The Disinherited

Journal of a Palestinian Exile

Fawaz Turki

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1972
• ISBN:
  9781583675267
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

1. Flight

I am aware that I have been stateless for nearly all of my twenty-nine years; that I have lived and grown up in a refugee camp on the edge of the desert; that except for those freckle-nosed bureaucrats in the West who from time to time endorsed a shipment of food and warm blankets to me, I did not (for all men and for all they knew) exist on the face of this globe; that I was robbed of my sense of purpose and sense of worth as a human being and was forced to line up obsequiously outside UN food depots each month; and that when for two decades I feared, I feared only the cold of twenty winters, and when I dreamed, I dreamed only of the food that others ate. I am also aware that this knowledge has mutilated my reality and impoverished my consciousness; that I lived, as a million of my fellow Palestinians lived, silently walking hither and thither along the muddy paths of DP camps, in a void, in a state of non-being because everything had been taken away from us, including our tangible abstractions; and that as a result, our beings were engulfed at times by lunatic extremes of hate and bitterness and at others by frustrated resignation.

With our memories of places and times we had known before, rational and good, floating in the space around us and within us, we existed not in the present tense, the tense of reality, but the future imperfect, when next year, next time, next speech, the wrongs will have been righted, the grievances removed, and our cause justified. We lay, as it were, supine under a tree; but, in a world where men will calmly use historical reality to suit their own issues, Godot, for whom we waited, never arrived.

My generation of Palestinians, growing up alienated, excluded, and forgotten, rejected this legacy; yet when we looked around us we could see either the desert to shed our tears in or the whole world to hit back at. Having nothing and with nothing to lose, we proceeded to do the latter. But our struggle was for our place in history, our right to glimpse a vision, to search for hope, to return to Palestine. We struggled for the phoenix, not the phantom, that is our homeland. As de Tocqueville observed in his commentary on the forces that led to the French Revolution: “Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.”

How did it come about that a whole nation found itself suddenly in exile and its two million people afflicted by defeat, hunger, and humiliation, repudiated by men, despised by host countries and forgotten by the world, left to live as pariah refugees, their disinherited souls empty of hope and devoid of meaning? How did it come about that they accepted with a stoic calm the vagaries of homelessness and the agonies of destitution? How did it come about that a versatile and ingenious people continued for many years to provoke, in their life-style and attitudes, identification with backwardness, illiteracy, stagnation, and an inability or unwillingness to transcend their plight? Why is it that they created a space around themselves which left no way out of this plight, no way around it or through it?

One can begin with the incredible career of Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement which attempted, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, to establish a national home for the Jews of the world. Herzl, himself an assimilated Jew from Vienna, was of the opinion that his people could never be accepted or assimilated by Gentile society since they tended to encapsulate themselves within the confines of their own culture, traditions, and religion. The only way the Jews could find an expression of their Jewish consciousness, could escape persecution and rejuvenate their heritage, was by the creation of an exclusive homeland where Jewish men and women could live in peace, no longer vulnerable to Gentile hostility. There was no better place, surely, for the “ingathering of the exiles” than Palestine, Eretz Israel, the ancient homeland from which the Jews themselves had been expelled two thousand years before.

In 1896, Herzl wrote A Jewish State, an idealized account of this political dream, in which he expounded his concept of Zionism, a concept concerned with the notion of “transporting a people without a country to a country without a people.” It is interesting to note that nowhere in his book did the author mention the indigenous population already in Palestine. He was either ignorant of its existence or, in an age that condoned the ceding of other people’s territory and the imposition of a European culture, seen as being to their betterment, he did not feel their fate warranted consideration. Herzl was satisfied to assure the world that “we should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”^*

A year later a Zionist Congress was held. Zionist leaders built support for their movement; their voice was heard and their gospel understood. Their efforts culminated in 1917 when the British government, which was to be granted mandate rule over Palestine after World War I, gave concrete hopes to Zionist aspirations by declaring that it viewed with favor the creation of a national Jewish Home in Palestine, and issued what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration. Among other things, this stated that the rights of the people already living there were not to be subordinated as a result of, nor was the Jewish Home to be established at the cost of, the dispossession of the Palestinians:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

But the Palestinians on whose soil another national state was to be superimposed, whose destiny was consequently to undergo a devastating change, were never consulted.^* In Palestine the initial response to Jewish immigration, particularly prior to the Balfour Declaration, was one of indifference; the Arab world had in the past accepted settlement on its territory by foreign peoples who wished to preserve their old language, culture, and traditions. This was so especially in the case of the Armenians in the Middle East. However, when it became clear that the newly arrived Europeans were the vanguard of a people that harbored intentions of being not just foreign settlers, but foreign occupiers, the Zionists came face to face with spontaneous hostility from both the local population and the Arab world in general. Jewish immigrants nevertheless continued to arrive in Palestine in very large numbers, although they still formed a small percentage of the population.

To the Zionists, to the Mandate government, and to the world, the million Palestinians who had been living in their ancient homeland for centuries were merely wretched natives and not sensitive human beings whose fate in history was about to be affected. It may astonish a lot of people when I say they were human beings who felt pain when they suffered, laughed when they were happy, and dreamed when they contemplated the future. There were peasants working on the land, there were shopkeepers tending their merchandise, there were teachers and students in their schools, there were housewives in their homes, there were men working on their goals. There were towns throbbing, houses building, mosques and churches being visited. There were thieves and vagabonds and lunatics, and there were poets and scholars and singers. And because I want to indulge in a return in my mind to the time when I was a child, I will add that there was a small township, near Haifa, which had a square in the middle of it where the locals gathered at evening time to play backgammon, dance the dabke, and listen to the oud. This was real to me, to us, and its intensity and poignance were not, and are not, negated by those who, thousands of miles away, smug in their seats of power, denied my existence over my pleas, and decided my fate over my head.

After World War II and the tragedy of the concentration camps, world conscience and world support surrendered to Zionism at any cost. The breath of Zionist afflatus became strong in its immediacy. Despite attempts by the Mandate authorities to appease the alarmed Palestinians by stemming the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, thousands still poured in. Jewish political leaders, backed by armed and militant terrorist organizations, were not prepared to hide or sugar-coat the fact that they intended to build a Jewish nation on the land of Palestine.

The history of Palestine between the Mandate and the withdrawal of the British is a chronicle of anarchy, claims and counterclaims, death and destruction, raids and reprisals between the two communities, while the British authorities stood helplessly by, unable to impose or interest the parties in a compromise solution. The Palestinians would not accept the partition of their homeland; nor were the Jews, still a minority, willing to live merely as citizens of Palestine. On April 19, 1936, Arab riots broke out in Jaffa which resulted in the imposition of a curfew and the enforcement of emergency regulations. This prompted Palestinian leaders to call for a general strike and, a few days later, to form the Higher Arab Committee to coordinate political and resistance activities. (The Committee was later outlawed and its leaders sent into exile.) This date may be taken to mark the beginning of the disturbances that continued up to 1948. It presaged the ominous future awaiting the Arabs and Zionists. The impasse was never resolved, despite various commissions, sponsored first by the British government, then by the United Nations, that attempted to investigate the possibility of an answer acceptable to both groups.

Shortly before the end of 1947, the UN passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem an international city bound to both states by an economic union. But the UN, helpless to put the plan into practice, and the British, unwilling to shoulder the burden of implementing it, left the two communities to solve their own problems as best they could. British troops were evacuated on May 15, 1948.

The conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians, which took on the character of a Greek tragedy as each step followed predictably on the heels of the preceding one, was renewed and intensified. Palestine became a country facing violence and rehearsing for a showdown. The Irgun and the Hagana, two formidable and ruthless Zionist organizations, commenced a campaign of terror against isolated towns and villages. Their purpose was to frighten as many Palestinians as possible into fleeing the country, thereby insuring a homogeneous Israel. In one operation alone, on April 9, 1948, a detachment of the Irgun attacked the small rural community of Deir Yassin and killed every man, woman, and child of its 254 inhabitants. Although the Hagana was not equally savage, its modus operandi was designed to achieve the same end: to precipitate a mass exodus of Palestinians out of the country. In his book, The Revolt—Story of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, leader of the terrorist organization, gloats over the massacre thus: “The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa.… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting Deir Yassin.… Arabs throughout the country were seized by limitless panic and started to flee for their lives.”^*

The Hagana’s efforts in that direction are described by Arthur Koestler, who was witness to them in the final months of 1948. “By that time,” he says, “Hagana was using not only its radio station but also loudspeaker vans which blared their sinister news from the vicinity of the Arab sooks. They warned the Arab population to keep clear of the billets of the foreign mercenaries who had infiltrated into town, warned them to send their women and children away before the new contingent of savage Irakis arrived, promised them safe conducts and escorts to Arab territory, and hinted at terrible consequences if their warnings were disregarded.”^†

The Israelis were immensely successful in their aim of creating a state “clean of Arabs.” For a people like the Palestinians, without arms or leadership, a people long subdued by the Turks and the British and pitted against an enemy unwilling to elevate itself above the perpetration of massacres, there was no choice but flight. In later years the story of this flight, as understood in the West and as told by Zionist propagandists, had it that the million or so refugees who poured into Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan “were urged to do so by the Arab governments” whose armies were mobilizing to attack the soon-to-be-declared state of Israel. This has since been exposed as a myth. An examination of radio monitoring records in the West revealed no such appeals to the population of Palestine from the neighboring states; rather, it was revealed that the Palestinians were exhorted not to leave their homeland.^‡

Soon after the dispersion of these people was accomplished their immense lands and their properties were immediately seized by Zionist agencies which declared their owners “absentees.”^* This action, which was sanctioned by all the Zionist political parties, including the left, and initiated by the government itself, was not restricted to absentees, but, by virtue of a hastily introduced series of laws, was extended to “present absentees.” This category included Palestinians who were very much present as citizens of Israel but who happened to be absent from their towns, villages, or farms on a certain date. Thus a Palestinian farmer who had gone to the next village to escape the fighting would return home to find himself classified as an “absentee.” In most cases whole families, bereft of the land to which they and their family system had been rooted for centuries, would hire themselves out at settlements and work as hired hands on their own lands.

Dr. Don Peretz, in his book Israel and the Palestine Arabs, tries to untangle the complicated legalisms of this land robbery which came to be known as the Absentee Property Law. He estimates that 300,000 dunams^† were taken away from Israeli Palestinians in this manner and that 4,000,000 additional dunams of land left behind by the refugees were confiscated by the authorities. He calculates that the export of fruit from formerly Arab land accounted for 10 percent of Israel’s foreign currency earnings in 1951, and that the country’s third largest export was provided by olive groves, 95 percent of which had belonged to Palestinians.^‡

In an earlier study that appeared in 1954 he wrote that:

Nearly half the new Jewish immigrants live in homes abandoned by the Arabs. They occupy nearly 400 Arab towns and villages. About a quarter of the buildings now in use in Israel formerly were Arab property. The Arabs left over 10,000 shops and stores in Jewish hands. The Israel Custodian of Absentee Property took over more than 4,000,000 dunams of former Arab land, or nearly 60 percent of the country’s cultivable area. This was nearly two and a half times the total Jewish-owned property at the time the state of Israel was established, and includes most of its olive orchards, a large part of its fruit and vegetable crop land and almost half the citrus groves.^*

In January 1954 the Israeli daily Ha’aretz published a series of articles by Moshe Karen to protest the government action taken against “a helpless minority.” The author stated that

here was a case of wholesale robbery in legal guise. Hundreds of thousands of dunams of land were taken away from the Arab minority—I am not talking here of the refugees—through a whole variety of legal devices.… Even more depressing is the fact that it was those same groups who presume to establish a new society free from injustice and exploitation—the kibbutzim, in other words—who marched in the vanguard of the seizure campaign.

Those Palestinians who did stay behind, roughly 12 percent of the original population, people who neither took up arms against Israel nor aided the Arab armies in 1948, were placed under military control and treated as an inferior people. They were reduced to second-class citizenship status and discriminated against on every level. Occasional acts of violence against them did not stop with the cessation of hostilities in 1948 but continued up to 1967, when they acquired a more sinister and horrifying nature.

In the June 13, 1967, issue of the Christian Science Monitor, we are informed that

Israeli security forces have on occasion dealt ruthlessly with Arabs more recently than 1948. Two incidents in particular are remembered fearfully by the Arabs. The first was in the Jordanian village of Qibya in October 1953, when Israeli regular soldiers killed 53 men, women, and children in retaliation for the killing of an Israeli mother and her two children, apparently by a saboteur from Jordan. The second was at Kafr Qassem, an Arab village within Israel, in October 1956, during the 100-hour Sinai war of that year. Israeli border police shot and killed 51 Israeli Arabs, including women and children, who were returning from the fields at the end of the day’s work and were unwittingly in breach of a curfew order.^*

John Cogley, the respected editor of Commonweal, a Catholic liberal periodical published in the United States, reported on a visit he made to Israel in 1954. A group of Israeli Palestinians had been waiting for two years to return home to Ikrit, a Catholic village, and in despair took their case to court, winning a ruling in their favor: “Before they could move back to their homes, Israeli planes dropped bombs on their abandoned town, destroying everything. Whether from malice or not no one can say, but the date chosen for this wholly Christian village was December 25th.… [Last September] Kafr Biram, another Catholic village, was destroyed.… In both cases, the reason offered for the destruction of the Catholic villages was ‘military security.’”^†

Palestinian intellectuals, writers, and poets were the group probably most discriminated against. The notorious preventive detention law permits the imprisonment, without the mercy of a time limit, of any person whose incarceration is considered “necessary or expedient … for securing the public safety, … the maintenance of public order, or the suppression of mutiny, rebellion, or riot.” Whatever this law purports to prevent, and for whatever reasons it is deemed...