The Iron Cage Read online

  Also by Rashid Khalidi

  British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914

  Palestine and the Gulf (coeditor)

  Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making during the 1982 War

  The Origins of Arab Nationalism (coeditor)

  Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness

  Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East

  Contents

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Introduction: Writing Middle Eastern History

  in a Time of Historical Amnesia

  1. Arab Society in Mandatory Palestine

  2. The Palestinians and the British Mandate

  3. A Failure of Leadership

  4. The Revolt, 1948, and Afterward

  5. Fateh, the PLO, and the PA:

  The Palestinian Para-State

  6. Stateless in Palestine

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  The Palestine Mandate, July 24, 1922

  Preface to the

  Paperback Edition

  In the mid-1990s, when I began writing this book, I could not have foreseen to what extent the dilemmas that faced the Palestinian people in the years before and immediately after 1948 would prove to be enduring ones, right down to the present. Although I was not particularly optimistic at that time, there still appeared to be at least a glimmering of horizons that today seem firmly closed. An end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, which by then had lasted for less than thirty years, still seemed possible, if frustratingly distant. And a just, negotiated, two-state solution to the problem of Palestine still appeared to be at least a distant possibility.

  Soon thereafter it became clear that throughout the 1990s, events on the ground—the expansion of Israeli settlements and a doubling of the settler population, the building of Israeli-only bypass roads in the West Bank, the sealing off of Jerusalem from the West Bank, and the tightening of movement restrictions on Palestinians—demonstrated that, far from moving toward a negotiated solution to the conflict, meaning an end to Israeli occupation and colonization of Arab land, the trend was in the opposite direction. In spite of near-universal optimism about the “peace process,” these underlying realities that were hidden by the false optimism of the 1990s inexorably propelled Palestinians and Israelis toward heightened conflict. This conflict broke into the open during the second intifada, starting at the end of 2000. There has been little room for optimism since.

  Originally, I had thought of the “iron cage” only as a metaphor describing the constraints hemming in the Palestinians in the period before 1948, which constituted the original focus of this book. As my research and writing progressed, however, I began to see the enduring nature of these constraints. I realized that, with some modifications, this metaphor applied also to the existence of the Palestinian people in the decades after 1948, and I decided to give some attention to this period as well. And then, over the last few years, as a monstrous wall/fence/barrier began to crisscross the occupied West Bank, hemming the Palestinians there into dozens of open-air prisons (Palestinians in Gaza had much earlier been similarly confined), what I had originally thought of as a metaphor now seemed to take on a concrete physical embodiment, one that the rare foreign visitors to Palestine can see for themselves today snaking across the landscapes and cityscapes of occupied Palestine.

  The iron cage in which the Palestinians still find themselves is not solely physical: it has a political dimension, represented most recently by the international boycott of both of the Palestinian governments that emerged from the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, which produced a majority for the Islamist Hamas movement in January 2006. For the eighteen months since then, the international funding that kept the Palestinian Authority (PA) afloat has been suspended, the funds transformed into welfare payments channeled directly to needy individuals. In the economic freefall that followed in the occupied territories, widespread hardship was prevented from degenerating into outright starvation only by the strong social solidarity that characterizes Palestinian society, and by this massive international charity. These things did nothing to prevent the decline of the structures of state created by the PA, and of general security and the rule of law; the hermetically sealed Gaza Strip, especially, has succumbed to a growth in lawlessness, a rise in clan and tribal influence, and sporadic but savage infighting between militias affiliated with the two leading Palestinian factions, Fateh and Hamas.

  However, this book attempts to explore not only the changing nature of the rigid constraints imposed on the Palestinian people by the more powerful actors with which they have had to contend, from the Mandate period until the present, but also how the Palestinians and their leaders performed within the context of these constraints. This proved to be the source of one of the most contested aspects of the book after its original publication. For some, any focus on Palestinian performance in this context of a largely unfavorable environment seemed to constitute a challenge to their firmly held idea that the primary—perhaps even the sole—responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians lay with others. Indeed, this attitude of helplessness, of a lack of Palestinian agency, of pushing the responsibility for events that affected the Palestinians onto other forces, was one of my targets in writing this book. In it, I tried to explain elements of the historical agency of the Palestinians and their leaders, all the while conveying as clearly as possible the nature of the constraints within which they operated. I was not particularly surprised at the reaction on the part of some readers to this discussion of Palestinian agency. To my way of thinking, it proved the need to understand the Palestinians as in some respect masters of their own fate, and as facing some choices, bad though most of these choices often are, given the unfavorable balance of forces they confront. Only when it is clear that one of the lessons of the past is that there have been such choices, however well or badly they were made, can better choices be made in the future.

  It is not always easy to disentangle the lines of responsibility, and of causation, where matters related to Palestine are concerned. This is not only because there is a bustling “blame the victim” cottage industry, which wants to make sure that all eyes are firmly fixed anywhere but on Israel, or on the great powers, regional and global, that have played such a large role in its modern history. It is also because of the view just mentioned, that seeks agency anywhere except among the Palestinians. And it is true that most matters relating to Palestine are devilishly complex. This is certainly the case in explaining the most recent tortuous descent into the outer circles of hell (which is taking place as I write these words in late May 2007) of nearly 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip, nearly 50 percent of them children under the age of fifteen. In all the media coverage of militias and militants, Hamas, Fateh, and the Israeli army, one forgets that they operate in the midst of these large numbers of innocent people, crammed into 360 square kilometers, an area “slightly more than twice the size of Washington, DC.”1

  The May 2007 conflagration could be said to have started with the collapse, amid yet another round of inter-Palestinian factional fighting, of the February Mecca accord brokered by Saudi king ‘Abdullah, which set up a Palestinian coalition government including both Hamas and Fateh. Scores of Palestinian lives have been lost in these savage internecine battles, taking place in the heart of heavily crowded residential areas in Gaza, Rafah, and elsewhere in the crowded Strip. Whatever the contributing factors, the blame here lies squarely on the Fateh and Hamas fighters, their leaders, and those who support them, both within Palestinian society and outside Palestine, as well as on the senior political leaders of both groups who either cannot or will
not restrain them. Whatever can be said about the siege imposed by the Israeli occupation, or the international financial blockade imposed on the Palestinian Authority, there is a basic responsibility on the shoulders of those who irresponsibly and callously allow themselves and their heavily armed followers to be dragged into such infighting between factions among a besieged, occupied, oppressed people.

  But to focus solely on the fighting within the pressure cooker that is the vast prison of the Gaza Strip is to ignore the jailors, those who put the Palestinians there in the first place. Most of the population of the Strip is not originally from there, but rather from a swath of villages in the southern regions of Israel, whose inhabitants were driven or fled there during the fighting of 1948–49, and who were never allowed to return to their homes. The Gaza Strip is thus not only a victim of a forty-year occupation that started in June 1967. Most of its 1.5 million people constitute the single largest concentration of the refugees produced as a direct, inevitable result of creating a Jewish state in 1948 in a country with a nearly two-thirds Arab majority.

  Responsibility attaches to others than those who are actually fighting amid the burning garbage of Gaza, Rafah, and Khan Yunis, and those who drove Palestinian civilians from their homes in 1948 and 1949. The obstinate refusal of both the Bush administration and the Israeli government to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, and their international campaign to try to force the Palestinians to go back on their democratic choice, is also crucially important in understanding why Palestinians were fighting over the ruins of their refugee camps in mid-2007. This campaign has included Israel’s withholding of Palestinian taxes, and an American-led international financial and diplomatic boycott of the PA. Beyond this, it involves an Israeli refusal to ease its choking restrictions on movement and goods in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (in the former there are hundreds of fixed checkpoints, earthen barriers, and mobile checkpoints, in addition to the ubiquitous wall/fence/barrier) irrespective of the changes in the security situation. Finally, and most ominously, the Palestinian slide into the abyss involves United States–government arming, training, funding, and encouragement of Fateh in order to bring it to attack its rivals.2

  It certainly required an almost criminal level of irresponsibility for Palestinian factions to fight one another in such circumstances, grave acts against the Palestinian national interest for which they are already being held responsible by Palestinian public opinion. But it would be wrong and irresponsible to look only at this undoubted Palestinian responsibility, and not also at those powerful external actors that are responsible for penning the Palestinians under occupation into the vast open-air prisons that have become their lot in this era, or who are egging them on in their vicious internecine fight. The Palestinian people, facing as before an array of forces stronger than they, have also once again been victimized by poor leadership when they most needed to make the right choices. This latest tragic situation once more underlines the basic theses of this book.

  Notes

  1. “Gaza Strip,” CIA: The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html#Geo.

  2. See Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke, “Elliot Abrams’ Uncivil War,” Conflicts Forum, January 7, 2007, http://conflictsforum.org/2007/elliot-abrams-uncivil-war/, and Mark Perry and Paul Woodward, “Document Details ‘U.S.’ Plan to Sink Hamas,” Asia Times, May 16, 2007, www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE16Ak04.html.

  Introduction

  Writing Middle Eastern History

  in a Time of Historical Amnesia

  This book examines the failure of the Palestinians to establish an independent state before 1948, the year of Israel’s founding and of the dissolution of Arab Palestine, and the impact of that failure in the years thereafter. Such a topic provokes a sequence of questions that relate to the present as much as to the past: What purpose is served by such a study when, nearly six decades after 1948, an independent Palestinian state—in any real sense of the word “independent”—still does not exist, and when its establishment continues to face formidable obstacles?

  The obstacles to independent Palestinian statehood only appeared to grow as violence escalated in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon during the summer of 2006. As these lines are written, in late July, Lebanon is the scene of hundreds of civilian deaths, enormous destruction, and fierce ground combat. Almost forgotten as a result of the carnage visited on Lebanon by Israel, and of Hizballah’s repeated rocket barrages against northern Israeli cities and towns, has been the suffering in Gaza caused by months of Israeli siege and bombardment. It is also forgotten that all of this started with Palestinian efforts to create a democratic structure of governance while still under Israeli occupation.

  Specifically, this latest escalation began with response by Israel and the United States to the elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in January 2006, which brought to power a Hamas-led government. Their campaign quickly moved from a crippling financial siege of the PA, with the aim of bringing down that government, to an escalation of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants, and to artillery and air attacks in Gaza that killed and wounded scores of civilians. Hamas had for eighteen months observed a cease-fire in the face of these and earlier provocations (other factions were not so restrained, firing rockets into Israel). However, after a major spike in Palestinian civilian deaths and the particularly provocative Israeli assassination of militant leader Jamal Abu Samhadana, whom the PA government had just named to a security post, Hamas finally took the bait and responded with the capture of one Israeli soldier and the killing of others. The predictably ferocious Israeli response—even more killings of civilians, more assassinations, and ground incursions in Gaza—finally provoked Hizballah (or perhaps gave Hizballah and its allies, Iran and Syria, the preemptive opportunity they had been searching for). The rest of this tragic scenario then unfolded with the grim, bloody, unthinking precision we have seen so many times before in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.

  This book is not about that conflict but about its Palestinian component, specifically the effort of the Palestinians to achieve independence in their homeland. The ongoing war in Gaza and Lebanon illustrates once again how intimately this effort is intertwined with regional and international factors. It illustrates also the crucial importance of a careful reading of recent Palestinian history to attain an understanding of the Middle East conflict. The one-dimensional and ahistorical approach to the conflict through the prism of terrorism that is prevalent in the United States obscures thoroughly the specificity of Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and other regional actors, like Syria and Iran, and how these relate to one another. The Palestinian quest for independence is only one of many elements that must be grasped in order to understand the causes of conflict in the Middle East. But because for nearly a century this quest has been so central to events there, willfully ignoring it leads to the kind of reductive, partial, and misguided American official thinking that has helped produce the profound problems that afflict the region. This book raises other questions as well: Is a historical study of why something occurred—or in this case did not occur—justified because it sheds light on apparent similarities with events that are currently taking place? Or are these two failures in state building—one in the past and the other ongoing—completely unrelated, and is any attempt to examine them in relation to one another an historical error, not to say an abuse of history?1

  It might be asked why I describe this failure to achieve independent statehood as a Palestinian failure. Specifically, why should the focus be on the role of the Palestinians in their past defeats, when they were the weakest of all the parties engaged in the prolonged struggle to determine the fate of Palestine, which culminated in 1948? These parties include the British Empire, until World War II the greatest power of its day, which actively opposed Palestinian aspirations for statehood and independence, and other major states, among them t
he United States, the Soviet Union, and France, all of which supported Zionism and the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, but did nothing to prevent the abortion of the embryonic Arab state of Palestine in 1947–48. They include as well the Zionist movement, composed of a worldwide network of institutions capable of mobilizing extensive diplomatic, propaganda, and financial resources, and the highly motivated and well-organized yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine). Both Britain and the Zionist movement always treated the prospect of an independent Arab state in Palestine as a grave threat. The Zionist movement saw such a prospect as a particular challenge to the Jews’ aspirations to exclusive sovereignty over what they considered Eretz Israel (the land of Israel). Finally, there were the seven newly independent Arab states, all of them relatively weak and heavily influenced by the Western powers; these states acted in ways that frequently excluded the interests of the Palestinians, and sometimes contradicted them.

  To rephrase the question in light of these facts, why concentrate on the failures or incapacities of the Palestinians to achieve independence before 1948, when the constellation of forces arrayed against them was so powerful, and in the end proved overwhelming? Why not focus on the external forces that played a predominant role in preventing the Palestinians from achieving self-determination? Others have countered that the Palestinians, or their leaders, should bear responsibility for their own failures, some going so far as to blame the victim entirely for the tragic history of the Palestinian people in the twentieth century and after.2 The benefits of blaming the victim, in light of the heavy responsibilities of various other parties in this story, are obvious, explaining the continuing vitality of this school of thought, although most of its core claims have long since been discredited. Others have argued that even if the Palestinians cannot be fully blamed for their own misfortunes, and even if the overwhelming balance of forces ranged against them must be taken into account, they nonetheless are accountable for their actions and decisions. Similar arguments can be heard today regarding Palestinian responsibility for the dire situation faced by the Palestinians after the collapse of the Oslo peace process of 1991–2000, the full reoccupation of the West Bank by Israel in 2001–6, and the election in January 2006 of a Palestinian Authority (PA) government headed by the radical Hamas movement.