Citizen Strangers

PALESTINIANS AND THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL'S LIBERAL SETTLER STATE

Stanford University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

FROM SETTLERS TO SOVEREIGNS

THE STRUCTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF THE ISRAELI STATE and the paradoxicalstatus of the Palestinian Arabs who managed to remain in or return to the countryafter 1948 are rooted in the struggle for sovereignty over the six decades thatpreceded its creation. Drawing largely on secondary sources, this brief chapterexamines how the development of the Jewish settler movement, British Mandatorylaw, and Arab nationalism converged in such a way as to harden the politicaland legal identities of Palestine's inhabitants. It also traces how and why theLeague of Nations, and its post-World War II successor, the United Nations,singled out the Zionist movement for exceptional treatment in comparison tothe European settler populations that it sought to constrain in Africa—a statusthat shifted over time from a privilege to a burden. At no time did the contradictionbetween popular democracy and Jewish statehood haunt Yishuv leadersmore than in November 1947, when the section of Palestine that the UN hadvoted to allocate to them included nearly as many Arabs as Jews. Thanks toyears of political and military preparation, the rapid descent into war enabledthe Zionist movement to reverse the minority status of Palestine's Jews.

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Zionist settlement in Palestine began in 1882, the first political expression of atiny proto-nationalist movement emerging in Eastern Europe in response towaves of anti-Jewish attacks and a mounting socioeconomic crisis. Although,at the time, Ottoman Palestine was divided into two administrative districts,it had for centuries featured as a single, discrete place in the minds of its inhabitantsand neighbors. An estimated twenty-four thousand Jews alreadylived there, comprising 5 percent of the total population. Concentrated in fourmajor cities, they consisted of a small class of Arabic- and Ladino-speakingmerchants and a large community of Yiddish speakers who had come duringthe previous centuries to live and die in the Holy Land. Palestine's indigenousJews lived alongside half a million Muslim and Christian Arabs, whose productionand export of textiles, olive oil, soap, tobacco, and citrus fruits woveintricate social, economic, and political networks between city and countrysideand across provincial borders. In 1914, roughly 10 percent of the native Arabmajority belonged to various Christian denominations; of the rest, most wereSunni Muslims.

The first Zionist colonies established in Palestine consisted of a handful offarms modeled on the racial division of labor in Algerian vineyards, where EasternEuropean Jewish planters oversaw underpaid local Arab employees withcapital from Western European Jewish philanthropists. Because living conditionswere tough and settlers could not compete with the abundant supply oflow-paid farmers, their farms failed to turn a profit. By the turn of the century,at least one-third of the new immigrants had left. The growing depletion of theYishuv prompted many leaders of the nascent national movement to fear thedemise of their ultimate goal of statehood. Over time, they gradually changedstrategies and adopted a program of national and "pure" colonial settlement.Instead of coercing or exploiting the labor of indigenous Palestinians, the Zionistleaders would work to displace them.

One of the first institutions created by the Zionist Organization (establishedin 1897 in Basel, Switzerland) to implement its new colonial strategy was a bodyto coordinate all land purchasing and settlement work. The founding charterof the Jewish National Fund prohibited "non-Jews" from leasing (and soon,working on) any holdings it acquired. The Fund's creation in 1901 quickly escalatedtensions between foreign settlers and indigenous Palestinians because itchanged the rules of the game. Since the 1880s, conflicts had erupted wheneverthe contracts of Jewish land purchases (usually from absentee owners) includeda proviso to evict the existing Arab tenant farmers. These tensions usually subsided,however, when planters hired the farmers to work on the colonies or allowedthem to lease back certain parcels. The new mission to "conquer" theland and labor market from indigenous farmers and workers foreclosed theseoptions. Indeed, despite exhortations to cultivate "brotherly relations" with Palestiniansin subsequent decades, labor and settlement leaders came quickly toview their project as a zero-sum game.

Over the next few years, reports of peasant dispossession began to capturethe attention of Arab urban elites, communal authorities, and Palestine's buddingprofessional class. The concerns they expressed were not entirely new. Sincethe 1880s a handful of notables had been petitioning the Ottoman authoritiesabout the ruinous intentions of Jewish settlers, but new outlets for popular oppositionopened up after 1908, when the Young Turk Revolt restored the constitutionalparliament in Istanbul and lifted repressive press restrictions at home.In the final years before World War I, denunciations of the settler movement inthe local Arabic (and in some cases Ladino) press, along with political appeals byelected Arab deputies in Istanbul, began to make it harder for Zionist leaders tosustain the fiction that Palestine was for all intents and purposes an empty land.

Like the European colonists in North America, Africa, and Australasiawith whom they often identified, Zionism's luminaries believed that theirrights to Palestine exceeded those of its "natives." Although the movement'sleadership could not deny that the land was full of people, it portrayed Palestiniansas a "mixture of races and types," a "multitude" distinguished not bytheir shared history or national character but by their inferior human "quality."This belief, which enabled them to see the local population as merelyanother part of the landscape to be tamed, enabled movement leaders in Palestineto blind themselves to the political conflict that their project was likelyto sow. Among them was a young activist named David Ben-Gurion, who roseto the top of the social-democratic Jewish Workers' Party shortly after he immigratedfrom Poland in 1906. As he told an audience of potential immigrantrecruits in New York in 1915, the Yishuv needed more pioneers to fight "wildnature and wilder redskins."

THE PURSUIT OF PRIVILEGE

Early on in World War I, as the European Allies began to deliberate over thefuture dispensation of the Ottoman provinces they hoped to conquer, Zionistleaders close to the British government lobbied intensively for its patronage.They had chased this prize for nearly two decades, enlisting several prominentevangelical parliament deputies along the way. It was not until the Ottomansappeared to be on their last legs, however, that enough policymakers were persuadedthat the cost of sponsoring a European settler community in Palestinewas in the geostrategic interests of the British Empire. Six weeks before Britishtroops marched into Jerusalem in December 1917, the Foreign Secretaryannounced the government's pledge, in the eponymous Balfour Declarationof November 2nd, to facilitate "the establishment in Palestine of a nationalhome for the Jewish people." The Balfour Declaration prompted immediatedemonstrations and petitions throughout the Middle East. As Lord Balfourwould later admit, Britain's commitment to the Zionists contradicted its prior(and secret) pledge to support the postwar independence of most of OttomanArabia, Mesopotamia, and Greater Syria. "Zionism," he explained in 1919, "beit right or wrong, good or bad, is ... of far profounder import than the desiresand prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."

For the Arabs of Palestine, the problem with Britain's endorsement randeeper than its diplomatic duplicity. More important was that it violated thelofty principle of national self-determination that US President Woodrow Wilsonhad unwittingly popularized in Asia and Africa after introducing the conceptduring his famous congressional address in January 1918. In particular,Arabs in Palestine pointed to the Balfour Declaration's express delineation betweenthe national rights that Britain would accord to Jews (still a tiny, andlargely foreign-born, minority) and the nonpolitical "civil and religious" rightsof the "non-Jewish communities" (the overwhelming native majority, definedin the negative and more diminutive plural), whom Britain would strive "notto prejudice" As Ben-Gurion acknowledged at the time, this formulation rancounter to democracy and negated their national existence. Warning that theYishuv sought to drive them out of the country, Palestinian leaders forecastedthe bloodshed this mission would produce at home and the instability thatMuslim resentment would wreak in British-ruled South Asia.

Arab stakes in convincing the Great Powers that calamity would strikethe region if Jewish colonization were to gain broader Western sanction rosesharply at the end of the war, when the Ottoman Empire relinquished all futureclaims to its provinces outside of Anatolia. As urban notables, secular nationalists,and communal figures pressed for united sovereignty with their neighborsin Syria, Zionist leaders lobbied for a British administration in Palestine thatwould fulfill Balfour's pledge. This debate took a sharp turn in 1919, when theAllied war victors announced their plan to establish a new colonial formationin the territories now severed from Ottoman and German control. Because,they claimed, the inhabitants of these areas were "not yet able to stand bythemselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world," the fledglingLeague of Nations would "mandate" selected Western powers to tutor them inthe ways of self-rule. Suddenly, after working to establish a constitutional republicbased in Damascus, the most the former Ottoman citizens of GreaterSyria (of which Palestine was a part) could hope for was a choice among ahandful of imperial overlords. In July 1919, an American commission traveledto the Eastern Mediterranean to survey their wishes. Apart from the Zioniststhemselves, the overwhelming majority of those polled reiterated the demandfor unified independence and an end to Jewish colonization. If immediate sovereigntywas off the table, the only mandatory power they would accept was theUnited States, which lacked the stain of imperial interference in the region.

As peace talks continued in Paris, Zionist boosters worked to dismiss Arabprophesies of national dispossession. Before the war, their promotional literaturehad generally avoided mention of Palestine's indigenous population, butthe patent contradiction between Jewish colonization and the Wilsonian sloganof self-rule was rendering this silence untenable. For this reason, movementemissaries adopted a two-pronged strategy. In public forums, they began tohighlight the humanitarian burden they were undertaking to bring prosperityand civilization to the backward peoples of the Holy Land. Behind the scenesthey lobbied aggressively to block the formation of a US mandate—their fearof which derived from a simple numerical formula. Despite the near doublingof their demographic ratio since the 1880s, Jews still comprised less than 10percent of Palestine's population. As the Zionist Organization in London explainedat the time, the possibility that the United States might facilitate thebirth of a constitutional republic in Palestine anytime soon would make "thetask of ... developing a great Jewish Palestine ... infinitely more difficult"As it turned out, their fears were overblown. The final report of the Americancommission was quickly buried and forgotten.

Racializing a People

Over the next three decades, the conflict between democratic principles and demographicrealities dogged Zionists leaders, Palestinian nationalists, and Britain,which inaugurated its colonial administration in Palestine in 1922. The inclusionof the Balfour Declaration in the Palestine Mandate's preamble and secondarticle imposed a uniquely challenging mission on the colonial administrationfrom the outset. Quite simply, British officials did not know how they would balancetheir obligation to shepherd the people of Palestine to self-rule against theirsimultaneous duty to facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home. Of courseall of the postwar Arab successor states were haunted by the inherent conflict betweencolonial occupation and national state building. Access to their new parliamentswas limited to wealthy and conservative male elites, whose own powerwas severely circumscribed by their imperial overseers. Still, it mattered thatthe European mandatory regimes in the Middle East were expected to "trade... in words and not arms"; to offer more legitimacy than the ferocious violencethey unleashed to quash early uprisings; and that they were obliged, in theory,to guarantee the well-being and national development of their subjects. Becauseof these constraints, the legislatures in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan allcreated narrow wedges of maneuver that nationalist politicians and local citizensmanaged occasionally to pry open. In Palestine, the contradiction carvedinto the edifice of the administration made this task much harder.

The central impediment to Palestinian state building during the interwaryears was the Mandate's recognition trap. The Arab Executive, for instance, thecommittee of Palestinians who assumed the leadership of the national strugglein the 1920s, refused to participate in any forum that would signal consentto their inferior legal status or recognition of a regime that refused even tomention them by name. Other Palestinians, such as businessmen and municipalauthorities, adopted a more flexible stance toward agencies and bodieswhen they believed their participation would make a difference to the public'swell-being by providing much-needed technical expertise or bureaucratic experience.Ultimately, however, Palestinians' unequal access to the colonial administrationas a result of its partnership with the Zionist movement sharplylimited their impact.

Not surprisingly, the recognition trap that gridlocked Palestinian politicalefforts served the Yishuv's effort to build national institutions that couldsteer government policy in their favor. Most important was the Histadrut, establishedin 1920 as a federation of Jewish trade unions attached to a fledglingunderground settler militia called the Haganah ("defense" in Hebrew). Underthe leadership of Ben-Gurion and other labor leaders, by the end of the decadethe organization transformed itself into the Yishuv's single largest banker, employer,insurance agent, manufacturing engine, and provider of housing andsocial services. Until 1929, when the Jewish Agency was established as the Zionistmovement's official representative to the administration, the Histadrut wasthe Yishuv's most powerful mediating agency in Jerusalem. Throughout thetwenty-five years of the Mandate, it labored tirelessly to pressure public- andprivate-sector employers to hire more Jews and to pay them "civilized rates," asopposed to what Palestinian Arabs earned.

The insistence of Zionist labor leaders that Palestine's European workingclass was culturally entitled to privileged wages had an explicitly racial overtone.Although Jewish settlers were not identified formally as belonging to adistinct "race" before the Mandate, Britain's dual imperative gave birth to a subtleyet fatal shift in the way the government classified them—and in turn the indigenousArab majority. This process began with the Mandate itself, which, inorder to facilitate the naturalization of Jewish settlers, became the only colonialregime in the region to include a specific nationality clause. Three years later,Palestine earned another distinction as the sole post-Ottoman mandate whosecitizenship law was enacted in the metropole. That statute also made Palestineone of just two Arab successor states where native-born residents living abroadcould acquire automatic citizenship even if they "differ[ed] in race from themajority of the population."

In international law at the time, the terms race and culture often appearedinterchangeably with nation and people. The slippery boundaries betweenthese categories reflected the prominence of race thinking in European liberalthought and imperial expansion since the late eighteenth century. Notably,the practice of tying political citizenship to an imagined cultural essencehad no Ottoman precedent until the early twentieth century. The imperial statehad no citizens per se until 1869; before then, the only political ties that hadbound all subjects were their fidelity to the sultan and their payment of taxes.Although the empire had privileged Muslims in certain spheres of social andpolitical life, its system of "institutionalized difference" had not been rooted innotions of biological destiny. Not only had the sultan granted substantial autonomyto non-Muslim communities, but he had also made no demands onthem to speak a single language, to assume a singular identity, or to assimilateto a "majority" culture. Unlike the French or British approach to emancipatedJews, for instance, the Ottoman state had not needed to "tolerate" non-Muslimsbecause there had been no norm from which they had appeared to depart.There had been, to be sure, periodic eruptions of violent communal conflict,but these had been exceptions to the norm. Overall, the Ottoman Empire'slaissez-faire approach to culture had enabled group boundaries to remain relativelyfluid and had been the key to its survival for five centuries.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Citizen Strangers by Shira Robinson. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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