Soon after the announcement of the Partition Plan and its aftermath, between December 1947 and May 1948, Palestine was systematically extinguished and a new country, the state of Israel, was created in its place. The death of a country and the birth of a new one are momentous, historic events. The fact that the country being born then was Israel, whose people had lived through the barbarity of the Final Solution and the Holocaust, made the birth all the more momentous. Numerous historians have participated in the celebratory retelling of this birth story, and accounts for Western audiences often highlight joyous tears, hard work, perseverance, and triumph.41 True as they may be, these accounts are often woefully incomplete, for they say nothing of the other, concurrent development, a country’s death, or of how that death occurred. But the historical record cannot be ignored.
According to one estimate, by 1948, Palestinian forces totaled around seven thousand fighters, including two separate volunteer forces, local rural militias, and various youth defense groups. Zionist forces, meanwhile, including the Haganah, the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and alleged professional volunteers from abroad, swelled from fifteen thousand to sixty thousand.42 A protracted conflict started soon after the UN vote on the Partition Plan—more sporadic Zionist-Palestinian conflicts had in fact been going on for some time—and a major Jewish military assault was launched in April 1948. One of the darker episodes of Israeli history occurred on April 9, when more than two hundred inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin were massacred, their bodies subsequently mutilated and dumped in wells.43 Other cities and villages were quick to fall—Haifa, Jaffa, West Jerusalem, and eastern Galilee all in less than a week in late April, followed by equally decisive victories in the first two weeks of May. “The attacks were brutal,” write two scholars. “Through terror, psychological warfare, and direct conquests, Palestine was dismembered, many of its villages purposefully destroyed and much of its people expelled as refugees.”44
A massive Palestinian exodus out of Palestine was thus set in motion. Israeli sources put the number of refugees at 520,000, while Arab sources estimate the number to be anywhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000.45 Like so much else in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the exact causes of the exodus are still debated and discussed.46 Contrary to the long-accepted proposition that Arab radio broadcasts encouraged Palestinians to leave, it is now almost uniformly accepted that such broadcasts did not exist and that most Palestinians were in fact urged not to abandon their homes and communities.47 Instead, the exodus appears to have been the result of two primary factors. Sheer terror appears to have been most compelling, with many Palestinians fearing a fate similar to that of Deir Yassin’s inhabitants. Psychological warfare only fueled Palestinian fears, as pamphlets dropped from the air warned Palestinians of the risks they faced if they stayed behind.48 Researchers later found that rumors of rape of women by Israeli soldiers and other “Jewish whispering operations” accounted for the movement of a significant percentage of Palestinians.49 Equally instrumental were a variety of military actions. Notable was the Haganah’s systematic depopulation campaign, aimed at clearing out clusters of Palestinians in the areas it considered to be territorially and strategically important. This campaign was officially adopted in May and June 1948 under the auspices of Plan Dalet, the basic premise of which was “the expulsion over the borders of the local Arab population in the event of opposition to our attacks.”50 According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe,
Plan Dalet was a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Had the Palestinians refrained from attacking Jewish targets after the partition resolution was adopted, and had the Palestinian elites not left the towns, it would have been difficult for the Zionist movement to implement its vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. Plan Dalet was not created in a vacuum. It emerged as the ultimate scheme in response to the way events gradually unfolded on the ground, through a kind of ad-hoc policy that crystalised with time. But that response was always inexorably grounded in the Zionist ideology and the purely Jewish state was its goal. Thus, the main objective was clear from the beginning—the de-Arabisation of Palestine—whereas the means to achieve this most effectively evolved in tandem with the military occupation of the Palestinian territories that were to become the new Jewish state of Israel.51
The plan officially went into effect on May 14, when the state was declared, by which time the exodus was well under way. Nevertheless, under the aegis of the plan, in July, in a ten-day period, over 100,000 Palestinians were driven into areas controlled by Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Another 100,000 to 150,000 refugees were expelled the following October. The “decimation of Palestinian Arab society” was now complete.52
Within hours after the state of Israel was declared, shortly after midnight on May 15, 1948, five Arab armies crossed over Israeli borders in what was to become the first of many abortive attempts to “liberate” Palestine. These included the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and the (Palestinian) Liberation Army. Transjordan’s King Abdullah was less concerned with Palestinian liberation than with his own territorial ambitions in Palestine and, especially, Jerusalem. His “flirtations” with members of the Jewish Agency just weeks before the invasion are generally thought to have been responsible for his army’s relatively scant contribution to the conflict.53 Nevertheless, a protracted and bloody war ensued, killing thousands of Arabs and Israelis in the process. Despite some initial successes, the Arab armies soon suffered humiliating losses, losing more territories than had been allotted to the Arab state under the UN Partition Plan. By the time an armistice agreement was signed in February 1949, Jordan occupied only the Arab sections of Jerusalem and the area that came to be known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River). Egypt held on to a narrow piece of Palestinian land along the northeastern border of the Sinai, the Gaza Strip. These were all that remained of a non-Jewish Palestine, and even they were at the mercy of non-Palestinian rulers now. Palestine was gone, its name erased from the world’s maps, its people exiled to refugee camps across the region. The map of the Middle East was forever changed.
PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM
The geographic entity Palestine may have died in 1948, but Palestinian identity did not. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the sense of being Palestinian, along with Palestinian nationalism, had been alive for some time. Much has already been said about Palestinian nationalism, but in light of subsequent Israeli denials of its existence and validity, it is important to briefly highlight some of its features and evolving phases. Much of this denial by Israelis, although lately no longer the norm given changing political circumstances, was no doubt motivated by the need to depopulate Palestine and make room for the incoming immigrants. But equally important for both Israeli and Western social scientists has been the lack of recognition of the fundamentally different nature of Arab and Palestinian nationalism from nationalism in the West and among Zionists, who were, after all, the West’s cultural and historical product. In the West, nationalism has historically been unidimensional and singular in focus and orientation. There has been only one series of objects, all organically related, toward which loyalty has been directed: one nation, one leader, one well-defined piece of territory, and one set of national symbols such as flags, anthems, and heroes. But Arab nationalism and its derivative of Palestinian nationalism have been multidimensional, layered, more diffuse in focus and orientation. Thus a Palestinian living in Jaffa or Haifa in the late 1800s could have simultaneously had loyalties and attachments to geographic Palestine, to the caliph in Istanbul, and to Islam and other symbols of caliphal rule. Over time, historical nuances prompted changes to popular conceptions of what constituted a nation. With the demise of Ottomanism and the Ottoman nation, focus shifted to Arabism and the Arab nation, the death of which in turn ushered in still more focused, more localized nationalist variations: Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian, Palestinian, and so on. Each current overlapped with its succeeding one, never quite disappearing altogether but retainin
g some, albeit diminished, salience.54 Such was the path taken by Palestinian nationalism into the middle years of mandatory rule.
Insofar as the distinctively Palestinian phase of Palestinian nationalism is concerned, we can detect five clearly identifiable periods (table 2). The first started in the early 1900s and lasted throughout the mandate up until 1948. This was a time of formation and initial expression of a uniquely Palestinian identity, which was shaped and hardened by a gradual awakening to the threat and the permanence of Zionism, the “Arab Revolt” of 1936–39, and the eventual nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. The second period was one of eclipse, the so-called lost years of Palestinian nationalism, marked initially by the shock and trauma of dispossession and then by the influence of Palestine’s self-appointed liberator, the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser. Palestine’s “lost years” continued until 1967, when the liberator was himself defeated and his own territory was occupied by a victorious Israel. What followed was a third phase of Palestinian nationalism, marked at first by institutional reorganization and military self-assertion—the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—and then a second dispersion, this time of the PLO to locations even farther away from the homeland. For the sake of convenience, these may be called “the PLO years,” lasting from about 1967 to 1987, although the PLO was officially established in 1964. Palestinian nationalist sentiments once again assumed their local, indigenous character beginning in late 1987. This time they took the form of a spontaneous uprising, the intifada, that took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by storm, lasting into the early 1990s. This prompted the signing between Israeli authorities and PLO officials of the Declaration of Principles, commonly referred to as the Oslo Accords, in 1993, which led to the emergence of a set of protostate institutions with the name Pales-tinian National Authority. Each of these phases, shaped and influenced by the one before it, witnessed a different facet of Palestinian nation--alism, conditioned often by circumstances beyond the Palestinians’ own control.55
Table 2.Phases in Palestinian Nationalism
Three broad, interrelated developments were responsible for the gradual emergence of Palestinian nationalism and its supplanting of Otto-manism. The first was the steady dismantling of Ottoman rule in Istanbul, in turn facilitating the rise of so-called Westphalian sovereignty and more locally based nationalist sentiments in the various provinces (velayats). In fact, in the decades before the collapse of the dynasty, the Ottoman sultan had been forced to acquiesce to the convening of a parliament. Although the phenomenon was short-lived, the presence of local representatives in the parliament heightened locally based nationalist sentiments throughout the Arab provinces.56 A second development was the advent of “print capitalism,” the spread of the printed press and books, especially the publication of many influential newspapers such as Filastin, Al-Karmil, and Al-Mufid.57 A number of highly celebrated “cultural leaders” also emerged—writers, poets, journalists, and other public intellectuals—and their influence was felt in such areas as Palestinian literature, the arts, historical awareness, and education. In the words of one observer, “Palestinian Arab writers during the British Mandate . . . did not produce literature that was only of abstract historical interest. On the contrary, by influencing the nationalism of the upper sectors of the population, they played an integral part of the historical process by which national consciousness spread through the various classes of Palestinian Arabs until it reached the masses of the population.”58 These two developments occurred within the context of, and largely in reaction to, the massive influx of Zionists into Palestine and the increasing entrenchment and institutionalization of the powers of the Zionist community. Together, these three developments combined to produce the earliest manifestations of Palestinian nationalism.
During the time of the British mandate, Palestinian nationalism itself can be divided into three phases. The first phase, which actually started just before Britain’s mandatory rule, somewhere around 1914 to 1917, was one of peaceful resistance. Apart from the flourishing of Palestin-ian literary and cultural nationalism, this period witnessed notable Pal-estinians’ employment of various methods of persuasion aimed at getting the British to abandon their pro-Zionist policies and to grant the Arabs a measure of self-rule.59 But these notables were bitterly divided among themselves; they could not meaningfully organize and coordinate their efforts, and their repeated petitions to British authorities fell on deaf ears. A second phase thus gradually emerged, one of increasing radicalization of Palestinian identity, beginning in July 1928. By this time the Zionists were well on their way to creating a separate, Zionist economy in Palestine, one from which the indigenous population was largely excluded. Palestinian anger and resentment were reaching a boiling point. Attempts were made to shore up the organizational aspects of Palestinian efforts, although they were short-circuited by the eruption of violent riots in August 1929. Not until 1936, however, did a revolutionary, third phase come into being, a three-year rebellion known as the Arab Revolt.
The Arab Revolt started out as a general, nationwide strike in April 1936. While the strike itself was in specific response to the Haganah’s retaliatory murder of two Palestinians, it occurred in a highly volatile atmosphere built up over the preceding years. The strike lasted for six months, during which Palestinian unions, chambers of commerce, virtually all businesses, and transportation ceased to operate. Initiated at the height of the fifth aliya, when an unprecedented number of Zionists were entering Palestine, the strike had disastrous economic and long-term consequences for the Arabs. The revolt only encouraged the deepening and exclusivist nature of the emerging Zionist economy; desperate Jewish laborers were only too happy to fill the void left by striking Palestinians. But before the strike ended, a spontaneous, violent rebellion had started and by 1938 had swept up almost all the Arab population of Palestine. Historian Benny Morris estimates that the number of active participants in the revolt grew from between 1,000 and 3,000 in 1936 to between 2,500 and 7,500 in 1937 and another 6,000 to 15,000 in 1938.60 The intensity of the violence grew accordingly. In 1937 alone, the rebels launched 438 attacks, of which 109 were against the British police and military, 143 were against Jewish settlements, and another 109 were against “Arab houses.”61 In 1937, in retaliation, British authorities deported most leaders of the Arab Revolt to the Seychelles. Only after a massive commitment of force by the British was order restored and the rebellion put down in 1939.
In response to the rebellion, the British promised to limit immigration into Palestine and to grant the country its independence in ten years. But British repression had also increased significantly during the rebellion years, and the Palestinians emerged from the revolt weaker and more defeated than when they had started it.62 By the time the rebellion was over, some five thousand Palestinians were dead and another ten thousand wounded. Scores were arrested and fined, and many of the revolt’s leaders were deported. Palestinians became even more marginalized in the country’s economic life after the rebellion. Zionists were now more determined than ever to secure their independence from Arab labor and Arab markets.63
As devastating as it was, the Arab Revolt only foretold a bigger “catastrophe” that was to befall Palestinian nationalism in less than a decade. The Palestinians never fully recovered from the revolt, and their efforts both then and later to see glory in defeat could only go so far, and then only psychologically rather than in reality.64 By the time 1948 and 1949 came around, there were no leaders, only refugees. And no real leaders, at least Palestinian ones, would emerge for another two decades. For the Palestinians, the interlude from 1948 to 1967 thus became one of shock and silence, introspection, and, near the end, mounting frustration to do something, anything. By then the Palestinian problem had become a full-blown Arab problem, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the Arab world (table 3).
Table 3.Palestinian Refugees of the 1948 War
SOURCE: Samih K. Farsoun and Christina E. Zacharia
, Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 137.
Because of the geographic dispersion of the Palestinian nation and the birth of a Palestinian diaspora, its leaderless and organizationless character, and the larger geopolitical predicament in which it found itself, from 1948 until about 1967 Palestinian nationalism lost its geographic focus and gave way to a more encompassing, seemingly more powerful, Arab nationalism. This broader nationalism also came to be known as Pan-Arabism. That the primary rallying cry of Pan-Arabism was the liberation of Palestine is itself indicative of the resonance of Palestinian nationalism. But for a variety of reasons, many of which revolved around political considerations at home, the Palestinian cause was now picked up by non-Palestinian political aspirants near and far, large and small. Of these, by far the most influential and history making, and the one on whom not only the Palestinians but millions of other Arabs pinned their hopes, was Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser had been a volunteer from Egypt in the 1948 war and later became a lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army. After 1952, he became Egypt’s strongman. For nearly two decades, “Nasserism” would sweep across Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.
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