The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  Ottoman Palestine

  For a relatively small and narrow territory, the land of Palestine contains a remarkable variety of soils, climates, and terrains. A glance at a relief map, as shown in Illustrations 1 and 2, shows the country falling topographically into two main divisions: the central mountainous range, running from south to north, and the coastal plains and inland valleys (with the remainder consisting of wide expanses of desert in the south). At the turn of the century, with Palestinian agriculture lacking sophisticated agricultural technology, it was these geographical features that largely determined agricultural conditions. The rich coastal plains and northern inland valleys possessed the important advantages of good soil, sufficient annual rainfall, and convenient transportation. Naturally, better agricultural possibilities were found there.

  Farming in the plains and valleys produced a variety of products hungrily consumed in Europe—wheat, barley, and maize, for example—but the choice export item in Palestine was the juicy, thick-skinned, and easy to transport Jaffa orange. Citrus fruits were in high demand in European markets at the turn of the century, and the high profits justified the investment in irrigation and the time it took for young seedlings to bear fruit. The introduction of the internal combustion engine in 1897 allowed orchard owners to improve vastly their access to underground aquifers. Citrus acreage expanded significantly.

  1. Relief map

  2. Relief cross section

  Nonetheless, the relative weakness of central Ottoman state power and policing at the beginning of the 19th century resulted in most of Palestine’s rural population living in the safer mountainous terrain. The need for water and cultivable land had to be balanced against the more pressing need to protect oneself against attack, for example from Bedouin raids. Such considerations were of enormous importance during the early 19th century when Ottoman authorities were unable to provide the basic infrastructure required by agriculturalists interested in increasing their input of labour or capital. Accordingly, patterns of cultivation were determined more by the variable degree of security for the settled population than by geographic and climatic factors. Though some cultivation did continue in parts of the plains adjacent to the central mountainous range, through satellite villages known as khirbehs, generally Palestine witnessed a decline in the cultivated area during this period.

  Areas that lay beyond the effective control of the Ottoman government at this time were dominated by competing local notable families, each with their own independent power base. The Ottomans could not have exercised effective authority without the notables’ services, such as tax collecting. In return, the notables required access to government in order to fulfil the expectations of their followers. While notable politics was characterized by a degree of factional squabbling, notables remained active intermediaries for the Ottoman government.

  These relationships underwent a major change in the mid 19th century, the effect of which was to push a western migration of the Palestinian population from the mountains into the valleys and plains. The context for this transformation was provided first by the results of the intense administrative reforms undertaken by the Ottoman government, known as the Tanzimat; and, secondly by the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the growing world economy.

  The Tanzimat (literally ‘reorganization’) represented a great push by the Ottoman leadership to extend its governing apparatus throughout the empire. The adoption of new legal and administrative codes, often inspired by European bureaucracies, was designed to empower the central government in Istanbul. A key measure in this respect was the Ottoman land law of 1858. By requiring that all individuals who possessed land be provided with a title deed, the law aimed to establish a one-to-one relationship between the peasant cultivator and the state. The Ottoman government stood to benefit financially, by the efficient taxation of agricultural production, and administratively, by extending the authority of trained officials. The intent may also have been to undermine the position of the notables, but in fact they were the best positioned to take advantage of the regulations. Quick to appreciate the new opportunities to purchase and register lands, and attracted by the improved security conditions, notable families acquired vast tracts of land in the relatively more sparsely populated plains and valleys of Palestine. One particularly significant illustration (the fallout from which will be considered in the next chapter) of the overall trend was the purchase by the Sursuq family of about 50,000 acres in the plain of Esdraelon (also known as the Jezreel valley or, in Arabic, Marj ibn Amr).

  The second important factor that contributed at this time to the growing interest in the agricultural potential of the plains and valleys was Palestine’s increased connectedness—by railroads, shipping lines, a telegraph network—to the world economy. Europe’s insatiable demand for raw materials resulted in a considerable increase in Palestine’s agricultural output. This is revealed by the estimates available for the trade out of the port of Jaffa during this period: for example, while orange exports to the United Kingdom increased more than sixfold between 1860 and 1881, the export of cereals doubled between 1873 and 1881.

  Market opportunities resulting from greater integration into the world market and the increased security of administrative reforms in the last part of the 19th century created increased pressure on the land and resources of Palestine’s coastal plains and inland valleys. Settlement took a number of forms: Bedouin groups began to settle in permanent locales; satellite khirbehs were more densely and continuously inhabited as the more densely inhabited Arab villages in the mountainous areas repopulated the fertile plains; and rich notables were quick to invest in economic opportunities as they arose. And then, following the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s, European Jews started arriving. They too sought agricultural opportunities, sometimes backed up by the financial support of wealthy patrons. By the beginning of the 20th century, Zionism had established a dozen settlements on land that was usually bought from Arab notables who had themselves acquired legal ownership of the land within the last few decades, attracted by the profits to be made. Such legal and economic opportunities for land purchase did not exist in the mountainous areas of greatest significance to Biblical antiquity. Recognizing how early Zionist settlers avoided attributing special importance to religious sites, and instead took root in the fertile lands of the plains, explains why ultimately the boundaries of Israel—when they were defined and redefined in the diplomacy of 1947 and the fighting of 1948—did not in the end include the Biblical areas of Judea and Samaria. Control over that territory would only come after another twenty years.

  Conclusion

  Over the course of the 19th century, the structure of the Ottoman state was subject to an intense, if piecemeal, reform process. These reforms aimed at strengthening the central administration of the empire. Some Arab citizens, understandably enough, contested government attempts to increase its control over their society, but few actually challenged the sovereignty of the Ottoman state or gave much thought to a world without it. As Ottoman citizens, Arabs were given some representation in the parliament, participated in the expanding bureaucracy and enrolled in the growing school system. And it was the Ottoman army that ostensibly provided protection against the intervention of European powers, their missionaries, and their intermediaries.

  Ultimately, this chapter’s use of the term ‘Palestine’, while helpful in demarcating a well known geographical region, is anachronistic in reference to a political unit. Before the First World War, there was no ‘Palestine’ as such; rather the territory, as shown in Illustration 3, consisted of the districts of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre, all of which were defined according to an evolving framework of Ottoman administration. This has contributed throughout the 20th century to some political leaders contesting the existence of Palestinians. In 1969 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that there was no such thing: ‘When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? … It was not as though there was
a Palestinian people considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.’ More recently, such sentiments were echoed by US Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich: ‘Palestinians are an invented people,’ he declared. ‘Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire … And they had the chance to go many places.’

  While it is true that Palestinian national identity would not arise until the British invasion and occupation of Ottoman land, and only consolidated itself as a result of the desire to both throw off the yoke of British imperial rule and resist Zionist immigration and settlement, the more important point to note is that all nationalisms arise and gather strength from specific historical circumstances. This includes Zionism, as constructed by the small but fractious minority of Jews who chose it as their national identity. As a national movement, Zionism rose to prominence in the late 19th century in opposition to the consistent persecution of Jews by newly emergent nationalist movements across Europe. This does not make it any less invented, or any more valid, than other nationalisms. When European Zionist leaders struck out to consolidate their position on the ground in Palestine, they were forced to respond to the presence of the indigenous Arab society and to the geography in which its economy was developing. The most remarkable component of this evolution was the territorial shift in the geographical definition of the land of Zion.

  3. Ottoman administrative divisions

  Significant as this shift would become, the overall achievement was still quite limited. When Herzl returned to Vienna following the 1897 Basel Congress, he reflected happily on its achievements by writing in his diary that ‘in Basel I created the Jewish State’ and that ‘five years hence, in any case, certainly fifty years hence, everyone will perceive it’. Accurate though Herzl’s statement appears in hindsight, one must nonetheless take great care not to read history backwards. In fact, the triumphalist hopes of Zionist leaders in 1897 were soon enough dashed by the actual failure to achieve any real objective. Of the 2.5 million Russian Jews who emigrated between 1882 and 1914, less than 50,000 made their way to the dreamed-of Jewish homeland in Palestine. And many of them did not stay for long. Those who did were able to acquire ownership of only a tiny percentage of the land. Herzl was right that Zionism needed a major diplomatic breakthrough. But that would have to wait twenty years, when the First World War presented the unique opportunity.

  Chapter 2

  British Palestine 1917–37

  The First World War (1914–18) has been described as the most transformative event in the history of the modern Middle East. The British army’s occupation of Arab territories ended four centuries of Ottoman rule over them. An entirely new political map emerged as six new successor states from the former Ottoman Empire were created: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan. In Anatolia, former Ottoman military commanders were able to rally to secure the national independence of Turkey. But in the five new Arab states the post-war period was one of Anglo-French dominance. European rule was sanctioned by the newly formed League of Nations through the mandate system, an institution that tried to gloss over the fact that colonial relationships were being imposed on the ground despite US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals for self-determination.

  This chapter sets out the ways in which Britain carved out and then ruled over the newly created state of Palestine—a quixotic, and ultimately doomed, experiment in facilitating Arab-Zionist cohabitation in a single state. Britain’s rule over Palestine lasted only three decades. It was long enough, nonetheless, for both the establishment of new national frameworks (a capital city, for example, as well as a new currency and trade agreements along newly defined borders) and, concurrently, the elaboration of ethno-religious fractures that would contribute to Palestine’s eventual partition. A complex tangle of constitutional, immigration, and land ownership issues, Britain’s failed attempts up to 1937 to reconcile the mutually exclusive demands for self-determination among Palestine’s Arab and Jewish communities, led inevitably to the intensifying conflict between them. The Arab–Jewish fault line would then be fundamentally transformed in the 1937–47 period by a unique clash of converging forces.

  The promised land?

  Britain’s long-standing strategic concern in the eastern Mediterranean was to protect the overland trade route to India and, after its opening in 1869, the Suez Canal, which quickly came to be regarded as the jugular vein of Empire. Beyond that, the main aim of British diplomacy prior to the First World War was to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire so as to guard against Russian expansionism. When the Ottomans allied with Germany, British leaders were forced to rethink how best to protect their interests in the Middle East. They were willing to consider multiple conflicting plans, all in the hope of securing a military victory.

  By the time the war ended, Britain had put her signature on a confusing array of promises and declarations. She had pledged the future disposition of Palestine to no less than three different real or imagined allies. First, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, made promises to Sharif Husayn, the Hashemite ruler of the Hijaz region of Arabia, about the creation of an independent Arab kingdom. Secondly, Britain officially recognized the long-standing claims of her French allies to Syria, while staking claims of her own. Third, promises were made to Zionist leaders in London. A fourth set of commitments, spurred by US President Woodrow Wilson, was broadcast about the rights of all peoples to independence and self-determination. The end result was a complex tangle of pledges and counter-pledges. British diplomats would do their best in the post-war years to square the contradictions, but these wartime agreements have remained to this day the source of much controversy and resentment.

  By the terms of the first negotiations—worked out during an exchange of letters between July 1915 and March 1916 commonly referred to as the Husayn–McMahon correspondence—Britain pursued an anti-Ottoman alliance with Sharif Husayn. As protector of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, Husayn oversaw the annual pilgrimage. A leader of such religious authority could, Britain hoped, reverse the call to jihad issued by the Ottoman sultan-caliph to stir up trouble among Muslims in the British Empire, particularly India. Better yet, perhaps Husayn, who before the war had been feeling increasingly threatened by Istanbul’s efforts to assert closer control over the Hijaz, would rise against Ottoman forces and take some pressure off Britain’s position at the Suez Canal.

  In return for a Hashemite-led revolt, Britain promised to recognize Sharif Husayn as ruler of an independent Arab kingdom. Much ambiguity surrounded the status of such a realm, not least the demarcation of its territorial boundaries. The place of Palestine in the assurances made by Britain became the subject of fierce debate when Britain was forced to defend its divisive policies in Palestine by interpreting the correspondence in a way that specifically excluded it from any prior promises made to Arabs. Its failure to argue this position successfully made British imperial rule across the Middle East all the more resented: ‘a startling piece of double-dealing,’ wrote George Antonius, a Palestinian leader and one of the first historians of Arab nationalism. British obfuscation, born out of wartime desperation, is perhaps best captured by Sir Henry McMahon’s own explanation for the inherent ambiguity of his assurances: ‘What we have to arrive at now is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy and bring them on to our side. This on our part is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from academic haggling over conditions.’

  At the same time as negotiating with Sharif Husayn, British officials were meeting with their European counterparts in order to divvy up the Middle East as the potential spoils of the still unfinished war. The second controversial set of promises, known as the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, recognized French claims to the northern parts of the Arab territories (the future Lebanon and Syria), while
guaranteeing British interests and influence in the southern part (from Egypt to Iraq). Both Britain and France wanted Palestine. In the end the agreement placed it under the control of an ‘international administration’, the precise definition of the term being left for the future, while giving Britain the ports of Haifa and Acre.

  Over the next year, however, Britain recalculated its own strategic interests in the future status of Palestine. The region was the site of important military operations, and government officials concluded that Palestine’s value as a buffer to the Suez Canal had become too important to allow for an ill-defined international presence there after the war. These new interests were being defined just as British forces were amassing in the Sinai Peninsula to push back the Ottoman forces and break through to Palestine. Moreover, these new calculations developed in tandem with the efforts of the leading members of Britain’s Jewish community who, in pursuit of the strategies of political Zionism, sought to persuade the government that Zionist interests complemented British interests. Accordingly, in November 1917, in a letter addressed by Arthur James Balfour, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Lord Walter Rothschild, a prominent member of the British Jewish community, Britain announced that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.’ Of the three sets of commitments Britain made over this much-promised land, the Balfour Declaration would be the most enduring.