One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I read Tom Segev's book on Mandatory Palestine in the original Hebrew, so I cannot tell you how well it translates to English or to what extent the translation reflects the source. But Segev's book is a lively, if not coherent enough, description of Israel's rise and the British role in it.

Segev's book is well written and deeply humane, reflecting the lives and times of ordinary (and extraordinary) people in Palestine and Britain. That said, the book has considerable weaknesses: It does not properly introduce to us the main protagonists, whether Ben Gurion, The Mufti Al Husseini, Balfour, or any other major personality. The focus is squarely on the Jews and British; the account of the Arabs is largely unsatisfactory; and while I can't quite prove it, I feel that Segev pushes his overarching thesis a little further than the evidence actually goes.

I am unconvinced, for example, that the main or only causes for the British pro-Zionist stand, particularly the Balfour Declaration, has been the British delusions of Jewish world-dominating power and the personal charisma of Chaim Weismann. Standard accounts (such as David Fromkin's masterpiece A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East) emphasize the role of Zionism as a bulwark against French Middle Eastern ambitions, but for Segev this was a minor concern at most.

As Segev tells it, the story of Palestine under the British mandate is the story of one National movement, supported by the British Overlords, overwhelming its rival for the land. But Segev does not meditate on the emergence of a separate Palestinian nationhood - when did it really, finally appear? The question of when a separate Palestinian nationhood emerged is significant in at least two ways:

First, before a Palestinian nation existed, it was unlikely that Palestinians could offer serious resistance to Israeli Jews. Thus if Palestinian nationhood was only consolidated in the late 1920s or early 1930s, there were no prospects for One Palestine, complete and dominated by Arabs. To be effective, Palestinian resistance had to be massive and early. By the mid 1930s, the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine was a foregone conclusion. The only questions were its boundaries and the amount of bloodshed it would take to establish it.

Second, the question is relevant for assessing to what extent immigrating Jews realized that the dream of a Jewish State meant the inevitable destruction of a Palestinian nation. The fact that, contrary to Zionist Propaganda, Zionism did not involve sending a "People without a country to a country without people" was deeply troubling to the emergent Jewish Nation. It considered itself a European state committed to European values of human rights and democracy, and yet it fostered a program that led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

No wonder Jews tended to brush the question aside! Pretending that there was no Palestinian Nation allowed them to focus on the economic benefits the Arabs in Palestine would get from the Zionist program, and to patronizingly see themselves as bringing superior European culture to the natives.

Segev's account convinced me that to the extent that Jews believed that, they did so recklessly, by willingly blinding themselves to reality. Haim Weizmann "determined" that there was no Palestinian nation by fiat (p. 95). He made no attempt to actually study the question.

Ben Gurion had been more far sighted, honest, and cruel: "everyone sees a difficulty in the question of the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs" he said "Yet not everyone realizes that it has no solution. No solution! There is an Abyss and nothing can bridge it. The conflict between the Interests of the Jews and Arabs in Israel cannot be solved by Sophism... there is a national question: We want the land for ourselves as a people, and the Arabs want it for themselves" (p.100).

It seems that the Jews knew, or should have known, what the consequences of their project were. And yet, is it fair to fully condemn them?

First, Jews were not alone in failing to completely realize the inevitability of the Conflict. Most of the world's statesman did, including David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. From their perspective, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire opened endless new opportunities in the Middle East. That there would be a piece of it for the Jews may not have seemed too outlandish; Even Hashemite King Feisal had agreed.

Second, there is the Holocaust. The establishment of a Jewish Settlement in Palestine undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands of innocent people from Nazi extermination.

We've covered the British and the Jews. But what about the Arabs? Why did they not seek accommodation with the Jews? The Palestinians were facing a better organized, better led, better armed national movement. If Segev is right, they had to face the British, biased, pro-Israeli referees. How did they fail to realize the inevitable consequences of their refusal to compromise? A Palestinian acceptance of the Peel Commission report and the partition of Palestine in 1937 would have given the Palestinian a homeland in most of Palestine. The rejection of the partition plan led to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and to the Palestinian `Nakba' - the disaster, namely the flood of some 750,000 refugees from mandatory Palestine (p. 412). Who was responsible for the failure of leadership? Segev, the British, and Arabs themselves frequently compared the situation in Palestine with the situation in Ireland. But the Irish question ended in compromise. Where was the Palestinian Michael Collins?

Segev's book is silent about this question. His masterly (if incomplete) account of the early years of the mandate loses steam at the outbreak of the Second World War. The interpretive approach clearly breaks down - by 1940, it was by no means clear that the British were pro-Zionists in any real sense. New passions have steered, new questions raised: and for all its strengths, Segev's book doesn't answer them.

Although Segev does not touch on the recent turbulence in the Mid-East, it all seems relevant. We've become accustomed to one view of Israel's history, and he shows us a new perspective. Most people believe that Israel would not have gained statehood without the Holocaust, but Segev points out that a move toward this was well on its way well before this, and that the Holocaust was actually a setback, depriving Israel of the settlers it needed to establish itself. He also has great, gossipy stories so that it's a surprisingly fast read, despite the heft of the book.

`One Palestine, Complete' is a brilliant piece of history and a very depressing book. Author Tom Segev is a columnist for Ha'aretz and a resident of Jerusalem, intimately acquainted with his topic. Segev effectively combines anecdote, a gift for striking quotes, excellent research and a broad historical vision into this amazingly informative volume about the 31 years of British rule. As Benny Morris has stated: "He treats the Mandate period as a novel."

The overwhelming image of the British mandate is that of parents trying to keep peace between their two children, their favored eldest son and his younger brother ... The parents tried and tried to get the kids to stop misbehaving -- and eventually gave up.

Many of us seem to have forgotten that Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire until a short 84 years ago! In fact, the British controlled this region for only three decades, from 1917 until 1948. This book is the story of those years. Among the horrors covered in this tome are: the Nebi Musa rampage of 1920, the Jaffa riot of 1921, the Jerusalem riot of 1929, the riots of 1933, and the Arab Rebellion of 1936-39. Segev's traces their origins, but even more chillingly, describes how they unfolded, event-by-event and horror-by-horror. Early Arab atrocities insured that many Jews would never trust their Arab neighbors.

Segev clearly distinguishes Zionism and Judaism. He reminds us that "much of the pre-Zionist Jewish population - that is, those who lived in Palestine before the 1880s - were ultra-Orthodox. They were deeply hostile to the notion of secular Jewish autonomy in the Holy Land, which, according to religious doctrine, would be redeemed only through divine intervention in the messianic age. To the traditional Jewish population was sacrilegious." [p. 14] Segev shows how this caused problems for the early Zionists, Ashkenazi upstart socialists scorned by the religious. Under the `chalukkah' system, the Diaspora supported pious Jews in Palestine. In return they studied the Torah and prayed on behalf of Jews worldwide; the ultra-Orthodox saw no need for change.

Segev establishes that even from the turn of the century relations between European Zionists and native Palestinian Arabs were bad. Regarding the `land issue', he points out that most people were tenant farmers on lands they did not own. He quotes Chaim Margalit Kalvarisky, a Polish-born agronomist whose job included purchasing land for the Jewish Colonization Association: "After the first purchase of land I made here I had to dispossess the Arab residents of their land for the purpose of settling our brothers.... They sang songs of mourning for their bad fortune, which forced them to leave the cradle of their birth. Those songs cut through my heart and I realized how tied the Bedouin is to his land." Segev quotes the words of British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour: "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." (At the time, only about 10 per cent of the population was Jewish). [p. 45]

There are a lot of surprises in this book. For instance, an interesting proposal that never went anywhere in 1922 was that the United States (!) take control over Palestine from the British. A publication from the Zionist Organization in London opposed the proposal on the basis that "if the crude arithmetical conception of democracy were to be applied now or at some early stage in the future to Palestinian condition, the majority that would rule would be an Arab majority..." [p.119]. Segev puts to rest some myths, among others, that emigration to Palestine could have saved the doomed masses of Europe during the 1940s [p.461]. And, of course, the author reminds us of `the Uganda proposal', of 1903 [p. 36], which suggested a homeland in Africa, and which almost cost Theodor Herzl his position in the Zionist movement.

There is some humor here, too. Segev describes early Zionist Commission meetings being held in a mish-mash of Yiddish, German and English, and David Ben-Gurion griping that `people walk around the country and don't even know its language'. [p. 99] A footnote mentions that pioneer Zionist Theodor Herzl did not know Hebrew: "Who of us knows Hebrew well enough to ask for a train ticket in that language", he complains.

Segev describes internal divisions in both Jewish and Arab camps and shows how these drove events. On the Jewish side, he details the bitter rivalry between Ben-Gurion's Labor movement) and Jabotinsky's Revisionists. The author quotes David Ben-Gurion describing Etzel (Irgun) as "a Nazi gang" [p.471], labeling Jabotinsky as "the Fascist Satan", and calling Menachem Begin "the fuehrer". On the Arab side, the Nashashibi and Husseini clans matched the factionalism of their Jewish opponents, though with less colorful language.

I was surprised to find how many dubious Israeli practices grew from British models. Sir Charles Tegert, brought in during the Arab Rebellion (1936-1939) was merciless. Segev writes: "At times the [British] army would enter a village and stay there for several months... As part of the counter terrorism campaign, the authorities also destroyed houses. [p. 423]" Also, he describes the origin of the theory of collective punishment. "The laws and regulations under which the [British] authorities conducted their counter terrorism operations placed responsibility for crimes on the entire community ... everyone was to be punished." Under Tegert, "Soldiers who were tried for abuse and even murder of civilians were given extremely light sentences." [p. 425]. And Tegert "established a special center in Jerusalem to train interrogators in torture". (Jerusalem police chief Douglas Duff even describes torture methods he employed in his memoirs!)

Though depressing, I read this work through twice, the second time underlining as I went. This is that kind of history - often unpleasant but ultimately fascinating.