Notes on Palestine, the Zionist Entity and the Arab regimes

Black, Ian. Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917 - 2017. Penguin, 2018.

Denvir, Daniel and Takriti, Abdel Razzaq. The Dig: Thawra Episodes 1 - 16. 2024.

Introduction

12 The Ottomans officially surrendered to the Brits inside Jerusalem’s walled Old City on 9 December 1917.

This ended four centuries of Ottoman imperial rule.

Palestine owed its name to the Romans; to Muslims it was home to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque (the third most sacred site after Mecca and Medina) from where the Prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven.

13 Locally it was regarded as part of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) today roughly Syria, Lebanon and the Levant.

It had not been a separate unit since Sultan Selim I had defeated the Mamluk rulers of Syria and Egypt in 1517.

It was divided into sanjaqs or districts ruled from the provinces of Damascus or Beirut.

In 1872 Jerusalem, along with the sanjaqs of Nablus and Acre formed the region commonly referred to as Southern Syria or Palestine.

The principal Christian denominations regarded Palestine as a separate entity; in Arabic it was called al-ard al-Muqaddasah - the Holy Land.

Palestine was bordered by the east by the river Jordan and the Dead Sea, in the west by the Mediterranean, and after a British-Ottoman agreement in 1906, by a marked frontier with Egypt.

On the eve of the first World War the primary identity of its majority Arab-speaking Muslim population was local as well as Palestinian but not in a manner than demanded independence from the sultan. A small elite which advocated autonomy within the Ottoman Empire held to the notion that there was a single Arab nation united by a common language and culture.

Christians were influenced by notions of nationalism and patriotism they derived from missionary schools.

Palestinian identity was also developing in opposition to the Zionist movement, which had been growing since the 1880s.

On 2 November 1917 Lord Balfour, Britain’s Foreign Secretary wrote to Lord Rothschild of the World Zionist Organisation informing him that the Brits favoured the establishment of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

In doing so Lloyd George wanted to outsmart the French in postwar operations in the Levant and grasp the opportunity to use Palestine’s strategic location to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal as well as the passage to India. An additional calculation may have been its propaganda value in Russia and the US, its consequences for Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia with regard to post-war spheres of influence in West Asia and pledges about Arab independence made by the Brits in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein to launch his revolt against the Turks, promising him he would become king of a pan-Arab Kingdom.

The Brits had a presence in the Gulf going back to the Napoleonic Wars; it operated a trading monopoly along the coast which penetrated further into the interior via a series of tribal alliances.

The first Saudi state was formed in the 18th century out of an alliance between small-town ruler from the Al-Saud family and a Wahhab. This was a mutually beneficial alliance produced immense gains for Wahhabism and the ruling family, leading to the development of a very powerful force relying on a large base of support in the interior the Arabian Peninsula in a region that is known historically as Najd Najjad.

From Najd, the Al Saud begin to conquer surrounding regions, they expand across much of the Arabian Peninsula and unify it under the narrative that they are a centralising force putting an end to the region’s chaos. Muhammad Ali destroys this by invading from Egypt, this was effectively an Ottoman counterinsurgency campaign.

With British support the royal family Al-Saud was able to formalise its control over the Peninsula by appropriation, coercion, raiding and taxation. Their territory also expanded into Mecca and Medina, selling out their now less strategically valuable ally Sharif Hussein, placing Arab Ottoman lands under the Mandate system and handing Palestine over to the Zionists. Saudi Arabia’s borders with Transjordan, Iraq and Kuwait were settled with a series of treaties throughout the 20s.

If it wasn’t for the Brits establishing themselves along the coast in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman - all to become the United Arab Emirates - those areas would have been part of modern day Saudi Arabia.

16 Balfour stipulated that nothing be done to violate the rights of existing non-Jewish communities which formed 90% of Palestine’s population.

This clause was in place due to the objections of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, predicting Arab discontent at their being expropriated and disenfranchised by Zionist settlement.

17 Ottoman conscription had taken a heavy toll on the Arab population of 700,000; food, animals and fuel were in short supply due to the acquisitions of the Turkish military. Starvation rations and disease were the norm.

In 1915 poor harvests and a plague of locusts added to the impact of the Allied naval blockade of Palestinian and Syrian ports.

The Jewish population - 59,000 on the eve of the war - was depleted by emigration and deportation of enemy nationals, especially Russians. Some took Ottoman citizenship, leading Zionists were jailed, Arab nationalists were hanged.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force began an assault on Gaza in March 1917. In April the civilian populations of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were ordered to leave. Beersheba and Gaza were captured in October and November.

18 C.P. Scott’s view that the Palestinians were uncivilised is presented as representative of European opinion, as is the suggestion that they would benefit from the Zionist project.

1882 - 1917

19 In 1918 the Brits military administration counted 512,000 Muslims, 66,000 Jews and 61,000 Christians.

The Arabs were largely peasants, artisans and in the countryside where Bedouin tribes roamed, overwhelmingly illiterate. Large tracts of land were in the hands of absentee owners. Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa were the urban centres.

By 1918 some 15,000 Jewish newcomers were living in 45 rural colonies that made up the new Zionist camp, which was distinct from the 50,000 strong old Jewish community.

20 Jews had always been in Palestine. Over the previous century Ashkenazi Jews, mostly Russian or Eastern European, had come to study and pray, subsisting on charitable contributions in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed, where they mourned the destruction of the Temple.

The majority came after 1840 after the Ottomans defeated a rebellion by the Egyptian Pasha Muhammed Ali. A minority were native-born Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews, whose ancestors were from Spain, North Africa, the Balkans. Many spoke Arabic or Ladino; their identity was religious, but not national, most were Ottoman citizens.

Relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews were not contentious, they lived under the Ottoman system of communal religious autonomy under the sultan in Istanbul. Inequalities existed in status and taxation but there was tolerance in mixed neighbourhoods.

In Jerusalem Ashkenazi formed a majority, speaking a Palestinian variant of Yiddish, the vernacular of the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement’ but replete with Arabic words.

Sephardim were culturally closer to Muslims than Christians.

Palestine’s connections with the wider world had deepened in the mid nineteenth century thanks to Ottoman reforms, European investment and the expansion of trade and communication. European consulates had been established in the years after the Crimean War in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa to deal with Christian pilgrims and increasing missionary activity. Economic growth driven by exports of wheat and citrus fruit boosted the population in coastal cities.

21 Zionism proper begins with the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire. The first settlers called themselves Hovevi Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups who sought to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and use the Hebrew language rather than Yiddish.

22 In theory the Ottoman authorities were hostile to settlers but in practice the administration was vulnerable to bribes.

Settlers depended on Arab labour for transport, supplies and fertiliser.

24 Disputes arose over the demarcation of land boundaries and grazing rights with farmers dispossessed by sale who had been working land for absentee landlords. In 1886 riots broke out in Petah Tikvah after a Jewish farmer confiscated Arab-owned donkeys grazing on his land.

By 1889 Zichron had 1,200 Arab agricultural workers serving 200 Jews. In Rishon LeZion 40 Jewish families attracted 300 Arab families to work as migrant labourers; they were cheaper, more expendable and more hard-working than Jewish immigrants from Europe.

Arab objections begann to take on a more overtly political character.

25 In 1891 the Arabs urged an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases, but Arab notables continued to sell their land; prices were high.

26 Theodore Herzl, the Viennesse journalist who founded Zionism knew v little about life in Ottoman Palestine. His quest for a Jewish homeland began in the wake of the Dreyfus affair in France.

In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State), which referred to Palestine and Argentina as two countries which would be suitable on the basis of their history as ’experiments in colonisation’.

The first Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, founded the Zionist Organisation whose goal was a publicly recognised legally secured home in Palestine for Jewish people. At this stage there was eighteen new colonies in the country and the Ottomans appointed an official committee to examine land purchase activity; sales were halted for the next few years. Herzl visited Palestine two months later, his diary makes no reference to the Arab residents.

Arab hostility was becoming more evident around the turn of the century; the eviction of peasants from land purchased in Galilee by the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA) led to attacks on Jewish surveyors.

By 1904 5,500 settlers were living in 25 agricultural colonies in 3 blocs; in eastern Upper Galilee, south of Haifa and south-east of Jaffa. This year the authorities banned the sale of land to foreign Jews.

29 The immigration and colonisation effort was better co-ordinated from 1908 onwards, the year the Young Turk revolution overthrew the Sultan. The Zionist Organisation set up its first premises in Palestine, to supplement the Zionist office in Istanbul.

Instances in which Jewish settlers were attacked and their farms pillages increased significantly.

30 Local opposition also came from Sephardic Jews who called on Zionists to embrace Arab rather than import European culture, but they had little influence.

33 Even as Arabs were being kicked off their lands Zionists emphasised the benefits which would accrue to them through settlement; through the creation of jobs, productive use being made of the land, etc.

Calls to replace Arab labourers by Jews, even at a higher cost to employers, increased after the second aliya (‘ascent’ or ‘wave of immigration’) in 1904; which included Russian socialists, among them David Gruen, born in Poland, who Hebraised his name to Ben-Gurion.

A group of Russian Jews from the Marxist Poalei Zion movement formed HaShomer (The Watchmen on Guard), to replace Arab settlement guards, which became the vanguard of a radical Zionist frontier ethos.

34 This new mentality, which was behind attacks on Arab workers and Jewish farmers who employed them, was praised by Zionist writers.

Between 1882 and 1909 thirteen Jews were killed by Arabs, but only two were politically motivated; from this point on politicaly motivated killings increase, generally in the wake of evictions.

This consolidated racist and anti-Arab attitudes among Zionists, though there were some who spoke publically about a co-operative model of settlement.

1917 - 1929

39 Sephardi had been encouraged to severe contacts with Arabs after intimidation from Ashkenazim.

In June 1918 Chaim Weizmann travelled to Aqaba in Transjordan to meet Emir Faisal, the third son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and commander of the Arab forces that had fought the Turks with British support. Weizmann had a dismissive attitude to the Palestinians, but admired Faisal; his objective in meeting him was to ’localise the Arab question’, use Jewish influence in the US to assist Arab nationalists in return for their support or non-involvement in Zionist affairs.

In January 1919 they signed an agreement, the fourth article of which laid out how all measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale. It stipulated that Arab farmer rights would be respected and all Islamic holy sites would remain under Arab control.

However, with French and British control across the region, this agreement was a dead letter.

Ben-Gurion, leader of the Labour Unity movement was the foremost pessimist with regard to a strategy of co-operation with Arabs: saw clearly that it was a zero-sum game.

40 In March 1920 the settlements of Metullah and Tel Hai were attacked; a cult of martyrdom began to develop among the settlers.

42 - 3 Zionists complained the Brits were not acting against the Palestinians, but Jewish representatives were assured there would be sufficient security during the Nebi Musa pilgrimage near Jericho in April. In the event, three days of violence left 5 Jews dead and 200 injured, 4 Arabs killed and 25 injured. The right-wing militant Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had served in the Brits Army during the war and had led Jewish efforts, was sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude; this service was reduced to a year.

A distinct Palestinian national identity began to take shape; in February 1919 the first congress of Muslim-Christian Associations (MCA) declared unity with Syria though this support faded when Faisal’s rule collapsed, he was expelled by the French the following summer and there was suspicion after his deal with Weizmann.

In May 1920 the San Remo conference granted Britain the Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations; Syria, including Lebanon and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were to be recognised as provisionally independent but in reality were under the yoke of Britain and France ‘until such a time as they are able to stand alone’.

Transjordan was placed under the rule of Faisal’s brother Emir Abdullah bin Hussein, later King Abdullah I. Abdullah I had initially planned to gain control of Syria and cultivated relations with the leaders of the Syrian independence movement. During the Syrian Revolt, he gave protection and refuge to the leaders because he believed he could establish a national coalition under him and then an Arab kingdom across the entirety of Greater Syria.

Ultimately the Brits did not back him against France and he turned his attention to networks he had developed among powerful families in Southern Syria / Palestine who had opposed the Mufti, seeking to convince the Brits he could govern part of Palestine in a manner that was amenable to their interests. Since the Mufti opposed the handing of land over to Zionists this became their excuse to get rid of him.

In Jordan there was a Sunni Muslim majority and a Christian minority; good relations between the two communities. There were also large refugee populations; Circassians, Armenians, Czechians, Dagestani, largely acclimatised to the majority Arab population.

Iraq, where Abdullah’s brother is based, was richer, far more populated, five times the size of Jordan, more ethnically and religiously diverse. It has the largest Shia population, a large Sunni population and many smaller sects including Jews and Christians of various denominations, as well as Kurds. Important to underline these divisions were not always a source of conflict; there were many figures and organisations who emphasised national unity or class over confessional identities.

44 Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine was Sir Herbert Samuel, a leading liberal Jewish politician.

The Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration almost verbatim; English, Arabic and Hebrew were declared official languages. A ‘Jewish Agency’ was created to advise the administration but no such agency was in place for Arabs; the document did not even use the word ‘Arab’.

In December 1920 the MCA’s third Palestinian Congress in Haifa dropped its demand for union with Syria and rejected the Balfour declaration. It elected an Arab Executive (AE) committee led by Musa Kazem al-Husseini of the eminent Jerusalem family. Palestinians began to focus more on Palestine, publishing works of geography and history.

45 Chaim Kalvarisky, a Polish-born and French educated land agent in Galilee, was tasked by the Zionist executive to promote a Muslim National Association to compete with the MCA.

Other plans to buy off Arab opposition failed due to a lack of funding.

46 Lawyer Awni Abdel-Hadi of Nablus wrote that he preferred dealing with Zionists who did not seek rapproachement as they are more open about their motives.

In May 1921 violence erupted in Jaffa.

47 Over six days of violence 41 Jews and 44 Arabs were killed.

Sir Herbert Samuel called for a halt to Jewish immigration which infuriated the Zionists; fines and other collective punishments were imposed on the Arabs.

48 A volunteer Zionist defense organisation was set up called the Haganah (Defence). Arms were smuggled in, intelligence-gathering on Arabs was initiated, Jabotinsky campaigned for for the revival of Jewish battalions who fought in WWI and their incorporation into the Brits garrison in Palestine.

A British report notes the almost complete breakdown in relations between formerly friendly Jews and Arabs.

49 The Zionist enterprise had begun four decades ago but had not not yet brought about a significant demographic transformation; Palestine’s 757,000 inhabitants were overwhelmingly Arab, with a Jewish minority of 83,000 or 11% of the population. The third aliya, from 1919 - 23 brought in 35,000 Russian, Polish newcomers, who played an important role in establishing kubbutzim and other collection Zionist organisations; they built roads, drained swamps and undertook other public construction projects.

50 Employing Arabs was increasingly frowned upon.

The fourth aliya is dated from 1924 - 29, the majority were Polish, escaping waves of anti-Semetic persecution.

Weizmann looked down on this new generation of immigrants; in comparison to previous generations of ideologically motivated pioneers this cohort was less interested in embarking on a settler colonial project.

53 Land purchases expanded and more Jewish settlements were established along the coastal plain.

The annual conference of Ahdut haAvoda, held at one of the first kibbutzim at Ein Harod concluded that the future of the state depended on the joint organisation of Israeli and Arab workers, as there was no Arab national movement and political agreement with them was impossible. Ben-Gurion spoke out against representative government.

54 When a new organisation Brit Shalom was established in order to foster dialogue and co-operation between Arabs and Jews and promote a bi-national state it was met with hostility from the Zionist establishment.

The Arabs declared a general strike when Lord Balfour, along with Weizmann and Field Marshall Alleby attended its inauguration.

55 Nashashibi’s Palestinian Arab National Party favoured co-operation with the Brit administration and were denounced as traitors by the Arab Executive. Zionists took advantage of divisions among the Arabs to the point of financially supporting one side against the other.

Land purchases began to edge out traditional farming methods in cereal cultivation and herding.

56 A dispute developed over the western wall of the Herodian temple compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, which Jews believed was the site of the Temple of Soloman. It is also the Western wall of the Haram al-Sharif known to Muslims as al-Buraq, named after the horse the Prophet Muhammed had tethered there before ascending to heaven.

Under the Ottomans the Jews were not permitted to place benches, screens or do anything which might lay claim to possession though in practice these edicts were often ignored. Little changed under the Brits. In 1922 the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) opposed any attempt to enhance Jewish access and Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti, raised a large amount of money to renovate the Haram.

57 This dispute escalated on Yom Kippur 1928 when Jews brought a screen to separate male and female worshipers, which was removed by police. The SMC started a campaign to tighten restrictions. On 16 August a Kurdish Jewish teenager was stabbed to death

58 The biggest Arab attack in response to this news took place in Hebron, home of the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Ibrahimi mosque. Sixty-four victims from the city’s Orthodox Jewish community.

59 In June 1930 three Arabs, convicted of murder in Hebron and similar disturbances in Safed were hanged in Acre prison; vigils were held in Haifa and Nablus; by contrast, the Jewish policeman who killed an entire Arab family in Jaffa had his death sentence commuted.

61 A British White Paper produced in 1930 implied that future Jewish immigration to Palestine might have to be restricted due to the growing crisis in Arab landholding, exacerbated by Jewish boycotts.

63 Ben-Gurion, now a powerful figure in the labour movement, spoke about the irreconcilable ambitions of Arabs and Zionists and emphasised the need to continue immigration and secure the gaps between existing settlement.

After the violence of 1929 there was a marked increase in physical separation in the cities; with Arabs moving to move Arab-dominated areas and vice versa.

1929 - 36

66 By 1931 Jews, numbering 175,000, still constituted less than 17% of the country’s population. In December the Grand Mufti Hai Amin al-Husseini convened an Islamic conference in Jerusalem to warn of a Jewish threat to Muslim holy places, Arab newspapers warned of the selling of land and shamed those who did. In 1930 British policemen pulled down Bedouin tents to clear the land for Jewish settlers. This ended with the eviction of 1,200 Bedouin and began the practice of renaming the area in Hebrew.

Attempts to set up a fund to compete with the Zionists failed.

67 Frustration with shortcomings in Arab leadership lead to the formation of the pan-Arab Istiqlal (Independence Party), by Awni Abdel-Hadi in 1932, part of a trend which saw Palestinian political life move away from the great aristocratic and merchant families to a younger generation of nationalist activists, often journalists and teachers, who had benefited from a European education and were influenced by Gandhi’s struggle against the Brits in India.

Party activity was centred in Haifa and its party programme was directed towards econonomic independence and the toppling of the Brits Mandate on the basis that Zionism would collapse with it.

Akram Zuwayter, a leading figure in the party, resigned his post as a teacher in a government school in Acre. Mayors and other Arab officials came under pressure to resign too. A National Congress of Arab Youth patrolled the Mediterranean coastline to prevent illegal Jewish immigrants from landing, underlining that the Mandate was not enforcing its own laws; Jews made up nearly a third of the population in 1936.

68 Under pressure from the radicals the Arab Executive called a general strike against British policy. In Jaffa in October 1933 police opened fire on demonstrators and killed 26 Arabs, injured ~200. Protests followed in Nablus, Haifa and Gaza.

71 Secret military organisations such as the Jihad al-Muqaddas (Holy War) led by Abdul-Qader al-Husseini, the son of Musa Kazem and the Mufti’s nephew were formed. By 1934 it had collected financial contributions and some firearms.

Other smaller groups followed a similar path, obtaining arms by clandestine means and entering into military training.

The best-known group, known as the Black Hand, was led by Shiekh Izzedin al-Qassam, a Syrian-born preacher, who urged Bedouin to resist settlement by armed methods.

1936 - 9

74 On 15 April 1936 three armed Arabs forced vehicles passing the road near Nur Shams to stop and give them money to buy weapons and ammunition. They shot three Jews they held up, two of whom died.

The following day two members of a Zionist organisation killed two Arab labourers in a shack near Petah Tiikvah.

75 Riots spread to Jaffa in the 19th, with nine Jews killed and sixty injured. Curfews were imposed by the police and troops, strikes spread across Arab areas, led by local national committees, clubs and unions.

The Husseini and Nashashibi families, under pressure, dropped their rivalry and formed a new Arab Higher Committee (AHC) under the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini which called for a general strike, civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes.

This was the beginning of the great rebellion, during which crops were burned and there was shooting at Zionist vehicles. Bombs went off in Haifa and Jaffa and the railway line to Egypt was sabotaged near Gaza.

76 In August 1936 Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a Lebanese veteran of the struggle against the French arrived at the head of a five-hundred strong band of Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians to try and consolidate the rebel force into an army.

77 Zionists represented the rebels as bandits, used the strike to get rid of Arab workers in the ports and quarries.

78 Two hundred buildings were destroyed in Jaffa to clear the way for the Brits military; leaving 6,000 Arabs homeless.

The strike ended in October 1936 when British efforts orchestrated an appeal by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and Yemen.

80 The Peel Report, produced by former secretary for India, presented partition as the solution, with the Jewish state covering 25% of Palestine, north from Tel Aviv along the coast including the overwhelmingly Arab Galilee.

The Arab state would encompass the mountains and the Negev desert, as well as Jaffa, and be linked to Transjordan. Britain would continue to control Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a corridor to the Mediterranean.

This provoked debate in the Zionist movement as it did not include Jerusalem, Hebron or Judea; Jabotinsky insisted the plan was absurd while Weizmann and Ben-Gurion called for more territory.

The Arab Higher Committee dismissed any idea of partitioning the land, prayers were made in public against partition.

81 The AHC repeated its demands for an end to Jewish immigration and purchases, and for the replacement of a Mandate with a treaty between British and a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.

Negotiations between Arab and Zionist agencies stalled when the Zionists rejected the idea that Bedouins and illiterate Arabs should have same rights as ‘sophisticated’ European Jews.

Attacks on British military targets began again in September 1937, blamed on al-Qassam supporters.

82 The Arab Higher Committee and national committee were proscribed and dozens were arrested. Haj Amin al-Husseini was removed from the presidency of the Supreme Muslim Council and went into exile in Lebanon. Other Arab leaders, including the Mayor of Jerusalem Hussein Khalidi were deported to the Seychelles.

In October Arabs attacks buses, railways, the Iraqi pipeline and army posts. Armed groups formed into larger regional units which competed for support from Damascus, where the AHC had established the Central Committee for Jihad under Izzat Darwaza, which collected money and sent supplies and weapons to the Palestinian rebels. The French authorities declined British pressure to interfere.

83 British policeman from the time:

‘running over an Arab is the same as a dog in England except we do not report it’.

Sir Charles Tegart, a colonial policeman, also a veteran of India recommended the construction of concrete forts across the country, the introduction of Doberman dogs from South Africa for use in searches and the opening of an Arab interrogation centre in Jerusalem where waterboarding and other forms of torture were common.

The revolt peaked in August with 9 - 10,000 rebels, 3,000 of whom were full-time fighters. British forces consisted of two army divisions; 25,000 servicemen. the Brits administered collective punishment on Arab villages, demanding fines, razing houses, confiscating livestock, uprooting trees. Arabs were made to act as human shields by sitting on inspection trolleys which drove on the railways ahead of trains or forced to ride on lorries with army convoys. Once the journey was over the lorry would brake hard to throw the victim off and then run over him, either maiming or killing him. A squaddie:

‘If there was any land mines it was them [the Arab prisoners] that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it’.

84 Until the winter of 1937 there were few instances of Jews attacking Arabs due to a lack of military capacity or experience.

85 Anti-Arab attacks began to be carried out by the National Military Organisation, the militant group inspired by Jabotinsky.

In April 1938 Shlomo Ben-Yosef, a member of the Revisionist youth movement, fired at an Arab bus in Galilee. When Ben-Yosef was hanged by the Brits, the Irgun kidnapped and hanged an Arab in Haifa and, using Mizrahi Jews disguised as Arabs, placed bombs in markets and public places, killing at least thirty-five Arabs in an attack in July.

86 In 1938 a commission of inquiry headed by Sir John Woodhead arrived in Jerusalem to investigate the unrest and review prospects for partition, deciding Peel’s proposals were not workable; three alternative partition schemes were arrived at with different boundaries and administrative arrangements; none of them were acceptable to either Zionists or Arabs and recommended the future of the country be reviewed at a London conference.

The AHC opposed co-operation with the commission, those who agreed to come forward were executed or sentenced to death by revolutionary courts in absentia.

87 A counter-insurgency campaign was ramped up with the help of Fakhri Abdel-Hadi, a former rebel commander from Arrabeh on the Brits’ payroll.

The rebellion was ultimately put down by air superiority as well as anti-rebel peasant formations in Nablus and among the Druze of Mount Carmel around Haifa. Peace bands were rounded up at rallies with the view to spreading the message that the vast majority of Arabs did not support an uprising.

88 New settlements were more militaristic as Zionists became more militarily experienced; 3,000 Jews were recruited into the supernumerary police by October 1936. By summer 1939 22,000 Jews were serving in it.

89 Haganah men joined a new British unit called the Special Night Squads (SNS), established after the Iraqi pipeline had been sabotaged. They led a brutal campaign of counter-insurgency, involving whipping, torture and executions.

90 The Brits’ White Paper in May abandoned partition but restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years with subsequent figures depending on Arab consent, placed restrictions on the right of Jews to buy land.

It also provided for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in ten years and the immediate appointment of Palestinians to the head of certain industries, made clear that it did not wish to construct a Jewish state against the wishes of the majority of the people in the area.

The Zionists obviously rejected it, the majority of the members of the AHC approved but the exiled mufti rejected.

1939 - 45

94 5,000 Palestinians had been killed in the counter-insurgency campaign, 146 hanged and thousands detained. Thousands of homes were demolished, leaders of the Arab Higher Committee were in exile or in jail.

Ben-Gurion pledged to fight the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, land purchases and minority status for Jews.

98 The Biltmore Programme, developed in a hotel of the same name in Manhattan called for unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Israel, its programme did not mention the Arab population.

The Zionists worked to influence USian opinion against the Brits.

100 - 1 Zionist intelligence organisations began to organise around the Jewish Agency and the Haganah.

Spying, collecting information on Arab villages, political allegiances and activity.

Hikes were organised among young Jews for this purpose; presented as an innocent youthful activity but in reality an intelligence gathering operation.

103 This data was exploited for land purchases, sometimes paid Palestinian informants were used as middlemen to encourage the Palestinians to part with their cash.

Information was collected on Arab landholders who were in debt.

1945 - 49

105 - 6 Series of attacks by Palestinian rebels and Zionist militias escalate.

In October 1945 the Haganah and Irgun launched a co-ordinated rebellion against Tan rule by sabotaging the railway system. In April 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the country be governed under bi-national principles and that 100,000 Jewish refugees enter the country.

In June another Haganah operation destroyed all bridges connecting Palestine to neighbouring countries. 2,700 Jews were rounded up by the Brits including most Jewish agency leaders and a large part of the Haganah command.

Three weeks later the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the Brits administration, killing 91 people about third of whom were Jewish.

107 The Brits kicked the question of the state to a UN-appointed Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), the Palestinians refused to participate.

In September seven of the UNs ten members recommended partition with international status for Jerusalem. The minority (India, Iran and Yugoslavia) proposed a federal state with Jerusalem as capital.

Intense Zionist lobbying secured a majority of 33 to 13 with ten abstentions.

UN Resolution 181 was backed by the US. It was opposed by Palestinians and the other Arab states; the USSR supported it as Stalin believed the Arab regimes were vassals of antagonistic states such as Britain and consequently so too did most Arab communists, against their better instincts.

Some Soviets supported from an anti-Semitic perspective; there had been pogroms against Jewish refugees from the Judeocide in Poland that the authorities were unable to control and Zionist lobbyists were able to get a sympathetic hearings, suggesting that they wouldn’t fall solidly within the Western bloc and made appeals to Socialist ideals; from an outside pov it also seemed Zionists were contesting Britain’s presence via their paramilitaries.

Arab communists were therefore hugely undermined in the eyes of the Ba’ath, Nasserites and other Arab nationalists; there was also the issue of a critical arms shipment to Israel that arrived from Czechoslovakia and the fact that Arab communist leadership were cracking down on those elements within their organisations who questioned this line.

The proposed Jewish state was to consist of 55% of the country, including the unpopulated Negev desert. Its population would comprise 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs.

At this point Jews owned 7% of Palestine’s private land, the Arab state was to have 44% of the land and a minority of 10,000 Jews. Greater Jerusalem would remain under international rule.

Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini declared this UN vote null and void.

108 The Palestinian leadership called for a general strike while the Haganah called on Jews aged between 17 to 25 to register for military service.

The Zionists accepted the decision, the Arabs rejected any abrogation of its sovereignty.

However the Arab National Fund had not succeeded in halting land sales, calls to boycott Jewish produce had not been heeded and many supporters of Palestinian nationhood condemned the incompetent leadership.

In 1947 in Syria the Arab Socialist Ba’athist Party was founded out of a merger between the Arab Ba’ath movement led by Michel ‘Aflaq (an Antiochian Orthodox Christian) and al-Bitar (a Sunni Muslim), and the Arab Ba’ath, led by al-ʾArsūzī (an Alawite).

The party espoused ‘Ba’athism’ meaning resurrection and ideology mixing Arab nationalist, pan-Arab, Arab socialist, and anti-imperialism interests, calling for the unity of the Arab world into a single state; it arose out of a merger of the Ba’thism calls for the unification of the Arab world into a single state. The party quickly established branches in other Arab countries.

100 - 111 The AHC was also divided between Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus, undermining effective communication. Its influence was dwarfed by that of the League of Arab States, whose members, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria (the French had been finally kicked out in 1946) Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, had their own agendas, the majority of whom were opposed to Abdullah I.

The AHC had to build up Palestine’s military capacity from scratch; nothing on their side matched the Haganah and the Arab effort was beset by rivalry; it was not until January 1947 that two existing paramilitaries the Futuwwa and the Najada were combined into a single Arab Youth Organisation.

112 Non-Palestinian forces were deployed by the Arab Liberation Army, set up by the Arab League’s Damascus-based military committee, it was made up of 5000 volunteers and seconded Syrian, Iraqi military personnel commanded by Fawzi al-Qawiqji. Morale was low, logistics and discipline were poor.

Arab States were highly patronising towards the Palestinians, some just went on a rampage and left. Communists, anyone associated with the Mufti and the old nationalist leadership were attacked. Some Palestinians did not want to fight, had secret non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbours, opposed the Husseinis or refused to harbor foreign forces.

114 Palestinian civilians began to flee, in early 1947 Haganah reported that wealthy Arabs were moving to winter residences in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. By January 15,000 of Jaffa’s residents had left. The AHC tried to stem these departures by radio broadcasts, urging neighbouring nations not to take Arabs but this was ineffective.

115 On 10 March 1948 Haganah commanders met in Tel Aviv to discuss plans to secure control of Zionist-held territory within and beyond UN partition borders. Arabs were to be expelled if they resisted, effectively ethnic cleansing.

116 The Haganah went on the offensive as the Brits departure neared and supplies of food ran low in Jewish areas of Jerusalem, capturing territory that was not earmarked under the Jewish plan.

Husseini, the head of the AHJ, was killed at the Arab hill-top village of Qastel.

117 - 8 On 9 April an Irgun-Lehi force launched an offensive on Deir Yassin, on the western edge of Jerusalem, there were reports of executions, rapes and looting, with whole families, women and children being killed, around a hundred people killed.

The Arab Press reported on the massacre prompted flight from nearby villages.

Revenge came when Arab fighters ambushed a convoy of trucks, ambulances, buses and armoured cars heading to a Jewish enclave on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus, 78 lecturers, students, nurses doctors and Haganah escorts were killed.

119 The war was won by the Zionists as Haganah units continued offensive operations helped by the arrival of rifles, machine guns and ammunition purchased from Czechslovakia.

Haifa and Tiberias, two cities with large Arab populations were taken.

121 When Haganah units entered Jaffa on 14 May only 3 - 40,00 residents remained, Zionist forces raided and looted what had been left.

122 The Haganah made further incursions into areas they expected neighbouring Arab states to invade, by mid-May 250,000 - 300,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their homes.

On 15 May High Commissioner Cunningham left Haifa harbour. The previous evening the sovereign state of Israel was proclaimed as David Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence on behalf of the Provisional Government; the state was recognised within hours by the US and the USSR.

Images of expulsions from Palestine fuelled calls for Arab regimes to intervene, particularly in Egypt due to the number of Palestinian refugees who could draw attention to what was happening; refugees across Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf also consequential in spreading pan-Arab views, whether as Communists, Ba’athists or Islamists.

Egypt was formally independent and a member of the UN but the Brits controlled the Suez Canal, Jordan and Iraq were tied to Britain via military treaties and there were British troops in Iran; nevertheless Jordanian, Egyptian, Iraqi and Syrian armies invaded, with Lebanon opting out at the last minute.

(Brits also controlled the whole of the Gulf shore apart from Saudi Arabia; Kuwait, Bahrain, all seven Emirates, plus Oman and Qatar, they created multiple sultanates in Yemen under their control)

123 Initial plans focused on invading northern Palestine to Haifa. Abdullah I announced Jordanian forces would head for Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron along what came to be known as the West Bank. This suggested he was focused on gaining control of the West Bank and seeking rapprochement with Israel, avoiding entering areas allotted to them by the UN.

This prompted the Egyptians to add a second invasion route; rather than moving forces up the coast towards Gaza and Tel Aviv, they took their forces East, an obvious attempt to outflank Abdullah.

Israelis encounter only Iraqi and Syrian forces in the Jordan Valley but no Egyptians, Iraqi units in Qalqilya did nothing, telling Palestinians they had no orders. Some Saudi and Yemeni troops were also deployed.

The Jordanian Arab Legion forces did assist Palestinian fighters in Jerusalem; Haganah fighters were taken prisoner after surrendering.

124 Israelis took more territory; the Alexandroni Brigade cleared more than sixty Arab villages on the plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The Israelis also made conquests in Galilee and in the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem ‘corridor’ that the UN had allocated to the Arabs.

125 Nazareth was taken 16 July.

Operation Dani was intended to capture Arab towns of Lydda and Ramle, alloted to the Arab state, in the centre of the country and clear the last Arab-held parts of adjacent Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. In Lydda on 12 July Israeli forces encountered a small Arab Legion force entering the town. During the ensuing firefight 250 Palestinians sheltering in a mosque compound were killed by men of the IOF’s Yiftah Brigade; biggest atrocity of the war.

50,000 Palestinians were expelled on Ben-Gurion’s orders to the Israeli commander Yitzak Rabin. Lydda residents were forced to walk for miles in summer heat in the middle of the Ramadan fast to the front lines where Arab Legion struggled to provide shelter and supplies. Unknown numbers died of exhaustion or dehydration.

126 A further 100,000 became refugees in the course of those ten days.

Under UN pressure a new open-ended truce came into effect on 18 July. Israel continued to launch operations but claimed they were not violations of this truce; Arab expulsions were ongoing. The Stern Gang assassinated the UN mediator.

128 Mass killing at Dawamiya.

Operation Hiram - New Israeli conquests in eastern Galilee, allotted to the Arab state by the UN, several villages across the border in Lebanon also occupied.

Atrocities in Eilabun, Safsaf and Jish led to the flight of 30,000 more Palestinians, mostly to Lebanon. Ben-Gurion instructed his units:

‘Do all in your power for a quick and immediate cleansing of the conquered areas of all the hostile elements’.

129 Overall Palestinian casualities are estimated at around 13,000, 1,400 Egyptians, several hundred Iraqis and Jordanians, 4,000 Israelis.

Egyptians who had fought felt they had not been given adequate instructions, that their strategy was ill-defined and that there were contradictory interests at play among Arab governments. Had the Egyptians been adequately equipped they could have moved beyond Hebron to Jaffa; all these failures were attributed to the Egyptian government.

In 1948 it was to a large extent the bourgeoisie who had been kicked out of Palestine, the urban representatives who would have served as a leading intelligentsia had left. All major political parties are destroyed leaving all organisational structures to be re-established from scratch.

The only one that survives is the Communist Party; this was allowed to operate because it was an Israeli one and the party’s demand was to restore the old unity between Zionist and Palestinian cadres, a divide opens up here after Israel is established for obvious reasons. Ultimately the Communist Party is entirely composed of Palestinians; it was the only place where anti-Zionist views were expressed.

1949 - 53

131 In the course of twenty months half the pre-war Arab population had fled or been driven out; 350 - 400 villages had been depopulated, many were destroyed or settled by Jewish immigrants.

In some areas families were divided by armistice lines which left a minority of 156,000 Palestinians in the new Jewish state, 15% of its population.

132 Refugees were scattered across the West Bank, occupied by Jordan, in the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, its original population more than doubled, in makeshift camps in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraq. Majority were uneducated farmers, initially under the care of the Red Cross and then the United Nations Relief and Works Agency; many camps were shanty towns and lacked basic amenities such as running water, electricity, sewage systems.

133 - 4 Israel made clear early on that refugees would not be allowed to return, putting forward the narrative that they had left voluntarily, which was reproduced abroad.

135 Palestinian women who had fled were left so destitute they were forced into prostitution; more than 400 babies in camps around Tyre and Sidon died of cold.

136 Israel lifted British restrictions on immigration, in July 1950 the Law of Return granted Jews from all over the world the right to live in Israel over the native non-Jewish population. The Jewish population increased to 1.5 million in 1951, most of the newcomers arriving from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen where anti-Jewish sentiment had grown.

Israelis bomb Jewish targets in Iraq to encourage Iraqi Jews to move to Israel. Strong racial hierarchy was in place viz. the Jewish population they wanted, German Jews followed by Russian, various Eastern European, Arab and then African; even those Arab Jews who were relatively well placed within these hierachy such as the Iraqis were persecuted, sprayed with DDT.

137 The intellectual core of Palestinian life was destroyed, as was the commercial and manufacturing bases of the Arab economy. The vast majority of those left were illiterate villagers and agricultural workers.

Israel’s national library collected 30,000 books, newspapers and other items from the abandoned homes of Palestinians who had fled West Jerusalem. Five of the eleven cities under Israeli control, Safed, Madjal, Tiberias, Beisan and Beersheba were emptied of Arabs; Jaffa, Haifa, Lydda, Ramle and Acre almost.

138 The majority of Israel’s Arabs lived in Galilee, along the Jordanian border north east of Tel Aviv and in the Negev, under military rule.

When the military government was established it employed two key provisions of the 1945 British Defence Emergency Regulations: the authority to declare any area closed to the public and impose a curfew.

Abandoned Arab land was allocated to Jews; Arab movements in and out of closed areas were regulated under a system of checkpoints, travel permits, curfews and other restrictions. These permits were in Hebrew and hence illegible to those who used them and had to be approved by Shin Bet, who used them as leverage to secure informants.

The ministries of education, welfare, interior and religious affairs had special sections to govern the Palestinians as a separate section of the population.

146 - 7 Security experts opposed enfranchising Arabs, warning they would seek restitution of property and freedom of movement, but these were over-ruled.

In the first parliamentary elections in January 1949 3 Arab MPs entered the 120 seat Knesset. Arab lists, created by the ruling Labour party Mapai, created a link between Arab notables who remained in the country and the structures of the state, preventing the formation of a separate political Arab bloc of opposition.

Divide and rule strategy adopted; 20,000 strong Druze community, Circassians (descendants of Muslim immigrants expelled from the Caucasus in the nineteenth century) and Bedouin in the south all given special treatment; in January 1949 the IOF created a minorities unit compromising 400 Druze, 200 Bedouins and 100 Circassians commanded by Jewish officers and employed it to ambush Palestinians trying to cross armistice lines; Druze were later subject to mandatory conscription, their role was described by one Israeli officer as ‘a sharp knife in the back of Arab unity’.

Sheikhs, religious judges and other notables were granted special dispensations that strengthened traditional social structures and consolidated control of Arab areas. Collaboration brought benefits such as work and travel permits, firearm licences, a blind eye to criminality corruption and even political office.

Egypt

The Egyptian Free Officers’ movement, which developed among a group of military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, was one of the most important legacies of the failed 1948 military campaign. They had no single unified programme whether liberalism, Christianity or socialism, but anti-colonialism and Republicanism as well as frustration with the Wafd - a nationalist liberal party that had been instrumental in getting Egypt’s 1923 constitution - were definite through-lines. Its membership benefited from opportunities which arose from access to military education as a result of the expansion of the British army.

In 1952 the officers began occupying strategic buildings, surrounding King Farouk’s palace, neutralising opposition in the army and demanded Farouk abdicate to his son; once they were in power they abolished the monarchy.

The first Egyptian president, Naguib, was chosen as a figurehead because he was an army general sympathetic to their demands but not as radical as they were.

The Wafd was highly critical of the coup. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in the 20s and aiming to preserve the core values of Islam and reject the values of the metropole, was initially supportive but not after Nasser suppressed all political parties as divisive / being agents of colonialism.

Syria

1948’s failures also motivated the first Syrian coup in 1949, led by military officer Husni al-Zaim. The CIA played a role here, due to their interests in protecting oil supply as well as the newly created Israeli state.

The US quickly recognised the post-coup government, followed by the Brits, France and Western-allied regional states like Jordan. Zaim signed a tap-line agreement with the West without consulting parliament and imprisoned many communists.

The second coup of 1949 took place when al-Zaim handed a man named Antoun Sada, founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an eclectic but anti-colonial and anti-sectarian movement aiming at the construction of Greater Syria, over to the Lebanese, who wanted him because he had tried to launch a revolution in Lebanon. When Sada was executed Sami al-Hanawi and his fellow SSNP allied officer Adeeb Shishakli overthrew al-Zaim.

Hanawi restored civilian control over the government which included figures such as Akram al-Hirani of the Arab Socialist Party and Michelle Aflaq of the Ba’ath Party (these two organisations merged in ‘52, bring a large peasant base of support into the Ba’ath, otherwise dominated by students, teachers and professionals) but pursued union with Hashemite Iraq. Because Iraq was a British proxy and most Syrians wanted to remain a republic, this led to Hanawi’s overthrow by Adeeb al-Shishakli in a third coup of 1949.

Shishakli installs a military dictatorship and dissolves all political parties, banning newspapers and closing party headquarters. Shishakli wants to maintain relations with the US and the Brits, but has bad relations with Iraq, Jordan and Israel. He is also hostile to Nasser which means he can’t assemble a coalition; the radicals don’t see him as radical enough. The army demands the civilian government allow for one of its representatives as Minister for Defense to forestall any Hashemite influence.

Shishakli’s military dictatorship and his failure to pursue land reform alienates both progressives and the more traditional leadership; Ba’athists and communists establish cells within the army which leads to his overthrow in 1954.

The Syrian Communist Party had been founded in 1925 as the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, in part due to the organising work of Joseph Berger leader of the Palestine Communist Party and a Jew from Poland, he had originally come to Palestine as a Zionist settler and then became a communist; Syria had absorbed a lot of Palestinian refugees. The organisation accumulates significant power despite the reputational harm it suffered by its allegiance to the colonial popular front and Soviet support for partition; they begin to collaborate with the Ba’ath in opposing imperialism and its regional allies.

The Saudis allied with the yanks by granting oil concessions. Prince, later King, Faisal was suspicious of Nasser and attempted to organise an assassination in 1958; others within the royal family were more positively disposed.

1953 - 58

150 On 12 October 1953 an IOF force crossed the green line into the West Bank village of Qibya. Unit 101 was under the command of Ariel Scheinerman (later Sharon) and killed 69 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children.

151 This was one of 200 raids which took place in the early years of Israel’s independence.

Suez Crisis

Nasser wanted independence for Egypt, for the Brits to withdraw from Suez but also good relations with the West to finance modernisation projects and the Egyptian military; under Truman the Yanks were promising developmental and military supports to newly independent countries in the Middle East to get them into the Western bloc and towards accommodation with Israel.

Egyptians went through a series of negotiations with the Brits to get them out of the canal peacefully but there was residual influence. After Nasser nationalises the canal the Brits the French and Israel attack Egypt. This tripartite aggression had been planned in advance by Ben-Gurion, who had arranged for a meeting with the Brits and the French - keen to get revenge for Nasser’s support of the Algerian independence struggle - laying out a plan and a pretext as well as the Protocol of Sévres, a seven-point agreement that would allow the Israelis to invade all the way to the Suez. The Brits and the French would appeal to both parties to stop the war and would ask Egypt to accept temporary occupation of key positions on the canal by Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement, which was to include an Israeli request for the withdrawal of all troops 10 miles to the east of canal. If the Egyptians failed to agree Anglo-French forces would intervene, launch military operations and the Israelis would occupy the Western shoes.

Meanwhile the Israelis commit many massacres in Gaza, claiming they were seeking to put an end to fedayeen raids from the area; two-thirds of Gaza’s population are now refugees living in eight large camps.

The Americans, angry the Brits didn’t consult them, put an end to the operation. Egyptian sovereignty was reduced in border areas in line with Israeli wishes - sewing the seeds of future conflict - but Nasser succeeded in nationalising the canal, an important symbolic victory and an occasion of some of the biggest mobilisations in these regions’ history; there were attacks on British bases and increasing discussion on getting state apparatuses and militaries independent of Western management.

155 Between 930 and 1,200 Palestinians were killed before Israel withdrew.

On 29 October 1956 Israeli authorities imposed a 5pm curfew on villages near the border w/ Jordan. In Kafr Qasim border guards shoot and kill 49 unarmed Arab citizens, including women and children.

159 In Israel the Nakba was not taught in schools or mentioned in print due to military censorship. The use of the word ‘watan’ for ‘homeland’ was also banned. A teacher was sacked for writing poetry about a mulberry tree in his old village of al-Mujaydil, renamed Migdal HaEmek in Hebrew.

160 The government produced a daily newspaper in Arabic reporting mainly on visits from government officials, the building of roads and other ‘positive’ stories; it focused on the village and clan structures of Arab life, emphasising backwardness and orientalist stereotypes of underdevelopment, even when most Arabs lived in towns; it was widely mocked.

161 Fears were expressed for national security over the fact that knowledge of Arabic among Jews was declining; Arab writers usually learned Hebrew but things didn’t flow the other way; parents preferred their kids to learn English and French rather than a ‘backwards’ language like Arabic.

School tours were arranged by IOF intelligence to Druze villages and Nassereth with guides provided by intelligence officials but not the natives. Students of these Orientalist courses were expected to practice colloquial Arabic and learn about Arab customs but never speak to the native population about politics. These courses were followed by jobs in IOF intelligence.

The Baghdad Pact

The Brits and the yanks refused to lend money to Egypt until they submitted to the terms of the Baghdad pact, a NATO-inspired anti-communist military alliance, so called because Iraq under Nuri al-Said was completely aligned with Britain.

The USSR worked to resist this pact and did so by working with a number of anti-colonial organisations. After the war the Soviet line had forced Communist parties in colonial countries to denounce bourgeois nationalists, making united fronts with anti-imperialist organisations impossible; once Stalin dies this made more strategic alliances viable.

Nasser refused the terms of the pact, turning to the USSR for funding and getting guns from the Czechs. In doing so he mobilised the Arab world against the west, including in Hashemite Jordan where mass movements developed with significant Palestinian involvement, becoming increasingly influential in the growing Arab nationalist movement.

Egyptian intelligence establishes a radio station which Nasser uses to promote anti-colonial positions to the broader Arab region and propagandise against the Baghdad Pact.

The Saudis took Nasser’s side because of their hostility to the Hashemite monarchies in Jordan and Iraq. Syria adopted a similar line to Nasser but Jordan was more vulnerable due to its pro-British Hashemite monarchy. When the Turkish president Celâl Bayar went to Jordan to lobby for acceptance opposition’s demonstrations - which coincided with mass protests in Amman, Nablus and Jerusalem - were so big that Prime Minister Sa’id al-Mufti resigned. The Pact fails.

Nasser establishes the Bureau of the Arab Maghreb, which hosts anti-imperialists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and gives them support. He establishes contact with anti-colonial elements in China and Indonesia; relationship with Nehru more fraught. One of the clashes in this anti-colonial axis is on the question of Palestine, Nasser and others in the region trying to emphasise the importance of a solid position at the Bandung Conference, other countries are more worried about antagonising the west.

Communists, along with Ba’athists were becoming less hostile to Nasser due to these pro-Soviet and anti-colonial positions, bringing Egypt and Syria closer to the Soviets and one another particularly once Shishakli was forced out of power and the political environment under Shukri al-Quwatli becomes more favourable to left-wing activity.

Syria

In 1955 the Ba’ath-aligned Lieutenant Colonel Adnan Al-Malki, deputy chief of the Syrian army was assassinated by a Syrian social nationalist party military police sergeant. The SSNP was consequently outlawed even though it was a small party without much grounding in military life or the government.

In 1957 the US attempt a coup in Syria, assisted by the SSNP amidst discussions with Soviet engineers to work on oil refineries, fellow travellers being assigned major roles in the army and Syrian Defense minister visiting the Soviet union forging agreements re: grain for weapons deals. The coup is unsuccessful; the Syrian intelligence service arrested the CIA agent attempting to organise it and his Syrian accomplices.

1958 - 67

In 1958, the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath Party, partly motivated by pan-Arabism and partly to pre-empt the rise of the Communist Party supports the unification of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic, which is established in 1958.

Nasser, believing the Syrian army was too ideological and hence unstable and forced Aflaq to dissolve the Ba’ath.

Iraq

In 1958 in response to the formation of the United Arab Republic a reactionary Hashemite union was formed between Iraq and Jordan. However the imperialist-aligned Hashemite monarchy is overthrown by an Iraqi Free Officers movement led by Abdul-Karim Qasim a few months later, consisting mainly of conscripts from lower-class backgrounds increasingly separate from and frustrated by their upper class leadership. 100,000 people go out in demonstrations as soon as word reached the masses about the army taking power, many of them led by the communist party. The Communists enter into power under Qasim and begin to repress their Ba’athist rivals.

The Iraqi Communist Party was founded in 1934 but had roots going back to the 20s. It went under a major phase of rejuvenation and expansion under Fahd from 1941 on. It had roots in the trade union movement, the army, the women’s movement, students, lower class religious minorities, those who supported land reform - an issue which was increasingly urgent with urbanisation in turn driven by a developing oil industry - and a growing working class. From 1945 - 47 there is a huge number of strikes, which opened up onto political demands relating to British rule and pro-British Nouri Said. The repression these activities were met with conditioned a more clandestine form of organising and also elevate national consciousness within the Kurdish population; leads to the formation of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP).

As part of the general crackdown against the Al-Wathbah uprising in Baghdad in 1948 communist leaders are executed and discredited after their acceptance of the Soviet line on Israel.

Lebanon

Lebanese president Camille Chamoun, reaching the constitutional limits of his term and wishing to stay in power, took advantage of events in Iraq. Stoking fears over communism and pan-Arabism he led a crackdown and, with the help of the US, rigged an election, requesting US troops enter Lebanon; the previous year Eisenhower had declared that the US would intervene to assist Middle Eastern countries threatened by communism.

The French had encouraged ethnic tensions between Maronite and Druze populations in Lebanon, creating a consociational system, creating a ruling class drawn from multiple confessional communities who determined the trajectory of the state. Each sect was accorded a certain position within the governing order; the prime minister had to be a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the house had to be a Shia Muslim, with smaller groups get no say in government.

169 The influx of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon after the Nakba inflamed these sectarian tensions; Lebanon introduced the severe restrictions on the 100 - 130,000 Palestinians who had arrived in 1949. Palestinians were excluded from political life and forced into refugee camps out of a fear many of them were active in leftist movements or other radical organisations, many of these were former Armenian refugee camps.

This stands in contrast to how Palestinians were treated in Jordan where they were granted citizenship rather than refugee status. However Palestinian nationality was de-legitimised, as it was argued that this represented a barrier to Arab unity; use of the term Palestine in official documentation or correspondence was banned. Associations with a Palestinian character such as the Haifa cultural association in Balus, the Jaffa Muslim Sports Club in Ramallah were not allowed to engage in political activity. By contrast Syria granted citizenship and upheld the right to return.

The CIA were convinced Iraq would set off a chain-reaction that would topple the pro-Western governments in Lebanon and Jordan. They were also concerned about the potential for the growth of Nasserism and oil nationalisations; the postwar reconstruction boom was driven to a large extent by the artificial deflation of oil prices in Iraq. The US sent 14,000 people, naval forces, the whole Sixth Fleet, aircraft carriers, land forces into Lebanon to underline US support for Chamoun. A compromise was ultimately brokered between Nasser and the US, with General Fouad Chehab as president, who attempted to create a Lebanese state to stave off an escalation into large-scale civil war. However he also escalated repression of Palestinians.

Iraq

Aflaq moves to Iraq immediately after the revolution amidst growing demands from Ba’athists for Iraq to join the UAR; allying with Abdul Salam Arif, one of Qasim’s co-conspirators and a supporter of unity. The Communists ally themselves with Qasim in staving this off.

Arif is charged with attempting to assassinate Qasim and sentenced to death. His sentence is commuted when nationalists quit Qasim’s cabinet in protest. There’s an attempted military uprising in Mosul in 1959 backed by Nasser’s UAR, the uprising is put down and Qasim installs a personal dictatorship with the assistance of the communists.

Qasim tries to secure good relations with the USSR without losing his connection with the West, increasing taxes on the wealthy, enacting reforms to the benefit of the working class and peasantry and nationalising the Iraqi Petroleum Company.

Qasim turns against Mullah Mustafa Barzani and begins to bombard Kurdish areas in the north so the Kurds, backed by Iran and more covertly Israel, in line with Ben-Gurion’s strategy to use religious and ethnic minorities to destabilise Arab states, launch the Aylul revolution against the central state.

164 The majority of citizens supported Israeli state policy in not allowing refugees to return, that they had been responsible for the 1948 war and left voluntarily. A state inquiry heard testimony to this effect and emphasised the threat the Arabs represented to the state; the word ‘Palestinian’ was not used in Hebrew or English discourse in the 1950s except on the far left.

165 Of nearly a million refugees more than half were under 15.

166 Dissatisfaction broke out at continuing restrictions on movement which still applied to 85% of Israeli Arabs. Communist organisers were arrested and a May Day rally banned. When this was ignored, with slogans such as ‘End military rule’ and ‘Long live Nasser’, 300 were arrested.

167 A small group of Arab intellectuals founded The Land in the spirit of Nasserism and the Arab nationalist movement, calling for a repeal of all discriminatory laws and the right to return; this represented a parting of the ways between Arab nationalists and communist organisations.

Its call to boycott the 1959 Knesset elections led to weakened Arab representation and worried the security establishment.

The majority of the 300,000 Palestinians in Egypt lived under military administration and emergency laws in the Gaza strip that lasted until 1962.

170 In 1951 George Habash, a medical student in Beirut and refugee from Lydda, founded the Movement of Arab Nationalists with Waddie Haddad and Ahmad Muhammad Al-Khatib and built a presence there, also in Jordan and Kuwait, which had absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians; incidentally Nasser also offered many refugees from the Nakba to study in Cairo.

Kuwait was the most economically diverse and politically dynamic territory in the Gulf in the fifties. It was the first to benefit from major oil development with an attendant expansion in education, infrastructure and trading; linkages with India and Iran created a wealthy merchant class and civil society. It adopted a constitution and a parliament early on due to Arab nationalist activism as well as the relative liberalism of the Emir Abdullah Saleh.

170 - 3 Many of the most important Palestinian and Yemeni movements are also founded in Kuwait. Yasser Arafat, employed as an engineer in the Ministry of Public Works having failed to get a visa to Saudi Arabia, founds the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) here in 1959 with Salah Khalaf, a literature student born in Ramala and expelled to Gaza as a teenager; Arafat had been born in Egypt in 1929 to a Gazan father and mother had lived in Jerusalem briefly, studied in Cairo university and fought in the 1948 war as part of a Muslim Brotherhood unit, complaining that he was disarmed twice, first by the Egyptian army and next while serving with Abdul-Qader al-Husseini by the Jordanian Arab legion.

Fatah sought to liberate the whole of Palestine and end the Zionist occupation, with an emphasis on armed struggle, influenced by the Algerian independence struggle, the black civil rights movement in the US and the Mau Mau, but they found it difficult to compete against Nasserism, despite the funding they received from wealthy families in the Gulf including Kuwaiti and Qatari ruling families; by 1963 the organisation still had only a few hundred members.

The Arab Nationalists were mentored by Constantin Zurayk who first coined the term Nakba and had been a member of clandestine pan-Arab nationalist group that had gone under many names. As such this movement was led to a large extent by the Palestinian diaspora.

The Arab Nationalists had meetings with Aflaq about joining the Ba’ath but their perspective was that the Ba’ath was not Palestinian enough, being based more in old Eastern Arab capitals - Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo - and had failed to reckon with the Nakba and its implications. They were therefore smaller than the Communists and the Ba’ath but making an active effort to recruit youth and Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Habash and Haddad travelled to Amman and establish a people’s clinic to offer free medicine to the poor and recruited in working class areas, both west and East Bankers, as well as native Jordanians, establishing a strong presence in Lebanese youth circles, a lower-class orientation which differentiated them from the Ba’ath; their literature and propaganda focused on the plight of the refugees and on combating peace agreements with Israel. They called for boycotts of states that support the Zionist entity and promoted solidarity initiatives with Arab revolutions across the region; their fortunes rise in their involvements in the mobilisations against tripartite aggression against Egypt.

The Algerian revolution was also a significant influence for the Arab nationalists; they laid an emphasis on confronting the Western-backed Zionist state with a strong regional force. The failures of the Arab regimes to confront Israel were also contrasted with Tunisia and Morocco’s willingness to open their borders to the FLN; increasing recognition that they were pursuing their own interests rather than the Palestinians’.

Their social programme at the outset was not particularly radical - the emphasis was laid more on the construction of a pan-nationalist front - but in the sixties they embrace a third-worldist Marxist national liberation politics. The importance they attributed to popular mobilisation rather than dependence on the Arab regimes provided the germ of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, South Yemen’s National Liberation Front which, after the Brits left in 1967, established the Socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and the Dhofar Liberation Front, which carried out an armed guerrilla struggle against the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. When this Yemeni branch tacks increasingly Marxist and ultimately the NLF leads the only successful armed struggle and establishes the only Marxist state in the Middle East.

Even though the movement was founded in large part by Palestinians their emphasis was on the liberation of Palestine via Arab unity. This entailed avoiding direct conflict with the Israeli state, which meant the movement was constraining the demands of its grassroots; some pan-Arabists argued this to the extent that armed campaigns against Israel could not begin until all Arab regimes were united. This was the opposite of Fatah’s position which was pushing for a more immediate campaign, out of a fear that leaving the cause to other Arab regimes would lead to the catastrophe of 1948.

Syria

In 1961 a coup in Syria forces the country out of the UAR. Nasser still had a lot of support - there was a popular uprising against succession - but Nasser denounced it as a reactionary regime rather than moving to repress it.

The new Syrian government rolls back Nasser’s nationalisations, restoring property to industrialists and landowners, aligns with the west, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and removes Ba’athist officers from the army.

Aflaq re-established the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath and approved a Ba’athist / Nasserist military coup in 1963 organised by a Military Committee led by Muhammad Umran, Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, which overthrows Nazim al-Qudsi and installs Amin Al-Hafiz as president. Jadid works to isolate Hafiz, purging officers in the army involved in the secession and appoints his own followers, many of them Alawites; Hafiz accuses Jadid and Assad as organising a sectarian takeover of the army and this backfires.

Iraq

In 1963 a coup led by Nasserists and Ba’athists overthrew Qasim; a brutal wave of revenge killings of communists followed, conducted primarily by an armed force parallel to the army called the National Guard. Nine months later Nasserists and other nationalists moved against the Ba’ath in another coup, establishing Abdul Salam Arif as leader; this created an atmosphere more conducive to communist organising; some embarked on guerilla struggle.

After Arif died in a plane crash in 1966, his brother Abdul Rahman Arif took power until the next Ba’ath coup in 1968 that brought Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr along with his deputy Saddam Hussein to power. Union w Nasser’s Egypt was discussed as the government nationalised major industries but this union did not go ahead and Nasserists increasingly turned against the Iraqi regime.

PLO

174 - 5 In 1964 Nasser convened a summit of Arab kings and presidents in Cairo declaring the collective goal of the Arab states was the liquidation of Israel and spoke of organising the Palestinians to liberate its country, the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was announced, reconstituting itself as the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament.

The new organisation’s charter called for the total liberation of Palestine and self-determination within the borders of the Brits’ mandate. It rejected the Balfour declaration, the Mandate system and claims of historical ties between Jews and Palestine, arguing Judaism was a religion and not a nationality.

Arafat kept his distance from this new body, discretely seeking help and training facilities from Syria, Algeria and Jordan.

176 - 7 In 1964 Fatah’s first military engagement against Israel was intercepted by Lebanese forces. Three days later it planted an explosive charge in the national water carrier canal in the Bet Netofa valley in lower Galilee. It did not go off but the raid was regarded as a propaganda success; even while Nasser hailed them he was concerned their activities would trigger a military action beyond their control at the wrong time; part of Fatah’s strategy was to provoke a reaction which would prompt the intervention of the other Arab states. This provoked tension; Jordan forces arrested 200 people they regarded as subversives including most of the PLO staff in Amman. In July Jordanian forces clashed with a Palestinian commando squad on its way to Israel and killed four of them.

In October after a bombing in Jerusalem’s Romema district Jordan accepted lists of fedayeen collaborators and arrested them but was also attacked by Israel in November in a punitive attack on Samu, south of Hebron on the West Bank.

178 This assault left 18 dead, 130 injured, 120 houses destroyed.

1967

180 In 1967, with US support, Israel launched a surprise attack with a ground offensive into Gaza and the Sinai, reaching the Suez Canal and Sharm el-Sheikh at the peninsula’s southern tip.

Nasser induced Syria and Jordan to launch attacks. Israel had urged King Hussein to stay out of the war and retaliated with an offensive to encircle East Jerusalem. Israeli forces initially held back from entering the Old City over religious sensitivities but on 7 June newly appointed minister for defense Moshe Dayan gave the order to attack; Israel conquered the city later that day.

Israeli forces captured Nablus without a shot being fired; IOF units were mistaken for Iraqi reinforcements, then Bethlehem fell. When King Hussein ordered his forces to pull back across the Jordan, Israel occupied the rest of the West Bank unopposed. Israel’s retaliation against Syria took the form of an air strike which destroyed two-thirds of the Syrian air force, giving them total air superiority.

The consequence was that large parts of the Sinai were occupied, huge parts of Syria, Palestinians lose whatever was left of Palestine - Nablus, Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah and other cities previously under Jordanian control - leaving all the people in these areas with no passports, civil political or national rights.

Israel triples in size and reduces its borders from 983 to 601 km, ruling over 1.1 million Palestinians. On 11 June a ceasefire was agreed; Arab losses were over 20,000.

A Security Council resolution calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territories, but normalises the prior occupation.

On 27 June the government voted to unite western and eastern parts of Jerusalem, more than doubling municipal jurisdiction to include the newer Arab suburbs and twelve villages, incorporating 69,000 Palestinians and extending to Ramallah in the north and Bethlehem in the south.

187 Military rule was imposed in these newly annexed areas, banking activities were suspended, financial restrictions, curfews, detention without trial, expulsion and house demolitions under powers put in place by the Brits. Three Palestinian villages, Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were destroyed a week after their inhabitants, expelled to Ramallah, tried to return.

189 Estimates suggest 200,000 Palestinians displaced; many of these were refugees for a second time, Israel providing transport for them to move east, forcing them to sign documents to the effect that they were doing so willingly.

190 Gaza’s population was densely distributed, mostly urban and young, 65% of them refugees from 1948. Less developed and more isolated than the West Bank, more dependent on Israelis for services and general assistance, weaker institutions.

194 No resistance to the occupation was tolerated; curfews, arrests and searches were deployed in response to a school strike over the withdrawal of Arab textbooks; ‘dissidents’ were often deported.

202 Debates within Israeli government as to the future of occupation; permanent annexation, granting a new state, settling the area or giving it back to Jordan while retaining control of security; ultimately this decision, and discussion with Jordan, was deferred.

Nasser resigned and only returned to power after massive demonstrations called for his return.

This disaster prompted a full-scale mobilisation of Palestinian society against the Zionist project, independent Palestinian organisations began to take the lead; FEDAI were recruited in large numbers and had more room to maneuver in front-line states like Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt but blowback still had the potential to attend to them in the Arab states they worked within. The weakened Jordan state allowed Palestinians to organise armed resistance from there and to infiltrate both states; clandestine units were organised in the west bank. Algerians also offering support, forced the Syrians to support Fatah.

Guerrilla bands of between 10 - 15 operated in the Nablus-Jenin-Tulkarem area and Hebron hills commanded by men who had trained in China and Algeria but the IOF and border police inflicted heavy losses through killings and arrests. The Israelis figure out the West Bank cells quickly and infiltrate them; the first campaign is crushed.

193 Jordan co-operated with Israel in the running of the West Bank.

Syrian Ba’athists also formed their own Palestinian organization, Asaika, which later became a tool of the Assad regime.

A split from the PFLP led to to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or DFLP, largely wiped out by PFLP until Fatah intervened.

The all-Palestine government had an office in Cairo that was supposed to represent all Palestinian people, when its head died Nasser saw an opportunity, at a time when the Israeli state is trying to divert the river Jordan for its national carrier project and there were suspicions the Israelis were developing nuclear weapons.

1968 - 72

207 3,345 dunams of private land in East Jerusalem were cleared for a new Jewish suburb; the first settlement built in occupied territory after the war.

208 These settlements were slow to expand beyond East Jerusalem, partly for political reasons; Israel argued the West Bank did not constitute occupied territory since Mandatory Palestine had been divided in 1949 and Jordan’s unilateral annexation of the West Bank had only been recognised by the Brits and Afghanistan, justified on the basis of the right to return.

212 In March 1968 Israel launched an attack on Fatah backed by the Jordanian army; despite an ostensible Israeli victory it was a propaganda win for the PLO; the Israelis left a tank and a number of trucks which Arafat and King Hussein photographed themselves with.

213 Four months later the Palestine National Council allotted seats to the fedayeen groups for the first time.

The PLO’s national covenant underwent significant changes in July 1968, emphasising the nationhood of the Palestinians and highlighting armed struggle as the only way to liberation. It also clarified that only Jews who had been living in Palestine before the Zionist invasion could be considered Palestinian; Fatah called for equal right regardless of religion.

In 1968 the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine breaks off and a Syrian army officer Akhma Jibril breaks off to form the PFLP general command, a more conventional nationalist and a Syrian proxy but refused to commit forces to the Battle of Karameh which lost them an enormous amount of credibility.

Fatah by contrast undergoes enormous boost in membership amidst indicators that the Israeli army can be defeated; Arafat becomes a better prospect for outside backing. Most of Fatah’s members were either Muslim brothers or Ba’athists, very few came from an Arab nationalist background. Members of these organisations often had to confront a more conservative leadership who preferred to wait until the Arab states were united, it later pivots towards Arab-Jewish coexistence in the context of a single democratic state.

Palestinians concentrated their forces in refugee camps liberated from Lebanese government repression and Jordan due to the large Palestinian and sympathetic East Bank population. Syria allowed training camps on its territory - which the Israelis were consistently bombing - but discouraged cross-border attacks from its soil.

However since guerilla activiy was going to happen anyway the PLO under Aḥmad Shuqayrī was founded; it was critiqued by Fatah as the product of an Arab bureaucracy passing off their interests as in line with those of the Palestinians but Arafat decided to enter the PLO with a view to reshaping it.

Tensions between existing Arab regimes and the wings of the PLO which aimed at their overthrow led to Jordanian intelligence engineering engagements between PLO fighters and the Jordanian army in 1970, leading to a crackdown, which precedes a shipment of American weapons and the mobilising of tribal leaders against the Palestinians under the banner of Jordanian nationalism.

The PLO established a new headquarters in Beirut and Lebanon where it allied with domestic forces against right-wing Maronite militias and the sectarian colonial order. The PLO also had to fight off constant Israeli attacks including an assassination campaign against cultural and political leaders.

In 1970 Assad launched a coup in Syria that removed Salah Jadid from power, more out of a quest for a personal dictatorship than any ideological differences; and Nasser died while trying to negotiate an end to fighting in Jordan; Anwar Sadat took power after him.

The PFLP embark on a hijacking campaign, taking three civilian airliners and blowing them up in Jordan. Hussein declared martial law, PLO forces and between 3 - 5,000 Palestinians and 600 Jordanians.

King Hussein met the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon promising to prevent further fedayeen raids. 3 - 5,000 Palestinian fighters fled to Lebanon, another 2,300 were taken prisoner. 72 surrendered to the Israelis rather than fight the Jordanians.

215 Support for the fedayeen grew in the West Bank as support for Jordanian loyalists fell; the new universities founded in the area created a new politically conscious generation.

216 In 1971 the fedayeen struggle reached its peak in the Gaza Strip, numbers were swelled by fighters fleeing escalating attacks on the PLO in Jordan; killings of Palestinians regarded as collaborators were common. Weapons stockpiled during Egyptian rule were gathered, others were smuggled in from Sinai, orange groves provided natural cover for guerrillas.

Sharon led a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, imposing 24 hour curfews and a shoot-to-kill policy. Roads were cleared through Gaza’s biggest refugee camps, about 100,000 people had been forced to find new homes by mid 1971.

218 This repression forced Palestinian resistance abroad.

King Hussein became worried about the future of his regime with PLO presence increasing and Fatah mounting 200 operations a month from Jordan, clamped down on the Palestinians but then agreed an armistice with Arafat.

1973 - 77

In 1973 Sadat and Assad launched a war against Israel with the limited goal of challenging the post-67 settlement, Assad was particularly anxious to liberate the Golan Heights.

226 On 6 October 1973 Egyptian and Syrian offensives along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights triggered air strikes, artillery duels and tank battles. Israel was caught unprepared by the breaching of its Bar-Lev line east of the canal and initial Egyptian advances in Sinai.

Mobilisation of IOF reserves turned the tide; when a UN-brokered ceasefire was introduced on 14 October Israeli forces were fifty miles from Cairo and twenty-five from Damascus; the entire Egpytian Third Army were encircled by the IOF on the Eastern bank of the Suez Canal.

A general strike took place in the occupied territories, Palestinian Liberation Army troops were deployed in a limited capacity on both fronts but the majority of Palestinians played no role, nor did Jordan.

227 Israel suffered 2,650 losses, their largest since 1948, Egypt and Syria together lost 16,000; Egypt regained territory, Syria did not however their success in spite of US backing dented the Zionist entity’s aura of invincibility.

At the Algiers Arab summit conference in November 1973 all twenty-one Arab states recognised the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

In the UN two weeks later Arafat offered ’the gun or the olive branch’.

234 In May 1977 the Likud, an alliance of right-wing Herut party and the liberals under Manachem Begin - founder of the Irgun, perpetrator of the bombing of the King David Hotel and the Deir Yassin massacre, mentored by Jabotinsky, and organiser of civilian bombings during the Nakba - emerged as the largest party in the general election after a campaign focused on allegations of incompetence surrouding Yitzhak Rabin’s government after the Yom Kippur war.

238 - 9 An expansion of settlements would take place under Begin; more confiscation of Palestinian land, more water under Israeli control, the extension of Israeli law. The number of settlers in the West Bank rose to 12,500 by 1980, with a view to Balkanising it out of existence. New settlements were built by Palestinians, making them an indispensible part of the labour force, even while social intercourse property was limited.

1977 - 81

241 - 3 In 1977 Sadat flew from Cairo to Tel Aviv and signed a peace treaty with the Israelis, on the principle of returning land to Egypt of all territory it had lost to Israel in 1967 except the Gaza Strip. This was a crushing blow to the PLO. Arafat condemned Sadat but did not join a radical Arab bloc of Syria, Algeria, South Yemen and Libya which cut all ties with Egypt.

244 Begin visited Ismailiya on the Suez Canal, Cairo being deemed too hostile an environment. Carter called on Begin to recognise the rights of Palestinians and the prospects of talks receded.

Shortly after a squad of thirteen Fatah men landed on a deserted beach in Haifa and killed thirty-eight Israeli civilians.

245 Three days later Israel sent 25,000 troops into Lebanon to push Palestinian fighters away from the border and bolster their local proxy the South Lebanon Army (SLA). Seven days of fighting ended with a ceasefire, with 1,100 people killed, mostly Palestinian and Lebanese. Between 100,000 and 250,000 people were displaced.

Sadat and Begin visited Washington in summer 1978 but relations worsened. In September Carter brought the two to Camp David in Maryland.

246 After two weeks agreement on removal of military bases from the Sinai was reached and normalisation of relations would occur, Sadat would receive $1.3 billion of annual US aid to the Egyptian armed forces.

A Second Camp David document agreed future negotiations would be based on UN Resolution 242 but the PLO was not mentioned.

Sadat drew the social basis for these imperialist reforms from the Muslim Brotherhood, ending Egypt’s role as a centre of revolutionary Arab nationalism and putting an effective end to Ba’athism as an emancipatory force.

247 Palestinian opposition hardened, Jordan declined to join talks on a self-governing authority, West Bank mayors were dismissive that autonomy would mean a change from the status quo.

A National Guidance Committee was formed in November 1978 representing and co-ordinating Palestinian trade unions and student body resistance. Fatah was part of this 23 member body but did not dominate it.

Following the signing of the Egyptian accord the biggest protest strike in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 took place.

251 Begin’s second term as prime minister began in 1981; changes to occupation policy included a separate civilian administration in the West Bank and Gaza, which would be subordinate to the military government. Division of labour was designed to pre-empt the outcome of autonomy talks with Egypt by implementing Israel’s interpretation of Camp David unilaterally.

252 The head of the new administration Menachem Milson was a professor who bolstered the Israeli-backed Village Leagues which had been established to counter the influence of the PLO in the cities, on the basis that the conservative rural sector, 70% of the West Bank’s population, would be easier to influence.

Palestinians were hostile but Jordan’s decision to ban membership of the Leagues on pain of death and confiscation of property was decisive.

Saudi King Fahd made a pitch for a two-state solution, flying a kite for Israeli recognition that serious discussions of a state in some form would be a rational decision. The Soviets also favoured this position; Kissinger worked to ensure the Palestinians and the PLO to be de facto excluded from any talks and have whatever settlement was broached to be forced on them.

In 1982 Begin launched a second invasion of Lebanon to wipe the PLO out, linking up with right wing Maronite phalangist militia allies to lay siege to West Beirut.

Lebanon had a Maronite president and the Maronites were disproportionately represented in the ruling class. With the rise of revolutionary activity associated with Palestine oppressed groups saw an opportunity for radical reform; Maronites v much identified with the American ruling order and regarded the civil war as a clash of civilisations. This side of the conflict engage in highly sectarian methods, Israel stoked divisions etween Shia and Christian villages, pulling Christians and blackmailing Shia collaborators into attacking Palestinian civilians while Fatah and its allies were committed to ecumenical vision.

Syria fought the Israelis, more to protect the Damascus Beirut road than any principled commitment to the cause, but the other Arab states remained neutral. USSR non-involvement was due to the decline in global Soviet position under Brezhnev and its involvement in Afghanistan.

The PLO and the Lebanese movement were at first in a much stronger position; they had taken over more than three quarters of the country. However Assad was concerned that the PLO will obtain some independence from Syria and that Arafat was not towing the Syrian line in regard to a broader negotations process. Assad therefore proposes going into Lebanon to back the Maronites and weaken the PLO and the US, Israel give this their blessing.

The PLO ultimately agreed to evacuate thousands of its fighters from the country in exchange for a guarantee from the US that Palestinian civilians would be protected. Israel didn’t respect this deal, rather the Israelis imprisoned thousands of men of fighting age in a concentration camp, leaving women children and the elderly in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps; Ariel Sharon oversaw the Maronites massacring them.

1982 - 87

260 In September 1982 Reagan unveiled a plan for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, creating an entity that would be linked to Jordan.

It also called for a freeze on settlements and Palestinian responsibility for internal security.

268 In February 1986 Hussein broke with Arafat and the Israelis allowed Palestinians to take over from IOF officers who had been running West Bank town halls since mayors had been sacked in 1982. The scion of a prominent local family took the job but was assassinated.