“Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country,” – Israel Zangwill, a prominent British Zionist, in the New Liberal Review in 1901.
This argument for a Jewish state appealed to many of the 250,000 Jewish DPs living in camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy after World War II [1]. They had survived concentration camps, or had recently come out of hiding, and were unwilling to return to their country of origin because of widespread anti-Semitism and destruction of their homes. Israel Zangwill and these other early Zionists failed to realize that Palestine was a populated land with a flourishing Palestinian culture. They did not realize that by trying to solve one problem, they were creating another. Avi Shlaim, the Alastair Buchan Reader in International Relations at the University of Oxford, discusses the highly political debate about the history of 1948 and the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem between new and old historians in “The Debate about 1948.” After the UN created a resolution to partition Palestine into two new countries, tensions between Arabs and Jews erupted into civil war, and 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes (Shlaim, 295). The once displaced people of Europe then unknowingly participated in creating another refugee problem. The Palestinians were not living in a land without a “people.” They are a connected and culturally rich people who were forced out of their homes with the creation of Israel.
A Palestinian refugee in the Dehaishe refugee camp holds the original key and title deeds to the home his family abandoned in 1948.
Pictured above is a Palestinian refugee with a key to his home. Just like he holds onto the key and deeds to his home, he also clings to the memory of his home and being forced out of it. According to Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University, in Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine, her father recalled that Jewish forces either forced their way into houses of Palestinians or Palestinians were pushed out indirectly because of events like “food was running out and mortar from Tel Aviv was falling on the city” (Abu-Lughod, 90). Even though Lila Abu-Lughod did not grow up in Palestine and her father spent many years away from his home, her father had and she has a cultural and emotional connection to the land and people.
Kanafani, a Palestinian writer and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (FPLP), wrote Returning to Haifa, in which he discusses a similar phenomenon through the story of a Palestinian couple who returns to their home in Haifa that they were forced to leave behind in the war of 1948. Said, the husband and father who left Haifa, asks “what is a homeland?” (Kanafani, 184) He wonders if it constitutes the material things people remember like parts of a house, or if relatives create a homeland. I believe that he concludes that people, more than the memory of objects, are essential to the concept of a homeland. The memories of human connections and common desires (for a certain goal like returning to the land) create a homeland.
In both Lila Abu-Lughod’s book and Kanafani’s article, there is a personal account of the events of 1948 that shows the emotional and human experience that Avi Shlaim could not show in his study of 1948. It is easy to not feel the emotional trauma of displacement through discussion of the history of people and cultures in numbers (750,000 Palestinians displaced, 250,000 displaced Jews in three European countries) and political terms. I feel that the best argument comes from the people who participate in certain events because of their intimate descriptions of human experience.
There were many factors that led Palestinians to leave their homes. People fighting in the streets and in their homes, ideological differences, and most of all, fear. In my opinion, it seems that leaving is not at the heart of the Palestinian refugee problem. It is the fact that these people were not allowed to return home, and fear of the “utter separation of Arab and Jew” (Abu-Lughod, 103). Lila Abu-Lughod and Kanafani discuss the future of Palestinians, and both argue that 1948 is a year that has affected thousands of people for 68 years. Abu-Lughod describes how the Palestinian problem “is not just something of the past” (Abu-Lughod, 103). Kanafani agrees through describing how Khalid (his son) is so intent on fighting for his future in Palestine and fighting for a place that he has never seen before. As his parents’ past is his past, he is the future.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005462
I think you did a really good job addressing the fact that the Zionists didn’t realize that Palestine was already occupied so their idea to just arrive wasn’t that good. I also think you did a good job including that there was a lot of displacement that occurred in Palestine by bringing up the couple who tried to return home from Haifa.
When you said, “utter separation of Arab and Jew”, I began to recall how cities like Haifa and many other cities, in what was once Palestine, already had sizable segments of the population that were Palestinian-Jews, even before the would-be Israelis arrived from Europe. The presence of this long-standing coexistence between Muslims and Jews makes me question why the Jewish state of Israel had to be created at all, at least in the way that it was. It makes me question why the Palestinian-Arabs were forced from their homes and forced into exile, yet the Palestinian-Jews were not, as the two native groups of Palestine were ethnically very similar, save for their faith. I’m sorry if this comment seems to have little point, but I’m just curious now to how the Palestinian-Jews felt about the displacement and exile of their Muslim neighbors following the creation of Israel.