the palestinians

When it comes to global geo-politics across the last hundred years or so, one thing becomes clear.  The majority of the peoples of the world, especially Christians, don’t care about the Palestinians. 

That doesn’t seem to be right.  I expect Palestinians to be among the ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’ (Rev 7.9) on that day and so, on this day, I want to be different.  ‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’, afterall.  And so, over the past six months, I’ve begun a little quest to understand the Palestinians a little more.  I’ve leaned forward and tried to listen to their story as empathetically as I can—with a couple of books to get me started.

The first is Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. 

It is an older book, written by a Jewish historian, focusing on the 30 years when the British effectively ruled Palestine—in what is known as the ‘British Mandate’.  This lasted from the end of the Ottoman Empire until just after the end of World War II (1917-1947).  It seemed quite a fair book, weaving into the history the stories of two acquaintances who became friends, Khalil al-Sakakini (a Christian Arab) and Alter Levine (a Jew)—after the former offered the latter shelter in his home. 

The second is Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017.

It is a newer book, written by a Palestinian historian, focusing on the 100 years in which he identifies six ‘declarations of war’ (the six chapter titles)—only the first of which occurs during the British Mandate.

There is a personal touch here as well.  Khalidi’s family is involved at different points, including at the beginning, when it was his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din, who engaged in correspondence with Theodor Herzl, commonly seen to be the father of Zionism, in what proved to be ‘the first meaningful exchange between a leading Palestinian figure and a founder of the Zionist movement’ (RK, 8).

Ten things I am learning about the Palestinians…

I’ve spent far more time on this post than any of the other 771 posts over my 18 years of blogging!  So forgive me for its length, but there is so much I do not want to lose—and, I’m sure, plenty with which people will want to disagree.  That’s OK.

If you are going to become hot and bothered about me not including the other side of the story—don’t bother :).  It gets plenty of attention, as we’ll see.  Across these hundred years there has been a victim and it is their voice I am trying to hear.  You are welcome to come along…

1.  Leaving a people unnamed is not right

Written in 1917, as Ottoman rule over Palestine comes to an end and the eventual victors in World War I begin to wonder how to divide up the spoils of war, The Balfour Declaration (see below) is something of a starting point for this more recent story.

It looks pretty innocent, doesn’t it?  Just 67 words.

However, with something it says and with something it doesn’t say, it sparked trouble.  The suggestion of a ‘national home’ seems reasonable—but under the watch of the likes of Lloyd George and Churchill, it quickly morphed into talk of a ‘Jewish state’.  A very different proposition.  Furthermore, although they comprised 94% of the population at the time, the Palestinians are not even mentioned in the Declaration—and, worse still, they are defined by what they are not: ‘non-Jewish communities’.

That is no way to treat a people—but it is consistent with a prevailing view at the time that Palestine was ‘a land without a people, for a people without a land’—which served to make its current inhabitants ‘nameless and amorphous’ (RK, 11).

This set the tone for much of the next century.  Again and again, the Palestinians are simply ignored—’airbrushed out of the history’ (RK, 15).  In 1922, the League of Nations covenant, ‘in an extraordinary gift to the Zionist movement, the Mandate not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, it substantially amplified the declaration’s commitments’ (RK, 34).  I suppose it is true that ‘the surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it’ (RK, 34) .

In the decades that followed, the Palestinians remained ‘virtually invisible, hardly covered in the Western media and rarely allowed to represent themselves internationally … subsumed under the rubric of the Arab-Israeli conflict’ (RK, 87-88).  As recently as 2015, one-time Republican presidential candidate, Mike Hukabee, asserted that ‘there’s really no such thing as the Palestinians’ (RK, 12).

Wow.  If you don’t name them I guess it makes it easier to ignore them.  This is what happens.  But put yourself in their shoes.  Living in a land for hundreds and hundreds of years must make it feel like it is your land.  Surely?!  It would for any of the rest of us, wouldn’t it?

2.  The Zionist narrative is powerful, enduring

From what I can understand, Zionists believe that the boundaries of the land occupied by the Jewish people in the Old Testament should be the dimensions of the modern political state of Israel.  ‘God gave it to us and it is still ours’ is the way the story goes.  So ‘only one people, the Jewish people, (have) a legitimate right and sovereignty in the entirety of the land, which was called Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, not Palestine. The Palestinians were, at best, interlopers’ (RK, 192).

‘Interlopers’?  That is a very big call indeed.

While it was Theodor Herzl, in the late 19th century, who championed the Zionist vision, it was Chaim Weizmann who established it.  Talk about shuttle diplomacy.  The guy is amazing.  He was back and forth to London, lobbying and cultivating and persuading, for years—winning the hearts and minds of British politicians.  He won the day and by the time the baton of being the supporting ‘great power’ passed from the British to the Americans, the Zionist narrative was firmly in control of the story.

And, of course, they say the Bible made them do it.  As David Ben-Gurion, later to become Israel’s first prime minister, expressed it in 1936: ‘the Bible was the Jewish people’s Mandate’ (TS, 401).  Zionists, like Weizmann, adorned their aspirations with this ‘biblical coat’ (RK, 9).  Now I can see a supporting thread in (part of) the biblical story that suggests this to be true—but what about the other threads in the coat, not to mention the full coat itself?  The threads about God’s heart for all peoples, all nations—how he blessed the Jewish people in order to make them a blessing to these other peoples?

Furthermore, not only is the Bible more than a Zionist narrative, it seems the Zionist narrative is far more than the Bible.  Listen to how the Jewish historian, Tom Segev, describes it:

The Zionist movement arose in Europe, drew its inspiration from Europe and was part of Europe’s history. It’s nationalism, liberalism and socialism were all products of Europe. The movement’s founding father had from the outset charged it with a cultural mission … (quoting Nordau) ‘It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates River’ (150).

There’s more than the Bible going on here!  From a Palestinian perspective, it is clear what is happening: it is about ‘eliminating the Palestinian reality, demographically, ideationally and politically’ (RK, 127).  So much for the ‘biblical coat’.  It is losing a thread.  

Four years ago, I asked a respected Christian Arab leader how they describe the land about which we are speaking.  “Occupied Palestine” was the response.  Yikes.  That response is one of the reasons why I started this quest.  I had some listening and learning to do.

3.  Shifting demographics and borders provide facts for the story

In the first two decades of the 20th century, as much as 90-95% of the population were Palestinian Arabs.  So, right from the outset, ‘the Zionist dream ran counter to the principles of democracy’ (TS, 119).  Very quickly, the story needed to become about building a Jewish majority in order to ‘create the impression that the national home was grounded in democratic values and justice’ (TS, 226-227).  So, the immigrants flooded in (reminiscent of the strategy in two locations close to my Himalayan upbringing…)

Through the 1920s ‘about 100,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, immigrated to Palestine, doubling the size of the Jewish community’ (TS, 225).  Through the second decade of British rule, 250,000 immigrants arrived.  ‘By the mid-1940s they were 30 per cent of the population—almost half a million’ (TS 378).  Settlements and cities were built, like Tel Aviv—which was ‘entirely Hebrew and European’ (TS, 238).

Once the story reaches the 1940s, something else becomes common alongside: adding Jews, but also subtracting Palestinians.  In 1948, half of the Palestinian population became refugees—and only about 20% remained in the country.  Afterall, right from the days of Herzl himself, ‘”disappearing” the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was a necessary condition of its realisation’ (TS, 405).

I have an Arab Christian friend whose family has lived in Bethlehem for centuries.  He married someone who was not from Israel-Palestine.  They have not been able to get visas to return and live in his homeland.  I have no idea if this is part of ‘disappearing the Arabs’, but it sounds like it—and was one of the anecdotes that drove me to this quest.  How can this rejection possibly be right?

The borders tells a similar story to the demographics.

‘Only about 6% of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948’ (RK, 83).  6%.  Let that figure settle-in for a moment.  However, with the UN Resolution 181 (the point at which the British Mandate ceased), Palestine was divided into a large Jewish state and a smaller Palestinian one,

providing the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land, a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter. The expulsion of enough Arabs to make possible a Jewish majority state necessarily followed (RK, 71-72).

… or, putting it more bluntly, ‘the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ (RK, 8) followed.  I know maps like this one, abundant on the internet, wind people up—but, from a Palestinian perspective (which is my concern), this is what has happened over 100 years.

As we say in New Zealand, ‘it is not a good look’.

As I read, one of the sadnesses I felt was that in 1917, at the start of the ‘hundred years’ war on Palestine’, these people were just emerging from 400 years of Ottoman rule.  Gee, that is a long time!  Imagine the hesitant, expectant anticipation of something new, something better—maybe, just maybe.  Then, within a few months, they discover ‘a radically new reality: they were to be ruled by Britain, and their country had been promised to others as a ‘national home” (RK, 28).

4.  Standing back from it all, it does look like colonialism

Today, the c-word is such a dirty word—but its dirtiness doesn’t seem to stick to this story.  And yet it is the word with which Khalidi frames the story, near the beginning:

… our concern here is its colonial nature, as this aspect has been as underappreciated as it is central, even though those qualities typical of other colonial campaigns are everywhere in evidence in the modern history of Palestine (9) … (it is) the implantation of a colonial settler society within an existing population (12) … [my purpose is to] highlight the colonial nature of the hundred years’ war on Palestine, and also the indispensable role of external powers in waging it (14).

And then near the end:

Establishing the colonial nature of the conflict has proven exceedingly hard given the biblical dimension of Zionism, which casts the new arrivals as indigenous and as historic proprietors of the land they colonized … Challenging this epic myth is especially difficult in the United States, which is steeped in an evangelical Protestantism that makes it particularly susceptible to such an evocative Bible-based appeal and which also prides itself on its colonial past (241).

It seems incredible that at the dawn of the postcolonial era, marked by India’s independence in 1947, the Palestinian experience of a colonial midnight was still to get much darker—and the dawn has never arrived.  Britain, and then the USA, have kept ‘trying to do the impossible: impose a colonial reality on Palestine in a postcolonial age’ (RK, 238).  It is just out-of-step with the wider world.  Meanwhile the Palestinians are caught in what Khalidi calls ‘a triple bind’:

After 1917 … they not only had to contend with the colonial power in the metropole, in this case London, but also with a singular colonial-settler movement that, while beholden to Britain, was independent of it, had its own national mission, a seductive biblical justification, and an established international base and financing … Making things worse was that Britian did not rule Palestine outright; it did so as a mandatory power of the League of Nations. It was therefore bound not just by the Balfour Declaration but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine … (and through it all, Palestine is left) with no serious allies (RK, 52, 53).

Triple bind, indeed. Britain. The Jewish people. The international community … and no allies.

The colonialism closest to home for me is our New Zealand story, with the unjust treatment of the indigenous Māori people.  The sad continuities are there, but consider the discontinuities.  This was a sobering exercise, highlighting the plight of the Palestinians for me.  With Māori, at least there is a Treaty and, while it has been dishonoured, it remains a founding document to which we can return.  Not so for the Palestinians.  With Māori, as a way to try and correct injustices, there is this wave upon wave of ‘affirmative action’ policies taking place.  Not so for the Palestinians.  With Māori, there are issues around land, stolen and seized, but Māori remain in the country making their case through the successful work, over many decades, by a Tribunal.  Not so for the Palestinians.  With Māori, co-governance is actually being debated in the public world.  Imagine it.  Not so for the Palestinians.  Or, extract two statements from those paragraphs. ‘The implantation of a colonial settler society within an existing population’?  True for Māori and Palestinian.  ‘The new arrivals (cast) as indigenous and as historic proprietors of the land they colonized’?  Not so for Māori.

5.  The resistance, increasingly ugly, has a context

There is an assumption in the air we breathe: Palestinian equals terrorist.  And sure, you can make a case for Hezbollah and Hamas being terrorist organisations.  I am not going to endorse such activity—but, gee whiz, I’d love to understand it a bit better.  What is it that we learnt in Bible Exegesis class?  ‘A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext’.  I’m trying to project that principle onto this story to help me with this understanding.

When you consider the features we’ve covered so far—namelessness, demography, colonialism—the Arab Rebellion in the 1930s seems to have a reasonable cause, doesn’t it?  It parallels the resistance going on in the wider region, except that ‘all the other mandated territories in the Middle East ultimately won independence’ (RK, 37)—except Palestine.  And so, understandably, the resistance continues.

In the months leading into the Brexit from Palestine—and before the UN decision in 1948 to create two states—there began a period of ‘seismic upheaval’ known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe.  ‘Like a slow seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months’ (RK, 72).  It is a crucial moment in the story, so lets’ linger with Palestinian Khalidi as he assesses its impact:

The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine and the Middle East. It transformed most of Palestine from what it had been for well over a millennium—a majority Arab country‚ into a new state that had a substantial Jewish majority. The transformation was the result of two processes: the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Arab-inhabited areas of the country seized during the war; and the theft of Palestinian land and property left behind by the refugees as well as much of that owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel. There would have been no other way to achieve a Jewish majority, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its inception. Nor would it have been possible to dominate the country without the seizures of land. In a third major and lasting impact of the Nakba, the victims, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes, served to further destabilize Syria, Lebanon and Jordan—poor, weak, recently independent countries—and the region for years thereafter. (75-76)

As might be expected, ‘the collective trauma of the Nakba had perversely cemented and reinforced their identity’ (RK, 112).  There is even a Nakba Day in the calendar (15 May) and, for the first time, just last month, the UN memorialised the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (the very day our latest grand-daughter was born!).

‘After 1948, it appeared as if the Palestinians had largely disappeared, both physically and as an idea … with almost no voice, no central address and no champions’ (RK, 112).  Resistance groups were being formed—like the PLO and Fatah—but from what I can understand, attention shifted more to what was happening between Israel and its neighbouring Arab states—culminating in the Six Day War in 1967, twenty years later.   

At this time the resistance is re-energized—’a central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians (RK, 109).  Much of it went off-shore after the Lebanon War in 1982 (with the PLO being sent to Tunisia).  The PLO seemed to lose touch and lose the confidence of those Palestinians back home—leaving a leadership vacuum.  Into that space stepped the next generation of Palestinians, ‘more fearless than their elders’ (RK, 171)—and the rise of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

In 1987, the resistance moves ‘back inside Palestine’ (RK, 165)—with the start of the Intifada, or ‘uprising’—’a spontaneous, bottom-up campaign of resistance born of an accumulation of frustration and initially with no connection to the formal political leadership … flexible and innovative, developing a coordinated leadership while remaining locally driven and controlled’ (RK, 173).

The resistance continued—and changed.

While the 1st Intifada brought greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause—including ‘the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917’ (RK, 174)—this was not the case with the 2nd Intifada, commencing around 2000.  The opposite is true.  It has become more militant, more murderous, more Islamic, more savage, with more deaths, more suicide bombings, more horrific images—and with an Israeli response that is ‘massive, disproportionate’ (RK, 91).  For example, Gaza has become ‘an open air prison’ (RK, 221).  Here is Khalidi reflecting on an incident in Gaza in 2014: 

The coverage succeeded in obscuring the extreme disproportionality of this one-sided war: one of the most powerful armies on the planet used its full might against a besieged area of one hundred and forty square miles, which is among the world’s most heavily populated enclaves and whose people had no way to escape the rain of fire and steel (223).

Through it all, from a Palestinian perspective, there has been ‘the undiminished effectiveness of Israel’s ceaseless proselytizing’ (RK, 228).  I don’t like or use the word ‘segue’, but I guess that is what is happening here…

6.  The media is relentless in its advocacy for Israel

The power of the media is easily misunderstood.  It often lies less in the perspective from which it tells a story and more in the decision about which stories to tell in the first place—and which ones to leave silent.  This has been the Palestinian predicament.  Silence.  Going back to the British Mandate, just the first of Khalidi’s six declarations of war, when comparisons with Ireland and India were often being made, this is how Segev describes the situation: ‘If India was the jewel in the empire’s crown, Palestine was hardly more than an anemone in the king’s buttonhole’ (TS, 495).

In the years after 1967, the media has cultivated this sense that Israel was ‘imperiled by annihilation … a tiny, vulnerable country facing constant, existential peril and it continues to do so’ (RK, 97).  For Palestinians, this is a ‘myth’.  “Constant, existential peril?  Look again”.  It was during these years that Palestine/Palestinians were connected ‘indelibly, if they were mentioned at all, with terrorism and hatred, rather than a forgotten but just cause’ (RK, 117).

The pattern in the media, continuing until this day, was being established—a focus on Palestinian atrocities, with Israel’s barely mentioned.  At no time was this more in evidence than in the aftermath, arguably, of the worst incident in the hundred years: the slaughter of men and ‘unarmed old people, women and children, not supposed terrorists’ (RK, 161), as was the claim, in the Sabra & Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, in 1982.  Watch it on YouTube.  It is horrific.  It seems widely acknowledged—ie you don’t need to be leaning forward to listen to a Palestinian perspective—that the invading Israeli army facilitated the massacre, with the supportive American leadership aware of what was going on (having made an agreement to guarantee safety!)

At no other time did the Israelis need the media to deliver than this time—and they did.  Initially, no amount of ‘sophisticated propaganda’ could erase the ‘indelible images’.  For a season the Palestinians were not synonymous with terrorism.  But not for long— eventually, Israel’s ‘shrewd public relations efforts had succeeded in re-anesthetizing much of US public opinion’ (RK, 169).

7.  The passivity of Arab states is sad

I didn’t expect this one.  Here is how Sakakini, one of Segev’s key characters, expresses it during the early days of the Nakba—”What breaks our hearts is that the Arab countries see and hear and do nothing” (TS, 508).  In fact at one point, one among them, Transjordan’s King Abdullah, is actually negotiating with the Zionists behind the scenes, ensuring a large piece of the (land) pie for himself…

Across in Khalidi’s story similar things are expressed.  In the years after the Nakba, Palestinians ‘expressed deep disgust over the performance of Arab states and the incapacity of their armies to preserve more than 22% of Arab Palestine. This was combined with anger at Arab rulers for their disunity, and even worse, the complicity of some with Israel and the great powers’ (RK, 81).  And, let’s remember, it wasn’t so easy for these Arab leaders either…

However much Arab leaders may have wished to demonstrate their postwar independence, the poor, backward states they led were entangled in a thick web of dependency, based on unequal treaties, continued foreign occupation, and external control of their natural resources … (with leaders) chosen by their European overlord for their pliability (RK, 69).

This passivity comes into the story a few times, as Palestine becomes a perennial ‘political football’. ‘Arab leaders often raised the question of Palestine because of popular pressure but refrained from actually doing anything about it, out of fear of Israel’s might and the disapproval of the great powers’ (RK, 87).  Reflecting on his ‘fourth declaration of war’ (Lebanon, 1982), Khalidi holds nothing back: ‘one of the shabbiest and most shameful subsidiary aspects of the war was the capitulation of the leading Arab regimes to American pressure (RK, 150).

8. Those negotiating tables provide a legacy of failure

When the League of Nations divided-up the Ottoman lollies, the Jewish people were seen to be the only ones to have any connection with the land.  Looking back, that is staggering.  Later, in 1947, the Atlee government did its Brexit and ‘dumped the problem of Palestine into the lap of the new United Nations’ (RK, 71), who formed a Special Commission on Palestine.  Later still, trying to facilitate some peace after the 1967 war, the Security Council Resolution 242 (SC, 242) focused solely on the Arab states and Israel, ghosting ‘the displaced and occupied Palestinians’.  No voice.  No visibility.

This is a key juncture in the story.  From a Palestinian perspective, an error is made here which impacts all that happens in the years afterwards.  Understanding this matter was a key moment in my quest.  Let’s linger with Khalidi, at length:

Thanks in large part to SC 242, a whole new layer of forgetting, of erasure and myth-making, was added to the induced amnesia that obscured the colonial origins of the conflict between Palestinians and the Zionist settlers. The resolution’s exclusive focus on the results of the 1967 war made it possible to ignore the fact that none of the underlying issues resulting from the 1948 war had been resolved in the intervening nineteen years. Along with the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees, the refusal to allow them to return, the theft of their property, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination, these included the legal status of Jerusalem and Israel’s expansion beyond the 1947 partition frontiers. As for the core problems arising from the original usurpation of Palestine, SC 242 did not even refer to them, much less offer any solutions. Yet the resolution henceforth became the benchmark for resolving the entire conflict, nominally accepted by all parties, even as it passed over the basic aspects of the conflict in silence. In view of the resolution’s perverse genesis, it is not surprising that over fifty years after it was adopted. UNSC 242 remains unimplemented and the essence of the struggle over Palestine remains unaddressed (107).

Staggering, isn’t it?

The victim has no voice, or visibility—while the history is given a new starting point…

Then, coming into the parts of the story I can remember, having always thought positively about them—but now discovering, from a Palestinian perspective, that they were disastrous.

Camp David in 1979?  The Palestinians were ‘frozen out’ of the conversation.  (Menachem) ‘Begin was allowed to dictate the terms where Palestine was concerned’—in fact, the eventual peace treaty ‘signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights’ (RK, 136).  From Camp David onwards negotiations have been marked by this ‘devious and infinitely flexible interim stage and deferral of Palestinian statehood’ (RK, 205).

Madrid in 1991?  Again I am staggered by the lack of a kinda natural justice in this story.  As late as 1991, there is still ‘no independent Palestinian representation at a conference that aimed to determine the fate of Palestine’ (RK, 186—emphasis very much mine!).  How can that be right?  To these NZ ears, where ‘fairness’ drives us as much as ‘freedom’ drives Americans (ah, that astonishing book by David Fischer comes to mind, my copy of which I located just yesterday in a box under my mother’s flat, after a decade of grief-stricken separation)—it just seems unfathomable (… as it should for people into freedom, I might add).  Around this negotiating table…

Every item of essence—Palestinian self-determination, sovereignty, the return of refugees, an end of occupation and colonization, the disposition of Jerusalem, the future of the Jewish settlements, and control of land and water rights—was disallowed (RK, 186)

The very issues at the heart of the conflict are off the agenda.  It seems to break all the rules of Peacemaking 101, doesn’t it—or, am I missing something?

Oslo in 1993?  Goodness me, in the middle of Langham’s International Council meetings in London one year, we took the night off to go to the theatre and see this play.  It seemed so good at the time, so full of hope and possibility…

But, as the great Edward Said himself expressed it, Oslo was ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles’ (in RK, 200).  Israel did a secret deal with the PLO and the world went “Wow, at last”.  However, the Palestinian envoys at Oslo were ‘simply out of their league … (their performance) was inept … falling into trap after trap’ (RK, 199, 200).  None of them had even lived in Palestine for years.  They had lost touch with the people.  Echoing Said, Khalidi sees Oslo as a ‘resounding, historic mistake’ (199).

…this exchange was neither symmetrical not reciprocal. Israel had not recognized a Palestinian state or even made a comitment to allow the creation of one.  This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement [ie the PLO] had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it.  This was a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people (RK, 198-199).

As was the case with me, you may need to read that paragraph twice :).

Part of the Oslo agreement enabled the PLO to return to Gaza and then be given special treatment (like ‘sailing through the checkpoints with VIP passes’, 203).  However ‘the PLO had entered the lion’s mouth, and it did not take long for the jaws to snap shut’ (RK, 204)—with the PLO becoming, effectively ‘a subcontractor for the occupation’ (RK, 205).  So the ‘myth of Oslo beneficence’ (RK, 209) is not exactly what I took away from my rare night at the theatre in London.

This is another critical juncture in the story, as so much of global opinion seems to assume Oslo ‘beneficence’—so let’s lean forward and listen to a paragraph of pain from Khalidi.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This depiction masks the uequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israeli settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change the reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield. Facing the colossus that is the Israeli state is a colonized people denied equal rights and the ability to exercise their right of national self-determination, a continuous condition since the idea of self-determination took hold globally after World War I (204-205).

Immediately, my mind races to the lament of a Palestinian friend about how Israel was filling their own swimming pools with water, while turning off the tap for the Palestinians over the wall—but I digress (only a little!).  It has been horrible.  That cannot be denied.  ‘Economic life underwent a slow strangulation … permission to travel and move goods (got lost) in a labyrinthine system of permits, checkpoints, walls, and fences was created’ (RK, 207).  Gaza was ‘severed’ from West Bank, while the West Bank was ‘fragmented’—and severed from Jerusalem.  But, ahh, ‘the persistent, hazy glow of Oslo had blinded most observers’ (RK, 209).

Is it any wonder that this helplessness and hopelessness, a legacy of failed negotiations, has led to the rise of extremist groups who feel that it is only ‘the use of force (that can) lead to the liberation of Palestine’ (RK, 209)?

But there is something else to wonder about…

9.  It is hard to see a role for the USA in the peacemaking process going forward 

A few sentences after that paragraph of pain, Khalidi reflects on the years since Camp David… 

From Camp David back in 1978 on, the architecture of the negotiations, with is devious and infinitely flexible interim stage and deferral of Palestinian statehood, was not enforced primarily by Israel, even if the framework was dreamed up by Begin … It was the United States that provided the muscle behind the insistence that for the Palestinians this was the only possible negotiating path, leading to only one possible outcome. The United States was not just an accessory: it was Israel’s partner (RK, 206).

Wow.  ‘Israel’s partner’?  Similar observations sprinkle their way through the narrative.

The British and then the Americans clearly take sides in this conflict.  That is an unalterable fact.  At one point, an American negotiator lets it slip (‘regretfully’) that they considered themselves ‘Israel’s lawyer’ (RK, 189)—or, their ‘indispensable sponsor’ (RK, 205).  Furthermore, the Americans didn’t tend to ‘make good’ on ‘commitments, failing to prevent an unending series of unilateral Israeli actions’ (RK, 187).  In the Trump years the US becomes ‘the mouthpiece of the most extreme government in Israel’s history’ (RK, 250).  And lest you start to think otherwise, Obama wasn’t a lot better!  ‘In the end he changed nothing in Palestine’ (RK, 235)—and he was in the White House ‘during all three of Israel’s assaults on Gaza’ (RK, 232).  No wonder Khalidi concludes that ‘the Palestinians ought to treat the United States as an extension of Israel’ (RK, 253).

So what do we make of this perspective?  Well, if you were to put it all into a conflict in a family or  workplace setting, how on earth can the USA be an agent of reconciliation, a broker of peace, when they are so clearly on one side of the conflict?  It is just not possible—even before we consider what Khalidi thinks.

The United States is not and cannot be a mediator, a broker, or a neutral party … (there is a need) to challenge the half-century-long US monopoly on peacemaking, a monopoly that has been crucial in preventing peace in Palestine’ (251, 253). 

10.  There is an injustice still to be addressed

The power of the gospel in the hands of true agents of reconciliation can still impact this context—and I’m sure it is, in lots of localised initiatives.  May God’s gracious hand rest upon you in the power of the Spirit and for the sake of Jesus—and for all the peoples in the region!

Khalidi’s final chapter raises a couple of issues that will be on the minds of such ‘agents of reconciliation’ as well: inequality and nationalism.  He writes about the need to ‘wean Israelis from their attachment to inequality’ (RK, 245):

uprooting the systemic inequality inherent in Zionism is crucial to creating a better future for both peoples, Palestinians and Israelis. Any formula advanced as a resolution of the conflict will necessarily and inevitably fail if it is not squarely based on the principle of equality. Absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies. This is a high sounding recommendation, but nothing else will address the core of the problem. nor will it be sustainable and lasting (244-245).

And the Palestinians have some ‘weaning’ to be done as well—’from the pernicious delusion … that Jewish Israelis are not a ‘real’ people and that they do not have national rights. While it is true that Zionism has transmuted the Jewish religion and the historic peoplehood of the Jews into something quite different—a modern nationalism—this does not erase the fact that Israeli Jews consider themselves a people with a sense of national belonging in Palestine’ (245).

When all is said and done (hang on, there is still so much to be said and done!), the Palestinians are to be admired for their ‘unusual patience, perseverance and steadfastness’ (RK, 254). Khalidi is discerning a shift in public opinion, beginning around 2016.  Maybe things can be different with new emerging generations and new emerging global powers?  And maybe the simple act with which Segev’s book was propelled forward, the story of a Palestinian offering hospitality to a Jew, can be a bigger part of the future—and be reciprocated a zillion times.

nice chatting — well, not really, as it is all too distressing!

Paul

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About Me

paul06.16

the art of unpacking

After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.

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6 Comments

  1. Anne Dorothy Adlam on October 20, 2023 at 3:33 pm

    Wow Paul, that is so much to think and pray about. I am very grateful to have these comments and notes to go back to time and time again. You write with so much clarity, wisdom and great words! It is such an awful and very sad state of affairs,
    I cannot bear to see the images of what is happening over in Israel/Gaza at the moment. I went there in 1988 on a pilgrimage, which was the most amazing time, but even then there was so much unrest, we could hear the sounds of war all day and night, it broke my heart, that God’s promised land was in so much strife. The world is in so much strife at the present time, I still hold onto the hope that God has it all under control and in the palm of His hand, which may be a very simplistic outlook!

    Thank you very much for sharing. Much food for thought! I have given you my personal email for your blog. God bless you and Barby.

    • Paul Windsor on October 22, 2023 at 6:20 am

      Thanks, Anne, for engaging with this post. It is the longest one I’ve ever written, so you did very well.

      And it was written back in June, before this most recent outbreak of trouble and tragedy. The issues are complex—and yet, once something of this historical story is understood, it is surprising how few Western Christians express any solidarity with the Palestinians. I am one who does.

      Much love to you both

      Paul

  2. Heather Johnson on October 25, 2023 at 8:00 am

    Thank you Paul for such a well researched and summarised writing on the history and current conflict in Israel/Palestine. I don’t profess to fully understand it but it is obvious that Palestine has been completely ignored and pushed to one side. We were in Israel in 2016 and saw first hand the segregation. To visit Bethlehem, which we hadn’t realised is in Palestine, we had to enter through security in the walled sector. We spent time with Palestinian Christians. Even they need a permit to leave Palestine. We were astonished to discover the Palestinians have no rights in Israel. They can’t vote. Tension is understandably rife. I pray God has a solution because man has so far failed.

    • Paul Windsor on October 27, 2023 at 5:11 am

      Hi Heather — “completely ignored and pushed aside” really does capture it, doesn’t it?

      Thanks for engaging with my longest ever post 🙂

      Solidarity with our sisters and brothers in troubled spots around the world is a big part of being a disciple of Jesus today because we have such easy access to so much information. I know that is the way you and Mike live … and Palestinians in the family of God need us to be there with them.

      blessings

  3. Ian Payne on October 31, 2023 at 5:16 pm

    Hello Paul,
    Thank you for providing a well-researched revelation on history that I knew very little about. Leon Uris’s Exodus, which I read 20 or 30 years ago, I can now see, cast a spell that almost totally obscures the perspective of the Palestinians. It makes the present conflict more understandable and damnable. May God help us all. Thanks heaps.

    • Paul Windsor on November 1, 2023 at 2:49 am

      Thanks, Ian

      It is interesting that you mention Leon Uris’s Exodus. It is referenced—I think in both of these books, although I don’t have them with me at the moment—as having a huge influence on popular opinion. I suspect, “casting a spell”, as you say, is how these people would express it as well. And it is hard to unpick the impact of a spell…

      best wishes

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