And here is where I learned the story of Palestinian subjugation began in earnest. After the British took control of Palestine, they denied Palestinians any form of administrative autonomy. Palestinian leaders, frustrated, demanded that Britain give them some form of representation and self-determination.9 British officials responded with a smirk, reaching out to the Palestinians and saying, Don’t be silly. Of course you can have your representation. Simply accept our Mandate, and poof – representation you shall have.
Accepting the Mandate, Palestinians knew, would be political suicide. It would signal their “recognition of the privileged national rights of the Jewish community in what they saw as their own country, and formal acceptance of their own legally subordinate position.”10 Palestinians balked at such preconditions. Britain tsk-tsked back with wagging fingers and said, You ask too much of us; nothing can be done. Then, just to make their point clear, they granted the Jewish community “fully-fledged representative institutions, internationally recognized diplomatic representation abroad … and control of most of the other apparatuses of internal self-government, amounting to a para-state within, dependent upon, but separate from, the mandatory state.”11
The march toward establishing a Jewish state, with no consideration for the nationalist rights of Palestinians, was on. And the logic that led this march was best articulated by Foreign Secretary Balfour himself, who wrote in a 1919 confidential memo that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires … of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”12
Jews’ blood, in other words, was redder.
It pains me to admit this, but there was a time when I thought that Jews somehow populated a different spectrum in God’s moral universe. After years in Israel, in the Holy Land, studying mystical texts from mystical teachers subtly suggesting that we – Jews – mattered in unimaginable ways, I couldn’t help but believe. After all, who doesn’t want to think of themselves as unique, as special in some ethereal way? And the evidence that the rabbis brought to prove this point seemed compelling. “There must be a reason we’ve survived so long,” they’d say. “There must be a reason the world focuses a disproportionate amount of attention on a people which make up less than .01 percent of the world’s population,” they’d say. “It must be that we indeed are a light unto the nations,” they’d say. I couldn’t help but believe.
But the story of Palestinian oppression began to complicate such pedestrian notions. The story of Palestinian suffering began to cloud my worldview, one which had cast Jews as good and Palestinians as evil. But the words “good” and “evil” were suddenly difficult to dole out with a child’s simplicity, as I had done in the past. Even if I had wanted to believe in the simplicity of such false absolutes, the words no longer allowed it, parsing themselves, splitting in the air and reconfiguring before me, “evil” becoming “veil,” wrapping itself around “good” and hiding all that had previously been clear to me. Palestine’s history complicated matters because the Palestinians were my enemy, both theoretically and practically. And Palestine’s history complicated matters because I couldn’t stomach the brutal ways in which my enemy was, in part, created.
After World War I, Britain and France were handed control over a number of territories that the League of Nations recognized as “independent states.” These were Arab territories “deemed to be in need solely of a period of external advice and assistance” until they could be turned loose as nation states in their own right. Such territories included Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine.
Now consider this: of these Arab territories, all – save the Palestinians – were given some form of governmental representation by the British and the French during their training-wheel years, and by 1946 all of these Arab territories – save Palestine – had become full members of the international community as free, self-governing states. In Palestine, the Jews were given the Jewish Agency, which served as a pre-state government, while the Palestinians were given virtually nothing. Sure, the British had offered them a similar Arab Agency, but only if this agency supported the terms set out in the Balfour Declaration, which gave national rights only to the Jews. That left the Palestinians as the only group with “no international sanction for their identity, no accepted and agreed context within which their putative nationhood and independence could express itself, and their representatives had no access whatsoever to any of the levers of state power.”13
Why were Palestinians the only significant population of people in the Middle East not granted nationalist rights in the early twentieth century? And why is this still true nearly one hundred years later? One hundred years: five generations of political suppression, colonial occupation, brutal violence, and shame.
I had never known any of this history – had never cared. But the more I read, the more I thought, Man, they were fucked. Yes, some of their plight came down to incompetent and corrupt leadership – as is so often the case – but the reality was that the Palestinians were victims. The British government had chosen to champion a competing victim, my people. Zionist leaders gained the sympathy and support of British officials, principally Balfour, after years of lobbying in the early 1900s. And in recognizing not merely the Jews’ tragic existence in Europe but their dream – the necessity – of a homeland in Palestine, the British government made the people already inhabiting Palestine invisible. It was a zero-sum game, and in the end, we won.14
I could no longer feel the jubilation of that victory.
None of this mitigates the unspeakable traumas experienced by European Jews, including my grandmother and grandfather, out of which the State of Israel arose. After the pogroms, after the Holocaust – where nearly half of my family was turned to ash – there was a legitimate need for a Jewish homeland. A Jewish refuge. The Jewish immigrants who descended upon Palestine after the wars weren’t buoyed by waves of enthusiasm. They were treading currents of desperation. And after World War II, when Hitler’s murderous regime was fully revealed, there was no doubt that Israel would be established. Not as a colonial enterprise. But as restitution for the sins of history.
However, Israel’s establishment became a defining moment for Palestinians – a defining trauma. Every year, as Israelis celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians mark al-Nakba – the catastrophe.
Before Israel was born in 1947, both Jews and Palestinians suffered. Jews had struggled against anti-Semitism and genocide in Europe, and Palestinians had struggled against a lack of self-determination and colonial suppression – two very different victimhoods. Victim-hoods which can be noted, side by side, but cannot be compared. Nor should they be. Yet noting them side by side offers a glimpse into the lens through which each people was looking when 1947 turned to 1948. A lens tinted by bitterness and sorrow, by injustice and suffering. A lens through which it would have been impossible to consider the needs and desires of the other side with any clarity or empathy.
When the time came for me to fully consider the birth of Israel, I thought, This is just about understanding my enemy. I have no interest in judging the circumstances around which Israel was created. I have no interest in exploring why Palestinians refused the United Nation’s partition of Palestine into two states in 1947 – one Jewish and one Arab – or how the war started between the two sides in 1948 and ended with Israel claiming nearly eighty percent of Palestine. There are already too many who-shot-first arguments, too many who-is-to-blame explorations; there is no need for another. Yes, multiple Arab armies simultaneously attacked Israel the moment it defeated Palestinian fighters and declared independence. Yes, Jewish para-military forces conquered Palestinian lands and kept them. But I’m not interested in finger-pointing, I’m interested in the result, in what happened to the Palestinians and their society after the war, in why they consider themselves the true victims of history.
What I had not known, what I could no longer ignore,
was that the original Arab–Israeli war ripped a majority of Palestinians from their homes and scattered them across the region. It altered the landscape to such a degree as to make it wholly unrecognizable, with the most vibrant Palestinian cities, such as Jaffa and Haifa, conquered and subsumed into the new Jewish state. I learned that:
[a]t the beginning of 1948, Arabs constituted an absolute majority of the population of Palestine … approximately 1.4 million out of 2 million people. They were a majority as well in fifteen of sixteen subdistricts of the country … [and] owned nearly 90 percent of the country’s privately owned land.
After the war, over half the Palestinian population had become refugees as Israel conquered and seized seventy-eight percent of what was once mandatory Palestine (up from the fifty-five percent offered to Jews in the UN Partition Plan). Overnight, those Palestinians who remained in the new State of Israel became a super-minority, with everyone else either huddled in the twenty-two percent of Palestine that was left to them or living in camps elsewhere.15
During our time in Jerusalem, Jamie and I lived right in the heart of some of this subsumed land; many of the stone homes that surrounded us, now occupied by Jews, had been abandoned by Palestinian families in 1948. Living there, it was difficult to imagine the neighborhood differently than it now stands: a wealthy, vibrant Jewish area full of synagogues and falafel stands and boys with yarmulkes playing football in the streets. But beneath our lives, a Palestinian neighborhood had disappeared, with someone, some where in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem, telling their grandchildren in hushed tones about the ways things used to be before violence forced them to leave their dishes and bedding and family photographs, before they were forced to abandon their ancestral homes.
Even with the passage of over sixty years, emotions remain raw. Claims to the land remain tenuous, fragile. Ask an Israeli casually whether an old house here or a domed structure there used to belong to Palestinians – as I did innocently on occasion – and you’d risk an angry look, as if the question alone suggested that things could or should be given back, that the country could be pulled out from under their feet. And when the words came from a Palestinian – “That was my childhood home” – they were taken by some as a provocation, a threat.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was stunningly honest about what a realistic Palestinian perspective on things might be:
If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?16
We have taken their country. I learned that there were some in 1948 who wanted to take more than seventy-eight percent. After routing the Egyptian army, Yigal Allon – a thirty-year-old commander and future acting Prime Minister – wanted to push his soldiers all the way to the Jordan River and take what is now the West Bank (or the Occupied Territories, depending on which side of the divide you’re on). He wanted to reclaim a “Whole Israel.” Allon’s reasoning was partially strategic – taking this land would widen Israel’s narrow waist – but Ben Gurion rejected the idea because he didn’t want to absorb the West Bank’s Arab population into Israel; he wanted a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.
Allon’s desire to grab the West Bank was not merely rooted in military strategy. It was also rooted in a desire to redeem every inch of biblical Israel for Jews, a desire propelled by United Kibbutz, an organization that represented much of the kibbutz movement in Israel, a movement which played a central role in the development of the state. In 1955, United Kibbutz pushed the idea of a “Whole Israel” for “the Jewish people … and the Arabs living in the land.” The Palestinians as a people were invisible, again. United Kibbutz, following the lead set by European entities before them, “treated the Jews as a nation, and the Arabs as individuals without national rights.”17 The kibbutz movement cultivated a system in which collectives could take over large swaths of agricultural land. It provided a path to a future in which every inch of Palestinian soil could be planted by Jews, and defended by Jews. However, for Palestinians, it was the continuation of the discrimination they endured under British rule, to put it lightly. While it might be argued that the new Israelis, traumatized by history and fighting for survival, were simply defending themselves by pursuing their best interests at the expense of another, this truth cannot be ignored: it was at the expense of another.
Once, I witnessed the following conversation between an Israeli teacher and his seventh-grade student in Washington, D.C.:
Teacher:
As you can see, Israel’s national anthem is one that represents the spiritual hopes and dreams of an entire nation.
Student:
Wait, does everyone in Israel sing this?
Teacher:
Yes.
Student:
I think maybe some people wouldn’t sing it.
Teacher:
Everyone sings it.
Student:
What about the Palestinians –
Teacher:
I said it’s for the nation, not for the Arabs.
The teacher then asked his class to rise and listen as the Israeli national anthem – Hatikvah, “The Hope” – was played. These American students, twelve and thirteen years old, knew the words, had them memorized in Hebrew, though many of them had never visited Israel, and might never press the grit of its sandy soil between their fingertips.
As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
And towards the East
An eye looks to Zion,
Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.18
Of course, Hatikvah isn’t an anthem for everyone living Israel; it’s a song for those whose dreams in that country matter. It’s a song for those Jews who dream of freedom in “the land of Zion,” the word “Zion” – traditionally interpreted to mean biblical Israel – never spoken lightly. And while from 1948 to 1967, the country’s borders never stretched to the Jordan River, there were those who still dreamed that one day it would happen, choosing to ignore the massive Palestinian population standing in the way.
It was this yearning, perhaps, that led to what happened in the Six Day War of 1967, during which Israel seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (along with the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula). As the noted historian Gershom Gorenberg put it, once Israeli troops crossed into the West Bank, “the logic of the avalanche took over. On the ground, commanders seized opportunities. In the cabinet, politicians renewed dreams unconnected to defense”19 – those dreams of claiming (or reclaiming, as many Jews would say) all of the Land of Israel. And when Israel’s army decimated Jordanian troops so easily that the land stood bare, empty of enemy soldiers, Israeli politicians couldn’t resist. Thus, the Old City of Jerusalem was stormed and taken. The West Bank was flooded and taken. The reasons weren’t strategic. They were spiritual, irrational, based on two thousand years of longing. Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister who oversaw Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967, later described the West Bank as “part of the flesh and bones – indeed the very spirit – of the Land of Israel.”20
But the flesh and bones of Palestinians were ignored. Again. That is, until Israel awoke and suddenly realized it was responsible for millions of Palestinians living in the now-occupied West Bank and Gaza.
In 1967, there were minority voices in the Israeli government, the voices of leaders who couldn’t stomach the idea of Israel taking these lands. The Minister of Justice at that time, Yaakov Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonialization in the whole world, can we really consider [controlling] an area
in which mainly Arabs live?”21 Such voices were overruled when Jordan seemed unwilling to negotiate with Israel for normalized peace. And so, the Israeli government chose a wait-and-see strategy, uncertain what to do with the West Bank but unwilling to relinquish it.
Dayan, for his part, wasn’t worried about the Palestinians, as evidenced by the infamous way in which he described matters to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan:
The situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will … You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.22
The situation today. Forty years later, Israel continues to force its presence upon a stateless Palestinian people. While Dayan was one of the first to correctly identify Palestinians as a nation – “You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today” – he incorrectly assumed that they would fulfill the awful imaginings of his metaphor and submit to his military.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 19