From Yidishland to Palestine – A Case for BDS – Part 2

Previously, in Part 1, I talked about my own experiences learning Jewish history through a Zionist lens and briefly explored the history of anti-Semitism and the Zionist movement in the years before World War II. Below, I delve deeper into the history of the colonization of Palestine, arguing that the Zionists’ stated goal of Jewish liberation can only be achieved by supporting Palestinian liberation too.

While European Jews were experiencing one thing,1 in the Middle East, imperial tensions were causing massive transformations.

The Ottoman Empire had been ruling Palestine since 1516 with the region changing hands for centuries prior.2 Palestine, during this period, has often been described to me as some kind of wasteland devoid of life and often people. When the people are acknowledged they are often described as nomadic, simple, or just absent.

In reality, Palestine was home to a vibrant community of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and surely other religious groups as well. In Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron, Menachem Klien cites journal entries penned by Palestinians in the early 20th century describing how Muslims gave Jewish women priority over water before Shabbat, sometimes joined Jews in prayer and sent their children to Jewish schools. Interfaith marriages even occurred, despite not being considered legitimate.3

Violence between groups did break out from time to time, but, unlike in Europe, it was not systemically structured against Jewish people. That is, Jews in Palestine, did not experience a pervasive anti-Semitism like Ashkenazim did for centuries.4

The Ottoman Power Vacuum, the Balfour Declaration, and Imperial Zionism

Along with both Arab and Jewish nationalism, anti-Semitism was almost imported into the region in the vacuum left by the Ottomans.

Towards the end of World War I, as the Ottoman Empire began to fall, western imperial powers began to squabble and scheme over the territories the Ottomans would leave behind. Great Britain’s major concern was preserving the link between London and India. Palestine held strategic importance due to its location on the Middle Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and its proximity to the Suez Canal that connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Making Palestine even more enticing, a railroad was proposed from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, offering access to the Indian Ocean.5

The Balfour Declaration in The Times of London, November 9, 1917

Britain quickly moved to secure claims to the region using the idea of Jewish self-determination as a cover for first colonial, then economic access.6 So, it was almost entirely imperial self-interest that prompted the issuance of the Balfour Declaration that pledged Great Britain’s support for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.

Arab forces in the region had their own plans of a united Syria that included Palestine. The Damascus Protocol demanded that Great Britain grant independence to a large territory including Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria in exchange for an alliance with and economic preference to Great Britain.7 The First Palestinian Congress of 1919 explicitly viewed Palestine as part of “Arab Syria.”8

This did not mean opposition to a Jewish Homeland. The European and American King-Crane Commission of 1917 that was setup to survey what the people living in the region thought received testimonies that “…drew a distinction between the concept of a ‘Jewish Homeland’ and the aspirations of the Zionists for a ‘Jewish state.'” The Commission said:

For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the greatest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.9

Zionists, having already established their connection between Jewish survival and statehood, were not having it, and French and British imperial aspirations led to the burying of this report until way after the Balfour Declaration.10

The Balfour Declaration was Britain’s first declaration of official support for establishing a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. Interestingly, it also explicitly discussed not interfering with non-Jewish communities in Palestine.11

As the Ottoman Empire’s control waned, different groups12 tried to claim a different national identity for the region. As part of this process, Jewish settlers began to cultivate an idealistic myth of the Jew as a Hebrew-speaking “tzabar,” that is, native of Israel/Palestine. Names of places began to be transformed into Hebrew in an attempt to secure this mythology.13 Right along with their European Jewish identity, Zionists brought with them imperial ideology, fear of an ever-present anti-Semitism,14 and the nationalist current birthed from those two perspectives.

Whereas Palestinians would see non-Ashkenazim as “alwad al-balad,” “sons of the land,” and “yahud awlad al-arab,” or, “Jewish Arabs,” they tended to view settlers quite differently: We knew they were different from ‘our Jews,’ I am talking about the Arab Jews. We saw them as foreigners who came from Europe more than as Jews.15

Zionists began to purchase land from the Arab a’yan,16 who were largely absentee.17 Some lived in Palestine’s urban centers and others even lived abroad. This left the fellahin,18 who worked the land and comprised the bulk of Palestine’s population,19 at the mercy of the Zionist settlers who would give stewardship and jobs only to Jews.

Much of this land was purchased by the Jewish National Fund which then only gave leases to Jewish people. Once purchased, agreements stipulated that only Jewish labor could be used on the land.20

These land purchases were legal both in Ottoman controlled Palestine and in British Mandate Palestine. Ottoman troops would sometimes even forcibly remove fellahin from the land they had cultivated for generations.21

These fellahin were then forced into the towns to look for work. There, they encountered the Histadrut,22 a labor union for Jewish workers in Palestine. The Histadrut bargained on behalf of Jewish workers for wages and working conditions while excluding Palestinian workers. They would also lobby the British Mandate for laws and policies in their interest.23

As one would expect, various Arab groups did not take kindly to these exclusionary practices. Arabs attempted to appeal to British leadership and also organized riots and strikes against both the Zionists24 and the British.25 While the riots were violent and hundreds of Jews and Arabs were killed, it’s important that these events were a reaction to colonization and discrimination, and not nationalistic, anti-Semitic pogroms.

Toward a Jewish Majority

Unfortunately for the Zionists, their goal of creating a state by gaining a Jewish majority had one minor wrinkle: Jews were not immigrating to Palestine as much as Zionists hoped. Between 1890 and 1914, the number of Jews living in Palestine increased by 50,000 while the number of Muslims increased by 93,000. The Jewish population then fell again by 10,000 by 1922. Compared to Muslims and Christians whose numbers continued to increase, this was not going well.26

Zionists attempted to encourage settlement in a variety of ways, including by meeting with anti-Semitic powers in Europe to ensure the emigration of Jews from European lands and prevent their immigration to European lands. This reached its height of cruelty during the Holocaust. David Ben-Gurion, a prominent Zionist and the first Prime Minister of Israel, even said:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative.27

The Haganah,28 the major Zionist militia in Palestine, had this to say to the German SS in 1937:

…in Jewish nationalist circles people were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs.29

The Holocaust, as it turns out, would be the greatest gift to the Zionist movement. By 1931 there were 175,000 Jews in Palestine and by 1947 there were 630,000.

***

After the Holocaust, many Western nations refused to accept Jewish refugees, many of whom saw an immediate resurgence of pogroms in their home countries. These refugees fled to Palestine en masse. 

Seeing the growing problem that mass immigration posed to the stability of Mandate Palestine, the British attempted to limit and control immigration. The effort was completely futile. The British finally chose to withdraw from Palestine and refer the matter to the UN in 1947.30

The UN Partition Plan

The UN proposal to split Palestine into two states, one with a Jewish majority and one with an Arab majority, would become known as the partition plan. Zionists will use the fact that “we” accepted the plan and “the Arabs” did not as justification for the next near-century of violent settler-colonialism. However, since Palestinians opposed Zionism consistently,31 invoking their right to self-determination for decades to anyone who would listen, the UN partition plan was downright offensive.

There were no terms under which the native Palestinians or the surrounding Arab nations were willing to accept a plan that surrendered part of Palestine to the colonists. As it turns out, Zionists only accepted this partition plan as a stepping stone to claiming the entire region anyway. Ben-Gurion said in 1938:

I do not see the partition as the final solution of the Palestine question32

And:

…this is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it should prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement33

And finally:

…the state, however, must enforce order and security and it will do this not by moralizing and preaching “sermons on the mount” but my machine-guns, which we will need.34

This demonstrates that the UN partition plan was never a real solution. Following the failed partition plan and the withdrawal of the British, the State of Israel was established, prompting the 1947-48 Civil War and the Arab-Israeli war. These wars resulted in the Nakba,35 in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled from Israeli territories. 

David Ben-Gurion had this to say about the partition, demonstrating why the refugee problem is still relevant today:

…the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. Such a composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority… There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%.36

Toward Jewish and Palestinian Liberation

Since the Nakba, Israel has experienced periods of relative stability overshadowed by periods of expansion and concomitant Palestinian resistance.

Zionists often claim that Israeli aggression is a simple reaction to acts performed by its Arab neighbors or by Palestinian groups. However, the occupation itself, the very first act of violence, is far from resolved. Israel’s existence has been achieved at the expense of the Palestinian people and it now implores us to forget or to accept that.

It is absolutely true that we Jews have suffered immeasurably at the hands of European anti-Semites, but why must other people have to pay as a result? Moreover, has the stated goal of eradicating anti-Semitism been achieved? Given the international resurgence in anti-Semitism that we have experienced,37 clearly not.

In fact, Israel’s deliberate efforts to bind its own existence with Jews and Judaism throughout the world in all spheres has created a ripe new field of anti-Semitic potential and a pervasive fracture in the Jewish left. Today, Zionists work to disrupt any organization that dare speak out against Israel while staying mostly silent on the ongoing rise of fascist movements and the resurgence of anti-Semitism that comes with them. Richard Spencer38 says this about Israel:

… an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogous feelings about whites. You could say that I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.39

Zionist leaders seem to reciprocate the affection of white nationalists. On Steve Bannon,40 Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, had this to say:

I knew Bannon was a great friend of the Jewish people and Israel. He’d call for my views on Israel, and ask for my views on various issues like moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.41

It seems as though Israel, rather than eradicating anti-Semitism, has instead made it acceptable, just as Herzl envisioned. For what exactly, then, are Palestinians suffering and dying? For what are Israelis living in fear?42

The dream of a Jewish homeland where we can be safe and realize our self-determination as Jews has become the beast of contemporary Zionism; a beast of colonization, dispossession, murder, and even self-destruction. In order to realize the dream of Jewish liberation, we have to connect it with Palestinian liberation.

We have to connect Jewish liberation with workers’ movements and with the liberation of the oppressed and exploited internationally. We have to return to our Yiddishland history of mass movements and working class organizing. This includes building solidarity by supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions on Israel to apply economic and cultural pressure against the occupation.

From Yiddishland to Palestine, our goals of liberation are bound up together. If we want a true end to anti-Semitism, self-determination for the Palestinian people, peace and prosperity in the Middle East, an end to the exploitation of workers internationally, and the birth of international socialism, then right along with “never again,” we must also say:

“From The River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”

>>Click here to read Part One

Rosa Cowen
+ posts

Rosa Cowen is an Athens Left Field contributor based in Athens County and a worker at Ohio University.

  1. https://athensleftfield.org/from-yiddishland-to-palestine/
  2. Wikipedia is useful enough to get the general idea. But also, since this comes up often enough, while much can be said about the history of Judea prior to Ottoman Rule, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that modern day Jewish people are essentially the same as those that inhabited the Kingdom of Israel around and before the destruction of the second temple. Arguments for statehood along those lines are somewhat essentialist, failing to recognize the plurality of histories and perspectives of both Jewish people and the myriad of cultures who have lived and now live in the territory.
  3. https://972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/118408/
  4. There was a sort of legally codified discrimination that applied to all non-Muslims, Christians included. The “dhimmis” were protected minorities with fewer rights to that of Muslims. See Mark Wagner’s work here.
  5. Regan, Bernard. The Balfour Declaration, pp 4, 23, 47, 69, 70
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews
  7. Regan, pp 94-95
  8. Ibid. pp 96
  9. Ibid. pp 74
  10. Ibid. pp 74
  11. We see how that went.
  12. At least Arab and Jewish
  13. Ibid
  14. http://jfrej.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/JFREJ-Understanding-Antisemitism-November-2017-v1-3.pdf
  15. This quotes appears in https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/
  16. Similar to Europe’s feudal lords
  17. http://www.isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history.shtml and Regan, pp. 84, 85, 91.
  18. Regan. pp 83
  19. Ibid. pp 84
  20. Ibid. pp 119
  21. Ibid. pp 85
  22. Here, in the midst of colonization, we see differences in the historical narrative starting to form. Take these two pieces about the Histadrut, one from the Jewish Virtual Library and one from the BDS Movement. One common thread you’ll see is exemplified here: the Jewish Virtual Library omits the fact that The Histadrut was only open to Jewish workers and only advocated for Jewish workers. Since Zionists worked hard to spin the narrative that Palestinians are not “a people,” this omission can be neatly slotted into the same racist narrative. Is this a lie by omission? Is this a sort of truth? That just depends on how you view “a people” and what your interests are.
  23. Ibid. pp 124 and 125
  24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict
  25. Regan, pp 96-97, 100, and others
  26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
  27. http://www.isreview.org/issues/15/israel_colonial.shtml
  28. This summary is good enough, but this article from Haaretz is good if you can get past the paywall.
  29. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/ch08.htm
  30. https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/maps/pages/1947%20un%20partition%20plan.aspx
  31. Regan, pp 96-97, 100, and others
  32. McMahon, Seth F. The Discourse of Palestinian-Israeli Relations: Persistent Analytics and Practices, pp 40
  33. Ibid
  34. Ibid
  35. This article cannot do the Nakba justice. See an interactive piece by Al Jazeera for more details.
  36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
  37. This piece from Time has some more details with a caveat: while it’s true that anti-Semitism is on the rise on college campuses, as it is elsewhere, the distinction between criticism of Israel as a state (like this article) and attacks on Jews has to be made.
  38. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer-0
  39. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/richard-spencer-to-israelis-i-m-a-white-zionist-respect-me-1.5443480
  40. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/steve-bannon-five-things-to-know
  41. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/how-morton-klein-went-from-fringe-figure-to-white-house-player-1.5627699
  42. Just Google “Israelis living in fear,” but here’s one piece. Increased anti-Semitism in the diaspora, with the “promised land” not being particularly safe either, seems to indicate that this project hasn’t really achieved its stated goals.