The Revolution That Will Be

The Question of Palestine, by Edward W. Said. Times Books, 265 pp., $12.50.

It is said that Max Nordau, one of the early pioneers of Zionism, once burst into Theodor Herzl’s room crying: “There are Arabs in Palestine! I didn’t know that—but then we are creating an injustice.” Nordau had good reason to be surprised. Herzl’s book, The Jewish State, which first set forth the Zionist program, made no mention of any Arabs, and the Zionists rallied around Israel Zangwill’s slogan, “A land without people, for a people without a land.” As late as 1969 Golda Meir could straightfacedly assert: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

In private, of course, the Zionist leadership knew perfectly well that the Palestinians did exist. In his Diaries, Herzl noted that “we shall have to spirit the penniless population [of Palestine] across the border . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” In 1940 the man in charge of that expropriation, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary: “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country . . . there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.” Three days after Israel declared independence, Weitz wrote that this principle would be applied to the Palestinian refugees; the Foreign Ministry agreed, “We must act in such a way as to transform the exodus of the Arabs into an established fact . . . so that they return no more.”

In The Question of Palestine, Dr. Edward Said, Professor of English at Columbia University and a member of the Palestinian National Council, the governing body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, uses evidence such as this to show that “the Zionists considered the Arab problem as something either to be avoided completely, or denied (and hence attacked) completely.” They were aided by what Said calls “the moral epistemology of imperialism.” Since Palestine was part of the non-European world, for example, Herzl saw nothing wrong with dismissing Palestine as “a plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient” to which the Jewish colonists, as “representatives of Western civilization,” would bring “cleanliness, order and the well-distilled customs of the Occident.” Arthur James Balfour, whose Declaration committed the British Empire to the Zionist cause, admitted that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. . . . [Zionism is] of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.” Balfour may have been influenced by the letters from Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (later president of Israel) instructing him on “the treacherous nature of the Arab” (Said uncovered quite a few Zionists who said such things—in private), but his views were perfectly in keeping with the assumptions of the imperialist mission civilatrice. For that matter, Said argues, “Zionism never spoke of itself unambiguously as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient.”

Zionism also drew strength from “a remarkable tradition in the West of enmity toward Islam in particular and the Orient in general,” a tradition Dr. Said documented in a previous book: Orientalism (New York; Pantheon Books, 1978). In that tradition the Orient and its inhabitants are regarded as so outré that they cannot possibly be understood by the European without the assistance of an expert “Orientalist.” The Zionist thus assumed the responsibility “for expressing what the Arabs were really like and about;” a typical example was the Weizmann-Balfour letters mentioned above. Zionism, as Said writes, saw Palestine “as essentially empty of inhabitants not because there were no inhabitants . . . but because their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was systematically denied.”

The slogan “A land without a people” was part of that denial, of course, as was the claim that the Jewish settlers were “making the desert bloom.” (As to that, see Alan George, “Making the Desert Bloom: A Myth Examined,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1979.) Just recently I noticed an ad for Sabra Liqueur, an Israeli product whose basic ingredient is the Jaffa orange—“Our Mediterranean miracle,” as the copywriters describe it. “From out of the dry, sun-scorched sands,” they say, “where it is impossible for anything to grow, something incredibly did.” One would never guess that there were Arabs in Palestine who not only “incredibly” made this “impossible” fruit grow, but also exported it to Europe for centuries before the Zionists came.

“The Zionists,” says Professor Said, “convinced themselves that these natives did not exist, then made it possible for them to exist only in the most rarefied forms.” Moshe Dayan gives a glimpse of one way this was done:

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state there. In considerable areas of the country [the total area was about 6 percent—ES] we bought the lands from the Arabs [or more properly, from their feudal overlords—BB]. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal [Dayan’s own village] arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat—in the place of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Sarid—in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehosua—in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. [Emphasis added.]

Professor Israel Shahak, head of the Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights, has concluded that almost 400 villages were destroyed in this fashion: “destroyed completely, with their houses, garden-walls, and even cemeteries and tombstones, so that literally a stone does not remain standing, and visitors are passing and being told that ‘it was all desert.’” This was called “redeeming the land.”

Another pillar of Zionism was the “conquest of labor,” also known as “Jewish socialism.” This was a systematic boycott of the Arab economy, and especially of Arab laborers. There is nothing wrong with voluntary boycotts, but there was nothing voluntary about the conquest of labor. “We stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there,” confesses David Hacohen, former head of the Jewish trade union Histadrut. His minions would also “pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes,” and even “attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they bought.” No wonder the “ignorant” Arabs opposed the Jewish state which the United Nations decreed in 1947.

The “rarefication” of the Palestinians increased dramatically when Israel was founded. The U.N. gave the Zionists, who had 30 percent of the population of Palestine and owned less than 7 percent of the land, 55 percent of the country. This gerrymander gave the prospective Jewish state almost as many Arabs as Jews (more, if one counted the nomadic Bedouins). It was obviously to Israel’s advantage to “transfer” these Arabs across her borders, and that’s what happened to the Palestinian refugees.

Irish journalist Erskine Childers was the first to demolish the Israeli claim that the refugees left at the incitement of radio broadcasts from the Arab countries. (See “The Other Exodus,” The Spectator, May 12, 1961.) No such broadcasts were made. But Israeli forces did use sound trucks to warn the Arabs, “Unless you leave your homes, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate.” Deir Yassin was a peaceful Arab village, well outside the borders of the proposed Jewish state, where six weeks before Israel declared independence the forces of Menachem Begin’s Irgun massacred some 250 men, women, and children. (The murderers received no punishment, other than a tongue-lashing from their regular-army liaison officer, and they receive Israeli government pensions to this day.) When they heard the news, Begin boasted, “The Arabs began to flee in terror, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’” The Israelis helped the terror along: Irgun radio warned urban Arabs to expect plague outbreaks “in April and May” of 1948, the time period of the big Israeli offensive (‘Plan Daleth’) of which Deir Yassin was a part. At the same time, Israeli commander Yigal Allon started a rumor campaign in Galilee to the effect that Jewish forces were coming to burn the Arab villages: “The flight,” he said, “numbered myriads.” The 60,000 residents of Lydda and Ramleh departed after Moshe Dayan’s columns shot up and looted those towns. (According to ex-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, this was done at the direct order of David Ben Gur-ion, Israel’s first prime minister.) Out of about 950,000 Arabs who had lived in what became the new, enlarged Israel, some 780,000 were refugees, giving the new state a solid Jewish majority and all their abandoned property, to which the Israeli government promptly helped itself. It was, as President Chaim Weizmann put it, “a miraculous simplification of our tasks.”

New settlements were built on confiscated refugee lands much as before; Lod was built in the place of Lydda, Kfar Sha’ul in the place of Deir Yassin. On sites where the terrain was unsuitable for Jewish settlement the villages were razed and trees planted. Not only refugee lands were confiscated; the 1950 Law for the Acquisition of Absentee Property expropriated the holdings of anyone who had left his usual residence for any place not controlled by the Israeli forces. According to David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), some of the victims had only crossed the street. In years to come, even those who stayed put often lost their lands on some pretext or another. For example, the Minister of Defense might bar Arab farmers from their land by declaring it a “security area”—whereupon the Minister of Agriculture would seize it because it wasn’t being cultivated and give it to someone who would cultivate it. Funny how these things work out: the someone was almost always a nearby Jewish colony. Similar methods are being used on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today.

“After 1948,” notes Said, “every Palestinian disappeared nationally and legally.” Those who fled became “refugees,” those who stayed became “non-Jews.” As Dr. Shahak observes:

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and we took their country away from them. They did not exist.”—Golda Meir, 1969

There are no Israeli babies born in the Zionist state. According to the statistical records compiled by the Government, there are only Jewish babies and non-Jewish babies. Similarly, the Israeli Yearbook shows that there is no Israeli corn, tomatoes, or citrus fruit — there is only Jewish corn, tomatoes and citrus fruit and non-Jewish corn, tomatoes and citrus fruit. If, as the Government claims, all of the citizens of Israel are equal, why segregate the babies—or, for that matter, the corn, tomatoes and citrus fruit?

Segregation usually implies discrimination, and Israel’s “non-Jews” face discrimination in education, in politics, in virtually every field, at the hands of the “Arab experts” who, according to Uri Avneri, a dissident member of the Israeli parliament, form “a secret government, unsanctioned topic: the Arab who murders Jews out of pleasure, and the pure Jewish boy who defeats “the coward swine”!” Perhaps it should not be too surprising then that when Israeli chief of staff General Mordecai Gur, who commanded the March 1978 invasion of Lebanon which killed nearly 2000 Arab civilians, was asked whether his forces made the proper distinction “between civilians and non-civilians” he replied: “What distinction?” (Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978.) During the 1973 war the army issued a booklet written by one A-braham Avidan, rabbi to the army central command, that said: “When our forces encounter civilians during the war or in the course of a pursuit or a raid, the encountered civilians may, and by Halachic standards even must be killed, whenever it cannot be ascertained that they are incapable of hitting by law,” within the Israeli bureaucracy. Such discrimination and oppression is documented in, among other sources, Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel (Second edition New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). The Palestinian Jiryis lived in Israel until he attempted to publish his book; the Israeli government promptly proved the book’s thesis by suppressing it and deporting its author.

Unsuppressed books, Said reports, include “Children’s literature which [is] made up of valiant Jews who always end up by killing low, treacherous Arabs, with names like Mastoul (crazy), Bandura (tomato), or Bukra (tomorrow). As a writer for [the Israeli newspaper] Ha’aretz said (September 20, 1974), ‘Children’s books deal with our us back. *Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he gives the impression of being civilized. [Emphasis added.]”

Contrary to Golda Meir, the Palestinian people did exist. Said produces references to Filastin Arabiyah — Arab Palestine — dating back to the eighth century. Though one foreign over-lord after another denied them political independence the Palestinians were still regarded, by themselves and by others, as part of a discrete political and cultural entity in the Arab world. They shared in the “Arab Awakening” that began at the end of the nineteenth century and they fought in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, in exchange for British promises of independence (which were, needless to say, not kept). Palestinian writers, intellectuals and political groups promoted Palestinian nationalism and opposition to British rule and Zionist colonialism.

had been obscured from the world for almost a century, to the world and, more importantly, to Palestinians themselves.” (Said sees this as a major factor in rallying the Third World behind the Palestinian cause.) In short, Said concludes, “The PLO [has] made being a Palestinian not only a possible thing . . . but a meaningful thing for every Palestinian, no matter where his place of residence, no matter what his final ideological commitment.”

Every Palestinian group is part of the PLO. But if this universality is part of the PLO’s strength, it also lays the organization open to the charge that it is a terrorist group. Said argues that “at least since the early seventies, the PLO has avoided and condemned terror.” (According to libertarian

Palestinian nationalism was not sufficient to cope with the strains imposed on it by Zionism, the British mandate and the beginning of modernization. That it still lives at all is partly a tribute to what Said calls “the sheer persistence of the Palestinians; they would not go away, not even after they had been dispersed, driven out, conquered,” and also a tribute to their unique response to the forces of dis-possession—the Palestine Liberation Organization. “One of the things that Western analysts of the movement have regularly misunderstood,” argues Said, “is that the PLO did not get its popularity, or its supporters, or even the volunteers who joined up, because it was a made-up device to terrorize the world. Rather, what the organization represented was the workings of a general Palestinian consensus sensitive to Palestinian history and aspirations.”

Through a network of Palestinian student organizations, trade unions, professional societies, women’s groups, welfare and relief societies, and so on in an evergrowing list, “the PLO took over schooling, arming, protecting, feeding, and generally providing for Palestinians, wherever it could.” The members of these organizations elect representatives to the Palestinian National Council, which serves as a Palestinian parliament-in-exile. (These representatives elect other Palestinian notables to join them. Evidently this is how Said became a member.) The National Council makes policy for the PLO as a whole and elects an Executive Committee (which in turn elects a chairman, currently Yasir Arafat) to carry it out. The PLO diplomatic arm and such centers as the Institute for Palestine Studies in Bei-rut serve “to interpret the Palestinian reality … which

Palestine, committed to the equality of Jew and Arab, which the PLO embraced after the 1967 war. Previously, the Palestinians had clung to the idea that “the Zionist invasion” could somehow be undone, “that we can all go back to 1948, to our property, to an Arab country, presumably ruled by traditional Arab despots”—a vision Said rightly finds “historically and morally intolerable.” In 1969, the PNC “bit the bullet” and passed a resolution calling for a democratic state in Palestine that included all its inhabitants. What this means is that the Palestinians have done what the Israelis have never done —indeed, what they cannot do without renouncing the very cornerstone of Zionism —they have accepted “that their Other, the Israeli-Jewish people, is a concrete political reality with which they must live in the future.” Since 1974, the PLO has refined its program to accept a Palestinian “mini-state” on the West Bank and Gaza as a first step to the larger goal and especially to establish the precedent of the Palestinian right to self-deter-mination. The PLO opposes the sham “autonomy” of the Camp David accords because it would not establish that precedent. In fact, the Hebrew text of the Camp David treaty bars even the word “Palestinian,” substituting the phrase “the Arabs of the Land of Israel.” Menachem Begin apparently still believes what he told an audience of kib-butzniks in 1969 (as recorded in Noam Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East?): “When you recognize the concept of ‘Palestine’, you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel . . . then what are you doing here? You came to another people’s homeland, as they claim, you expelled them and you have taken their land. . . .”

Imad Dean Ahmad, a Palestinian himself, such sources as M.C. Hudson’s Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy seem to support that claim.) Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is largely a response to Israeli state terrorism (cf: General Gur) and other Israeli crimes, alongside which “Palestinian ‘terror’ [is] a very pale and incompetent thing.” (From 1970 through 1977, “according to Israeli Embassy figures, Palestinians had killed 258 Jews,” Commonweal magazine found. “During the same time, Israel had killed over 2000 Arabs in retaliation.”) “But,” Said writes, “I would not wish it otherwise.”

For Said, “the true novelty and the revolutionary force of the movement” is the idea of a secular, democratic state in

In Dr. Said’s opinion, what he has elsewhere described as “the libertarian power” of the Palestinian idea holds great promise for the other Arab countries as well. He was impressed, for example, by what he saw at the 1977 session of the PNC: “For the first time in recent memory there was a broadly representative national body in the Arab world actually debating important matters in a totally democratic way. The PLO came in for heavy criticism; its executive committee, Yasir Arafat, and the rest were subjected to minute, critical scrutiny. There is no Arab country in which such thing can go on.” The Palestine issue has served to rally opposition to the regimes in Iran, Egypt and Kuwait, to name only a few. “Palestine,” says Said, “has become the acceptable trope for bringing criticism to bear on state authority.” No wonder that Dr. Ahmad should find Palestinian activists, even members of Arafat’s Al Fatah, “receptive to the classical liberal tradition.”

Unfortunately there are all too many libertarians, even though they claim to be the keepers of the classical liberal tradition, who seem quite unwilling to support the Palestinian cause, or even to acknowledge its justice. True, it is extremely unpopular, and the truth about it well concealed, but obstacles don’t stop libertarians from taking equally unpopular and hard to prove positions on a score of domestic issues. Besides, as Dr. Said points out, most of the facts about Palestine and Zionism are readily available; the problem is to connect them, “and see them not as they are hidden, but as they are ignored or denied.”

The problem, I think, is that the thinking of anti- Palestinian libertarians suffers from a common defect that manifests itself in their view of foreign affairs. The people who think the Palestinians “want to drive the Jews into the sea” are generally those who believed — and perhaps still believe — that the U.S. was “defending freedom” in Vietnam or Iran. In all these cases, the facts about the oppressed people in question were and are easy to find, but they were ignored or denied — mainly, in my opinion, because of an unwillingness to believe that these non- Western people could have genuine grievances that libertarians could support. The sometimes reactionary and obtuse letters LR has received in response to its articles on Iran and the Middle East seem prime examples of this.

The Question of Palestine is especially valuable to libertarians because it deals not so much with facts about Palestine (though it includes them in abundance) as with attitudes: the kind of attitudes libertarians have to shuck off if they are ever to effectively relate to the people of the Third World. I would like to see American libertarians, for example, demand the U.S. end its support for Israel — not because it is a drain on the Treasury, or because it could embroil us in war, although those are perfectly good reasons, but because it enables Israel to murder and oppress the Palestinian people. I would like to see American libertarians put aside their conservatism, and their xenophobia, and their terror of being somehow contaminated by “leftist” issues and learn to say, with the Egyptian student demonstrators of the early seventies: We are all Palestinians.

Bill Birmingham is a staff writer for The Libertarian Review whose writings also appear frequently in other libertarian publications.