Juan Cole - The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power
As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Andrew
Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of thunder
and noise among anti-Palestinian writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic , but shed very little light. (PS, the map as a hard copy mapcard is available
from Sabeel.)
The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A Mandate
(i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was: “Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the
Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as
independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of
administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power]
until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these
communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”
The Deir Yassin massacre of 1948
Chris Hedges: Imploding the myth of Israel
Israel Guilty of Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians: UN Rapporteur
The Agony of Palestine
Christianity, Nazism and Anti-Semitism: The origins of the never-ending crisis in West Asia lie in the long history of Christian anti-Semitism. For centuries, the Catholic Church and its offshoots called for the punishment of Jews for their mythical role in the murder of Jesus Christ. The myth originated in Biblical gospels, and was perpetuated by Christianity's greatest intellects, including Saint Paul, Saint Aquinas, Martin Luther and Calvin, not to mention the Papacy.. Read more: http://archives.hardnewsmedia.com/2009/02/2566
The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the
British Mandate of Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the
Ottoman districts that came to be the Mandate during World War I (the Ottoman
sultan threw in with Austria
and Germany against Britain , France
and Russia , mainly out of
fear of Russia ). But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the
influence of President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about self-determination, Britain and France could not decently simply
make their new, previously Ottoman territories into mere colonies. The League of Nations awarded them “Mandates.” Britain got Palestine ,
France got Syria (which it made into Syria and Lebanon ),
Britain got Iraq .
That is, the purpose
of the later British Mandate of Palestine, of the French Mandate of Syria,
of the British Mandate of Iraq, was to ‘render administrative advice and
assistance” to these peoples in preparation for their becoming independent
states, an achievement that they were recognized as not far from attaining. The
Covenant was written before the actual Mandates were established, but Palestine was a Class A
Mandate and so the language of the Covenant was applicable to it. The territory
that formed the British Mandate of Iraq was the same territory that became
independent Iraq ,
and the same could have been expected of the British Mandate of Palestine.
(Even class B Mandates like Togo
have become nation-states, but the poor Palestinians are just stateless
prisoners in colonial cantons).
The first map thus shows what the League of Nations imagined
would become the state of Palestine .
The economist published an odd assertion that the Negev Desert League of Nations as
belonging to the Mandate of Palestine, a state-in-training. The Mandate of
Palestine also had a charge to allow for the establishment of a ‘homeland’ in Palestine for Jews (because of the 1917 Balfour
Declaration), but nobody among League of Nations
officialdom at that time imagined it would be a whole and competing territorial
state. There was no prospect of more than a few tens of thousands of Jews
settling in Palestine ,
as of the mid-1920s. (They are shown in white on the first map, refuting those
who mysteriously complained that the maps alternated between showing
sovereignty and showing population). As late as the 1939 British White Paper,
British officials imagined that the Mandate would emerge as an independent
Palestinian state within 10 years.
In 1851, there had been 327,000 Palestinians (yes, the word
‘Filistin’ was current then) and other non-Jews, and only 13,000 Jews. In 1925,
after decades of determined Jewish immigration, there were a little over
100,000 Jews, and there were 765,000 mostly Palestinian non-Jews in the British
Mandate of Palestine. For historical demography of this area, see Justin
McCarthy’s painstaking calculations; it is not true, as sometimes is claimed,
that we cannot know anything about population figures in this region. See
also his journal article, reprinted
at this site.
The Palestinian population grew because of rapid population
growth, not in-migration, which was minor. The common allegation that Jerusalem had a Jewish
majority at some point in the 19th century is meaningless. Jerusalem
was a small town in 1851, and many pious or indigent elderly Jews from Eastern Europe and elsewhere retired there because of
charities that would support them. In 1851, Jews were only about 4% of the
population of the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine some
70 years later. And, there had been few adherents of Judaism, just a few
thousand, from the time most Jews in Palestine
adopted Christianity and Islam in the first millennium CE all the way until the
20th century. In the British Mandate of Palestine, the district of Jerusalem
was largely Palestinian.
The rise of the Nazis in the 1930s impelled massive Jewish
emigration to Palestine ,
so by 1940 there were over 400,000 Jews there amid over a million Palestinians.
The second map shows the United Nations partition plan of
1947, which awarded Jews (who only then owned about 6% of Palestinian land) a
substantial state alongside a much reduced Palestine . Although apologists for the
Zionist movement say that the Zionists accepted this partition plan and the
Arabs rejected it, that is not entirely true. Zionist leader David Ben Gurion
noted in his diary when Israel
was established that when the US
had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that the
same was true of Israel .
We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli expansionist who fully intended to annex
more land to Israel , and by
1956 he attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon . So the
Zionist “acceptance” of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond a
happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their actual
land ownership had given them any right to expect.
The third map shows the status quo after the
Israeli-Palestinian civil war of 1947-1948. It is not true that the entire Arab
League attacked the Jewish community in Palestine
or later Israel
on behalf of the Palestinians. As Avi
Shlaim has shown, Jordan
had made an understanding with the Zionist leadership that it would grab the
West Bank, and its troops did not mount a campaign in the territory awarded to Israel by the
UN. Egypt grabbed Gaza and then tried to grab the Negev Desert
[The nascent Israeli military deliberately pursued a policy
of ethnically cleansing non-combatant Palestinians from Israeli-held territory,
expelling about 720,000 of them in 1947-48, then locking them outside, bereft
of their homes and farms and penniless.
The final map shows the situation today, which springs from
the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank
in 1967 and then the decision of the Israelis to colonize the West
Bank intensively (a process that is illegal in the law of war
concerning occupied populations).
There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all,
historically. Goldberg maintained that the Palestinians’ ‘original sin’ was
rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other
expansionists went on to grab more territory later in history, it is not clear
that the Palestinians could have avoided being occupied even if they had given
away willingly so much of their country in 1947. The first original sin was the
contradictory and feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration
into their Mandate in Palestine ,
which they wickedly and fantastically promised would never inconvenience the
Palestinians in any way.
It was the same kind of original sin as the French
policy of sponsoring a million colons in French Algeria, or the French attempt
to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon
where the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original
sin was the refusal of the United States
to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s and early 1940s, which forced them to
go to Palestine
to escape the monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis.
The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it
is inaccurate but because it clearly shows what has been done to the
Palestinians, which the League of Nations had
recognized as not far from achieving statehood in its Covenant. Their statehood
and their territory has been taken from them, and they have been left
stateless, without citizenship and therefore without basic civil and human
rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The map had to be
stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization of an image could
be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian statelessness would remain,
and the children of Gaza
would still be being malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of
blockading civilians. The map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the
map does not change that reality.
Goldberg, according to Spencer
Ackerman, says that he will stop replying to Andrew Sullivan, for which
Ackerman is grateful, since, he implies, Goldberg is a propagandistic hack who
loves to promote wars on flimsy pretenses. Matthew
Yglesias also has some fun at Goldberg’s expense. [Otherwise, like most other major
US institutions, our press is corrupt on this issue.]
People like Goldberg never tell us what they expect to
happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. They don’t seem to
understand that the status quo is untenable. They are like militant ostriches,
hiding their heads in the sand while lashing out with their hind talons at
anyone who stares clear-eyed at the problem, characterizing us as bigots. As if
that old calumny has any purchase for anyone who knows something serious about
the actual views of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman, more bigoted persons than whom would be difficult
to find. Indeed, some of Israel’s current problems [2010] with Brazil come out
of Lieberman’s visit there last summer; I was in Rio then and remember the
distaste with which the multi-cultural, multi-racial Brazilians viewed
Lieberman, whom some openly called a racist.
Also see:
