The Historiography of the Creation of Israel
From Petition to Confrontation - Charles Anderson
For much of my long life the creation of Israel was thought of, by all bien pensant peoples, as a triumph of people with the right stuff doing the right thing and triumphing against all odds. I don't know how that story evolved into the the creation of Israel being the most digusting evil of the twentieth century because I wasn't paying attention. I thought no doubt some bad things must have happened but it was not a really big deal after all compared to the Armenian genocide, the First World War, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the Holomodor, the Second World War, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the Soviet Union gulags, the Great Leap Forward or the Pol Pot regime and other events that don't spring as quickly to my mind.
The return of millions of the Jews to the Levant occurred under the aegis and administration of (the formerly Great) Britain and as the Jews had a history of extensive commentary, debate, and detailed textual analysis it was to be expected that the early histories of the event would be written by English and Jewish writers who gave the Arab culture Palestinians minor roles as slack, backward, violent, primitive people who were attempting to hold back the creation of a new, dynamic agrarian order.
However, in the last 50 years or so, there has arisen a growing group of academics, journalists and historians and would be academics, journalists and historians determined to prove that white is bad, brown is good and the Jews had a secret conspiracy to steal the land from the natives with the complicity of the British government, administrators and the military. Charles Anderson is such an historian. No doubt there are some Jews pleased to be finally accepted as white men but these settler-colonialist accusations aided and abetted by the British fall short.
Anderson does at least acknowledge that the British attempted to reconcile the interests of the Zionists and the indigenous populations
Despite the attempts of successive administrations in Palestine and London to reconcile the objectives of the Zionist movement with the interests of the indigenous population, its application did grave injury to Palestinian society while on the whole aiding the Zionist enterprise. By demonstrating the manifest negative consequences of British rule for Arabs in the countryside, this chapter also seeks to put paid to arguments attributing the mounting malaise within Arab society primarily to the Palestinians themselves. Kenneth Stein, for instance, offers a typical rendition of such contentions when he claims that "The reasons for rural economic stagnation or decline were many, and none ultimately related to Ottoman or British governance or Zionist presence."12 As will be shown here, the distressed state of the rural sphere was intimately related to colonial policy and to the advancement of the Zionist project. It should be clear then, that the present findings further serve to illustrate the falsity of the claim made by proponents of Zionism, most especially the Jewish Agency itself, that the advent of Jewish colonization was a net boon to the Arab population, who misguidedly turned their backs on the prospects of prosperous coexistence.13
The racist underpinnings of the British preconceptions of the Arabs and Arab agriculture does not, however, make them untrue. Arab agriculture was technologically underdeveloped and the local Arab society was quasi-feudal with the feudal lords demanding that the Ottomans or the British government finance the modernisation of agriculture.
the British believed that the Bedouin were the "true" Arabs while the settled majority was seen as dissolute and corrupt and hence lacking the vigor, disposition and capacities necessary for autonomously-driven modern economic development. Emblematic of this view, British officials saw Arab agriculture - the bedrock of the Palestinian economy - as marked by slackness and technological underdevelopment. In turn, as Zeina Ghandour has observed, they further interpreted the state of local agriculture as symptomatic of the purported moral decay in Arab society.14 The supposed deficiencies of local culture and knowledge were abetted in this view by Ottoman law and the "antiquated" land tenure system, which taken together revealed local Arab society's "quasi-feudal" nature.15
Anderson demonstrates that when the British conquered Palestine it could hardly have been in a worse situation. No-one disputes this. The agrarian "bedrock of the Palestinian economy" was already in a parlous position before the war. The Palestinian elites had used Ottoman "modernising" legislation of the prior 50 years to take legal, religious and financial control of the fellaheen and were bleeding them dry with high rents and even higher interest rates. This was exacerbated by the musha' system of land tenure which, while more sophisticated than the British administrators realised, suffered from effects of the Tragedy of the Commons especially as Palestine suffered considerable violence.
Palestine was first put under military administration from 1917-20. The territory had been devastated by the Great War and was in a state of catastrophic disrepair when General Allenby's forces conquered it. During the war up to a quarter of its population had fled the area, been conscripted, or been evacuated. The Ottoman military had drawn heavily on local human, financial and natural resources. In addition to conscription, locals performed corvée labor, particularly during the Ottoman army's retreat, moving materiel often with nothing more than there own bodies. The tithe rose to almost three times its pre-war rate, or almost 40 percent, before the final period of Ottoman rule during which peasants were left only with shares calibrated to guarantee their family's sustenance while the Sultan's forces claimed everything else. The country's forests were depleted up and converted into fuel for the railroad. Locusts added to the shortages of foodstuffs and inflation hit 400 percent on what remained of marketable produce. As elsewhere in bilad al-Sham these conditions produced famine and the spread of plague diseases such as typhoid, malaria, and typhus, which took a horrible toll on the population. After the end of the war, many residents who had left returned and the population rebounded, placing further strains on the beleaguered territory.16
10 Miller, Government and Society, p. 164.
11 Graham-Brown, "The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus," p. 99-100. See below.
12 Stein, "Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine,
1936-39" in Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, p. 146. The litany of reasons which Stein
adduces is long, but wholly exonerates both the British and the Zionists from having any role in the matter.
13 As noted in the introduction, this is a time-worn argument, central to the Zionist movement's self-image
as a progressive force. It served an important ideological function of dispelling concerns that Zionism of
necessity did injury to the indigenous Palestinian population, and is still in circulation today both in
historical work and regarding the present conflict. A classic rendition of this claim from the period of the
current study appears in the Jewish Agency's testimony and evidence before the Peel Commission, which
was accepted without question or caveat by that body, as summarized in the report's sub-section on "Arab
Progress" (especially p. 128-29). For scholarly versions of the contention, see, for instance Haim,
Abandonment, p. 69-71; Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of
Zionist Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, 1983), p. 49, 145
14 Zeina Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property, and
Insurgency (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 44-45.
15 Peel Commission report, p. 44.