This is an excerpt from a draft of the introduction to my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, which briefly sketches how Israeli colonial policies turned it into an open-air concentration camp.
By the way, the book makes a great Christmas gift for your progressive friends and family members who agree that Christmas should mean that no one should ever be genocided.
At the Versailles Peace Conference after the war and more specifically at its San Remo satellite conference, Britain was awarded a League of Nations Mandate over Iraq and Palestine. Mandates were envisaged by the League of Nations as a temporary guardianship, such that the mandatory power had the responsibility to train up their wards for independent statehood. This plan, however paternalistic and imperialist, did give birth eventually to the new independent nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Togo, Rwanda and Tanzania. The Mandate of Palestine, however, did not lead to a state of Palestine in the same way.
In 1917, the British cabinet had been convinced by London Zionists, proponents of turning Judaism into a form of nationalism that sought to colonize a territory, to issue the Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild, saying, “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 which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” It was a ridiculous pledge, since no such home for the Jewish people (even if the British then thought about it more as a community center than a new nation-state) could have avoided injuring the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. The British rulers of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans thought nothing about moving people around to suit their imperial interests, and even at one point considered transporting millions of Punjabis to Iraq to relieve what they saw as India’s dangerous population pressure. In 1915, two years before the tragic Balfour Declaration, 683,389 Arabic-speaking natives dwelled in the territory that the British would call Palestine, about 81,000 of them Christians and the rest Muslims. There were only 38,752 Jews, most of them recent immigrants from Russia and Europe permitted to come into these provinces by the Ottoman sultan, some as pilgrims qua retirees.[i]
The British in Palestine created a province of Gaza, separating it from the Bedouin-dominated area of Beersheba and the Negev, and permitted its notable families to administer it, though some refused to cooperate with the foreigners and others engaged in clan-based political faction-fighting. The war-time food crisis passed, probably helped more by the “highly fertile” land of Gaza than by laissez-faire British economic policies. Still, growing landlessness and poverty kept much of the population on the edge.[ii] The influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, whom the indigenous viewed as illegal aliens sponsored by an illegitimate colonialism, created tensions. People in Gaza, as in the rest of Palestine, demonstrated annually against the Balfour Declaration. The Jews who colonized Palestine (their words) established a Jewish National Fund to buy land, which it forbade ever after to be sold to a non-Jew. The Palestinian population, in a largely agricultural country, doubled from 1915 to 1947, turning many proprietors into very small farmers or landless laborers. At the same time, Jewish immigrants took six percent of the best land off the market. A riot against Jews in 1928 in Jerusalem had echoes in Gaza, where the 54 Jews were threatened by a mob. The former mayor, Said Shawa, and his clan intervened to protect the Jews. Some mayors in the 1930s, Filiu explained, undertook improvements, establishing a new hospital, a park, and a fancy neighborhood near the beach. He says that the French tourist magazine, Le Guide Bleu, in 1932 praised Gaza City’s lively markets, its antiquities such as the ancient mosque, and its good communications, since it lay on the rail link from Haifa to the Suez Canal. It put Gaza City’s population at 17,480, more than four times larger than Khan Younis. Deir al-Balah and Rafah were small.[iii]
The pledge of the Balfour Declaration took on a significance beyond the relatively small Zionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of virulent European fascist movements that made Jew-hatred a centerpiece of their projects. Polish anti-Jewish measures and the antipathy to immigration in the United States caused Jews seeking to emigrate to go to British Mandate Palestine. The Jewish population there had swelled to about 175,000 by 1931. By 1939 it had nearly tripled to over 457,000.[iv] These immigrants were refugees from an unprecedented paroxysm of murderous European racism, not for the most part committed Zionists with a program for settler colonialism. Once in Palestine, and given the horrors of the 1940s, however, some of them were available for mobilization by the ideological Zionists. This enormous influx of displaced Europeans created conflicts with indigenous Palestinians.
Notables and townspeople in Gaza joined in the strikes and demonstrations of 1936-1939, the “Great Revolt,” which protested British colonial rule and the policy of allowing in thousands of European Jews. The uprising was begun by Ezzeddin al-Qassam, whom the British killed late in 1935, making him a martyr. Militias proliferated among Palestinians and immigrant Jews. The British military allied with the Haganah, one of the Jewish militias, in putting down the revolt. Nevertheless, in May 1939 the Colonial Office under Malcolm MacDonald put forward a White Paper that laid out a plan to halt Jewish immigration and to create a Palestinian state by 1949 that would contain a Jewish minority.[v]
Juan Cole, Gaza Yet Stands (Ann Arbor: Informed Comment KDP, 2024). Click here to buy.
Instead, the British after World War II announced that they would abruptly depart Palestine. The Zionist militias took advantage of this looming power vacuum, undertaking attacks on British and Palestinian targets in hopes of reversing the MacDonald White Paper. The Mandate fell into civil war. A shockingly unbalanced and anti-Palestinian U.N. General Assembly advisory plan for partition issued in late 1947 made things worse by raising the hopes of the ambitious Zionists that they could defy expectations that they would become a model minority in an independent Palestine and instead establish a state for themselves on a territory far greater than the 6 percent they had managed to purchase and settle. As the civil war unfolded, the commanders on the ground were emboldened and began deliberately chasing out the Palestinian population. Joel Beinin, reviewing the findings of Israeli historian Benny Morris, observed that in July of 1948 the Arab Affairs director of the leftist Zionist Mapam party, Aharon Cohen, received a copy of a report from military intelligence. It explained why 240,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled from the regions awarded to the Jews by the 1947 U.N. General Assembly partition proposal and another 150,000 left the Jerusalem region and territories suggested for the Arab state. Beinin wrote, “Cohen was upset to read the report’s conclusion that 70 percent of these Arabs had fled due to ‘direct, hostile Jewish operations against Arab settlements’ by Zionist militias, or the ‘effect of our hostile operations on nearby (Arab) settlements.’”[vi] The leftwing Mapam politicians had not wanted this ethnic cleansing, but politicians by then were not in control of events on the ground.
Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, with a little help from Iraq, came into the war, though often with relatively small forces. The sheer number of troops on each side was roughly equal. The Arabs, however, were no match for the well-organized Zionist forces some of whom had served in the anti-Nazi resistance or in the British Army, and who obtained good weaponry from Czechoslovakia. Jordan seemed mainly interested in grabbing the West Bank for itself and did not otherwise pose much of a challenge to the Zionists. The bureaucrats of the corrupt Egyptian government sold off equipment on the black market that should have gone to soldiers at the front. By the time of the 1949 Armistice, some 750,000 Palestinians had been ousted from what became Israel. In the south, some 250,000 of them were expelled to Gaza, where they swamped the 80,000 natives, becoming 70 percent of the population in what now was referred to as the Gaza “Strip,” five miles wide and 28 miles long.[vii] They never received any compensation for the property they lost or for having been made permanent refugees.
Egypt served as the caretaker for the Palestinians of Gaza for the succeeding decades. The Strip suffered from being cut off from its agricultural hinterland, which was usurped by the Israelis, and from its traditional trading markets in what became Israel and the West Bank, a separation that contained the origins of its long-term food insecurity. Egypt co-administered the territory, the population of which had been rendered stateless, with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.[viii]
During the 1967 Six Day War, which Israel’s leadership launched in hopes of vastly expanding its territory, Tel Aviv’s armies captured Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. By the 1970s, elements of the Zionist establishment in Israel had decided to attempt to colonize the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). In Gaza, Israeli economic policies, including restrictions on water use, began a process of “de-development.”[ix] While Egypt recovered the Sinai Peninsula with the 1979 Camp David Accords, the latter functioned as a separate peace. With the largest, best-armed and most capable Arab army out of the game, Israel could do as it pleased with the Palestinians in the OPT, and its hardliners pleased to colonize them and annex them. Some Israeli governments at some points, as with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 or Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, showed a willingness to compromise and to seriously consider a Palestinian state (though a very weak one that Israel could be sure to dominate). Their wiser instincts were overruled, however, by the rising Israeli right wing, embodied at first in the Likud Party but joined by new entrants as a million Russian and other immigrant Jews from the old East Bloc flooded into the country in the 1990s, many of whom were hungry for living space and resources and opposed relinquishing the West Bank and Gaza.
Inside Gaza under Israeli occupation, a hothouse atmosphere of resistance inevitably grew up. Large numbers of people gave their loyalty to the umbrella group of secular and leftist parties, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had many grassroots organizers and which sponsored institutions such as al-Azhar University (a secular school not related to the Egyptian seminary). The PLO, led by the Fatah Party, recognized Israel in 1993. Palestinians in Gaza were and are religiously and politically diverse. Hamas’s narrow victory in the 2006 elections for the Palestine Authority has created an image of fundamentalism as more hegemonic in Gaza than it is, in part because of winner-take-all electoral rules. Aaron N. Bondar observed of the 2006 elections, “there were 170,021 votes for Hamas (Change and Reform) candidates in North Gaza and 146,818 votes for Fatah candidate; a total of 390,194 votes were cast. Hamas, despite receiving only 44 percent of the vote, gained 100 percent of the seats.”[x]
The Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist organization of political Islam founded in Egypt in 1928, had established a small branch in Gaza in 1936. It was a decidedly minority taste for most Palestinians. Palestinian politics has often had a secular, nationalist or leftist overtone. Practicing Muslims among Palestinians were usually moderate traditionalists rather than fundamentalists, and Sufi orders remain active in Gaza.[xi] The Brotherhood gradually built a following, however, by constructing a network of mosques, clinics, soup kitchens in desperately poor Gaza, supplementing the work of UNRWA and other aid groups. A group drawn from the Brotherhood formed the core of the radical Hamas organization, founded in 1987. In response to Israeli strikes on Gaza and Tel Aviv’s strangling of its economy.
The Hamas paramilitary, the Ezzeddin al-Qassam Brigades, began conducting reprisal attacks on Israel in the 1990s. The non-state organization was straightforwardly committed to violence as a form of resistance, and it made no distinction between military and civilian targets. Hamas did its part in torpedoing the 1993 Oslo Accords, which it viewed as fatal to its maximalist (and wholly unrealistic) demands for an overthrow of Israel, with a series of high-profile attacks on civilians. In response to provocations and attacks by the government of Ariel Sharon, including the de-development of the Gaza economy, it engaged in another round of terrorist operations from 2000, killing hundreds of Israelis, though Israelis killed far more Palestinians with air strikes.[xii] It was, however, capable of concluding and honoring a truce with the Israelis for a year or more at a time (sometimes it was the Israelis who violated such understandings).
Successive Israeli governments also used Hamas for their own purposes, to keep the Palestinians politically divided and to weaken the PLO, and to represent themselves as defending Israelis from (largely ineffectual) Hamas rockets. The Israeli economic boycott devasted the small Palestinian middle class in Gaza, which had the resources to resist Hamas, and some proportion of which favored the secular-minded PLO. The extended family unit of the Palestinians is the Hamulah or clan, and Hamulahs make up a republic of cousins bound by loyalty, honor, and feuding with other clans. The impoverishment of these clans made it easier for Hamas to penetrate and tame them. It has been argued that Hamas subdued the Hamulahs in part through violence and in part through mobilizing them into an informal judicial system for settling conflicts.[xiii] Where even one member of a Hamulah joined Hamas, that person’s male relatives – brothers, uncles and cousins – would feel a responsibility to declare a blood feud and take revenge if he was killed by the Israelis.
[i] B.C. Busch, Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 22; Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 12.
[ii] Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza; Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 131-133.
[iii] Filiu, Gaza, 40-43.
[iv] “Demography and the Palestine Question,” Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/294/demography-and-palestine-question-i
[v] R. Orzeck, “Normative geographies and the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations in Palestine,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (2014): 345-359.
[vi] Joel Beinin, “No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), 230 (Spring 2004), https://merip.org/2004/03/no-more-tears/; citing Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83-102.
[vii] Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 2013); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: WW Norton, 2nd edn. 2014).
[viii] Feldman, Governing Gaza, 135-140; Filiu, Gaza, 57-121.
[ix] Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995).
[x] Aaron N. Bondar, “Breaking down the 2006 Palestinian elections vote-by-vote,” ProgressME Magazine, Mar 15, 2016 https://medium.com/progressme-magazine/breaking-down-the-2006-palestinian-elections-vote-by-vote-cfc0ca2fd444
[xi] Ala’ al-Muqayyad, “Al-Tasawwuf fi Ghazzah: Tariq al-hurub min ‘din al-siyasah’ ila din al-ruh,” Raseef, June 21, 2016. https://tinyurl.com/598hynej
[xii] Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, Hamas (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010); Tarek Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of the Palestinian Resistance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018), chapters 1-3.
[xiii] Abdalhadi Alijla, “The (Semi) State’s Fragility: Hamas, Clannism, and Legitimacy,” Soc. Science, 10, no. 11 (2021): 437-455.
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