Why Palestinians are the modern Sioux

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal's The Palestinian People: A History charts an unequal struggle that has a depressing parallel

The Observer
June 8, 2003
By Ian Gilmour

The Palestinias have long been the Native Americans of the contemporary world. In the nineteenth century, Americans showed little regard for America's indigenous inhabitants, taking their land and harrying them ever further westward before huddling them into reservations. So ruthless was this conduct that it evoked the admiration of Hitler who declared that the Germans should 'look upon the [East European] natives as Redskins'. For the last half-century by providing arms, subsidy and support, America has enabled Israel to dole out similar treatment to the Palestinians.

Baruch Kimmerling, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Joel S. Migdal, professor of international studies, University of Washington, do not draw this parallel, although, referring to the Gaza Strip, they - perhaps coincidentally - entitle one of their sub-chapter headings 'A Palestinian Reservation'.

But they reject the standard Israeli claim that no self-identified Palestinian people existed until very recently, an idea that was memorably expressed in 1969 by the then Israeli Prime Minister. 'There was no such thing as Palestinians,' maintained Golda Meir, who hailed from Milwaukee. 'It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.'

While similarly rejecting the claim of the Palestinians that they had existed as a people from time immemorial, the authors argue that 'a self-identified [Palestinian] people' was the result of their encountering over two centuries, first, 'the powerful forces stemming from European markets and governmental administration, and later, Jewish settlements'. Throughout their book the authors' sociological-historical approach is original, illuminating and convincing.

The crucial stage in the 'Native Americanisation' of the Palestinians was 'the catastrophe' of 1948-9, when some 750,000 of them - 90 per cent of the Arabs living in the territory that became the Jewish state, or 50 per cent of the population of mandatory Palestine - were driven from their homes by the Israelis' brutal ethnic cleansing. This 'transfer' (the Zionist euphemism) was accomplished by massacres, force and intimidation. Refusing to allow the refugees to return, Israel obliterated 40 Palestinian villages.

The 1967 war produced a much smaller ejection of Palestinians and an Israeli occupation of all Palestine that was, initially, relatively benign, except in Gaza where, under the military commander, Ariel Sharon, 'numerous young Palestinians were executed without trial following a rebellion attempt'. Kimmerling and Migdal remind us that Sharon's notoriety began in 1953 when, on Jordanian territory he and his soldiers massacred 69 Arabs, including 46 women and children.

Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat had founded Fatah which became the nucleus of the PLO. Some Palestinians were guilty of dreadful terrorist actions, including the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Although the PLO attracted much international recognition and increased Palestinian self-consciousness as a people, it suffered serious setbacks, being expelled from Jordan by the Jordanians and from Lebanon by the Israelis.

After Arafat had been forced to leave Beirut, hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were murdered by Lebanese militiamen with Israeli connivance. An Israeli commission found that the Defence Minister (Sharon) 'bears personal responsibility' and recommended his dismissal.

Israel's pre-1967 borders gave her 78 per cent of Palestine, which most observers would think quite a lot for a people who in 1948 had only 6 per cent of it. The Israelis were not satisfied, however, and inserted illegal settlements in the small area left to the Palestinians. When the Palestinians, fed up with occupation and the relentless theft of their land, began their intifada in 1988, Israel's reaction was ferocious. The Defence Minister (not Sharon, funnily enough) recommended 'beatings' and 'breaking... bones' for the natives, but the intifida and the 1991 Gulf war led to the Oslo agreement of 1993.

Kimmerling and Migdal are at their considerable best on Oslo and why it failed. They are, though, perhaps unduly charitable in not stressing the astonishing incompetence of the Palestinian negotiators. Either not realising the extent of Israel's settlements or relying on Israeli good faith, they did not secure an immediate ban on more being built. Consequently an agreement that should have led to Israel returning Palestinian land for peace, resulted instead in Israel filching even more land. By 2000 the number of illegal settlers since Oslo had more than doubled.

The authors believe, surely rightly, that Oslo had two key defects: there was no outside arbitrator, and the agreement was not balanced. The Israelis wanted recognition of Israel by the PLO and an immediate end to violence, and they got them. All the Palestinians got was implicit promises - of a sovereign state, the end of Jewish settlements and a just resolution of the refugee problem - and none was kept.

The Palestinians saw that the chief results were economic decline, ever-increasing settlements, as well as more apartheid roads which only the settlers could use, so the violence started again.

Concluding their acute, thorough, fair-minded history, Kimmerling and Migdal see the Palestinians facing Prime Minister Sharon's 'renewed attempts to wipe out their political autonomy - what we might call politicide'. Although President Bush now says he favours a Palestinian state, his administration has so far done everything that Sharon, who opposes such a state and whom Bush ridiculously called 'a man of peace', has wanted. Moreover, nearly all the far-Right ideologues now ascendant in Washington follow the Israeli line. They are Sharonistas, for whom justice for the Palestinians is no more on their agenda than was justice for the Native Americans on that of the US pioneers. So it is hard to be optimistic. The Palestinians may eventually get something that is called 'a state'. Very possibly, however, it will in reality be a Bantustan or a reservation.

The Palestinian People: A History
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal
Harvard University Press £29.95,pp608

Original link

 
_____
Nieuwe Oorlog 2003 | Ander Nieuws week 24