In a year when Israel has been celebrating its sixtieth birthday, it is worth remembering that 2008 is also the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Antonius’ impassioned polemic, “The Arab Awakening” that warned that no good would come from the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Published at the close of 1938, The Arab Awakening is a reminder that the conflict between Arab and Jew over Palestine was raging long before World War II. The horrors visited upon the Jews by Hitler’s Reich have diverted attention from the degree to which Jewish immigration into Palestine was already a source of bitter Arab resentment in the 1920s and 30s when Palestine was ruled by the “British Mandate”. Antonius was the first writer to make the case that the displacement of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants by Jewish settlers was both a monstrous injustice in itself and a recipe for endless bloodshed; he was the first, too, to indict Europe for failing to take responsibility for the fate of its Jews and making innocent Arabs bear the brunt of a Jewish refugee crisis that arose on European soil.
Yest, this heroic champion of the Palestinians has been ill served by posterity. Snubbed in his own lifetime, Antonius has gone on being snubbed in his death; in many ways, he was a tragic figure whose life mirrored the broader tragedy of the Palestinian people. That his critique of Zionism, the project to appropriate the whole of Palestine on behalf of world Jewry, is not more familiar, testifies to how far, in the West, discussion of the Middle East conflict has been dominated from the outset by the Zionist point of view. Born in Lebanon in 1891 into a prosperous Greek Orthodox Christian family, Antonius was educated at Alexandria’s Victoria College, an institution modeled on the British public school system that his celebrated successor as an advocate of the Palestinian cause, Edward Said, was to attend a generation later. Subsequently, he attended King’s College, Cambridge, emerging as an Arab version of that vaunted figure, the British gentleman, and imbued with the gentlemanly belief that public service and “fair play” were the very essence of what Britain stood for. In the 1920s, Antonius served as deputy director of the Palestine education service, but his mission in life became to insist that Britain honor its pledges to the Arabs for helping to defeat Turkey in World War I. It was because of his determination to hold the British to account over the very values for which they purported to uphold that he fell foul of the British establishment.
To no British grandee can Antonius have endeared himself less than to the foreign secretary and one-time prime minister, Arthur Balfour, whose eponymous “Declaration” of 1917 had promised Jews a homeland in Palestine while exhibiting no more than cursory concern for the fate of Palestine’s indigenous Arab inhabitants. When, in 1925, the 70- year-old British statesman visited Palestine, Antonius served as his escort and must have been hard-pressed to conceal his private view that the supercilious Balfour was “abysmally ignorant” about the Arab world. He suspected that, for Balfour, Palestine was a mere “intellectual diversion” and that the aloof aristocrat would never have espoused the Zionist cause in the first place but for the flattery of a “plausible and astute Jew” — namely the Russian chemist and pioneering Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, who had settled in Britain and tirelessly propagandized the British ruling elite. The story was told that when Balfour went to Jerusalem, he asked: “Who are these people in long cloaks and white head dresses?” Informed that they were Arabs, he exclaimed: “But if they are Arabs, what are they doing in this country?”
“The Arab Awakening” sought to demonstrate how British public opinion had been conditioned to view Palestine exclusively from a Zionist perspective. The book documented how, through the offices of the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, the Arab leader, Sharif Hussein, had received in writing a general promise from Britain in relation to the independence of Palestine and a more specific promise guaranteeing the political and economic freedom of its Arab inhabitants. Antonius’ charge was that the evidence of Britain’s pledges had been deliberately withheld, thus ensuring that the Palestine issue had been debated by the British Parliament in the “twilight of half-truth”.
Antonius feared that wholesale Zionist colonization of Palestine was guaranteed to provoke ever worse outbreaks of violence on the part of what had been an essentially hospitable Arab farming community. When — against the background of the Arab Revolt of 1936 — the British government launched the Peel Commission to look into the roots of the deepening Palestinian crisis, he stressed the importance of addressing the Palestinians’ mounting sense of injustice before it was too late. Yet the commission’s recommendations seemed calculated only to confirm Arab fears that what the Zionists were being offered amounted not just to a homeland but a sovereign state — far more than could be justified on even the most generous interpretation of the Balfour Declaration.
Following the publication of the Peel Commission’s report, Arab violence broke out anew. However, Antonius was heartened to learn that a major conference was to be held in London at the beginning of 1939, involving British Mandate officials, Zionists and representatives of the Arab world. The favorable reception of his book in London encouraged him to believe that his proselytizing had not been in vain and he traveled to the British capital conference hopeful of being able to press home his case for the restriction of Jewish immigration and the establishment of an independent Arab Palestine. Far from indifferent to the evidence of the systematic persecution that the Jews were suffering at the hands of the Nazi Germany, Antonius nevertheless failed to see how the “relief of Jewish distress” could be accomplished at the “cost of inflicting a corresponding distress” on blameless Palestinian peasants.
Antonius had strained every fiber of his being in his pursuit of justice on behalf of the Palestinian people. But the advent of World War II and its unspeakable consequences for the Jews changed everything. His own end was bitter; marginalized and impoverished, he died in Jerusalem in 1941. It was just as well, perhaps, that he did not live to witness the creation of the Jewish state he had campaigned so hard to prevent. Forty years were to pass before a comparably articulate advocate of the Palestinian cause emerged in the person of Edward Said, and by that stage George Antonius’s forebodings had been all too fully realized.
