Now, I know none of that matters. Because ultimately, the argument will still be, "no matter what their words meant, their actions involved attacking Palestinians and stealing their land."
The question is: fucking when??
It wasn't during the Ottoman Empire.
Then that fell. And the League of Nations - the precursor to the United Nations - met with different peoples all across the fallen Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, to figure out which lands were effectively already countries, and which ones should be but needed infrastructure first.
It wasn't during that process.
Then the League of Nations mandated that the southern chunk of Syria - the region commonly called Palestine or the Holy Land - would be a new country called Palestine.
Jews would be allowed and encouraged to keep immigrating there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
The Jewish and Arab communities would each mostly self-govern, and they would work together on building the overarching federal government. Britain would run it in the meantime, and help them in whatever way it could.
It wasn't during the Mandate era.
The Mandate era did see a lot of action, though.
There were anti-Jewish attacks, riots, and massacres in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1935, and perhaps most famously, throughout 1936-1939. Jews started fighting back (via the Irgun) at the very end of 1937.
That last bit was nicknamed the "Arab Revolt." (Don't confuse it with the actual "Arab Revolt" of WWI, where Arab groups worked with the British to take down the Ottoman Empire.)
And this is where anti-colonialism actually comes in.
The handful of rich fascist Hitler fanboys who organized these attacks, like Amin al-Husseini, had lost some privilege and power-over when the Ottoman Empire fell. They were also angry at having to treat Jews as equals, and let them participate in government build a government with them?!
And they were scared that if enough Jews immigrated, Arabs would become a minority, and Jews would be in power - either by default, or by design.
(This despite the fact that even in 1947, Jews were only about a third of Palestine's population.)
That was one of the biggest objections to the Mandate, pretty much from the moment it was even proposed. The fact that it allowed, even encouraged, Jewish immigration.
It didn't put any limits on Arab immigration, which increased dramatically. The problem was just the fact that nobody could ban land sales to Jews anymore - which they'd been doing on and off for centuries.
It's wild to me that radical leftists have embraced such an intensely conservative argument. Even antizionists who know that Jews were immigrating for decades, before the Empire fell, routinely oppose the immigration itself. Increased Jewish immigration = bad and nefarious.
This is an argument that belongs in the far right's mouth, not ours.
The "Arab Revolt, Part Deux" consisted of three years of attacks on Jews, Brits, and (most of all) on moderate Arabs who supported coexistence.
Britain almost declared martial law to shut it down. But the revolt's leadership consisted of well-connected little dickheads. And they were able to get a bunch of leaders across the Arab world on their side. Britain was desperate to stay on the Arab world's good side, not least Because Oil.
So it didn't declare martial law. Instead, it told the League of Nations to give up on the whole Mandate, and to partition the land instead.
And it issued the White Paper, which committed to effectively ending Jewish immigration.
(In 1939! The year AFTER dozens of countries, including Britain, had held the Evian Conference, agreed that the Jews were all gonna die if nobody took them in, and then refused to take them in. Britain, afterward: "Oh yeah -- they can't go to Palestine, either. Almost forgot to say that part.")
And the little dickheads rejoiced.
Except for Amin al-Husseini, the leader Britain had installed for Arab Palestine.
He rejected the White Paper entirely, because he didn't want partition. He wanted one big, united, Arab Palestine, and he wanted to rule over it.
If all of this sounds like bullshit politically improbable, let's see what he and his allies said about it! In fact, let's go back to the reaction to Britain recommending partition.
In 1937, when Britain recommended partitioning the land into an Arab Palestine and a Jewish Israel, Arab leaders held the Bludan Congress.
Again: this is after almost 30 years of Arab attacks on the Jewish community, and before even one Jewish attack on the Arab community.
This was still an entirely one-sided battle.
From the report of the Congress's Finance and Economic Committee:
From the Congress's final report:
Again: it was Britain that tried to establish a Jewish state.
Not because the Zionists lobbied for any such thing.
Because the level of anti-Zionist violence had reached the point that Britain threw up its hands and said, "These people cannot co-exist."
This was literally entirely a non-Jewish problem.
The Bludan Congress, to the best of my knowledge, is also the origin of the call for freeing, or at that point "liberating," Palestine.
This is the same position Hamas established in its charter, exactly 50 years later:
(To Hamas, the land Israel is on isn't "Israel." It's "Occupied Palestine," or "the Interior" (of Palestine).
Just like the Bludan Congress, when Hamas talks about "liberating" that land it means "restoring it to the Arab world."
Also, importantly: "The Islamic Resistance," aka Hamas, is putting a fake-religious spin on this position. Because it's a far-right fundamentalist group that uses a veneer of religion to gain power. I.e., it's the equivalent of Christian Nationalist groups.
The argument that actually, legally, conquering something once means it's yours forever, is not fucking widely accepted by the actual real-life Muslim world: it's a blatantly imperialist position, plain and simple.)
The reports from the Bludan Congress are full of statements like, "Palestine has been an Arab country for more than one thousand three hundred years; and... moreover, this country was the part which completed the Arab territory."
Arabs conquered the land 1,300 years before.
If it's not under full Arab rule now, there will be a hole in the Arab world -- it won't be there "completing" it like before.
Arabs have the right to sovereign rule over the entire land, in perpetuity.
Jews are a minority, so they don't have the right to participate in government.
They should remain a minority, and the majority should decide what safeguarding their rights looks like.
In other other words: The powers that be wanted - in fact, had expected - to keep the entire region functioning as an Arab empire. Like it had before the Ottoman Empire conquered a large part of it. Like it had, under regional rulers, for most of that time too. This was known as the pan-Arab nationalist movement.
They wanted to return to the status quo where Jews, as a minority, were not allowed to participate in government, work in civil service, immigrate, build synagogues, testify in self-defense, physically defend themselves, etc.
Palestinian nationalism or self-determination was not involved. Nobody was arguing that the Arab Palestinian farmers - well, nobody was arguing ANYTHING on behalf of the farmers. This was emphatically a movement of the elite and powerful. But they especially weren't arguing that the Arabs who farmed the land had extra bonus rights to it.
From 1937 through 1947, there was a certain amount of back-and-forth actual gun-and-bomb fighting.
But still no attacking Palestinians and stealing their land.
And that brings us to the part with the actual armies.
In 1947, the newly-formed United Nations finally did vote to partition the land into a 55% Jewish Israel, and a 90% Arab Palestine. Britain would officially leave on May 15, 1948.
Amin al-Husseini was still the leader of the Arab Higher Committee, the government of Arab Palestine.
In absentia, because his ass had genuinely, I swear I'm not making this up, gone off and become a bonafide Nazi war criminal in the meantime.
He and his cronies still flatly refused partition. They flatly refused to even participate in negotiations of any kind.
Instead, they convinced the leaders of every surrounding country, plus Iraq, to invade.
Still not in order to "free Palestine."
Still to yeet the Jews and take the land for the Arab world.
Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt raised volunteer armies to join those of the Arab Higher Committee, so that they could low-key invade and take control of as much land as possible without Britain retaliating.
Britain was Extremely Fucking Done with the whole situation. It was willing to overlook a lot in order to get the fuck out of there on time.
To quote the New York Times, almost exactly seventy-eight years ago:
As the critical date approaches, the state of affairs for the Jews, the Arabs and the U. N., is this: The Jews have carved out their state in Palestine. They have taken control of a region roughly corresponding to the area allotted to them under the U. N. General Assembly's partition plan of last Nov. 29.
They have achieved their objective, at least temporarily, by defeating the Arabs in bitter battles. The Arabs in Palestine have been promised "deliverance" by the Arab countries of the Middle East.
They promised to free Palestine, and they failed.
But they did drive hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians out and into their own neighboring lands before the war officially started, by making life fucking unlivable in the meantime:
In Palestine last week the stutter of Sten guns, the crack of rifle fire, the explosion of grenades were the common sounds in many places. There was little normal life anywhere.
Everyone was affected by the war: those who did not actually take part in the fighting lived in a state of acute nervous tension. Business -except the selling of food-had generally collapsed. British control, as troops were withdrawn, slipped faster and faster. The courts had folded up.
These screenshots are from Benny Morris's The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. He notes that 40,000 Arab Palestinians had temporarily left the country during "Arab Revolt Jr.," so the neighboring countries and the AHC didn't think anything of it at first.
As the war intensified and rumors spread, people started fleeing the shifting war front in droves. Both Arabs and Jews were internally displaced, but only Arabs fled - because, again, all the surrounding countries were invading to free it from the Jews. They certainly weren't about to take Jewish refugees in themselves.
He notes that it's often unclear whether villagers left because they were fleeing in anticipation of a battle, during/as the result of a battle, or whether they were being forced to leave. But all told, he lists about 25 villages that were expelled by Jewish forces, either because the village had been taken over by invading armies, or the villagers had allied with the armies - or because the village was on the front lines and was going to be attacked repeatedly. He lists another 6 that were expelled by Arab forces: Haifa, Beit Nabala, Ma'dhar, Hadatha, 'Ulam, and Sirin.
In the other nearly 340 villages, people fled because the war came to their doorsteps, or was about to, or they were afraid it was about to.
A huge number of those refugees never left the country.
Jordan annexed what's now called the West Bank. Egypt annexed what's now called the Gaza Strip. They yeeted the Jews from those bits first, and kept the Arab residents, both displaced and not.
According to contemporary counts, 200,000 Arab Palestinians were internally displaced in the Gaza Strip, along with the 70,000 people who already lived there, and 280,000 in the West Bank. Of those who actually left the country on purpose, 70,000 went to Jordan, and 4,000 to Iraq, both of which gave them citizenship; 75,000 went to Syria, and 97,000 to Lebanon, which STILL refuse citizenship to them and all their descendants. (For a total of 246,000 who genuinely left the country, rather than being "annexed.")
Within Israel, there were 31,000 Arab now-Israelis who had been internally displaced, and about 115,000 more who hadn't; 17,000 Jewish Israelis who had been internally displaced; and about 97,000 refugees living in tent camps.
Lebanon and Egypt said they didn't want to keep the Palestinians because they didn't have room. Syria did have room48,, but said it didn't want to keep them because they wanted to go home.
And Israel wanted to negotiate a peace agreement, because the armistice left it without established borders and without Jerusalem.I t was willing to take 100,000 refugees back, and to compensate others for their lands. But it also wanted to negotiate compensation from the invading countries, for the damages they had caused to those lands.
A large part of the reason Israel was unwilling to take more people back was that it was also getting an average of 20,000 Jewish refugees a month, from both the Holocaust and the Arab world. (There would ultimately end up being twice as many Jewish refugees from Arab countries, as Arab refugees from the 1948 war.)
Which is why, in 1950, there were already 97,000 people living in tent cities in Israel. Despite the fact that there had only been about 48,000 total refugees, within Israel, from the war.
In conclusion: That never happened.
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