Zionist organizations in Palestine
is broached, it is usually not stated that these land transactions are to be
explained by the big Arab landowners’ eagerness to sell their property.
Furthermore, these purchases led to an extremely lucrative wave of property
speculation: the price of a dunam near Rishon-le-Zion, originally 8
shillings, had gone up to £P10-£P25 by 1931. The Zionists certainly paid
dearly for their Holy Land. The high prices sales, which brought a fortune to
the usurious, parasitic effendi class, proved disastrous for the fellahin who
were expelled from the estates they had worked on.”[9]
So the Arab peasants who had been “mercilessly
exploited by the big landowners” were now simply cast out as the Arab landowners
rushed to make a killing by selling the land to the Zionist Jews, who would
pay top dollar for it. But Weinstock explains that these same landowners were
the leaders of the supposed “Palestinian Arab national movement.” Doesn’t
this mean that there was really no such movement?
Why then would Weinstock insist on the existence of
this supposed movement? Because Weinstock is a committed anti-Zionist,
and no matter what the facts, he will spin them with an anti-Zionist
interpretation. Thus, he asserts that,
“Massive
dispossession of the fellahin was the essence of the Palestinian problem,
both as a national and a social issue. Certain authors try and skirt round
this direct consequence of the Zionist enterprise...”[10]
According to Weinstock, then, “certain authors try
and skirt round” the supposed fact that the problems of the Arabs in this
part of the world are supposedly the fault of the Jews. Here Weinstock is
denying what he himself has documented: that the essence of the
‘Palestinian’ problem was the exploitation and oppression of the Arab
fellahin by the Arab effendis. The Zionist Jews simply came to buy land
-- they did not create the conditions of extreme exploitation and oppression
that the Arab feudal lords perpetuated in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ Who
could the Zionist Jews buy land from? Most of the fellahin did not have title
to any land, so the Zionists bought land from those who had title: the
effendis. There was absolutely nothing that the Zionist Jews could do about
this particular state of affairs, and so when Weinstock blames the Zionist
Jews for the conditions of the fellahin he plumbs the depths of absurdity.
But this is the only strategy open to an anti-Zionist, because the Zionist
Jews, unlike the Europeans who conquered the Americas, did not come to steal
and exterminate, but to offer good money in order to purchase
legally from those who had title.
What is most amazing is that even Weinstock concedes
that many “fellahin [were] displaced following purchases made by non-Jews,
say, for example, an Arab middleman or moneylender who then sold the property
acquired to a Zionist purchasing body,” and many other displaced Arab poor
had been “peasants who were not share-croppers ...[but] smallholders,” which
is to say peasants with actual title to their tiny plots of land, whose plots
were also bought by Arab middlemen and resold to the Zionists.[11]
This is quite significant because, according to Weinstock himself, the large
Arab landowners were charging with ‘treason’ any smallholders who tried to
make a decent buck selling their land to the Zionists. In order to prevent
such sales, the large Arab landowners directed terrorist attacks against the
smallholders; this allowed the feudal lords to buy the plots of smallholders
for a song and resell them at very high prices to the Zionists. Weinstock
explains:
“...whilst in
public these [Arab] leaders stepped up their incendiary attacks on Zionism,
denouncing any transfer of ancestral soil to the Jews as a betrayal, they
secretly enriched themselves by means of the very operations which they so
furiously attacked. The fanatical braggadocio was designed for the gallery.
It made it possible to win the support of the masses. It also, no doubt,
served other less avowable goals. Under nationalist pressure, the small Arab
landowners no longer dared to sell their land openly to the Jews. During the
1936-39 Revolt Husseini’s guerillas actually executed ‘traitors,’ but ‘at the
same time a close relative of the Mufti was doing a brisk trade in precisely
such allegedly criminal deals, but with a notable difference, for this person
used to force sales from Arab small-holders at niggardly prices and then
resell to the Jews at the usual exorbitant rates...’ In other words,
hyper-nationalist propaganda became a lucrative industry, indeed even an
American-style racket, for the Arab gentry.”[12]
It is hardly any fun arguing against Weinstock when
he makes my arguments for me.
The references to “Husseini” and “the Mufti” above
are to the same person: Hajj Amin al Husseini, a scion of one of the biggest
feudal landed families in British Mandate Palestine, whom the British made
Mufti of Jerusalem in 1920 after he demonstrated that he could organize
massive terrorist riots against the Jews.[12a] We
shall take a closer look at him in Part 4. What matters here is that Hajj
Amin al Husseini was the supreme leader of what Weinstock calls the
“Palestinian Arab national movement.” So clearly there was no such
movement. What existed in ‘Palestine,’ by Weinstock’s own admission, was a
racist movement against all Jews, Zionist or not, fomented by the feudal Arab
landowners who didn’t want the Arab poor getting any ideas from the Jews, who
were mostly socialists. In order to prevent this, any Arabs who tried to be
friendly with the Zionist Jews risked execution. Hajj Amin even executed his
own cousin for sympathizing with the Zionists, as Weinstock himself explains.[13]
The other contributing factor to the problems of the
Arab poor was that the land which was not being hogged by the Arab effendi
class was being hogged by the British Empire. This is made evident when
Weinstock explains that “popular discontent reached such a pitch that the
British authorities had to offer to put Crown lands at the disposal of the
evicted share-croppers.”[14]
The Zionist Jews were much nicer to the Arab poor than the Arab ruling
elite
________________
It was in fact the Zionist Jews who showed the most
compassion for ordinary Arabs, even though the Arab leadership was mobilizing
these ordinary Arabs in terrorist attacks against the Jews. As historian
Anita Shapira documents,
“The defensive
ethos [of the Zionist Jews] was distinguished by two parallel approaches to
the Arabs. One related to the Arabs as individuals, while the other viewed
them as a people. The existence of those two approaches helped fashion a
distinction between relating to the Arab as a human being and, contrastingly,
seeing him as a member of a people vying for control of Palestine. While in
the first domain, Jews were obliged to adhere to the acceptable canon of
[Jewish] ethical tenets in interpersonal behavior, in the second sphere, the
constraints of national interest served to release persons from compliance
with those rules. Thus it was argued that one should act to promote the
rights of the Arab worker and better his lot and avoid placing him at any
disadvantage. Yet at one and the same time, it was permissible to demand of
the Arab that he renounce his exclusive claim to Palestine. It was prohibited
to expel the fellahin; but it was perfectly alright to purchase land from the
effendis, even if that involved eviction of fellahin from the soil.”[15]
As is common for Jewish historians, Anita Shapira --
considered a Zionist -- sounds critical of the Zionist movement. What is her
criticism? Namely, that the Zionist Jews did not save the fellahin from the
big Arab landowners!
This is typical: it is hard for Jews to conclude
that they have been sufficiently ethical precisely because Judaism is an
ethical civilization. Shapira herself points out that there are “three sins”
that “rather than commit, a Jew preferred to be killed” -- these are “‘idol
worship’...along with bloodshed and incest.”[16]
That’s interesting: rather than shed blood, it is orthodox for a Jew to allow
himself to die (contrast this with Muslims, for whom it is orthodox to
slaughter the recalcitrant infidel[17]).
One dramatic example of this aspect of Jewish ideology was given in the
Middle Ages, when more than 1000 Jews were trapped in a bishop’s palace in
the city of Mainz by a mob of ‘Crusaders,’ and, as they awaited the carnage
that was to come, these Jews decided to commit suicide rather than take enemy
lives in self-defense.[18] This same
ideology is what made Jewish self-defense in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ very
difficult, because even after repeated Arab terrorist attacks the Jews living
there found it hard to take arms to protect themselves, and so it was a long
time until they did. Anita Shapira’s book is an attempt to understand this
psychology of the Jews that delayed an effective self defense -- at the cost
of many Jewish lives -- for a good long time.
The peculiarities of Jewish ideology thus explain
the stark difference between the Zionist Jews and the Arab effendi class. The
Zionist Jews “argued that one should act to promote the rights of the Arab
worker and better his lot,” whereas the Arab effendi class couldn’t run out
of ways to oppress the Arab fellahin and executed them if they tried to get
rich -- as the big landowners were getting rich -- by selling land to the
Zionist Jews. Moreover, to Jewish ethics, “It was prohibited to expel the
fellahin” whereas the Arab landowners were evicting them. Even though many
Zionists held that Jewish land should only be worked by Jewish labor, many
others disagreed, and in those plots where the Arab landowners did not evict
the fellahin, as Shapira herself admits, “Arab workers stayed on to work in
the Jewish-owned fields.”[19]
So Shapira’s implied judgment against the Zionist
movement is entirely unfair: the Zionist Jews were not God. They were not
responsible for, nor could they easily solve, the problems in Arab society
that the Arab ruling class had created for the Arab poor. And her gesture of
deference to the Arabs in her repeated implication that there was an Arab
nationalist movement contradicts the facts: there was a racist anti-Jewish
movement built on the traditional anti-Jewish racism rampant all over the
Muslim world ever since the Muslim expansion began (see Part 1).
This was a fire whose flames were fanned by the Arab ruling class in British
Mandate ‘Palestine,’ which got rich directing terrorism towards both ordinary
Arabs and Jews.
But though the Zionist Jews were not God, the
overall assessment must still be that they were on balance a blessing to the
fellahin. Nathan Weinstock himself explains why:
“...the
repercussions on the Arab economy of the inflow of capital into Palestine and
the country’s economic expansion were felt in the long run. Agriculture
advanced considerably during this period, when there were the beginnings of
an evolution towards intensive farming. Arab orchards, which covered an area
of 332,000 dunams in 1921, spread over 832,000 dunams in 1942.
Cattle-breeding and poultry-rearing made rapid headway; there was an increase
of the order of 60 per cent in 13 years. The orange-groves developed at great
speed: 22,000 dunams of citrus fruit in 1922, 144,000 dunams in 1937.
Vegetable production increased almost tenfold between 1920 and 1938. On the
whole, however -- and it was here that the immobilisme and the backwardness
of the social structures really told -- Arab agriculture continued to suffer
from a shortage of capital.
On the other
hand, in a period of economic boom and massive immigration, the scarcity of
man-power and the intense tempo of construction favoured the taking on of
Arab workers. Moreover, a growing number of Palestinian Arabs found jobs in
the public services: 18,000 in 1930, more than 30,000 in 1945. One should add
to this those employed by concessionary companies, concerns in which the
majority of capital was Jewish but which were bound under their statutory
provisions to take on a certain proportion of Arab workers.
An Arab
industry likewise made its appearance...”[20]
So, many of the displaced Arab fellahin found jobs
elsewhere in the booming economy that the Zionist Jews created. If that were
not so, there would not have been a massive immigration of Arabs into British
Mandate ‘Palestine,’ as documented in Part
2 of this series. These new jobs that the displaced
fellahin were getting were outside the feudal economy that had
oppressed them.
Conclusion
___________
In conclusion, one cannot argue that the Arabs in
British Mandate ‘Palestine’ were dispossessed by the immigrant Jews. The Arab
poor had already been dispossessed by the brutally exploitative and
oppressive ruling Arab effendi class, who took zero interest in the welfare
of commoners just as the European medieval feudal lords also did. By
contrast, it is not difficult to argue that the Arab fellahin benefited, on
the whole, from Zionist immigration, and one can find the argument even in
the work of an anti-Zionist historian such as Nathan Weinstock, who
nevertheless would like to argue that the Zionist Jews were doing harm.
It is true that many Arabs lost their land and/or
homes during the war of 1948 (Israel’s War of Independence). But this, once
again, was not the fault of the Zionist Jews, as will be shown in Part 4 of
this series.
The next piece in
this series is:
“How did the 'Palestinian movement' emerge? The
British sponsored it. Then the German Nazis, and the US”; Historical and
Investigative Research; 13 June 2006; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
__________________________________________________________
Footnotes and Further Reading
__________________________________________________________
“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The
British sponsored it. Then the German Nazis, and the US.”; Historical and
Investigative Research; 13 June 2006; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm
Some of this material was originally published here:
“Anti-Semitism, Misinformation, And The Whitewashing
Of The Palestinian Leadership”; Israel National News; May 26, '03 / 24 Iyar
5763; by Francisco J. Gil-White
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2405
