Arab Violence and British Developmentalism in Palestine

The 1917 Balfour Declaration was perhaps the most important moment in Palestinian history. In legitimizing the Zionist movement, it prompted the Aliyots, in which European Jews, fueled by existential desperation amidst the increasingly apparent epoch of centuries of anti-Semetic violence saw Palestine as their only hope and stopped at nothing to establish their homeland, even if it meant participating in an essentially colonial expulsion of indigenous Arabs. Queens College Professor of Middle East Studies Yerach Gover described Zionism as a “Zero Sum Game” in which progress towards the Zionist end goal of Eretz Israel inherently came at the expense of the indigenous.  In other words, conflict stemmed from the very nature of the Zionist ideology. Gover’s argument, if true, implies that Zionist settlement in Palestine was destined for violence from the very beginning. Yet, no account of Palestine’s history between 1920 and 1948 is complete without accounts of Arab-Jewish solidarity and attempts at reconciliation that an optimist might be moved to see as paths tragically not taken. Specifically, many Zionist factions were willing to make peace with Arabs, but were most often met with violence that only radicalized them to be less sympathetic toward Arab goals. The British policies that prompted this violence was the true crux of the conflict. Indeed, while the violence in Palestine originated from the mutual exclusivity between Arab land ownership and the militant version of Zionism that came to dominate by 1948, a series of British administrative failures were to blame for the faltering of other visions of Zionism that sought to reconcile and resolve this tension.

First, the violence in Palestine could be interpreted as a result of the fundamental conflict over land between Arab self-determination and Zionism. That the core essence of Zionism necessitated the expulsion of indigenous labor was apparent in Zionist messaging since before large-scale immigration to Palestine began. For example, an early Zionist slogan called for Israel to be established in a “Land Without a People”, implying that – since no land on earth is truly depopulated – Zionists must be willing to dehumanize and displace those who inhabited the land Israel is to be established on (Gelvin, 210). In fact, some Zionists had no pretensions of respecting Arab land sovereignty at all, as they were fully cognizant of that Arabs “have every reason to oppose Zionism [...] until met with overwhelming force” (Penslar, NYT, 7). Indeed, in the face of rising Anti-Semitism in Europe, Zionists regarded expelling Arabs as a necessary evil for long-term global Jewish safety, and were thus ideologically resistant to appeals to Arab humanity. The most problematic way in which this Zionist willingness to disregard Arab humanity was in the Conquest of Land and Labour, a doctrine in which Arabs were systematically forced off their land as Zionists opposed communally managing the land or even employing Arab laborers. As a result, absentee land sales had pushed 20 thousand peasant families off their land by 1930 and the introduction of foreign farming techniques threatened to permanently make the land unworkable to Arabs (Gelvin, 211). Though the Arabs certainly had other reasons to oppose Zionist immigration, land was the most important and least negotiable one for two reasons. First, the majority of Arab Palestinians were rural peasants reliant on their land for not just their livelihoods but their very way of life (LeVine, 113). Absent land, peasants had nowhere to live, no community to belong to, and no way to make a living; thus, the Arabs could see no compromise with the Zionists if their land was not ceded back to them. Secondly, land acquisitions became a scapegoat for the larger issue of systemic wealth inequality, thus inducing Arab class rage. While Jewish immigrants, subsidized by foreign philanthropists, became wealthy and educated urbanites, “the fellah's economic condition [did] not appreciably improve since World War I” (LeVine, 98). Arabs saw this stagnation primarily as a result of the deterioration of their land rights, which is why the early Arab-Christian communes primarily resistance Zionist immigration by drafting letters of complaint to the colonial authority about their opposition to land sales, and why the 1936 intifada “was led not by the nationalist elite in Jerusalem but by the fellahin, the farmers, in the countryside, who were the ones suffering from loss of land” (NYT, 7, Bawalsa; NYT, 11, Bawalsa). Ultimately, that the Zionist mission sought to take what the Arabs valued most made the two visions fundamentally irreconcilable. The more land the Zionists had, the less the Arab peasantry did, and vice versa; the closer one group came to their goal, the angrier the other group became. The conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists could be interpreted as the effect of solely this tension. 

At the same time, however, the conflict could also be seen as the product of a misguided British administrative doctrine that disintegrated the Arab capacity to politically organize, rendering them incapable of negotiating with Zionists and forcing them to resort to violence. This British failure materialized in two ways. Firstly, blinded by their developmentalist economic doctrine, they manufactured the aforementioned wealth inequality by discouraging Jewish-Arab integration. Britain’s impetus to support Zionist aspirations was in the racist hope that the Zionists could “develop the land” economically while minimizing the supposed inefficiency created by the Arab peasantry and thus increase tax income, despite the fact that an integrated economy incorporating Arab labor and expertise would have undeniably made the region more prosperous (LeVine, 101). This belief led them to take measures to culturally and politically separate Arabs and Zionists. In replacing Arabic as the language of the land with three separate national languages of English, Hebrew, and Arabic, for example, the British ensured that Jewish immigrants learned “little Arabic” and thus could not identify with or form community with Arab laborers, a reality that was eventually enshrined in the “separate spheres” approach in which Arab and Jewish communities would be administered independently of one another (NYT, Tamari, 5; Idinopulos, 177; Idinopulos, 183). While British landscape modernization efforts primarily benefited Jewish communities by building centers of economic agglomeration on their behalf, the Arab peasantry faced underinvestment in education and poverty reduction; displaced from their land and without economic recourse, the Arabs were trapped at the bottom of an unequal society (LeVine, 103; Idinopulos, 187). Arab violence was a product of the class rage that stemmed from this inequality. Secondly, the British, out of a belief that the Arabs could not effectively govern themselves, actively gutted Arab political institutions; absent someone to represent them at the negotiating table, the Arabs could not internally reconcile nor rationally express their demands, and thus had to resort to disorganized mob violence. When Grand Mufti al-Husseini tried to push for an Arab legislative council similar to the Jewish agency that would “provide an independent institution for [Arab] nationalist ambitions,” for example, his organizational capacity was “weakened by British suppression of Arab revolts” (NYT, 14). Thus, the Arabs were “devoid” of a unifying, coherently nuanced political position from which they could diplomatically engage with the Zionists. Thus, Arab grievances were interpreted by Arab representatives, the British, and the Zionists as an uncompromising demand for full statehood, which Zionists were unwilling to accept (Gelvin, 210; NYT, Bawalsa, 7). The Arabs’ lack of centralization also led to a lack of productive activism: in failing to more often organize civil disobedience campaigns that would have raised the financial cost of governance for the British and thus force them to yield to Arab demands, the Arabs ensured that they had no true voice at the negotiating table (Idinopulos, 108). Critically, this multi-layered British negligence in effective conflict management ultimately, and the ensuing Arab strife pushed Zionists toward a more hardline determination to take the land the Arabs would never give up without a fight. For example, the 1936 Arab strike, the subsequent “explosion” of violence, and the “brutal” British crackdown on Arab sympathizers in response, each discouraged Jewish sympathy for Arab grievances (Gelvin 212). Meanwhile, the period of violence in the 1920s prompted Sephardic Jews who were critical of Arab-Jewish separation to embrace more militant and anti-Arab attitudes in self-defense (NYT, 9). 

In conclusion, both the incompatibility between Zionist and Arab land aspirations and the British failure to provide the Arabs with opportunity to politically organize and dissuade them from violence could be blamed for the conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists. However, the former is not a complete explanation because Zionism was not a monolithic entity; while the version of Zionism that dominated Palestine by 1948 undeniably called for Arab land displacement, the alienating model of an exclusive “Hebrew economy” that refused integrating Arab labor advocated by Ben-Gurion’s proponents was only one specific interpretation of Zionism (LeVine, 109). Instead, many Jews within Palestine envisioned a Zionist future incorporating Arab demands for land. For example, the indigenous, predominantly Sephardic Jews who were versed in Arab culture and language “sought to mediate between Zionist leaders and the Palestinians” by taking jobs as translators and multilingual journalists (NYT, Jacobson, 10). This ideological diversity was also present on an academic level: the Brit Shalom school of Zionism opposed displacing Arabs while Russian-born socialist Jews prioritized inter-ethnic working class solidarity over the Conquest of Labor (Idinopulos, 178-179). More conciliatory versions of Zionism occasionally even manifested in national policy. Zionist leaders throughout the 30’s, for instance, “made efforts to negotiate with Arab leaders [...] to see whether compromise was feasible (NYT, Rabinovich, 10). Each aforementioned party within the Zionist movement pushed for greater Arab integration into the new Jewish economic infrastructure and greater Zionist integration into Arab culture, both of which were conducive to a potential Arab willingness to negotiate. However, the diversity within Zionism that pushed the movement to make peace with the Arabs was met not with a self-interested Arab rationale but by disorganized violence, violence which pushed Zionists toward the movement’s more hardline iteration. Thus, the British suppression that incensed this violence is ultimately the origin of the conflict between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine. This framing of the conflict has important implications on modern discourse on the issue; though many scholars frame the conflict in Palestine as an issue of Zionist encroachment upon Arab land rights out of necessity, this interpretation misses the full picture. Seeing violence as a product of racist British policy suggests that the horrifically violent history of Israel’s establishment was not some tragic, passive coincidence that had to happen for the sake of a Jewish homeland; instead, it was an exercise in byzantine colonial logic that resulted from human racism.