By Jeremy Salt
Looking at the catastrophic scale of these developments and the epic scale of violations of international law, it should be clear that the rights of the 1948 generation are just as valid now as they were then.
Genocide in Palestine did not begin in 2023, 1967, or 1948, but in the minds of the Zionist leadership, beginning with Theodor Herzl. The takeover of Palestine would begin with the removal of the “penniless population.” This was the basis of wanting the land but not the population.
Herzl was a dreamer. Those who followed him were not. They were hard men (and sometimes women) who realized what had to be done. The Palestinians would not surrender their homes and land voluntarily. They would have to be removed by force, the opportunity finally arising in 1948.
The ‘western’ discourse on a solution to the ‘Palestine problem’ is centered solely on the disposition of the territories seized by Israel in 1967.
There is no logical reason for this. While the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied in 1967 and about 300,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, a far larger part of Palestine was occupied in 1948 and a far greater number of people (about 800,000) were deliberately driven from their homeland.
Everything the Palestinians owned was stolen, from their olive groves and citrus crops in their fields down to the furniture, books and carpets in their homes. Even taking into account the ongoing destruction and theft on the West Bank, the magnitude of criminality in 1948 was enormous. Yet in ‘western’ approaches to a solution of the ‘Palestine problem’ the rights of the 1948 generation seem to have been all but abandoned.
There is no logical, legal, or moral reason for this. Israel proclaims a ‘right’ to all of Palestine on the basis of Biblical history. This is a false right – not a right at all. The real right belongs to the Palestinians, including Jews living in Palestine up to the beginning of Zionist colonization in the 1880s.
By any reasonable definition, the land was theirs, legally, individually, collectively, and historically. International law gives ethnically cleansed Palestinians not just the right to return but the right to retrieve their stolen property and demand restitution for property that has been destroyed, plus financial compensation flowing from the use of their agricultural land and property that was not destroyed but taken over.
These rights have been spelled out in numerous international conventions and UN resolutions. The right of return of all refugees or displaced persons – not just of the Palestinians – has been upheld in numerous court hearings.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) emphasizes that international refugee law and international human rights law mutually reinforce each other on the right of return of the Palestinians. The right also extends to the restitution of homes and land unlawfully or arbitrarily taken from them or, instead, compensation for their stolen property.
The right of return as it relates specifically to the Palestinians was written into UNGA resolution 194 of 1948. Against international law, Israel denies that there is any such right. As the ethnic cleansing of the people and the theft of their property were two of the foundations on which the state was built, the rejection of Palestinian rights in international law has to be regarded as the third.
Palestine fell into the hands of the British government with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. The occupation was turned into the ‘mandate,’ a “sacred trust of civilization ” as it was described at the League of Nations. This was a trust that Britain never intended to respect and one that the Palestinian people had no reason to trust.
The real goal was not Balfour’s “national home” for the Jewish people but a Jewish state planted at the heart of the Middle East, a barrier against Arab nationalism and Islam, serving the strategic interests of the empire and theoretically loyal to it.
The reserve position that nothing would be done to damage the civil and religious rights of the “existing non-Jewish communities” as expressed in the Balfour Declaration was a contradiction in terms because nothing could be more damaging to these ‘communities’ than setting up a “national home” for Jewish colonists against their wishes.
The insertion of the word “existing” was sinister. It pointed to an option the British had in mind all along, which was the ‘transfer’ of the “non-Jewish” population out of Palestine. “Non-Jewish” was intended to convey the impression of a minority, when it was the native Jewish population before zionist colonization that was the minority, consisting of perhaps 4 to 5% of the overall number.
By 1920, almost four decades after the first wave of Zionist settlement, the “non-Jewish communities” – the native population, mostly Muslim – still comprised 90 percent of the population.
The British protected the Zionists by disarming the Palestinians and allowing Zionist colonists to set up ‘self-defense’ units. From the appointment of a Jewish high commissioner down to senior officials, it seeded the occupation administration with officials who were either sympathetic to Zionism or active Zionists. This category included Norman Bentwich, appointed as attorney-general. The Jewish Agency was given a privileged position, thus furthering the process of Zionist settlement.
‘Immigration’ in the 1930s rapidly changed the demographics. The 1922 census showed a total population of 649,048 (Muslims 486,177, Christians 71,464, Jews 83,790). By 1935 the population had reached 1,241, 559 (Muslims 770,135, Christians 105,236, Jews 355,157), By the time of the 1944 census the population had risen to 1,673, 071 (Muslim 994,724, Christian 135,547, Jewish 528,702 with a revised estimate upward of 553,600).
In their opposition to Zionism, Muslim and Christian Palestinians have to be counted as one. The population increases were almost wholly natural in the case of the Muslims, and almost wholly ‘migratory’ in the case of the Jews.
While in Zionist agricultural settlements, most of the incoming settlers chose to live in the towns and cities, especially Safad and Jerusalem or those along the coastal strip. The statistics reveal the following numbers for 1931: Jaffa (188,075 Muslims, 128,467 Jews); Ramleh (8211 Muslims, eight Jews); Lydda (10,002 Muslims, 28 Jews); Hebron (17,276 Muslims, 125 Jews); Jerusalem (19,894 Muslims, 51,222 Jews, 19,335 Christians, giving a Muslim-Christian total of 39,229).
Despite the swelled Jewish population of Jerusalem, the bulk of land and property in and around the city was owned by Muslims and Christians.
Coming to Palestine to acquire land, the Zionists before 1948 had legally purchased between 5-6 percent of Palestine, mainly from absentee owners such as the Sursocks of Lebanon or from Palestinians acting as front men for Zionist interests. By 1943, according to the occupation regime’s cadastral survey, 24,670,455 dunums of land were owned by ‘Arabs’ and 1,514,247 by ‘Jews’.
By 1946, surveys by subdistrict show an overwhelming difference between ‘Arab’ and ‘Jewish’ land ownership: 68 to 18% in Safad, 87 to three % in ‘Akka (Acre), 84 to less than one % in Jenin, 76 to less than one % in Nablus, 96 to less than one % in Hebron, 75 to four % in Gaza, 84 to two % in Jerusalem and Haifa 42 to 35%.
Agricultural production and animal husbandry remained largely Palestinian. In 1943, of the total yield of 280, 068 tons of fruit, excluding citrus production, 73% was produced by Palestinians. In 1944-45, of the 244, 834 tons of vegetables produced, 77% was Palestinian-grown and harvested. Palestinian farmers pastured 89 % of all cattle, 94% of sheep, 9 % of goats and 100% of camels and produced 61 percent of all eggs.
The industries and small workshops spread across Palestine included glassware, soap production, sesame oil extraction, weaving, textiles, ceramics, tiles, stonework, metal fabrication, woodwork, leather goods, and paper production factories seized in the 78 percent of Palestine occupied by the Zionists in 1948. About 10,000 businesses were occupied and handed to new ‘owners.’
The Huleh wetlands, rich in themselves, a crossing point for migratory birds, a natural wonderland, “unrivaled in beauty no matter when or from what point beheld, “ according to the 19th-century missionary W.M. Thomson in his Land and the Book (1874), was drained and almost ruined by the Zionists in the 1950s. Along with rivers and lakes, the Huleh was part of the Palestinian heritage.
By 1951-52, orchards and groves owned by Palestinians but occupied by Zionist colonists were producing 1.25 million boxes of fruit, 400,000 of them exported, amounting to nearly 10% of Israel’s foreign currency. In 1949, olives from stolen Palestinian plantations were Israel’s third largest export.
The ‘custodian of absentee property’ oversaw the parceling out of stolen Palestinian property, which in 1949 amounted to “hundreds of thousands of dwellings, shops, storehouses and workshops” as well as the produce of orchards, groves and vineyards. The massive theft of land was described as a “miraculous simplification of our task” by the occupying regime’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. The ‘present absentees’-those Palestinians who, during the war, had moved from their homes in what became Israel – were never allowed to return.
In 1948 the Zionists occupied 526 small towns and villages as well as mixed cities and large towns and wholly Arab cities and large towns. They destroyed 425 small towns and villages along with 67 Bedouin localities (the figures vary according to source).
Plunder and looting were general, detailed and widespread. Anything that could be carried off was stolen – furniture, refrigerators, household fittings, jewelry, clothing, bedding and carpets.
From Lydda alone, according to senior Zionist regime figure Bechor Shitrit, the army took away 1800 truckloads of people’s belongings. After the bombardment of Haifa and the flight of its population, there was a “mass invasion” by thousands of settlers to seize houses and property, the same pattern being repeated in Jaffa. In west Jerusalem, the upper class districts of Talbieh, Qatamon and al Baq’a were singled out for plunder and vandalism by soldiers and civilian settlers.
The pillage was on a “fantastic scale” according to one source. The first wave took away pianos, refrigerators, radios, paintings, expensive furniture and carpets and other valuable items; the next took electric fittings, wiring, plumbing and tiles, with a third wave concentrating on roof shingles, window frames and other parts of the building itself. Arabic books were burned. Nothing that could be carried away was missed.
The finest stone houses and mansions were reserved for high regime figures, judges, university professors and so on. A stolen property is now Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence; the politician Yair Lapid lives in another, while former ‘prime ministers’ Golda Meir and Ariel Sharon also moved into Palestinian property, but many others shared in the best of what was stolen from the Palestinians.
These thefts took place not in the setting of an ‘empty land’ but one that was agriculturally well developed, especially along the coastal littoral. By 1947-48 Palestine had 555 government schools, 131 non-government schools and by 1944 2521 medical doctors and 742 dentists. For higher education, the American University of Beirut was the first choice of wealthy families. Educated Palestinians were urbane, cultured, sophisticated, usually multilingual, and capable of holding their own in any company.
UNSCOP (UN Special Committee on Palestine) allocated 54% of Palestine to foreign colonists. This would not have been acceptable to an indigenous population anywhere. In the ethnic cleansing operation of 1948, the Zionists seized another 24%.
The ‘successful’ partition resolution of 1948 was the outcome of US intervention through the bullying of vulnerable delegations. It was a rigged vote. It did not represent the genuine wishes of the world body.
In any case, partition was to be effected through UN supervision. Through such a process, almost exactly half the population of the Jewish state would have been Palestinian. Only through war and ethnic cleansing could this fundamental problem be overcome. The result was the beginning on the ground of the Palestinian genocide.
One further critical point is that as unfair and unbalanced as it was, the partition resolution did not allow for the ‘transfer’ of any part of the population. Except as a contingent wartime measure, the permanent removal of a population is as illegal as the permanent resettlement of land by an occupying power. This is as true of 1948 as it is of the 300,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1967. Under international law, the Palestinian rights of return and restitution have not diminished with the passage of time.
As for Jerusalem, the eastern part of the city is occupied under international law, as affirmed recently by the ICJ (International Court of Justice). In 1947, the whole city was to be placed under international administration. Ignoring this provision of the partition resolution, the Zionists permanently occupied West Jerusalem. There is no moral or legal reason behind the ‘western’ assumption that this part of the city somehow belongs to Israel. It does not. It remains just as much occupied in fact and law as the eastern part.
Looking at the catastrophic scale of these developments and the epic scale of violations of international law, it should be clear that the rights of the 1948 generation are just as valid now as they were then. Yet they are entirely neglected in the mainstream ‘western’ discourse, as though they no longer exist.
Others, across the Arab and Muslim worlds, and to a certain extent across the Global South, have a very different view, which is that all Palestine is occupied territory. In this view, the rights of the earlier generation of Palestinians are as valid now as they were in 1948 and as valid as the rights of post-1967 Palestinians.
A peaceful resolution of the struggle with the Zionists seems less likely now than ever before. All the same, it is the rights of all Palestinians that have to be kept in mind whenever the subject of rights comes up. The last word can perhaps be left to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, writing in 1961: “Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of ceaseless hatred [of the Arabs]. It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us.”
Reprinted from The Palestine Chronicle.
