Ocnus.Net
The Tangled Truth
By Benny Morris, The New Republic 7/5/08
Apr 23, 2008 - 8:11:07 AM
The hills of the West Bank--Judea and Samaria--are dotted
with well-ordered, red-roofed Jewish settlements. Clearly, they make the
partition of the land of Israel/Palestine into two states more difficult, and
as such they constitute an obstacle to peace. This is certainly the view in
Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv, the bastion of center-left Israel. But for
most Palestinians (who, incidentally, do not really want a two-state
settlement--vide their support of Hamas in the elections in 2006), the
settlements represent something far more sinister. They are highly visible
agents and symbols of Israel's design to steal their land.
The plain fact is that the West Bank settlements were
largely built by Palestinian Arab laborers, who continue to construct
buildings, security walls, tunnels, and bypass roads that daily reinforce
Israel's settlement enterprise and thus its grip on the territory. These
workers--two generations of them since the summer of 1967, when the settlement
venture was launched--reluctantly or eagerly took up their jobs in order to
feed their families, putting personal need before collective interest. And the
Palestinian political parties and armed factions, overcoming some initial
unease, failed to interfere with and never tried to halt their work, even as
these laborers were building the very "facts on the ground" that
their national leadership--and, more generally, the Arab world and its
supporters around the globe--were denouncing as evil. Over the same decades,
dozens of Palestinians have been shot dead or maimed by fellow Arabs for selling
or facilitating the sale of buildings and land to Jews--the very same land on
which some of the settlements were later constructed. (Other settlements were
constructed on state land.)
Encapsulated in this apparent illogic is an ambivalence
that, throughout the history of the conflict, has marked Palestinian Arab
attitudes toward cooperation, indeed collaboration, with the Zionists. On the
one hand, there always were Arabs, in very large numbers, ready to sell their
labor and land to the Jews, and to inform on Arab militants, and even to fight
their fellow Arabs who were fighting the Jews (and the British, who were
regarded as the Zionists' patrons). On the other hand, Arabs were willing to
battle against land sales and cooperation with the Jews, and to kill Jews (and
Britons) and collaborators. And sometimes it was the very same people, at one
and the same time or within a short span of years, who hotly denounced Zionism
and secretly helped the Jews. (The Nazi German consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff,
in 1933 contemptuously cabled Berlin that these nationalists "in daylight
were crying out against Jewish immigration and in the darkness of the night
were selling land to the Jews.")
In his important book, Hillel Cohen, the author of fine
studies of Israel's Arab minority, succeeds in presenting an objective view of
"collaboration," ignoring for the purposes of analysis the bad name
that the phenomenon received during and after World War II. Cohen is not
interested here in the moral dimensions of collaboration, and indeed treason.
His perspective--and this is one of his book's strengths--is neither
pro-Palestinian nor anti-Palestinian, neither pro-Zionist nor anti-Zionist.
Cohen argues--with Talleyrand, who famously quipped that "treason is a matter
of dates"--that "treason is ultimately a social construct.
Definitions vary with circumstances," and "collaboration" is
"in the eye of the beholder." So Cohen leaves "the moral and
political judgment" to his readers. He buttresses his argument with the
observation that Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the
leader of the Palestine Arab national movement during the 1930s and
1940s, called "traitors" not only those who
cooperated with the Jews and the British, but also those who stood aside and
were neutral in the ArabZionist and Arab- British struggles, as well as those
who opposed his and his party's dominance of the national movement. Husseini, a
nasty piece of work by all Arab, Jewish, and British accounts, brandished the
epithet "traitor" at the drop of a hat, and routinely ordered the
assassination of his political opponents.
Already by the late 1920s, Cohen writes, "the
definition of treason" had been so broadened as "to include all those
who opposed the hegemonic nationalist al-Husseini faction." So in 1927 one
anti-Husseini newspaper quipped: "Were we to enumerate the number of
traitors in the country in accordance with some of the newspapers, more than
half of the country's inhabitants would be traitors." Husseini, as Cohen
implies, appears to have been driven by personal and familial interests, like
many of the collaborators whom he lambasted; he often put his own position in
Palestinian politics above what could objectively be called the
"national" interest. This was glaringly apparent, even to some of his
astonished supporters, in May 1939, when he rejected the British White Paper
that reneged on the Balfour Declaration and in effect promised the Arabs majority
rule and independence within a decade. For Husseini, the document was
problematic because it did not place him at the helm of the future Palestinian
state.
Already in the 1920s, Husseini began calling his opponents,
primarily the notables of the rival Nashashibi clan, "traitors"--this
at a time when there were no clear policy differences between them. (Both the
Husseinis and the Nashashibis wanted all of Palestine for the Arabs, opposed
all Jewish immigration, regarded the Zionists as aggressive usurpers, and so on.)
Cohen argues that the Husseinis' routine use of the terms "traitor"
and "collaborator" denuded them of all moral weight or political
significance. And in the long perspective of history, who is to say whether the
man who advocated the bloody, abortive rebellion against the British in
1936-1939, which resulted in the impoverishment of Palestine's Arabs and the
weakening of their national movement, was more of a "nationalist" or
less of a "traitor" to the Palestinian cause than he who, calculating
more accurately, advocated an early cessation of violence and cooperation with
the British authorities (and, temporarily, even with the Zionists) in the
interests of Palestinian well-being?
The value of Cohen's erudite book lies in its meticulous
recounting of the history of Arab-Zionist cooperation and collaboration, period
by period, region by region, family by family. There are many eye-opening--and
pathetic--tales, often well-told. Cohen has culled the relevant archives--the
archives of the IDF and the main pre-state militia, the Haganah; the Central
Zionist Archive; the Public Record Office in London (for some reason, perhaps
to sow confusion, now named, like the American archive in Washington, the
National Archive); and also Arab memoirs and newspapers. (There are no open
Arab archives to speak of. ) The picture presented is thorough and fair and
persuasive.
Cohen describes the various types and gradations of
collaboration, ranging from socializing with Jewish co-workers and buying
Jewish products to working Jewish fields to actively supporting the Zionist
cause with intelligence, weaponry, and even combat against fellow Arabs during
the years of British rule and in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. During that war,
for example, the Druze communities of the Galilee and Mount Carmel eventually
threw in their lot with the Israelis--a Druze unit fought alongside Israeli
troops against Palestinian irregulars and the Arab Liberation Army, and the
Arab al-Heib, a northern Bedouin tribe, formed a small unit under Jewish command
that raided Arab villages and militia bases. Both were driven by a cold
calculus of profit and loss.
A major area of cooperation or collaboration, dating from
the start of the Zionist enterprise in the 1880s, was Arab land sales to the
Zionist movement--a phenomenon that permanently blighted Palestinian Arab
nationalism, sowing suspicion, confusion, and moral disarray. By the end of
1947, Zionist institutions and individual Jews had bought close to 7 percent of
Palestine's land surface (which, in all, encompassed 10,000 square miles or
26,000 square kilometers). Almost all the purchases had been from Arabs. (A
small quantity of land was bought from Europeans.) Most of the land was
purchased from rich absentee Arab landowners, or effendi, who lived in big
cities in Palestine or abroad, though many tracts, especially in the 1930s and
1940s, were sold to the Jews by smallholders. "Thousands of Palestinians
sold land to Jews during the Mandate," asserts Cohen. He may be slightly
exaggerating; but it was this land that made possible the grid of Jewish
settlements that served as the core and the shield of the state that was
established in 1948.
From the start, both the Arabs and the Zionists understood
that legal possession of land "was a necessary condition for realizing
[each of] their national idea[s]." Already in 1911, a Jerusalem
mathematics teacher named Mustafa Effendi Tamr published an article denouncing
Arab land-sellers: "You are selling the property of your fathers and
grandfathers for a pittance to people who will have no pity on you, to those
who will act to expel you and expunge your memory from your habitations and
disperse you among the nations. This is a crime that will be recorded in your
names in history, a black stain and disgrace that your descendants will bear,
which will not be expunged even after years and eras have gone by." Cohen
remarks that "opposition to land sales was one of the principal focal
points around which the Arab national idea in Palestine coalesced. It was the
place where the national idea adopted by the urban elite intersected with the
villagers' fears that the Jews would buy up more land and dispossess
them."
But not all Palestinian Arabs saw things this way. Some
simply preferred to make a buck; and many were driven by debt. Some played both
ends, selling land to Jews and helping the Zionists in other ways even as they
were loudly propagating Arab nationalism, such as Tulkarem's mayor Abd
al-Rahman al-Hajj Ibrahim and his family. Ali al-Qasem, al-Hajj Ibrahim's son-in-law,
"vandalized Jewish citrus groves" but also helped track down the
murderers of a Jewish couple in 1931. Later he speculated in land and was a
major Haganah intelligence asset--while also serving as an Arab intelligence
operative--until he was executed by the IDF Intelligence Service in December,
1948. His liquidation without legal sanction led to the trial and then the
dismissal of Issar Beeri, the IDF's commander, by David Ben-Gurion.
What will rivet the attention of many readers are Cohen's
penetrating, though sometimes speculative, portrayals of what drove various
collaborators. Money, or other material benefit, "was not the only
reason," he repeatedly stresses. Many Palestinian Arabs saw close
relations with the Zionists as a way to gain favor with, or favors from, the
British, whom Arabs universally saw in 1917 (when such a view was correct) and
in 1947 (by which time it was absurd) as the patrons and the guardians of
Zionism. For many collaborators, it was not a personal matter: they believed that
cooperation with the Jews would gain "communal" benefits for their
clan, village, and tribe. Others had "nationalist" motives: they
believed, simply, that the Zionists were on a roll and that prudence demanded
that, for the good of Palestine's Arabs, they side with the future victors.
Some were repelled by the methods of the mainstream Husseini nationalists,
which included substantial reliance upon intimidation and terrorism. Still
others had Jewish friends or admired the Jews. Many collaborators acted out of
some combination of all these reasons.
It is relatively easy to trace the spoor of those motivated
by personal interest, especially pecuniary gain. Sheikh Taher al-Husseini, the
nephew of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, contacted the Zionist officials Chaim
Margaliot Kalvarisky and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi simply because he wanted Hajj Amin's
job as mufti of Jerusalem. Later Taher's son, Zein al-Din al-Husseini, sold
land to the Jews. But for many others, especially from the middle and upper
classes, the motivating factor was a realistic assessment of the balance of
forces. (Cohen projects this type of thinking onto the 1970s, when, he argues,
Palestinian national interests required summud--attachment to, and staying put
on, the land, even if this necessitated a certain amount of cooperation with
the Israeli rulers. For this reason, the construction of Israeli settlements,
which would help Palestinians feed themselves and stubbornly remain in their
locations, could be seen as an alternative "nationalist" strategy and
not as "collaboration.")
A few were driven by a sympathy for the Zionist cause and an
appreciation of Zionist achievements, though almost none agreed to Zionist
dominance or to Jewish statehood alongside a Palestinian state in a partition
settlement. Hasan Shukri, the Arab mayor of Haifa during World War I and again
in the years between 1927 and 1940, cabled the British government in 1921
denouncing those Arab nationalists who demanded that Britain renounce Zionism:
"We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy.... We consider the Jews
as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the
construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish
immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our
country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews
such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias are making steady progress while
Nablus, Acre and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining."
Another public figure, Muhammad Tawil of Acre, wrote: "I cannot recognize
Hajj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has
brought no benefit to the country"--though he later became disaffected
with the Zionists who had employed and then discarded him, pointing to a
phenomenon that, sadly, would characterize Zionist- collaborator relations down
the decades. (This ugly phenomenon survives in the abandonment of some South
Lebanese Army veterans after the final IDF pullout from Lebanon in 2000.)
Some Palestinian collaborators were animated by personal
friendship, empathy with Jews, or even ideological sympathy. Ezra Danin, one of
the founders of the HIS (Haganah Intelligence Service), recalled in his memoirs
an Arab who was employed as a guard in a Jewish-owned citrus grove and was
involved in land sales on the side: "He believed in the return to Zion and
wanted cooperation with the Jews.... I remember an instance in which I once
said to him: 'You do it for the money, of course. [So] why do you get so angry
if they tell you that you are a hired spy?' He said: 'I for money? I work only
for the idea.'" The principle of good neighborliness, a time-honored Arab
tradition, also played a part. Some Hebron Arabs, including Ahmad Rashid
al-Hirbawi, the president of the town's chamber of commerce, supported--against
Husseini's line--the return of Jews to the town after the massacre of 1929,
when they had abandoned it.
A fair number were driven to collaborate with the
Zionists--and the British-- by a desire for revenge against a particular leader
(especially Hajj Amin al- Husseini), or an armed band or
political party that had harmed them or their kin or deprived them of what they
regarded as their due. Omar Sidqi al-Dajani became a significant HIS agent
after his father, the Jerusalem notable Hassan Sidqi al-Dajani, was murdered by
the mufti's operatives. Aptly, in HIS signals Omar was code-named
"hayatom," the orphan. He was to be of major political assistance to
the Jewish Agency, providing reports about the thinking and the activities of
the Arab delegations during the proceedings at the United Nations leading up to
the partition resolution of November 1947. Inter-Arab feuding between clans or
villages and the need for outside assistance, in weapons or funds, also
sometimes led to cooperation with the Zionists. And Cohen notes finally that
several collaborators were motivated, once they had embarked on an
anti-Husseini course, simply by the "drive to succeed."
Regarding Zionism, Cohen divides the Palestinians during the
Mandate years--they numbered about one million in 1936 and 1.3 million in
1948--roughly into two camps: the Husseini-led
"mainstream national movement," which fought Zionism to the bitter
end, and those who "believed that the Zionists could not be defeated and
that the common good of Palestinian Arabs demanded coexistence. " Put
another way, there was a "discourse of justice" (all of Palestine
should remain Arab) and a "discourse of the possible" (allowing for
some form of co- existence). This was true in the period between 1917 and 1947
and during the 1948 war. Much of the Nashashibi-led opposition, which tried to
win over the Palestinian masses and depose Husseini from the presidency of the
Supreme Muslim Council (the British-established body that oversaw religious
schools, mosques, cemeteries, and other Muslim trust assets), adhered to the
second view, though they were by no means "Zionists" or supportive of
the establishment of a Jewish state.
The Husseinis began to punish "traitors"--sellers
of land, informers, those socializing with Jews--as early as the 1920s. The
first murder of a public figure occurred in 1929, near the Jaffa Gate in
Jerusalem. Sheikh Musa Hadeib hailed from the village of Duwaimah, in the
Hebron foothills, and he may have sold land to the Jews. But his chief sin was
political: he spoke out in favor of the British Mandate, and he had once hosted
the High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. He had also helped to found the
Zionist-supported "Muslim National Associations" in the 1920s, as a
counterweight to the Muslim-Christian associations that were hotbeds of
anti-Zionist nationalist agitation; and he headed the Mount Hebron farmers'
party, one of the rural associations set up with Zionist aid to counter the
urban-based nationalists. His killers, according to Zionist intelligence, were
three men dressed as women, from the Maraqa clan of Hebron. The killing
occurred in October, less than two months after the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms
that swept the country--"the 1929 Disturbances," as the British (and
the Zionists) called them, though in the collective memory of the Arabs they
are known as the first "Arab Revolt"--which were triggered by Arab
fears, methodically stirred up by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, that the Jews intended
to "take control of" the Temple Mount, or al-Haram al- Sharif, and
destroy the two sacred mosques in the compound, Al Aksa and the Dome of the
Rock.
By the mid-1930s, the Husseinis had discarded all
inhibitions (such as the traditional fear that a murder would spark an
open-ended blood feud with the victim's clan). The first murder of a land
speculator, or simsar, was recorded in November 1934, with the shooting of
Saleh Isa Hamdan, of Lifta, outside Jerusalem. The killers are "people
extremely close to Hajj Amin," the police reported. During the rebellion
of
1936-1939, when Husseini assassinations of political
opponents and anyone suspected of any type of collaboration crested, about
1,000 Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs, about 500 of them in 1938 alone. (By
comparison, about 1,100 Arab rebels were killed in 1938 by British, Zionist,
and anti-rebel Arab forces.) By 1939, the Husseinis were paying 100 Palestine
pounds to operatives for the killing of high-level "traitors" and 25
pounds for lower-level "traitors." Killers of Jews earned only 10
pounds. Perhaps this partly explains why "only" some 500 Jews were
killed in the course of the revolt.
The Husseini murder campaign drove many in the
opposition--who until mid- or late 1937 had supported the rebellion--into the
arms of the British and, more hesitantly, the Zionists. The head of the
Nashashibi clan, Ragheb Nashashibi, and his nephew, Fakhri al-Nashashibi, began
to seek British and Zionist help, in money, arms, and intelligence, and in
1938 helped to establish the so-called rural "peace
bands," armed bands that fought against rebel bands, sometimes alongside
British troops. Often the peace bands and the opposition operatives supplied
the British with information that led to the destruction of rebel bands; less often,
they took money from the Jewish Agency to support their activities.
Cohen points out that very few Palestinians rallied to the
colors in 1948 and actually fought against the Yishuv. This was one reason for
their defeat. He attributes this to a lack of enthusiasm to fight, or at least
to fight for a lost cause. The Zionists, many Palestinians felt, were
unbeatable. But he fails to note that the failure and the cost of the 1936-1939
rebellion--in which the British crushed the Palestinian national movement,
killed thousands of its activists, and eviscerated its leadership--had so
thoroughly disheartened the Palestinians that when the test of battle came in
1947-1948, they were unwilling to join in.
To be sure, the Zionist institutions--the Arab Bureau, which
ran the initial intelligence networks in the 1920s, the Jewish Agency Political
Department's Arab Division, and the HIS--exploited inter-Arab divisions and
feuds between Christians and Muslims, Bedouins and farmers, and neighboring
villages and clans, as well as human weaknesses, to recruit agents and gather
intelligence. Cohen relates the story of a middle-aged Arab shepherd and his
recruitment by a shepherd from Kibbutz Givat Hayyim named Parneto Klein in
1936, at the start of the Arab Revolt. The Arab shepherd was unmarried because
he could not afford to pay the bride's dowry. Klein made him a proposal:
"You, a miserable beggar, will never be able to save enough money to buy a
young woman like you want, and in the meantime, you, God forbid, commit the sin
of bestiality.... But if you provide us with news about what goes on in
al-Qawuqji's camp ... we will give you money and you can finally buy a
woman." (Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a Lebanese- Syrian army officer, commanded a
band of foreign fighters who fought the British in northern Samaria during the
revolt.)
And so it was. Later, when the shepherd proved unable on the
wedding night to consummate his marriage, Danin sent him a Jewish doctor
"who gave him an injection to improve his performance and preserve his
honor." This only reinforced the shepherd's loyalty to his Jewish
controllers. The Zionist intelligence chiefs, like case officers the world
over, often looked for and recruited lowlifes. As Danin put it in his
autobiography: "Types generally exploitable for intelligence work are
rebellious sons, thieves who have brought disgrace on their families, rapists
who have acted on their passions and fled the avengers of tainted honor."
Another motive for Palestinian collaboration was noted by
Sheikh Said Darwish of the village of al-Maliha, outside Jerusalem. He headed a
clan that sold land. In explaining his actions, he once told a gathering of
village elders: "You've groveled before the [urban] effendis long enough.
Enough of flattering them.... Rise up and look at your situation in the rooms
of the nation's house. Rise up and search for a single fellah [peasant]
official on the Arab Executive.... Leave politics to the politicians, to those
who have great fortunes and whose idleness drives them mad. We want nothing of
either the Zionists or the Arab Executive.... Why don't we have governors and
district officers of our own? Were we not created in the image of God? Do we
lack men of wisdom and knowledge who can fill responsible positions in the
service of the nation? ... The religious knowledge and wondrous sanctity [of
our ulama-- religious wise men] is greater than that of Hajj Amin
al-Husseini." The Darwishes had simply had enough of the urban notables'
disdain, of being pushed around.
Initially, the Zionist institutions tried to buy off
Palestinian nationalism. In March 1930, the Zionist Executive allocated 50
Palestinian pounds to delegates participating in a gathering of sheikhs,
representing rural fellahin, at Ajjur; a further sum was allocated for organizing
a second rural sheikhs' meeting in Jaffa two years later. Money was given to
Arab journalists to write neutral articles, or ones explicitly favoring
Zionism. (One such writer was Sheikh Asad al-Shuqayri, the father of Ahmad
Shuqayri, who became the founding chairman of the PLO.) But by the end of the
1930s, the heads of the Jewish Agency understood that "bribery" was
no way to neutralize Palestinian nationalism. Moshe Shertok (Sharret), the head
of the Jewish Agency Political Department (and, from 1948, Israel's first
foreign minister), pointed out the incongruity of the Zionist movement's
efforts to "turn" the Arabs: the Zionist movement was based on ideas
and ideology, not on materialist considerations, but here it was trying to persuade
the Arabs that it was "bringing a blessing on the Arabs of the country ...
a material blessing. We are enriching the land, we are enriching them, we are
raising their standard of living ... and therefore there are no contradictions
between our fundamental interests and their fundamental interests.... The
unrealism of this conception was evident."
Shertok correctly grasped that you cannot buy off national
movements. The Zionists were not taking account of "the factors of
politics, the factors of national consciousness, the factors of ethnic instinct
that are at work here," he wrote in 1940. The conclusion that Shertok--and
Ben-Gurion--reached, on the basis of the Revolt of 1936-1939, was that that
there was indeed an Arab national movement, and that it could not be dissuaded
by material benefits. Instead the Zionist enterprise had to become so strong
that the Arabs would regard it as undefeatable, and so agree to compromise.
But some Arabs, it seems, were won over by Zionist
achievements rather than Zionist power. Consider a letter of invitation by a
group of Bedouin sheikhs in the Beit Shean (Bisan) Valley to the British high
commissioner Herbert Samuel in 1923: "We don't meddle in politics.... We
are simple people who live in tents and deal with our own affairs only. We
agree with everything the government does.... We have seen no evil from the
Jews. We have sold the American [sic] Jewish Agency some of our lands, and with
the help of the money we received we are developing and cultivating the large
tracts that still remain ours. We are pleased with these Jews, and we are
convinced that we will work together to improve our region and to pursue our
common interests." This letter, says Cohen, may have been drafted by Chaim
Margaliot Kalvarisky, who simultaneously orchestrated outreach programs and ran
the Arab Bureau's espionage network.
II.
Cohen's learned book, especially its lengthy citations from
Zionist intelligence reports and from Arab letters and memoranda, incidentally
sheds light on a rarely illumined aspect of Palestinian nationalism (and one
that indirectly "explains" at least some of the collaborators). From
the first, the nationalism of Palestine's Arabs was blatantly religious. Almost
all the "nationalist" statements Cohen quotes were couched in religious
or semi- religious terms. We are dealing here with an Islamic nationalism.
Indeed, when the Palestinian national struggle turned significantly violent,
against the British in 1936-1939 and against the Zionists in 1947-1948, the
struggle was defined by the movement's leaders as "a religious holy
war," a jihad. And those rejecting Husseini's leadership, in peacetime as
in wartime, were deemed heretics as well as traitors. The gang that murdered a
collaborator in Balad al- Sheikh, a village near Haifa, hung a placard in the
village square reading: "We hereby inform you that on 8 March 1939, Nimer
the policeman was executed ... as he betrayed his religion and his homeland....
The supreme God revealed to those who preserve their religion and their homeland
that he betrayed them, and they did to him what Muslim law commands. Because
the supreme and holy God said: 'Fight the heretics and hypocrites; their
dwelling-place is hell.'"
This Islamism colored the Palestinian national movement from
its conception. When, in 1911, the Jaffa newspaper Filastin attacked
land-sellers, it declared: "All land belongs to God, but the land on which
we live belongs to the homeland [watan], at the command of God."
"Islam does not forgive traitors," village mukhtars were told by
urban nationalists in 1920. In 1925, the mufti of Gaza, Hajj Muhammad Said
al-Husseini, issued a fatwa forbidding land sales to Jews. The Jews, he said,
were no longer a protected people (as they had been in the Islamic world during
the previous thirteen centuries). Muslims who helped them were to be treated as
heretics, and Christians who aided them were to be deported.
A more comprehensive fatwa against land sales was issued by
the ulama
(the authorities on law and religion) of Palestine in January
1935. It declared that "the seller and speculator and agent in [the sale
of] the land of Palestine to Jews" abetted the prevention of "the
mention of Allah's name in mosques," and accepted "the Jews as
rulers," and offended "Allah and his messenger and the
faithful," and betrayed "Allah and his messenger and believers."
These abettors were to be cast out of the community of the faithful, "even
if they are parents or children or brothers or spouses." Hajj Amin
alHusseini was the first signatory to this edict; and his name was followed by
those of the muftis of Jenin, Beersheba, Nablus, Safed, and Tiberias. Cohen
observes that this fatwa applied "the traditional [religious] concept of
khiyana--betrayal--to traitors against the national cause."
A year later, the mufti and qadi (religious judge) of Nablus
toured the neighboring villages and preached that anyone who killed a
land-seller "would reside in paradise in the company of the righteous
people of the world." Similarly, penitent collaborators made public
professions of a clearly religious cast: "I call on Allah, may He be
exalted, to bear witness ... I call on Allah and the angels and the prophets
and the knights of Palestinian nationalism to bear witness that if I violate
this oath, I will kill myself," declared Abd al-Fattah Darwish, of
al-Maliha, in May 1936. The religious discourse prohibiting the sale of land to
Jews was also adopted by the Christian Arab clergy of Palestine, no doubt under
Muslim pressure. A congress of Christian clerics that same year ruled that
"whoever sells or speculates in the sale of any portion of the homeland is
considered the same as one who sells the place of Jesus' birth or his tomb and
as such will be considered a heretic against the principles of Christianity and
all believers are required to ban and interdict him." And finally, in
1947, Jamal al-Husseini, Hajj Amin's cousin and deputy, reportedly called for
the murder of land-sellers: "Murder them, murder them. Our religion
commands this and you must do as the religion commands."
The religious discourse underpinning Palestinian nationalism
was not limited to the matter of land sales. The founding declaration of the
Higher Arab Committee, the executive body chaired by Hajj Amin alHusseini that
was to lead the Palestinians both in the 1936-1939 Revolt and in the 1947-1948
war against the Yishuv, referred to the Palestinian National movement as
"the holy national jihad movement." The following year, in July 1937,
those who supported the British Peel Commission recommendations--to partition
Palestine into Arab and Jewish states--were denounced as heretics, whereas
those destroying Jewish property would be declared saints.
Ideologically, it is only a short leap from these utterances
to those of the Hamas, the Islamist movement which today dominates the
Palestinian political arena and Palestinian nationalism. It would appear that
the secularism of Fatah, the political party led by Yasir Arafat that dominated
the Palestinian national movement from the 1960s until the turn of the century,
was a cultural aberration, something of an illusion, an ideological patina in
part adopted by Palestinian intellectuals and politicians to win over hearts
and minds in the largely secular West. And yet, when looking at footage of
Arafat on his knees in a mosque at prayer, five times a day, day in, day out,
and of Fatah suicide bombers on their way to destroy a bus or restaurant in
downtown Tel Aviv declaiming the certainty of meeting up with virgins in
paradise, one may be permitted to conclude that the secular declarations of the
1980s and 1990s were mere window dressing, and did not really reflect the
spirit of Palestinian politics. And no sooner had the grand old man of
Palestinian politics departed the scene than Hamas won the first--and free--Palestinian
general elections in which it participated.
Cohen indirectly establishes a particular connection between
collaboration and the nature of Palestinian nationalism, though he does not
explicitly dwell on the matter. The ardent nationalists of the Mandate years
were in large measure driven by their Islamic faith and tenets--but the
collaborators often exhibited, if not outright apostasy, then at least a
measure of religious (as well as nationalist-political) backsliding. Cohen
relates the story of Kamel and Sharif Shanti, a leading land-selling family in
Qalqilya. Tellingly, they both married Jewish women. During Ramadan 1935,
Sharif reportedly broke the fast and ate during daytime in public.
In 1929, Filastin reported that the Zionist Congress had
allocated one million pounds for the purchase of land, and commented that some
"twenty people--a portion of the nation that should not be
discounted--will [now] have all their worries dispelled ... because the bars
and dance clubs will now be wide open" to them. Another newspaper reported
that "the [Jewish] city of Tel Aviv, its streets and its cafes, buzz each
day with large groups of fellahin and samasirah [speculators] who humiliate
themselves and sell the fertile lands of the foothills."
The leaders of the Bedouin Ghazawiyya tribe, the Zeinati
clan, in the Beit Shean Valley sold land to the Jews and then spent their days
in "endless trips to Haifa ... [in] fancy hotels [and] ... cafes,
replacing horses with automobiles, installing a radio in their tents." All
this "caused a revolution in their lives and, necessarily, their
religion," a member of the neighboring Kibbutz Maoz Hayyim noted. There
are reports that the Zionist land-purchasing agencies took sellers and
speculators on binges in Haifa and Tel Aviv and provided them with women during
the deal-making negotiations. And the ostentatious samasirah behavior triggered
a vicious cycle in which they were eventually forced to sell more and more
land, and help in the sale of others' lands, to maintain their new lifestyle.
The outcome was predictable. The head of the Zeinati clan, Emir Muhammad,
"was murdered in 1946 as he came out of a barbershop in Haifa."
So there appears to have been a correlation between
irreligiosity and collaboration. Or, put another way, the more ardently
religious a Palestinian Arab was, the less likely he was to collaborate with
the Zionists. This was demonstrated in no uncertain terms in Israel's battle
with Palestinian violence decades later: While the Israeli security services
thoroughly penetrated the Fatah movement before, during, and after the First
Intifada, they had great difficulty in recruiting Hamas operatives (and,
incidentally, fundamentalist Hezbollah men in Lebanon).
Looking beyond the religious-secular divide, what is to be
learned from the phenomenon of Palestinian collaboration? Without doubt--and
Cohen is mindful of this--it reveals a basic hollowness at the heart of
Palestinian nationalism. Some pointed to the widespread nature of
collaborationism and deduced that "there was no Palestinian people"
or Palestinian national movement. Others asserted that if there was a
Palestinian national movement, it was far from enjoying mass support, and that
many if not most Arabs in Palestine put personal and familial and tribal
interests before national interests. Or, put another way, that the
"nationalism" of many of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine was only
skin deep: after all, many thousands assisted the Zionists in one way or
another. Cohen is correct, I think, in asserting that the widespread phenomenon
of collaboration was a "constant and sharp reminder that many Palestinian
Arabs did not accept the nationalist ethos, at least not as it was formulated
by the Husseinis."
In their book The Palestinian People: A History, Baruch
Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal wrote that Palestinian nationalism can be traced
back to
1834, when a group of peasants in the Nablus area rebelled
against their then-Egyptian rulers. Most historians disagree, and locate the
birth of Palestinian Arab nationalism in the 1920s (and the start of general
Arab nationalism only a few years before). But for years thereafter,
Palestinian Arab nationalism remained the purview of middle- and upper-class
families. Most peasants, and perhaps many among the urban poor as
well--together, some 80 percent of the Palestine Arabs--lacked political
consciousness or a "national" ideology. The masses could be
periodically stirred to action by religious rhetoric (Islam certainly touched
them to the quick), but this failed to bind them in a protracted political
engagement, especially when the price had to be paid in blood. Cohen writes,
too hesitantly in my view, that "the conduct of Palestinian society
[during 1917-1948] might lead to the conclusion that ... [its] national spirit
was not sufficient to the task at hand."
But of course the Palestinians were to change. Indeed, the
disaster and the dispersion that befell them in 1948 was itself a major
milestone in the formation of a truly "national" consciousness; and
the results of the war in 1967 certainly abetted this development. By the time
of the intifadas, millions of Palestinians had rallied to the cause, and many
thousands were prepared to engage in political action and combat, and to pay
the price in blood and imprisonment. By then it was incontrovertible that there
was a Palestinian people. Palestinian nationalism may not have been during the
Mandate, and may not be today, quite the secular, democratic, and open
nationalism of modern Western Europe; and it may still be defined in large
measure by what it wishes to destroy rather than by what it hopes to build. It
is intolerant, violent, and--above all--religious. But it is most certainly a
variety of nationalism.
Source: Ocnus.net 2008