Do "Palestinians" possess a "History?"

by Yardena Anat Even, Haifa Israel
Yardena3@aol.com


published 12 August 2002
in Jerusalem Post

Dear Ignorant Pro Palestinian naive posters 
Please Educate yourselves 
and its free for the takers! 

"Every society needs a past of some sort. This past is interpreted, and
sometimes partly invented, in accord with the current needs of the society
and of building its collective identity." 

the Palestinian Arabs do not have traditional, historical sense of being
different from the Arab Muslims in neighboring countries, Even the Arab
historian Majid Khadduri questioned the "Palestinian people" notion. 

After all, the formation of a people has to do with, among other things,
when (and if!) it became aware of itself as in some way a people, a
distinct people, different from others, and when (and if) others came to
think of it as a distinct, separate people, and whom do the "Palestinians"
see as being part of their collectivity and who is left out. The usefulness
of a separate "Palestinian" identity as a weapon of psychological warfare
against Israel does not seem to occur to them. 

the Arab side began the war of 1947-49, and that it began with attacks on
Jewish civilians and neighborhoods. 
he Arab invasion of the country began in 634 and was not completed until
640 with the fall of Caesarea (The taking of Jerusalem is usually dated to
638). In other words, it took the Arabs six years to conquer the country.
One can imagine the destruction that took place in six years of warfare.
Christians likely outnumbered Arab Muslims in the Land before the Crusader
conquest (1099). In any case, Jerusalem had a Christian majority through
the whole Early Period of Muslim rule (638-1099), despite some monumental
building in the city by the Muslim rulers. Hence, it was only after the
Crusades that the majority of the country's population was clearly Muslim.
The Crusaders had massacred much of the country's Jewish population. 

The rebels did not see themselves as "Palestinians" and probably did not
even know the name "Palestine" for the country which Arab Muslims
traditionally saw as an undifferentiated part of Bilad al-Sham (usually
translated as Syria or Greater Syria) which comprised the Syria, Lebanon,
Israel and Jordan of today, roughly speaking. Administrative divisions
(vilayets, sanjaqs) were mainly unrelated to today's borders. At the time,
Palestine only existed in the vocabulary of the West and in the Western
historical memory. The rebellion broke out against the regime of Muhammad
Ali of Egypt (himself a Balkan native) who had conquered Bilad al-Sham from
his Ottoman suzerains in 1831. The motive for revolt was opposition to
Muhammad Ali's policy of drafting the sons of ordinary Muslims into his
army, whereas traditionally soldiers were loot-seekers, mercenaries, slaves
or members of a military caste. Conscription of ordinary subjects was an
innovation, and Muhammad Ali was himself a usurper. The revolt took place
among the Arab-Muslims of the Judea-Samaria mountain ridge, not throughout
the country. The rebels also attacked and looted the Jews --and then the
Christians-- in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Similar revolts took place with
the same motive around the same time in other parts of Muhammad Ali's
holdings in Bilad al-Sham. However, in Lebanon, by way of contrast, various
ethnic-religious communities, such as Maronites, Shiites, Greek Orthodox
and Druze, joined together in revolt with a common program drawn up in
writing (Antelias, 1840). Some of the population of the Galilee joined the
Lebanese rebels (to be sure, the communal harmony in Lebanon did not last
long). Now what made the revolt on the Judea-Samaria ridge specifically
"Palestinian" or "national"? It did not embrace the whole country which the
West then and the Arabs now call Palestine (the Arabs are following recent
Western usage, since the West most often called the country the Holy Land
through the nineteenth century). The revolt did not embrace the whole
population or all communities of the population in the area where it did
take place, since it involved attacks on the Christians and Jews. The
motive was not national but social (the end of the new policy of
conscription). And the conduct of the revolt displayed the traditional
sense of Muslim superiority and the recurrent Muslim urge to despoil the
dhimmis, the non-Muslims. Nor is it clear how much has changed since then
when we see how on Easter Sunday, 1999, Muslims in Nazareth attacked their
Christian neighbors, supposedly Arabs like themselves, on their way home
from church. Just 40 years earlier (1794) in America, the Whiskey Rebellion
had broken out in Pennsylvania because farmers did not want to pay a
federal tax on whiskey making. Did that rebellion initiate "Pennsylvanian
nationalism"? 

After taking the country back from Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Empire was
able to effectively integrate the Arab notables into the state's governing
structure. The Arabs got official positions in their own areas. For
instance, they describe Jerusalem notables as getting posts in the
Jerusalem sanjaq (district). They later write about Musa Kazem Husseini
(Faisal Husseini's grandfather) that he "nurtured his career in the Ottoman
bureaucracy" . Husseini attended the Ottoman School of Administration and
served as governor of various districts in the empire, including in
Anatolia, far from his home in Jerusalem. Another Jerusalem Arab notable
who served in a highly responsible post on behalf of the Empire was a
member of the Jerusalem Khalidi family who served as Ottoman consul in
Vienna. Now the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its capital at Vienna,
bordered the Ottoman Empire and coveted Ottoman territories in Europe.
Relations between the two empires were correct but tense, based on
long-standing hostility. Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi must have been well trusted
and highly regarded in Constantinople to have obtained not only this
sensitive post, but the prestigious post of speaker of the Ottoman
parliament as well. In other words, Husseinis and Khalidis formed part of
the governing class of the Empire. How does this fit in with their
belonging to an incipient "Palestinian people"? 

Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire was known to be oppressive, especially to
the Christian subject peoples, although by the end of the nineteenth
century much had been done to make non-Muslims legally equal to Muslims.
Yet the new laws were not always carried out and many Muslims resented the
legal equality given to dhimmis. So Khalidi and Husseini were officials in
an oppressive state where legally or in practice Muslims enjoyed a status
far superior to non-Muslims, like the status of Whites in the United States
before the 1960s (although US Blacks did not suffer anything like the
Armenian or Bulgarian massacres after Emancipation from slavery in 1865), a
status that made a poor Muslim in important ways superior to even a wealthy
dhimmi. This status allowed Muslim notables to be positively rapacious
toward the dhimmi communities. To take an example from Jerusalem before
1800, the notables habitually extorted from the local Jewish community all
sorts of irregular taxes, levies, fines, and bribes. These were in addition
to the standard taxes, jizya and kharaj, imposed on non-Muslims (dhimmis)
throughout the Islamic domain. This picture emerges from a study in account
ledgers of the Jewish/Christian community in Jerusalem from the second half
of the eighteenth century. This kind of extra-legal exploitation (that is,
beyond the prescription of Islamic law) seems to have ended by the late
nineteenth century, yet descendants of some of the same Jerusalem notable
families are still active in the leadership of the PLO and the Palestinian
Authority. Of course the Muslim peasants were exploited too, but so were
Russian peasants at that time. Did that make Russian peasants a separate
nation from the Russian land-owners? Or make Russia less oppressive to
minorities, such as Christians? And who exploited the Muslim-Arab fallahin
if not their own notables? As to a separate Arab nationalism (let alone
"Palestinian" nationalism) before the First World War, the scholars Zeine
Zeine, an Arab, and Ziya Gokalp, a Turk, agree that the Ottoman Empire was
a joint enterprise of Turks and Arabs. Zeine wrote, "The Arabs as Muslims
were proud of Turkish power and prestige. The Ottoman Empire was their
Empire as much as it was the Turks'... the Arabs did not consider the
Turkish rule as 'foreign' rule..." Gokalp wrote, "the Ottoman state might
even be called a Turkish-Arab state." 
After the war, with the Ottoman Empire defeated, politically aware and
active Palestinian Arabs took part in the general Arab nationalist
movement. In particular, many supported Faisal, the British-sponsored king
of Syria, and expected the Land of Israel to be part of a Syrian kingdom.
One of these was Muhammad Amin el-Husseini, who later became Mufti of
Jerusalem, courtesy of British appointment. It was after Faisal's kingdom
had been overthrown by the French (July 1920) that the Arab leadership in
the country saw the expedient need to focus on the newly created
"Palestine" entity (juridically constituted at the San Remo Conference in
April 1920), since there was no Greater Syria to be part of. At the Third
Arab Congress held at Haifa in December 1920, five months after Faisal's
overthrow, Musa Kazem Husseini supplied a pragmatic reason for focussing on
Israel (no longer "Southern Syria" but "Palestine" in his words). "Now,
after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in
our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. (In fact, a less important
notable had proposed Arab autonomy in the country under British aegis in
January 1919, before Faisal's downfall made the proposal seem necessary to
most of the notables). 

Yet recognition of the need to focus on Israel did not lead the local Arabs
to see themselves as a "Palestinian people." The discourse of Amin
Husseini, appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by the British after he had incited
a murderous pogrom against Jews in April 1920, was marked by pan-Arab and
pan-Islamic thinking. This was true of other leaders as well. Further, the
belief that the Land of Israel was a part of Syria was expressed as late as
1946 by spokesmen representing the Palestinian Arabs before the
Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine. These representatives
told the Commission that "Palestine" did not exist in history and that the
country was simply part of "Syria." Zuheir Muhsen stressed the mere
expediency of stressing a "Palestinian" identity as late as 1977, in an
interview with the US weekly Seven Days (also published in Dutch
translation in Trouw, 31 March 1977). Muhsen led one of the component
organizations of the PLO, so perhaps he understood what the PLO's
intentions were. the PLO Charter is a clearly pan-Arabist document and
makes clear that the "Palestinian people" is a mere geographically defined
section of the "Arab nation" and that only Arabs can be "Palestinians." 

Article I of the Charter states: "Palestine is the homeland of the
Palestinian Arab people and an integral part of the great Arab homeland and
the people of Palestine is a part of the Arab nation." Later PLO documents
such as the 1988 "Declaration of a State" say the same thing in other
words, and it has been expressed over and over by PLO leaders. Anyone who
doubted that the "Palestinians" were Arab nationalists should have been
brought back to reality by the outburst of pan-Arab enthusiasm among Arabs
when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. there was no "Palestinian people" in
history and the "Palestinian identity" is an extension of their Arab
identity. 

Arabs collaborated in the Holocaust, and particularly that of Amin
el-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem and chief leader of the Palestinian Arabs
both before and after the Second World War. 
For the record, Husseini spent most of the war years in the Nazi-fascist
domain in Europe. He also helped to have Jews murdered in Arab countries
through his incitement, in particular in Baghdad where 600 Jews were
murdered in a farhud (1941), which is attributed in great measure to his
preaching there. But his plans for Jews in the Arab lands, fortunately
unrealized, were more sinister than this. He and some fellow Arab leaders
petitioned the Germans, in the name of the Arab nation, to recognize the
Arab right to "solve the question of the Jewish elements in Palestine and
in the other Arab countries... in the same way as the Jewish question in
the Axis lands is being solved" (The document went through several versions
quoted and discussed by Bernard Lewis, Majid Khadduri, ). In his meeting
with Hitler, he was gratified that Hitler promised to destroy the Jews in
"the Arab sphere." These facts prove his participation in the Holocaust and
his intention to spread it. 

it is unlikely that the Zionists could have built up the Jewish National
Home without the political framework provided by the Mandate, which was an
international obligation accepted by Britain to foster the National Home.
Nevertheless, various high British officials worked consistently over the
years to undermine the National Home, to limit and hobble its development,
and --both overtly and surreptitiously-- to encourage Arab opposition to
the Jewish National Home, including hatred of and assaults on Jews. Even
before the Jewish National Home and the Mandate were formally established,
a British officer, Col. Waters-Taylor, was encouraging Amin Husseini to
foment anti-Jewish pogroms in order to demonstrate to the British
administration Arab opposition to the Zionist program. This was reported by
Col. Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer. The Nebi Musa riot
broke out in Jerusalem (1920) not long afterwards. It left five Jews dead
in the Old City. Jabotinsky, who had tried to defend the Jews, received a
15 year sentence from a British court. Amin Husseini, a leading inciter of
the pogrom, somehow escaped over the Jordan to territory which was also
under British authority. He was sentenced in absentia to only ten years.
The next year Husseini was amnestied by the British High Commissioner and
appointed Mufti by him, despite his relatively meager knowledge of Muslim
law compared to other candidates, his having received fewer votes from the
electoral panel of Islamic clerics than other candidates, and his role in
inciting the riot the year before. Another case where British officials
apparently encouraged extreme Arab positions was represented by a
memorandum that Musa Kazem Husseini, leading the Arab Executive Committee
in 1921, presented to Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies.


British complicity with Arab pogromists was seen by non-Jewish observers in
the 1929 Pogroms. The journalists Pierre van Paassen and Albert Londres saw
this in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Safed. In Hebron British police did not
intervene to stop the massacre and later removed the whole surviving Jewish
population from the town. Van Paassen published a somewhat incriminating
interview with Harry Luke, acting high commissioner at the time. Likewise,
the Arab Revolt of 1936-38 was seen by a contemporary observer as a "Revolt
by Leave" in the title of a book of the time (by Horace Samuel). During the
period of the revolt, one George Antonius worked in the high echelon of the
revolt's political leadership. Antonius' career may more graphically
illustrate Arab-British collaboration than any other set of facts from the
Mandate years. George Antonius was born in Lebanon and taken to Egypt as a
child where he received a British education; later he graduated Cambridge
in England. Returning to Egypt, he served Britain in a sensitive post as
Deputy Press Censor in Alexandria during the First World War. 

In letters he wrote in that period he identified himself as British, not
Arab. In 1921, he was invited to join the British administration in
mandatory Israel. While still with the mandatory government, he was sent on
detached service to help the British negotiate with Ibn Saud and on another
occasion with the Egyptian government. These diplomatic missions won him
the British honorary title, Commander of the Order of the British Empire
(CBE). While a high official of the mandatory government, he formed close
ties with Amin Husseini and lived in a house rented from him, called Karm
al-Mufti (the Mufti's Vineyard). Here his wife established her famous salon
which was a focus of social life for both British officials and Arab
notables and intellectuals in Jerusalem. He left the Mandatory
administration in 1930 and became the Middle East representative of the New
York-based Institute of Current World Affairs which was funded and run by a
wealthy American and fanatic Judeophobe named Charles Crane who had been
appointed to the King-Crane Commission in 1919 by President Wilson. Crane
was an admirer of Hitler. He dreamed of setting up a worldwide
Christian-Muslim anti-Jewish front. And for this purpose he had Antonius
arrange at least one meeting for him with the Mufti Husseini. While
receiving his salary from Crane, Antonius worked in the framework of the
Arab Executive and its successor, the Arab Higher Committee. The Higher
Committee was of course the political leadership of the Arab Revolt of the
1930s. Nevertheless, Antonius' close personal friendships continued with
high officials of the British administration and they continued to frequent
his wife's salon. Antonius continued to regard himself as loyal to Britain
and was seen that way by British friends. After he died in 1942, obituaries
in two prestigious British publications emphasized that he had received the
CBE. Although most facts about Antonius' British connections have been
fairly well known. 

The British always appointed Arab mayors for Jerusalem, although Jews had
been the majority in the city since 1870. More significant of course, was
the 1939 White Paper which meant nullification of the Jewish National Home.
At first, the new policy severely limited Jewish immigration and later
limited Jewish rights to buy real estate in most of the country. And this
on the eve of the Holocaust. The determination by the League of Nations
Permanent Mandates Commission that the White Paper was illegal was not much
help to Jewish refugees. Antonius was a great admirer of Haj Amin
el-Husseini which did not prevent him from retaining his many friends among
high British officials, both inside and outside the country. 

After the war, Britain and its allies, France and the United States,
refused to put the Mufti on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, despite his
part in the Holocaust and calls uttered in the three countries (including
in their parliaments) to try him. 

In fact, the Yugoslav government did put him on a UN list of war criminals
for his role in organizing and inspiring a Bosnian Muslim SS division.
Nevertheless, Britain and its allies allowed the Mufti to return to the
Middle East in 1946 (a year after the end of World War 2) and resume
leadership of the 
Palestinian Arabs. However, he returned to the Middle East, not on a
British plane, to be sure, but on a US plane. According to his admirer, the
Arab historian Majid Khadduri, this was a US Army aircraft. Another
peculiar feature of British policy during the mandate -- was to keep Jews
and Arabs from reaching agreements among themselves. 

One Arab leader, Ragheb Bey al-Nashashibi, suggested in 1923 that it was
British policy to keep Jews and Arabs at odds. He complained, "the High
Commissioner is guided by the advice of [Ernest] Richmond, who makes all
cooperation with the Jews impossible." The European Union states seem to
follow a similar policy in the practice of their Jerusalem consulates to
hold separate celebrations for Jews and Arabs on the national holidays of
the various EU states. 

When 600,000 to 800,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees --the immediate
post-war period-- twenty to thirty million refugees were created in Europe
and India. Shortly after the fighting of WW2 stopped, more than three
million Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia where
they had lived for hundreds of years. Another nine to twelve million
Germans were expelled from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, which were
transferred to Poland and the USSR. 

Millions of Poles were transferred from western Ukraine and Belarus to
Poland's new western territories taken from Germany. Finns were transferred
from the 10% of Finland that was transferred to the USSR. This adds up to a
conservative estimate of about 15 million. In India, between eight and 15
million persons fled from the newly invented Pakistan state to the new
Indian Republic, and vice versa, Hindus and Sikhs going to India and
Muslims to Pakistan (a million or more are estimated killed). These many
millions of refugees were soon resettled in both Europe and India
(including Pakistan). Today little is heard of these refugees. 

Many otherwise well informed people are not aware of these events. To be
sure, groups of expellees in Germany still nurture demands for return. But
even in Germany they are not much heard, and they are labelled "right
wing." In contrast, a great international apparatus, supported over the
years mainly by US funds funneled through the UN's UNRWA subsidiary, and
including other bodies such as the American Friends Service Committee
(Quakers), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and various church
groups, has been functioning for more than fifty years not only to provide
help to the 1948 refugees but to perpetuate their refugee status. To some
extent,we realize that UNRWA and the refugee camp system have served to
perpetuate the refugee situation and to create, to some extent, a sense of
identity among the camp population somewhat distinct from that of other
Arabs. 

Yet they attribute perpetuation of the camps and the refugee status to the
camp residents themselves who, rejected resettlement out of the camps.
However, if we assume that the camp residents always rejected resettlement
(and we know that the UN, the Arab states, and Western powers objected to
Israel's project to build housing for them in Gaza outside the camps, when
some were willing to move to new homes), then we still need to ask if the
popular will has often been the determining factor in the countries where
the camps were located. In any case, the camps could not have continued
without international funding and international political support. 

Another is issue is what the international agencies have been telling and
teaching the Arabs over the years. Why the Arab refugee situation has
persisted as it has whereas other refugee situations from the same period
were solved long ago, by resettlement. 
This is the main question one should ask. 
Why are these Arabs an exception? 

Why the Western press and academic world and Western governments and church
establishments seem so eager to promote the notion of a "Palestinian
people" and to anguish along with these Arabs, while the other post-war
refugees are forgotten. 
people who are themselves ill informed may not realize that. 

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