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Was Biblical error to blame for Middle East woes?
Mohammad Al-Urdun examines the airbrushing out of Palestinian history
“PALESTINE – A PERSONAL HISTORY”
by Karl Sabbagh, Atlantic Books, £9.99
Paperback from 28th September.
THE Bishop of Jerusalem likes to tell a joke about how the troubles in Palestine began with a Biblical cock-up. Moses and the Israelites had been wandering the desert in search of a new home for 40 years, cracks Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal with a mischievous twinkle. They were parched, hungry and almost ready to throw in the towel when Moses fell to his knees and turned to God for directions: “Pl … Please God, show us to the land of the Ca … Cana … Canaa,” the prophet stuttered. Looking down with pity God replied, “I know, I know Moses, you’re longing for the land of the Canaanites [Palestine]. I’ll show you the way.”
The tragedy, as the Bishop tells it, is that Moses didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence and his people didn’t get to land of their dreams – Canada, a place of empty prairies and easy living. Instead they ended up in Palestine – then the land of the Canaanites and now one of the world’s great open wounds. History records the blood price.
The Bishop usually tells his “naughty” joke with a wry smile because he’s one of the millions who counts the cost personally: his family is part of the Palestinian Diaspora torn apart by the conflict and he longs for the chance to have so much as a family photograph with his younger brother.
The same tragedy has also touched British film-maker and writer Karl Sabbagh who set out to explore whether a Biblical cock-up was really to blame.
Born into wartime London to an English mother and a Palestinian father, Sabbagh lives in Britain, has written several books, produced major documentaries for British and American television and written for Fleet Street newspapers. But like many children of mixed parentage he’s had a foot in both cultural camps.
A few years ago he decided to trace his father’s roots and to address the Palestinian riddle: Why people in the West generally regard Palestinians as swarthy suicide bombers and know nothing of their rich past and its sinister airbrushing from history books.
He starts by meeting his cousin Aleef Sabbagh who tries – and fails – to put his arms lovingly around a huge olive tree, about 800 years old and which his family have tended for generations. Aleef’s gesture is a significant one because the issue of whether Palestine actually has a history at all is key to the conflict today.
It may seem common sense that Palestinian Arabs are an ancient and that for most of the time the three monotheist religions generally rubbed along. But orthodox opinion in Israel and much of America is that the Zionist settlers created Palestine from dust. The view that the Arabs never had a civilisation and the land was empty until the European Jewish settlers arrived, underwrites Israeli policy from the security wall to shelling Gaza. The then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was speaking literally when he stated in 2002: “The land is ours. God gave us the title deeds”. The “deeds” are, of course, contradicted by the weight of scientific evidence.
Sabbagh’s cousin Aleef and his uncles have a hatful of stories about their descendents stretching back to the 18th Century when Palestine was part of the sprawling Ottoman empire. It turns out that his great-great-great-great-grandfather Ibrahim Sabbagh was the royal doctor and chancellor to the powerful Ottoman pro-consul Daher Al-Omar.
Daher, considered a good ruler, grew rich on European trade in cotton and olives – the basis of a large soap industry from which the Sabbaghs (which means soap maker in Arabic) derived their name. Ibrahim was, however, a “miser and an embezzler” who encouraged Daher to wage wars and stole the booty until they gambled too far by withholding taxes from the Ottomans. Most blame Ibrahim – although Sabbagh’s relatives refuse to point the finger – for snubbing the Ottomans who executed Daher and tortured Ibrahim to death for the whereabouts of his treasure, who, true to his nature, kept his secret.
Daher and Ibrahim were part of the Palestine’s historical footprint, proving it was developed and populated even when the grandfather of Zionism, Israel Zangwill, said in 1901: “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country”.
Zionism was a brainchild of bourgeois European Jews, mostly immigrants to Britain frustrated by anti-Semitism and ambitious for a land where they could set the rules – a fact Sabbagh fails to register. They were by and large neither from the progressive Jewish intelligentsia that was at the forefront of progressive movements, nor from the working class that laboured in sweat shops from London’s East End to Manchester and had much more in common with the Palestinian Jews living cheek by jowl with other ordinary Arabs. Zionism was not – and still isn’t – universally accepted by Jews, some opposing it for religious doctrinal or political reasons.
But it might never have amounted to anything had it not been for a Russian Jewish chemist in Manchester, Chiam Weizmann, who developed a method for extracting nail varnish (acetone) used in explosives from conkers (horse chestnuts). When the First World War broke out the munitions minister and future Prime Minister Lloyd George leapt at the acetone supply. Lloyd George was a powerful ally and later quipped, “Acetone converted me to Zionism”.
With powerful allies including Lord Rothschild, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill, the Zionists had a gilt-edged chance and in 1917 they guided the Balfour Declaration, which opened the way for the creation of Israel. Not for Palestine was the semi-independence of other Middle East countries after the war: it remained under direct rule from Britain – ready for use by Zionist settlers.
But it wasn’t, as Sabbagh infers, just a matter of Zionists pulling the strings or misappropriating Britain’s foreign policy. On the contrary, they were natural bedfellows. Although many policy makers (including Balfour) didn’t particularly care for Jews and some relished the chance to export them, they instinctively preferred them to Arabs and the Zionists cheerleaders spotted the crucial importance of a colonial ally against Arab nationalism.
Although many in Britain were cautious and commissions galore warned of the dangers of mass immigration of European Jewish settlers and the displacement of Arabs, London encouraged the Jewish population to swell from around 80,000 to 650,000 by 1947, fully one-third of the total.
Zionist promises to settle fairly with the Arabs were discarded before a dream of ethnically cleansing the land. As the writer Arthur Koestler, a Zionist sympathiser, observed: “The Arabs represented [for the Zionists] a political headache, not a human and moral problem … Palestine was the [Jews] Promised Land, doubly promised from Mount Sinai and Downing Street, and they came to take possession of it as masters. The presence of the Arabs was a mere accident like the presence of some forgotten pieces of furniture in a house which has been temporarily let to strangers”.
But the ruthless extremes to which the Zionists were prepared to go is generally withheld from official histories.
The Holocaust was both a tragedy and an opportunity for them. When it looked as if Germany would win Zionist leaders, including future Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, offered to back the Third Reich if it would support the creation of Israel. They were honoured guests of the Nazis while they haggled over the fate of 1,000 wealthy Austrian Jews and ways to get them past British immigration controls in Palestine – but, while saving many, turned away from the tens of thousands left behind. In 1938, as news of the Nazi camps leaked out the Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, said: “If I knew it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
The violence to drive out the Arabs and British forces was also at the heart of Zionism. When violence broke out Arabs and Jews armed but the Jewish militias, the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were notorious terrorists. The targets were mainly civilian but included in 1946 the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, used as British intelligence HQ, which blasted killing 91 people and injuring hundreds more Jews, Arabs and Britons.
The links between Israel’s political figures and the terror gangs run deep. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first PM, led Haganah; Ariel Sharon, former PM, was commander of a bloody Haganah unit and indicted for later war crimes; Golda Meir, PM in the 70s, was a senior member of Irgun; Menachem Begin, a future PM, lead Irgun; Yitzhak Shamir, also a PM, was part of the murderous Stern Gang; Yitzhak Rabin, who was army chief during the early atrocities and later Israel; Moshe Dyan, the leading figure, who led death squads; Doris Katz, another leading light, boasted of her part in Irgun in her book, The Lady was a Terrorist.
British forces had a reputation too. When a British convoy was attacked near the village of Kufr Yassif, where Sabbagh’s family lived, the furious Tommies threatened to machine gun the villagers and then torched their homes. All except the Sabbagh’s which was saved by a miracle, recalled his uncle Ghassan.
His aunt Georgette, a teacher, showed the soldiers her government papers to try to save their home but was waved away. She produced letters Sabbagh’s father had sent from the BBC in London but the soldiers went looking for matches to torch the home – even asking his aunt for one. Then suddenly a captain arrived who read the letter and reprieved his aunt and her home.
Sabbagh’s father, Isa Khalil Sabbagh, was the smooth voice of the BBC’s all important Arabic Service in the 1940s after being recruited from university. He had natural talent, a silky voice and exotic good looks and was hired as an announcer and newsreader but was quickly promoted, becoming a dashing war correspondent and international reporter and even writing, producing and presenting his own plays. He appeared regularly in picture magazines – in British army uniform as the serious correspondent, or as a glamorous pin-up with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He separated from Sabbagh’s mother and settled in America where he started Voice of America’s Arabic Service before a long career in the State Department.
In 1948 he had the painful task of reporting on the United Nations at which it voted, after scandalous coercion by America, to create Israel. It was a thunderous betrayal of the Palestinian Arabs – Muslim and Christian – who had lived for centuries with Arab Jews and were willing to share their land with a reasonable number of European settlers. But they were swept aside in favour of a total Europeanization of Palestine the results of which are measured in the dead and the despoliation of the land.
In the wake of the vote the violence by the Zionist militia, condemned as “offence against civilisation” by the British High Commissioner, reached its nadir at the village of Deir Yassin. Despite a peace deal it was attacked on April 9th 1948 by Irgun, Stern and Haganah forces who slaughtered villagers, and forced survivors, including women and children, to a nearby quarry where they were murdered. A Jewish witness wrote: “[Haganah] members tell of the barbaric behaviour of the Irgun towards the prisoners and the dead. They also related that Irgun men raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterwards.” The leader of the attack, future Israeli PM Menachem Begin, boasted of how the Arabs “began to flee in terror”. A former director of the Israeli army archives recorded: “In almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres and rapes.”
The brutality, part of Plan D (Dalet) to drive out the Arabs, was repeated in towns like Ramleh and Lydda and led to 750,000 fleeing abroad.
A fighter led by Moshe Dyan gave a chilling insight into the murderous mood during an attack: “[My] jeep made the turn and here at the … entrance to the house opposite stands an Arab girl, stands and screams with eyes filled with fear and dread. She is all torn and dripping blood – she is certainly wounded. Around her on the ground lie the corpses of her family. Still quivering, death has not yet redeemed them from their pain. Next to her is a bundle of rags – her mother, hand outstretched trying to draw her house into the house. And the girl understands nothing … Did I fire at her? … But why these thoughts, for we are in the midst of battle, in the midst of conquest of the town. The enemy is at every corner. Everyone is an enemy. Kill! Destroy! Murder! Otherwise you will be murdered and not conquer the town. What [feeling] did this lone girl stir within you? Continue to shoot! Move forward! … Where does this desire to murder come from? What, because your friend … was killed or wounded, you have lost your humanity and you kill and destroy? Yes! … I kill everyone who belongs to the enemy camp: man, woman, old person, child. And I am not deterred.”
Nor were the attacks weren’t confined to Arab civilians. When the UN dispatched the head of Swedish Red Cross Count Folke Bernadotte to mediate he was assassinated in a Stern ambush led by Yitzhak Shamir.
Safad, home to many of Sabbagh’s relatives, was one of the last towns to be emptied. He went back to discover an exclusively Jewish town. He was given a tour by David, a Jewish former teacher who quit because of the anti-Arab racism he encountered, and visited the home of an immigrant Russian painter and his wife, one of many who, under a government regeneration scheme, snapped up homes emptied of Arabs for as little as $100 (about £400 in today’s money).
The Palestinian president Mohammed Abbas, who also grew up in Safad, recalled in a book an ancient olive tree that grew in the middle of a house – and there it was slap in the middle of the Russian’s home. Abbas wanted to take another look at Safad a few years ago and David planned to show him around. But when news got out he found a dead cat on his doorstep with a note saying, “This will happen to your children too, if Abu Mazen [Abbas] visits Safad.”
At the time of the Oslo peace talks, David recalls, another Arab former resident wanted to buy back his home. A deal was struck with the Jewish lawyer who lived there but one night the house was mysteriously burned down. No one in the town was arrested.
Sabbagh visited Tiberius, the once glorious capital of Daher’s Palestine, but a Jewish town since 1948. A run-down shopping centre surrounds Daher’s beautiful mosque, which is littered with abandoned shopping trolleys and bottles. Standing on a discarded dining chair he peered inside at the cracked walls, collapsed ceiling and the household waste tossed across the floor where Daher and the community once prayed.
Safad, similarly forlorn, is a pitiful epitaph to the failure of the Zionist dream. Blighted by poverty and high unemployment, the Arabic plaques over doors have been scratched out in a desperate effort to erase signs of the town’s rich history. A 14th Century mausoleum is filled with rubbish and a 16th Century mosque dilapidated and of the five ancient cemeteries, four have been destroyed. The fifth, which contains Sabbagh’s ancestors, suffered a worse fate. When he visited he discovered it fenced off with barbed wire. The land, it turns out, was sold to a friend of Ariel Sharon’s son who turned it into a wildlife park. The scheme flopped and the only sign of life was a bedraggled ostrich, “free to roam the cemetery and peck at the tombs and gravestones”.
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