When Israel unleashes its US-supplied F-16s against the Palestinians, as it did on May 19, and the Palestinians respond by sending suicide bombers against the Israelis, as they did on June 1; and when Zionism decides, openly and brazenly, to go back to its roots of land colonization, and Palestinians decide to assault those who colonize that land, wherever they may be, we know there has been a profoundly dramatic shift back to the old ways that had characterized the conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism.
Forget, in other words, the Oslo Accords. The Wye River Agreements, the Clinton Proposals, and the Mitchell Report. The struggle for Palestine has gone full circle — back to its origins in the 1930s when the Palestinians fought against one foreign master, without compromise; today they fight against another, with the same intent.
Tom Segeve, the prominent Israeli journalist, New Historian, and author of two classic works on the modern history of Palestine, writes: “The laws and regulations under which the authorities conducted their counter-terrorism operations placed responsibility for crimes on the entire Palestinian community — whole villages, neighborhoods, sometimes cities. The guiding principle was that everyone was to be punished.”
No, Segeve is not here talking about the tactics of Israeli occupation authorities in the West Bank and Gaza, rather he is describing, in his new book, “One Palestine, Complete”, those of British occupation forces in Palestine in the 1930s.
Sometime after the beginning of the Palestinian intifada of 1936-1939, the British dispatched an additional 25,000 soldiers to Palestine to bolster their military presence there and crush the Palestinian revolt. (Reportedly, no military force of this size had left Britain’s shores since World War I). And the new British high commissioner in the country, Harold MacMichael, a cynical bureaucrat and arrogant racist in the tradition of his imperial time, began a campaign of massive arrests of Palestinians, and operating “military courts” in the Galilee.
By 1938, the number of detainees rose to over nine thousand, ten times the figure of two years before his arrival. Thousands were held in administrative detention, without trial, in extremely overcrowded camps with inadequate sanitation. Some of the detainees were elderly men in their 80s and boys as young as 14. Incarcerated in open-air holding pens for days on end, under the fierce sun, without food or water, many expired.
From the beginning of the intifada in 1936 till the end of it in 1939, more than one hundred Palestinians were sentenced to death, an average of one a week, and more than thirty were executed, about one a month.
Still the intifada went on.
Then in June 1938, the British hanged three popular Palestinian patriots in Acre, the twin city of Haifa. If Harold MacMichael thought this was going to “teach the Arabs a lesson,” as he claimed, he was mistaken.
The three condemned men — Muhammad Jamjum, Fouad Hijazi and Attalah Al-Zir — were well known to their community, and their deaths triggered massive demonstrations, riots, and more killings of British soldiers and Jewish settlers all over Palestine. Songs were written about them, memorials were held for them, sheiks in mosque pulpits blessed their names, poets extolled their dedication to the cause, and in later years parents called their newborn babies after them.
All that took place exactly 63 years ago this month. And nothing has changed. The Palestinians continue to soldier on.
Every national struggle, even after it is deflected from its preordained course, in the end goes back to its roots. Every national struggle, in other words, has its own dynamic. Every people have their own inward preoccupations. And no memory declines in the collective consciousness of a community, its energies, as it were, dispersed to the wind. The echoes by which a society seeks to determine the reach, the logic, of its own voice comes from the past. Images from a people’s past are imprinted, almost in the manner of generic information, on their sensibility, even where these people are not “intellectually” in touch with their history’s narrative.
For almost fifty years, the British tried to subdue the Palestinians (just as they had tried for five hundred years to subdue the Irish), but it did not work. The subsequent fifty years saw a community of settler-colonial riff-raff from Europe and elsewhere, seeking the same goal, but it did not work either. Nor does it appear that it ever will.
Israel, a wounded beast, can have its way in Palestine only if it can induce total passivity on the part of the Palestinians. But as the history of these people will attest, that is not likely.
There will always be suicide bombers and stone-throwing children — and other kinds of militants in between — ready to confront the occupiers. Let’s face it, it was not Che Guevara, but Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States (1801-1809), who said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
And, oh yes, Harold MacMichael, the British high commissioner, soon after he realized that his brutally punitive measurers against Palestinians had failed, was quoted as saying: “I shall be lucky if I leave this country with one hair that is not white on my head.”
There is no record of what color hair he had when he left Palestine, but he, along with his compatriots, finally had to leave, with their tail between their legs.
So will, in time, these settler colonists who call themselves Israelis. It is writ large in our Islamic tradition: For every oppressor, a day will come.
