ESSAY
Crossroads to Statehood

By Daniel Mandel

Zionism and Palestinian nationalism jockey today for an historic compromise in the territory of the former British Mandate. That one was never reached before is the starting point for claim and counter-claim as to which side was ultimately responsible. But it can also be the starting point for a related but distinct investigation: what ingredients of national discipline and organisation were required for statehood and why did the Jews acquire them whilst the Palestinians did not, at any rate, until much later?

In 1917, Jewish statehood was indeed the aspiration of Zionist leaders, but one considered scarcely attainable in their lifetimes. The Jews were a distinct minority: in 1918 only 66,000 out of a total population of 639,000, or just over 11.5 per cent, something like the ruling Alawis in present-day Syria. Given Zionist vulnerability, Jewish minority status in Palestine and the support of considerable neighbours, why did Palestinian nationalism fail to overrun Jewish nationalism as it intended throughout to do?

When the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, and later confirmed and cemented by the League of Nations in a general post-war settlement to which the Arab powers were also party, the Zionist leaders possessed only an international title to a National Home. What this home would prove to be, how it would be constituted, with what measure of agreement with Arab parties and on what footing, were all open questions, not unlike Palestinian final status issues once Israel and PLO signed the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Contrary to the familiar chide of the post-colonial school that Zionism was a colonial, oppressive enterprise, it was committed to democracy, to its own peril when one considers its relative strength at the time. Its internal political arrangements were representative: both the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency were elected bodies encompassing a wide degree of Jewish opinion. This was never true of its closest Palestinian Arab parallel, the Arab Higher Committee, which remained from first to last the political vehicle of a single, singularly uncompromising man, Haj Amin el Husseini.

Rather than depending on cheap Arab labour, Jewish land was worked by Jews. Zionism avoided colonial exploitation, though not without cost to the Palestinians nonetheless, as the use of Jewish labour always meant a loss for Arab labour, even in an expanding agricultural sector. Though Jewish industry made Palestine an attractive land for Arabs from outside Palestine, it also resulted in the importation of a modern, western society into an indigenous Eastern one. The differences in the material and social development between the two societies were bound to draw them into conflict.

Zionism had problems that cost it dearly. The 1920s realised no massive influx of Jews to Palestine and the numbers that came might have been still less had the US not effectively barred its doors to further Jewish immigration in 1924. Nor did auguries of Arab-Jewish co-operation in Palestine take root. There were preliminary understandings, such as the 1918 Hussein-Hogarth discussions and the Weizmann-Feisal agreement, which suggested that Arab and Jewish nationalism might be reconciled. Had Arabs achieved independence in Greater Syria, these agreements might have come to something, but the opportunities of the 1920s, once lost, never returned. In the 1930s there was no longer any prospect of Arab-Jewish accord and British policy was increasingly dictated by European exigencies. Jewish nation building was insufficiently swift for it own good, just as Palestinian Arab reaction was in some form inevitable.

For all these Zionist reversals, the Palestinians made the least of their opportunities in this period. Mandates, as a rule, were to be prepared for self-government. The Jews, basing their claim to their ancestral land on historic title, present need and international recognition, accepted British proposals for a constituent assembly to represent Palestine’s inhabitants. Haj Amin and his party, basing themselves on a sense of unqualified entitlement, opposed the notion of any reciprocal national recognition. In 1929, a Palestinian Congress elected a moderate Arab Executive interested in representative institutions, but it was out-flanked by the Mufti. The Arab Higher Committee rejected proposals in 1922 and again in 1931 for a Legislative Assembly or even an Advisory Council to be shared with the Jews as a distinct group. Palestine, exceptionally amongst mandated territories, remained to the end without representative institutions.

The rejection of democratic principle or agreed procedure bedevilled Palestinian nationalism throughout the Mandate. It militated against the emergence of Arab parties and tended to concentrate power in the hands of the Mufti. Henceforth, for a Palestinian notable to embrace negotiation or compromise in the face of the Mufti’s policy of boycott was to invite inclusion in what became a long list of murdered Palestinian nationalists. The boycott of representative institutions was followed eventually by an armed uprising against the Mandatory power in 1936. Despite at all times possessing powerful British friends and administrators partial to their cause, Haj Amin succeeded only in turning the armed might of Britain against them.

The Jews, being a minority with only small land holdings, worked assiduously to cultivate land, often purchased at prohibitive prices, to settle immigrants, and evolved the educational, social and agricultural infrastructure to sustain them. The Technion, Israel’s MIT, was founded in 1924, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem the following year. Vulnerable to marauders, the network of Jewish collective farms and settlements evolved a small, mobile defence force. Facing privation and financial austerity, especially in the 1920s, their answer was to develop a sophisticated range of international fund-raising activities.

Little Arab money, in contrast, ever flowed into Palestine. There was no Arab Agency (despite British suggestions that one be founded), no Arab University, no Arab land development fund, no harnessing of the considerable resources of Palestinian landowners and absentee landlords. To the end of the Mandate, the Palestinians avoided the creation of national institutions, selected no national anthem and had ready in 1948 none of the machinery of government which the Jews were able to apply to their new-found independence.

The British retreat from its commitments under the terms of the Mandate was exemplified in the White Paper of January 1939, which imposed drastic and effectively permanent restrictions on future Jewish immigration and development on the eve of the Second World War. This terminated a peaceful Anglo-Zionist relationship.

This meant that perhaps a million or more Jews never reached sanctuary in Palestine and that Arab demographic superiority was preserved. It meant, at the end of the war, that both sides were sufficiently balanced in strength, one too strong to be persuaded, the other to weak to be acquiesced in, ensuring the impossibility of a peaceful, post-war settlement, despite the best efforts of the United Nations.

But the Palestinians, although they endured no Holocaust, fared worse in nation building. For their policy of insisting on absolute priority to work, it needed wider support than it could hope to command in the post-war, post-Holocaust world. The Palestinian response to a settlement which would deliver them sovereignty in only part of Palestine was to scornfully reject it. Various lines of negotiation and international enquiry after the Second World War were met by unyielding Palestinian maximalism, and even a boycott of a UN investigating committee in 1947.

When the UN duly determined to partition Palestine between its Arab and Jewish inhabitants, the Palestinians, fortified by strong opinion but weak military preparedness in the Arab and Muslim world, fought the proposal. So Palestine was partitioned, not by agreement, but by war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes.

The Palestinian propensity for abjuring compromise to the bitter end might reflect what Hanan Ashrawi is pleased to describe thus: "We are different from the Jews. There is a purism and idealism in our approach which is based on principle." The end result of such idealism has been an all-or-nothing gamble that caused the Palestinians to lose most, then all, of the former Mandate and more than compromise would have originally necessitated. This left them out of the picture for a generation, more at Arab than Jewish insistence. It was only the Israelis in the 1949 armistice talks at Rhodes who wanted to meet a Palestinian delegation. The Arab states insisted on its exclusion.

Lacking any indigenous territory under Palestinian control, Israeli Arabs derived nationalist education from an ironic source: the history and ethos of Zionism. One Palestinian nationalist in Israel, Muhamed Wattad, even wrote of the need for auto-emancipation, an idea that forms the title of a classical nineteenth century Zionist tract whose central argument is that no people can be strangers everywhere and sovereign nowhere. In contrast, Palestinians under Jordanian rule were assimilated, by persuasion or compulsion as the case might be, to a Jordanian identity which only lifted when Israel replaced Jordan in the West Bank.

The Jews enjoyed less than complete success, however, on the matter of internal national discipline in pre-state days. A wartime partition plan was shelved in 1944 after the Stern Gang assassinated the British Minister of State in Cairo, Lord Moyne. In 1948, the UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish aristocrat who was biased against Jews but had actually also saved some in the war, was assassinated by the Sternists in Jerusalem. The only result of this crime was that it delayed Israel’s admission as a member of the United Nations. Maverick wings of Zionism, outside the consensus attainable within the representative institutions of Zionism, posed at this point a serious test of Zionism’s internal discipline.

The Sternists fought the British even throughout the war and were not above assassination and indiscriminate killings. The Irgun, under Menachem Begin conducted a more intelligent form of guerrilla warfare against Britain, and avoided assassination and generalised acts of terror, the King David Hotel bombing excepted. It was also prepared to fight British rule by spectacular acts of sabotage and bloody retribution for the hanging of Irgun prisoners. The Jews were generally out of sympathy with the militants, but tended to admire their valour: thus their tacit sympathy for them and thus the British mistake of antagonising further the whole Jewish population with repressive decrees and collective punishment. Opposing the dissidents only fitfully, the Jewish Agency eventually resorted to a policy of arrest and neutralisation in co-operation with the British called the saison which still inflames emotion in Israel to this day.

Such a policy had its unsavoury aspects. But it might well have been also the necessary price of national discipline. Zionism has derived advantages from a leadership rarely outflanked by hard-liners or extremists. Even in contemporary Israeli politics, atomised by an impractical electoral system, pragmatic government has generally prevailed. Above all, when the Irgun independently imported arms aboard a ship named the Altalena in the early days of statehood, prime minister David Ben Gurion determined once and for all to insist that Israel would have but a single authority and sovereign voice. This led to another controversial action, the sinking of the Altalena by Israeli forces with the loss of life of some Irgunists. But the point was made, and Begin, otherwise wrathful and uncompromising, demonstrated his appreciation of the larger issue by submerging the Irgun into the Israel Defence Forces. Other sectarianisms abound in Israel, but political sectarianism has so far been avoided, however close it has seemingly loomed at times.

The Palestinians, in contrast, throughout have suffered the misfortune of being reduced to the mercy of extremist parties and factions. The career of Haj Amin has already been noted. The 1967 Six Day War delivered the Jordanian occupied former Mandate to Israeli hands and permitted Palestinian front groups to emerge in their own right free of their Arab clients. But it was hard to define what this freedom portended. Yasser Arafat, in taking over the PLO, a Nasserite creation of the 1960s, spent decades unifying Palestinian factions behind him in the coin of terrorism and guerilla warfare. A host of quasi-nationalist institutions were now created, even a representative body, the Palestine National Council, but always subject to despotic whim. And with still more militant Palestinian factions emerging outside the PLO, the PLO found itself in a perpetual minuet of finding and exchanging protectors and patrons as well as waging internecine warfare that the Jews avoided even at the height of the saison and the Altalena incident.

From the start of the Arafat years, the PLO was wholly representative of paralysis, unable in the 1970s and 1980s to advance beyond an internal commitment to destroy Israel allied to an external policy of negotiation. The contradiction involved meant no serious contacts with Israel until the passing of the Cold War and the dissolution of its Soviet patron weakened the PLO’s hand irretrievably.

Indeed, part of the success of Zionism has been its orientation towards the right powers and proposals, not the wrong ones. When Britain held sway by both power and example, the Zionists secured the basis for state building. They worked creatively with Britain as far as it was possible and for that reason never lost important allies in London. After the war, they appealed to the United Nations and the Americans, ultimately successfully. They did not collapse into civil war when partition was accepted, effectively forfeiting Jewish claims to part of the biblical land.

Bereft of Third World friends during the Arab oil squeeze of the 1970s and the dominance of mafia-style government in Africa, Israel found it difficult to choose its friends. Mobutu’s Zaire and white supremacist South Africa became friends of convenience. But these were the exceptions, and Israel in time restored its fruitful relationship with much of Africa.

Renegade PLO factions, like the Abu Nidal group, engaged not only in the worst acts of terrorism but probably also killed far more Arabs than Jews, including members of Arafat’s inner circle. No sooner had they spoken of compromise, moderates like Issam Sartawi were gunned down by internal enemies. A number of West Bank and Gaza notables died similarly. Internal PLO dissension tore apart what remained of its forces in Lebanon after 1983. Arafat’s skill at holding the movement together at all amounts to a considerable achievement, even allowing that some of the mess was of his own making.

The inability to cement a consensus undoubtedly weakened the PLO, which can have expected even a greater public relations success in the West than it often enjoyed. When the Soviets fell and took the Ceausescus and Jaruselskis with them, the PLO was more impotent than at any time since its creation. Egregiously, Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein over his invasion of Kuwait, an act of treachery to Kuwaitis who had generously supported the Palestinians, which only resulted in their mass expulsion when the Kuwaitis returned, and the loss of large revenues.

Once ensconced in a negotiating relationship with the Israelis after 1993, and in command of increasing amounts of West Bank and Gaza territory after 1994, Arafat was still up against irredentism from Islamist and radical terror groups opposed on principle to any negotiated compromise. Pledged to curbing terrorist excesses, Arafat to this day refuses to disband Palestinian groups under his dominion, although being otherwise willing to suppress internal dissent aimed at his own authority. The Israelis have accepted despairingly that Palestinian terrorists will never be extradited. There has been no saison, but avoiding one is the easy option, no matter the strictures of "purism and idealism". Lacking any democratic imperative, Arafat can enforce whatever unity his purposes require, or so he calculates. The absence of national discipline, a society based on the rule of law, and the devolving of power to embryonic representative institutions means that Palestinians live today under what they have always known: arbitrary rule. The shift from Israeli to Palestinian control means for most of them only that they live without recourse to the Israeli judiciary.

There is some cause for hope. Palestinian human rights activists show increasing willingness to challenge their government. The Palestinian Legislative Council, purely consultative at this stage, does represent a plurality of opinion and a permanent seat is expected for it in time. There is a Palestinian press as vigorously independent as it dare be. Israel authors, it was recently announced, will figure in the Palestinian school curriculum. What form of Palestinian politics will emerge remains the great unanswered question, and with it, the prospect of answering affirmatively that the Israeli-Palestinian relationship represents a new departure for the two peoples and indeed the region.