Bombshell

by Mia Bloom

  According to The Independent’s Robert Fisk, who arrived on the scene soon after the blast, one woman lay in a heap, a chair leg run through her,3 and another lay outside with her brains gushing out of her head. A small child was so mutilated by the bomb that the eyes had been blasted out of his head. Amid the acrid smoke and broken glass, rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble. Jens Palme, a German photographer from Stern magazine, counted ten dead in two minutes.4

  HERZL’S DREAM

  Many people observing Israel-Palestine today assume that its inhabitants have been killing each other since Biblical times. In fact, this is not at all the case. Jews and Arabs got on well for centuries even as Jews were being persecuted in Christian Europe in inquisitions, witch hunts, blood libels, and pogroms. In the golden age of Islam in Spain, both Muslim and Jewish philosophy and science were celebrated. Jews, like Christians and Zoroastrians, were honored as “people of the book” (ahl al Kitab), their prophets recognized and respected by centuries of Islamic rulers.

  The Islamic world was largely insulated from the religious anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages and the so-called “scientific” anti-Semitism that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Europe penetrated the Middle East in both positive and negative ways, influencing political thought and technological progress. When violence erupted between the Muslim and Jewish communities it was often the result of European instigation.

  The story of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict starts with the Jewish diaspora in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While religious Zionism (love for the Holy Land) was enshrined in the Jewish faith from the beginning, the desire to create a political entity in the Holy Land developed much later. Various movements in the late nineteenth century began to agitate for a Jewish homeland. One of these, the Lovers of Zion, emerged in 1882 during the Russian pogroms and encouraged emigration to the Holy Land. At the time, Palestine was a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire,5 a narrow strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea and characterized by swamps, disease, and deserts. While there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the region since Roman times, it consisted mainly of religious scholars.6 Small Jewish settlements at Hebron, Tzfat, Tiberius, and Jerusalem were notably poor if not destitute.

  In 1894 a seminal event in France would have reverberations throughout the Jewish diaspora. A young Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany. He was found guilty, publicly stripped of his rank, and sent to Devil’s Island. But Dreyfus was innocent, and new evidence that implicated the real conspirator, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was covered up by French intelligence. Dreyfus’s religion had made him the ideal scapegoat.

  French writer Émile Zola wrote an open letter in the newspaper L’Aurore accusing the government of anti-Semitism and suppressing evidence. Most of the French intelligentsia took one side or the other. The home of liberty, equality, and fraternity witnessed some of the ugliest anti-Semitic propaganda from the literati. In attendance at Dreyfus’s second trial was the Paris correspondent for the Austrian New Free Press, Theodore Herzl. A journalist long assimilated into Austrian culture, Herzl found himself shocked and dismayed by the racist epithets he read and the rallies he witnessed in Paris where many chanted “Death to the Jews!” For Herzl this was an epiphany: if Jews were discriminated against in the home of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, they would never be safe until they had their own homeland.

  Herzl quickly wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which became the basis for political Zionism, in 1896. The next year the first Zionist congress met in Basel, Switzerland, to discuss how and where to create a Jewish state. In the sixth congress in 1903 suggestions mooted for potential sites included Uganda, Kenya, or somewhere in British East Africa. But the majority held fast to the idea that the Jewish state would have to be in the biblical Kingdom of Israel.

  Zionist groups and their supporters approached the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II about forming a chartered company to develop the area. Europeans used charter companies to establish economic and political domination over the developing world; South Africa and Rhodesia began as chartered companies, as did the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo. While the sultan refused to sanction large-scale Jewish immigration to the area, he permitted several waves of immigration with the hope that European settlement would provide hard currency and strong trading links, both of which the Ottoman Empire needed badly.

  Life was extremely difficult for the first colonists. With little infrastructure and the constant threat of disease, many quickly returned to Europe. The handful who survived were a hearty bunch of settlers whose socialist philosophy impacted their daily lives. They brought in eucalyptus trees to soak up the brackish swamps and create a bulwark against the spread of malaria. They introduced irrigation to make the desert bloom. In the early years, the colonists and the local Arab population cooperated and their children often played together. Moshe Dayan, the man who would grow up to conquer the Sinai and the West Bank in 1967, remembered as a child playing with his Arab neighbors and learning to speak Arabic, unaware that their different ethnicities would one day pit friend against friend and divide the land along confessional and religious lines.7

  As the numbers of Europeans increased, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) bought more and more land, often from absentee landlords who resided in faraway urban centers like Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. The tenant farmers (fellahin) had little to no contact with the landowners who had consolidated the small independent farms into large estates. Tension between the settlers and the expelled farmers was made worse because many of the new settlers believed that only Jewish labor should be employed on the farm. The two communities no longer benefited mutually from one another and gradually separated along ethnic and religious lines.

  The situation came to a head when the Ottomans sided with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I and the Triple Entente began to plan for the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The foreign ministers of the three European states in the Triple Entente, Mark Sykes of Great Britain, Georges Picot of France, and Sergey Sazonov of Russia, secretly met and drafted the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. In it, they envisioned a division of the Middle East between direct and indirect spheres of influence through a mandate system, which allowed European domination until such time as the colonies had matured and “were able to stand alone.”8 Britain was allocated what is now Jordan, southern Iraq, and Haifa, to provide access to a Mediterranean port. France would control southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. The czar would control Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and Armenia.9 The Holy Land remained a sticking point as both France and Britain wanted the area, so it was agreed that the issue would be settled at some future date; one possibility was internationalizing the region, like the “free city of Danzig” (now Gdansk) in Poland.

  Britain found itself in the uneasy position of fighting the war on two fronts, in Europe and in Asia. The dramatic loss to the Ottomans at Gallipoli meant that Britain needed local allies who could distract Turkish forces and make them fight a two-front war. Out of Cairo in 1915, the British high commissioner, Henry McMahon, exchanged a series of letters with Hussein bin ‘Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in which he promised Hussein control of Arab lands in exchange for a revolt against the Turks. The Arab Bureau sent Captain T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia) to contact the Hashemi family and investigate whether the Arab tribes could be convinced to blow up the Hedjaz Railway that ferried Ottoman troops from the western to the eastern Mediterranean.10 As Lawrence consulted Sharif Hussein, the keeper of the keys of the Islamic holy places at Mecca and Medina, the India Office of the Crown pursued closer relations with a young upstart religious leader, Abdul Aziz bin Abdur Rahman al Saud, best known as ibn Saud. The Hashemis and al Sauds were sworn enemies and the British negotiated with each family separately to hedge their bets as to who would prevail in Arabia.

  The background to why Britain
issued the Balfour Declaration is as complex as the Middle Eastern conflict itself. A mixture of good reasons and faulty assumptions led the British government to preemptively issue a declaration in support of Zionist aspirations in Palestine. This was done quickly, before a similar statement of support could be issued by the Central Powers. Britain hoped to get the United States into the war and the Russians back in. According to historian James Gelvin:

  Two of Wilson’s closest advisors, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, were avid Zionists. How better to shore up an uncertain ally than by endorsing Zionist aims? The British adopted similar thinking when it came to the Russians, who were in the midst of their revolution. Several of the most prominent revolutionaries, including Leon Trotsky, were of Jewish descent. Why not see if they could be persuaded to keep Russia in the war by appealing to their latent Jewishness and giving them another reason to continue the fight?11

  In London in November 1917, British foreign minister Lord Arthur Balfour issued his famous statement in a letter addressed to Baron Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community. The wording of the declaration was deliberately vague, and the French and English versions differed in specificity. The English read:

  His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.12

  When the Russian monarchy fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917, one of the first things V. I. Lenin did was make public all of the secret agreements negotiated by the czar. Among the documents released was the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Britain’s Arab allies were triply confused. Sharif Hussein had understood that Britain had promised Palestine to him as part of a greater Arab homeland, although the McMahon-Hussein correspondence avoided any mention of Palestine and excluded “portions of Syria” lying to the west of “the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” Meanwhile, the Balfour Declaration promised the Holy Land to the Jews, while the Sykes–Picot Agreement implied that it would fall under British or French colonial control.

  In 1920, the Allied Supreme Council offered Great Britain a mandate for Palestine. Prince Faisal—Sharif Hussein’s son—was given control over a new entity called Iraq (three Ottoman sanjaks or provinces that had been unnaturally fused together). His brother Abdullah was installed as king of Trans-Jordan and ibn Saud took over the Arabian Peninsula in 1924. The Middle East state system was thus born with new borders devised by British planners who were now assured that they could ship their oil from the Gulf to the Mediterranean without ever touching French-controlled soil.

  In 1920, the Jewish population comprised roughly 8 percent of Palestine; nevertheless, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the new entity’s mandate, in both the preamble and as article 6 of the text. Several Arab leaders, such as Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, virulently opposed Jewish immigration. In protest, the Palestinian Arab population refused to participate in the mandate administration.13

  Knowing that the Arabs would inevitably refuse any cooperation with the British colonial authorities, the Jewish community in Palestine, known as the Yishuv, accepted any concessions the British were willing to offer. As immigration increased, so did Arab opposition, leading to a series of riots from 1922 to 1929. The British responded by issuing several White Papers beginning in 1922, and began to scale down the number of Jews permitted to immigrate. Nevertheless, in the years between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population in the Holy Land more than doubled, from 175,000 or 17 percent of the population to 370,000 or 27 percent.14 As a result of the growing hostility between the communities and Arab opposition to both the Yishuv and the British Colonial Office, the Arab Higher Committee called for boycotts and trade embargoes.

  The Palestinian Arab revolt of 1936 had three key demands: prohibit future Jewish immigration; prohibit the transfer of Arab land to Jews; and establish a national government responsible to a representative council.15 The uprising was initially directed against the British and the Jews and included attacks against infrastructure, transportation, and Jewish settlements, neighborhoods, and individuals. The struggle quickly turned into an exercise in self-destruction as Palestinians began killing each other in large numbers, each side accusing the other of collaborating with the British. The Yishuv took a series of defensive actions. The first was to create parallel institutions so that any economic interaction with the Palestinians was unnecessary for Jewish survival. They established the port of Tel Aviv so as not to rely on Jaffa for trade and many Jews offered Britain their assistance in quelling the revolt in hopes of receiving training and weapons for the inevitable clash between the two communities. By the time order was restored in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Brits had been killed.16

  The final British White Paper, issued in 1939 and known as the MacDonald White Paper after the British colonial secretary at the time, stopped Jewish immigration precisely at a time when a safe haven was most needed, as the political situation worsened in Nazi Germany. European Jews began to enter Palestine illegally and the Jewish community planned for an eventual bid for independence from Britain. The leader of the Yishuv, David Ben Gurion, decided that the best Zionist strategy was to fight the war in Europe as if there was no problem with the British in Palestine and fight the British in Palestine as if there was no war in Europe.

  In the aftermath of World War II and the discovery of what Hitler’s “Final Solution” really entailed, world public opinion shifted in favor of Jewish settlement in Palestine and many refugees held in deportation camps were repatriated to Palestine. Palestinian Arab leaders worried about the massive influx of Jewish refugees and opted once again for a violent response. Riots broke out in Jerusalem, and Palestinian irregular forces cut off food, water, and fuel supplies to the city during the long siege that followed. There was strife throughout the country, with massacres taking place at Gush Etzion (by Palestinians) and in Deir Yassin (by Jews). Arab Palestinians began leaving their towns and villages in droves to escape the fighting.17

  By 1947, Britain could no longer tolerate the cost of empire in either lives or treasure. World War II had bankrupted the nation and one by one all of its colonial possessions were becoming independent: Sri Lanka; the “jewel in the crown,” India; and, eventually, Palestine. The British brought the Palestinian issue to the fledgling United Nations. In a surprising move, the U.N. voted in favor of partition.

  On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself to be independent and British troops left immediately. The following day the new state was invaded simultaneously by all of its neighbors: Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Israel emerged victorious from the war and with decidedly more territory than had been proposed by the 1947 Partition Plan. Resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly recognized the state of Israel. In 1948 and 1949, the U.N. arranged a series of ceasefires to end hostilities. Several armistice agreements were signed but never ratified to become formal peace agreements. The Arab states refused to recognize the existence of the state of Israel and considered the 1948 war to be a great catastrophe; while Israelis call it the War of Independence, Arabs know it as al Naqbah (the disaster). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went or were forced into exile. The Palestinian areas that remained under Arab control in the West Bank were annexed to the Kingdom of Jordan and the Gaza Strip found itself under Egyptian administrative control.

  The origin of the Palestinian refugee problem has long been a subject of intense debate among Israeli scholars and even among Palestinians. Estimates for the number of Palestinian Arab refugees who fled or were forced out of their homes during the fighting vary from 520,000 (Israeli sources) to 726,000 (U.N. sources) to more than 800,000 (Arab sources). Since 1987, when an Israeli freedom-of-inf
ormation act allowed the war records to be released, many of the accusations Palestinians have leveled over the years about Israelis’ deliberate ethnic cleansing campaigns have turned out to be true. Israeli revisionist scholars like Benny Morris, Illan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim have detailed the creation of the refugee problem by emphasizing the deliberate campaigns to clear Palestinians from strategic areas around Jerusalem and Lydda (Lod).18 Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to reside in temporary housing, a refugee problem that has still not been fully addressed. With every war that Israel and Palestine fought, culminating in Israel’s greatest victory in the Six Day War of 1967, the refugee crisis worsened and the Palestinian population tended increasingly to radicalization and the pull of violence.

  Before 1967, competing Arab governments used the Palestinian refugees in their bid for leadership of the Arab World. The Arab countries were sharply divided between those with monarchies and those with revolutionary regimes. The crisis within the Arab world resulted in a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, as well as hostile accusations within the Arab League. In 1964 President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt took the initiative and established the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was soon recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, even though its leader, a lawyer named Ahmed Shukairi, was little more than an Egyptian puppet. Several other Arab countries established their own Palestinian groups. Far from the manipulation of Arab leaders, another group, Fatah (Harikat al Tahrir al Watini al Falistini; the acronym, read backwards, meant the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), had been founded in 1954 in the Persian Gulf, where many educated Palestinian engineers and teachers had gone to earn a living. Unlike the other organizations, this group was created by the members of the Palestinian diaspora and remained in the background of the Palestinian movement until after the defeat of 1967. At the Battle of Karameh in March 1968, Fatah fedayeen (guerrilla fighters) were able to repel Israeli forces back across the Jordan River. This small victory in the wake of the agonizing 1967 defeat propelled Fatah to prominence.19 The group’s leader, a young engineer named Yasser Arafat, became the chairman of the PLO in 1969 and launched a new era of armed struggle.