In 1948, following the conclusion of the Second World War and the ensuing years of displacement suffered by the Jewish peoples of Europe, the remaining Ashkenazim people finally united and pushed forward to make the dream of Zion a reality. With the help of such Allies as Great Britain, who currently held Palestine as a Mandate under its protection, the state of Israel was created in Palestine and it seemed that the great wandering people may have finally come home to the land of their fore-bearers. There was one essential issue with this fateful homecoming however; Palestine was not their home, it was not their land. The Arab-Palestinians who were living there had been doing so for centuries upon centuries, and so had far better claims to the land than a practically foreign people who’s only claim to the land extended back several thousand years to a long lost kingdom. Yet, regardless of who was right and who was wrong, the British who held power there sided with the Jewish people and so many thousands of Palestinian families were forced from their homes and essentially exiled into camps and foreign countries where they could not trouble the new-comers. And so it was, that what was meant to be an attempt to preserve and secure a people devastated by genocide and ethnic cleansing, resulted in nothing more than the ethnic cleansing of another people in their stead.
For the Palestinians, there was little hope of resisting the Jewish newcomers; they were many, they were united, and they had the backing of the West. Even in cities such as Haifa, which were under the control of the Arab Liberation Army(ALA), the Israeli paramilitary force, known as Haganah, crushed all resistance in as little as 24 hours. What followed was martial law and the forced removal of a majority of the Arab-Palestinian population from the city along with the confiscation of much of their property and the systematic destruction of many of their homes, in order to make way for the Israeli colonists. As written by Kanafani (and Palestinian writer and leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in Returning to Haifa, Palestinian Arabs were largely forced to leave everything save for what they could think to carry with them in the wake of their expulsion from their homes by the Israelis. In the case of Said and Sayiffa, the Palestinian main characters of Kanafani’s novel, even their infant son, Khaldun, is lost to the Israelis in the chaos of their being forced to flee Haifa following the battle. Khaldun is then adopted by a couple of Israeli colonists who raise him as their own son for twenty years, eventually growing into his own and joining the Israeli military to fight against the various Arab-Palestinian militant groups. (Kanafani, p. 158-182) I feel that though something like this pseudo-kidnapping of Palestinian infants by Israelis may have happened, it more likely serves as a way in which Kanafani can portray how, metaphorically, the future of Palestine was stolen away from the actual Palestinian people by these foreigners, who then turned their children, their country, into a weapon to be used against them. Even when tensions eased somewhat and Palestinians were allowed to return to their homes to an extent, many did not. To them, it seemed corrupted somehow, transformed by the Israeli colonists who tore down what they could in order to recreate the landscape as they saw fit. In this way, many Palestinians, including the father of Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Return to Half-Ruins, refused to return to the homes and lands they had been exiled from; in a way, it was no longer theirs to return to, even for those who eventually were allowed to return after years spent as an exile in foreign lands or scraping by on the outskirts of Israeli society. (Lughod, p. 78-79) The land was no longer Palestine, it was Israel, and just as the streets were renamed and the physical homes of the Palestinians were knocked down and rebuilt, so were the spiritual homes of the Palestinians destroyed, and so they were they forced to wander, homeless, as they Jews once did.
As said in the writings of Kanafani and Lughod, thousands upon thousands were forcibly removed from their homes by the Israelis to make room for their own colonists; essentially being robbed of property, possessions and the ability to prosper. Yet even when these Palestinians and their children and grandchildren were allowed to return to their former homes years later, after decades of exile and displacement, many felt that they no longer belonged, and that their former homes and cities now felt alien, as if changed somehow. In the wake of these readings and the countless abuses against the Palestinian people that they illuminate, I still do not understand how such an event as what was essentially the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Israelis was permitted to happen. The Jews had been devastated by the Holocaust and the Second World War, this is beyond doubt, but what gives them the right or authority to take away the homes and lands of others, to take their property and force them away into the fringes of society, to kill them if they resist or refuse to leave? Was the western world or the Allies so eager to get rid of the Jewish/Zionist issue that they were willing to displace and oppress a whole different people; must one be put down so that the other may be allowed to rise?
You raise very interesting and important questions. I think after being victimized it is easy to have the mentality of entitlement (I use that world lightly in that I do not mean it in the general sense it is usually used) intrinsically tied with hope for a better future (i.e., a world without as much struggle as they have experienced). Great post!
I like how you used Dov or Khaldun as an analogy for Israelis taking what was Palestine’s and using it against them. You also do a good job of showing the various ways that Palestinians were affected by the conflict other than physically.
Your point in the end of the first paragraph about how Israelis committed similar acts against the Palestinians as was done to them is really striking. You did a good rest of the job analyzing the stories.
As with many other posts, you touch on the subject of ethnic cleansing. While the definition of ethnic cleansing matches up to the events of the Israeli-Arrab conflict of 1948, why do you think that such events have seemingly been forgotten to the wider world? Good job with this post, and I hope we will be able to discuss this topic more in the next class period.
Instead of just commenting on how great you did as usual, I would like to answer your question about the Western World allowing the Jews to go to Palestine. You make a great point about the Jews feeling entitled or questioning their entitlement and I think the Western Powers felt the same. For Dr. Gitre’s other class we had to read memoirs and one soldier said that the concentration camp he saw was the worst thing, he exclaimed how inhumane it was. With that said, prior to WWII just after WWI, France and Great Britain agreed to the Sykes-Pecot Agreement essentially splitting the Middle East into 4 zones, oh which their influence was strongly present. We also see how the British left the region with great hast. Therefore I conclude that the Western Powers saw what had been done to the Jews and not wanting to give up their own land saw Palestine as an opportunity to have the Jews obtain their own home while having some kind of influence in the region. I would like to go farther and say that in 1948 when many of the world powers recognized Israel as a nation, they did so because they were a people who were victimized and seeing the horrors first hand they sympathized with them. That being said I also don’t recall much US or Russian presence in the Middle East until the US backed the Shaw in Iran therefore its like giving money to a friend who is recovering from a near death experience.
Again this is just my opinion supported by our readings, discussions, and outside information, I am not claiming to be an expert… because I am not
As horrible a thought as it is, the western leaders were fine pushing the Palestinians out of Palestine because they were deemed a lower race of peoples (eugenics was still a branch of study at the time) and because, no matter the backlash by the Palestinians and Arabs, the West would be able to solve the Jewish problem without much risk to their countries.
Also, I like how you point out the hypocrisy in the logic of the West’s solution for the Jews, Israel in the place of Palestine.