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(In my review of "Ruins of Lifta", I mentioned that historian Hillel
Cohen was among those interviewed and alluded to his book "1929: Year
Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict" that appears to be an important
contribution to "revisionist" literature.)
LRB, Vol. 38 No. 19 · 6 October 2016
Divide and divide and divide and rule
by Yonatan Mendel
1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Hillel Cohen,
translation by Haim Watzman
Brandeis, 312 pp, £20.00, November 2015, ISBN 978 1 61168 811 5
Ten minutes into Elia Suleiman’s film The Time That Remains, the
Palestinian city of Nazareth officially surrenders to Israeli military
forces on 16 July 1948. In the town hall, the Israeli commander reads
out the bill of surrender to the gathered Arab-Palestinian notables.
It’s in Hebrew and they don’t understand a word. The commander tells the
mayor to sign the document, and then to join his soldiers for a
‘historic photo’. A military cameraman points his camera at the
soldiers. But when the black and white photo appears on screen it isn’t
the soldiers we see: it’s the puzzled group of Arab-Palestinian figures
at the other end of the room, ordinary people, onlookers. They, and
others like them, are central figures in the work of Hillel Cohen.
Neither the conventional ‘winners’ nor the stereotypical ‘losers’, they
play a part in the grand political story which, though crucial, is often
overlooked.
Cohen was born in 1961 into a National Religious family; his father was
of Jewish Afghan origin, his mother of Jewish Polish descent. As a
teenager he lived in a settlement in the West Bank. He left school at 16
and began to explore the neighbouring Palestinian villages. He made
friends, learned Arabic, and by being there found out about the lives of
Palestinians under the occupation. He worked as a floorer before
beginning his academic career. He reads the Bible but no longer
considers himself ‘religious’. He goes ‘more often to Hebron than to Tel
Aviv and more often to Bethlehem than to Haifa’. He believes in a
one-state solution (at least in the long term) and supports Israeli
human rights organisations such as Anarchists against the Wall and
Hamoked, which works with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories whose
rights have been violated by Israeli policies. He writes in Hebrew –
unusually for an academic, he doesn’t have an international audience
primarily in mind. In half a dozen scholarly books covering the history
of Palestine and Israel from 1929 to 1967 and beyond, he has
consistently written about ordinary people, something no other Israeli
historian has managed to do.
Cohen identifies 1929 as the year that gave birth ‘to the Zionist
military ethos’. The Arab-Israeli conflict probably doesn’t have a ‘year
zero’ – its roots go back at least as far as the 19th century – but 1929
should certainly be seen as a landmark. Between 23 and 29 August that
year, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed. Hundreds more were injured.
The worst violence was in the Old City of Jerusalem and near the Cave of
the Patriarchs in Hebron. Cohen shows how the violence was connected to
the threat – real or imagined – of a change in the status of a religious
site that served as a symbol of political hegemony. In the 1920s, the
Western Wall in Jerusalem was a Jewish prayer site in an Arab area where
‘Jews were allowed to pray … on the condition that they not disturb the
residents of the neighbourhood, and on the understanding that they not
claim title to the site.’
On 15 August 1929, following months of tension, Jewish demonstrators
marched to the Wall, raised the Zionist flag, sang the Zionist anthem
and claimed ownership of the site. The effect on relations between Jews
and Arabs was dramatic. There was an Arab counter-demonstration the next
day, which within a week had escalated into full-blown anti-Jewish
riots. (More recent violence in Jerusalem has also been a consequence of
Israeli attempts to change the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple
Mount site. The Second Intifada was sparked in 2000 by Ariel Sharon’s
decision to visit the site to prove Israeli sovereignty; and the latest
cycle of violence in Jerusalem follows 15 meetings at which the Interior
Committee of the Knesset discussed changing the site’s status to allow
Jews to pray there.)
Drawing on a wide range of sources, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, Cohen
argues that neither side includes in the history it tells itself the
massacres and murders committed by its own members. He juxtaposes Hebrew
and Arabic accounts of particular incidents – for example, the murder of
the Palestinian ‘Awn family in Abu Kabir village by a Jewish policeman
named Simha Hinkis – and shows how Jews and Arabs described them at the
time, and how they have been remembered, and forgotten, since. In
Biladuna Filastin (‘Our Homeland Palestine’) Mustafa Dabbagh describes
the murders of the ‘Awn family and the way Hinkis mutilated their
bodies: Jewish newspapers didn’t report the crime at all, and when they
covered the trial referred to the murder as the ‘Hinkis incident’.
The division between the two communities – Jewish Zionists on one side
and Arab Palestinians on the other – ‘grew ever more salient’, Cohen
argues, ‘as national identity grew stronger’. At the beginning of the
20th century, many of the Jews in Palestine, not to mention the wider
Middle East, had no Zionist national aspirations. The riots of 1929
changed that. ‘No other factor was more influential in bringing the
established Jewish communities in Palestine and the new Zionist
community together under a single political roof.’
After 1929 tension was no longer between the indigenous population (Arab
Palestinians, including Jews) and European Zionist immigrants, but
between Arabs and Jews. In Israel today, descendants of Mizrahi Jews (or
Arab Jews) tend to have more anti-Arab views than the rest of the Jewish
population. This has a lot to do with the narrow range of identities
‘allowed’ by Zionist European ideologies, according to which an Arab
cannot be a Jew and a Jew cannot be an Arab. The 1929 attacks on Mizrahi
Jews, who spoke Arabic and dressed in Arab clothes, marked a moment of
dramatic change.
Mazal Cohen was a Jewish woman murdered in Safed on 29 August 1929. Her
brother spoke at her funeral:
For a quarter of a century I have spoken their language, perused their
books, learned their way of life, observed their ways and manners, yet I
did not know them … Who injected into your inner beings this twisted
spirit, to stride with drawn swords at the head of a bloodthirsty throng
and to lend a hand to murdering innocent people who lived with you
securely for generations, who just yesterday were your companions and
friends? … You always said that you considered native-born Jews to be
your brothers, that you would love them, that you would respect them,
because you share a single language and way of talking with them, and
that you bore a grudge only against those who came anew … And how is it
that you, the murderers of Safed, beset like beasts of prey solely those
inhabitants of the city who have been integrated there for generations,
turning their homes to heaps of ruins, mercilessly killing women and the
old and the weak, who never did you any harm, taking the lives of people
whose mother tongue is your language, and whose way of life is yours,
different from you only in religion? … I have lived among you for a
quarter of a century, I have been your guest, I have attended to your
confidences and thoughts, and I did not know you.
This was the moment at which the possibility of a unified Arab-Jewish
identity, or even a shared Arab-Jewish life, disappeared, perhaps for
ever. The Zionist movement had succeeded in associating itself with all
Jews, no matter whether they were European or Mizrahi, supportive of
Zionism, indifferent or opposed to it. From now on Jews would see Arabs,
all Arabs, as their enemy, and vice versa.
Theodor Herzl envisaged Israel as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia, an
outpost of civilisation against barbarism’. In the 1930s, some 57 Jewish
settlements were established in a project called ‘Homa u-Migdal’ (‘A
Wall and a Watchtower’), in which new villages were built in Palestine
with two prescribed features: they were surrounded by a fence, and there
was a guard tower in the middle. Jewish Israeli society still sees
itself and its position in the world through the prism of security. Ehud
Barak used to call Israel a ‘villa in the jungle’. Benjamin Netanyahu
has said: ‘We need to secure our villa, the State of Israel, with fences
and barriers from all sides, to protect it from the wild beasts that
surround us.’ Military service is compulsory, and generally regarded as
the highest contribution to the ‘common good’. The security
establishment is also key to the Israeli economy: Israel, with a
population of only eight million people, is the world’s seventh biggest
arms exporter.
Cohen is less interested in the militarisation of Israeli society than
in the practices that have shaped the relationship between Jews and
Arabs. In Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism
1917-48 (2008) and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the
Israeli Arabs 1948-67 (2010), he explores the way that the security
apparatus gradually became Israel’s main means of interacting with and
controlling the Palestinian community. Intelligence work – especially
the recruitment and running of collaborators – has deepened Israeli
penetration of Palestinian society, which served not only to strengthen
Israel militarily but also to dilute Palestinians’ sense of national
identity, their political commitment and above all their social
solidarity. Over the years, and especially under martial law between
1948 and 1966, it became clear to some that working with the Israeli
security forces was a way to ensure their survival, and to others that
it could bring material gain.
By looking at the security apparatus as a ‘bond’ between Jews and Arabs
and examining the role played by Palestinian collaborators, Cohen
exposes a crucial – and ongoing – aspect of history that nobody else
wants to talk about. Much of what’s written on the conflict is confined
within the ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ frameworks. Cohen’s angle makes both sides
uncomfortable. From a ‘pro-Israel’ point of view, his work raises
serious moral questions about the underhand methods used by the Zionist
movement and Israel against the Palestinians, as well as making plain
that the hands of Jewish decision-makers have not been held out in
peace. From a ‘pro-Palestinian’ point of view, his research seems liable
to undermine the unity of the Palestinian national movement if only by
showing the historic depth of ‘betrayal’ in the Palestinian community in
the 1930s and 1940.
In 1920 Chaim Weizmann, then president of the Zionist Movement, called
for the ‘provocation of dissension between Christians and Muslims’.
Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky, head of the Zionist Executive’s Arab
Department, created the Muslim National Association with the purpose of
widening divisions between Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian
Christians. These were the early seeds of a Zionist divide and rule
strategy that prevailed after 1929. Following another wave of clashes in
the 1930s the dominant institutions of the Zionist movement’s security
establishment began to take shape (Irgun was established in 1931, the
Arab department of the Hagana in 1937, the Stern Gang in 1940 and so
on). A Jewish ‘collaboration doctrine’ was formulated, based on the
assumption that every Jewish-Arab relationship, however friendly and
peaceful, would be subordinated to a ‘higher cause’: the needs of the
Zionist movement. This is how Ezra Danin, one of the first intelligence
co-ordinators in the Jewish community in Palestine, saw the situation in
1936:
There is always bad blood in a village and sometimes there are murders
and then a chain of reprisals. In many cases of this sort, the murderer
emigrates to another settlement, where he receives protection under
Muslim custom. You can always get information from such a pursued,
protected man in need of succour. The refusal to give a girl to a given
man can lead to harsh conflicts. A man who asks the hand of a girl and
is refused by her parents feels himself abused, especially if he is the
girl’s cousin. Types generally exploitable for intelligence work are
rebellious sons, thieves who have brought disgrace on their families,
rapists who have acted on their passions and fled the avengers of
tainted honour. An intelligence agent with open eyes and ready ears will
always be able to make use of these personal circumstances and exploit
them for his own needs.
*
‘Rebellious sons’ are still available for exploitation today. Mos’ab
Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas leader in the West Bank, collaborated with
Israeli intelligence from 1997 to 2007. His story made it into bookshops
(Son of Hamas) and cinemas (The Green Prince). Human rights
organisations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip report evidence of
Palestinians killed, tortured or jailed, by both official and unofficial
Palestinian bodies, for collaborating with Israel. When I worked at
Physicians for Human Rights, there were many stories of Palestinians
from the West Bank being stopped by Israeli intelligence officers on
their way to Jordan to get medical treatment. ‘They told me, if you want
to save the life of your daughter, you have to work with us,’ a
Palestinian father said. ‘I refused and came back home.’ The next day he
tried again, and was allowed to go to Jordan. He told me after his
return to Palestine that those who are first refused and then allowed to
leave the country, or are allowed through in the first place, will
always be suspected of being collaborators. In other words, any contact
that Palestinians have with Israeli officials involves the threat of
being made to collaborate, or of being labelled a collaborator. For
Israeli security it’s doubly useful: it brings in information and
deepens mistrust.
The earliest murder of an Arab collaborator that Cohen has discovered
took place in 1929; the earliest murder of an Arab land dealer who
arranged a sale of land from Arabs to Jews occurred in 1934; in 1938, at
the height of the Great Arab Revolt, of 900 Palestinians killed, 498
were killed by fellow Palestinians on suspicion of either collaborating
with the Zionists or selling land to Jews. As the circle of khawana
(‘traitors’), real or suspected, grew, so did the violence. In such
circumstances it was almost impossible to create a united Palestinian
front. In 1948, Cohen says, there was not only a general unwillingness
among Palestinians to fight, but even active resistance to the Arab
fighters. The Zionist intelligence services were working overtime to
create the impression that everybody in Palestine was betraying
everybody else.
With the creation of the Israeli state, Palestinians became ‘Arab
Israelis’ overnight while Israel did its best – with the help of
Palestinian collaborators – to create satellite political parties that
were friendly to Israel as a way of impeding the creation of an
authentic Palestinian leadership. Many Arab members of the Knesset had
been collaborators before 1948. As far as Israel was concerned, there
were ‘bad Arabs’ (politically aware Palestinian citizens of Israel who
wanted to connect to the Arab world, called for equal rights and
demanded the return of refugees) and ‘good Arabs’ (Palestinian citizens
of Israel who co-operated with the state and showed loyalty to its
principles).
Investigating the daily lives of Palestinians between 1948 and 1967,
Cohen looks at the school system, and traces letters from informers
denouncing teachers who didn’t toe the Zionist line, or tried to remain
apolitical. He enters into the political debates between the Communist
Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties,
especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace
the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds
informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the
village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they heard when
they went to have a pee in an olive grove or as they were walking past
the house of the head of the village. With the help of informers, the
Israeli government ‘was able to obtain information about what was going
on in Palestinian communities and what was said in private’, Cohen
writes, and ‘even when informers were unable to obtain information, they
were able to make their fellow Arabs think they knew.’ As Napoleon III’s
chief of police put it, ‘I don’t need one out of every three Parisians
chatting on the streets to be my informer, all I need is for each of the
three to think that one of the others is an informer.’ Israel made the
Palestinian community the first inspector, and the first supervisor, of
its own members.
The strategy’s success is at times hard to believe. ‘Good Arabs’ were
often as Zionist and anti-Arab as the Israeli establishment, perhaps
convincing themselves that they were helping to secure the existence of
the Arab community in Israel, or simply for personal gain: rewards
ranged from land to public status, from local power to protection. After
the 1956 massacre in Kafr Qasim – Israeli border police shot dead 47
men, women and children – Arab community leaders expressed their
understanding of the ‘special considerations’ that led to the killings,
and rejected the idea of building a memorial in the village. In 1964,
Arab MKs chose to celebrate the establishment of Karmiel – a Jewish city
built as part of the ‘Judaisation of the Galilee’ – instead of attending
a memorial ceremony in Kafr Qasim. And when, on several occasions in the
1960s, the Knesset debated whether to continue with martial law in Arab
areas, some Arab MKs voted with the government against dismantling the
military regime imposed on their own communities.
The principle of divide and rule governs many walks of life. One
significant example given by Cohen was the decision to recruit the Druze
into the Israeli army, to cut them off both from the Arab Palestinian
community in Israel and from the Druze communities in Lebanon and Syria.
Cohen quotes Avraham Akhituv, the former head of Shin Bet: ‘We need to
continue our efforts to increase the uniqueness of the Druze and their
separateness – that of the young Druze generation especially – from the
general Arab population.’ The prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs
said that ‘the individuality of each and every separate community should
be consolidated.’ Breaking the Arab community up into smaller
communities of Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouins not only forced
each group to deal with the state separately, Cohen argues, but helped
to change the conflict from a conflict between a Jewish community and an
Arab community into one between a Jewish majority and Arab minorities,
with the singular and plural forms echoing the power relations
established by Israel.
Cohen also records Palestinian acts of resistance, organised and
unorganised, collective and individual. He has unearthed a police
report, for example, on a wedding in the village of Tur’an in the 1960s.
After the regular shouts of ‘long live the prime minister of Israel and
long live the military governor,’ one of the guests shouted: ‘long live
Abu Khaled [Nasser], long live Ben Bella, long live Amin al-Hafez’ – the
leaders of Algeria and Syria respectively. In 1958, the Communist Party
called on Palestinian citizens not to celebrate Israel’s tenth anniversary:
Will we dance on the day of mourning for the destruction of our
villages? Will we dance on the graves of our martyrs who fell in the
many massacres, like the ones at Dir Yasin and Kafr Qasim? Will we
celebrate while a million of our compatriots are dispersed in exile and
prevented from returning to their homes and their homeland? Will we
celebrate when we are stripped of national rights and live under a
military regime and national repression? No, we will not celebrate. We
are part of a huge nation that is today raising its head everywhere, in
Algeria, Oman, Aden and Lebanon, against the imperialists and their
lackeys, and we will pay them back double.
When the head of the village of Jish refused to celebrate Israeli
Independence Day, he lost his position at the Ministry of Health. A
customer in a crowded café in a village in the Galilee told the owner
not to turn the radio off when it began broadcasting a speech of
Nasser’s. ‘I am not afraid of collaborators,’ he said. In Acre in the
late 1950s, the Israeli authorities decided that the renovation of
Al-Jazzar mosque would be celebrated together with Israel’s Independence
Day. Elias Kousa, a prominent lawyer and activist, wrote to the mosque
committee:
The Israeli government took Arab land and put it in Jewish hands, so the
Jews can live in prosperity while the Arabs live in poverty … This
government … chained your freedom as if you were dogs, humiliated you,
hurt your dignity and made you a people without respect or pride. It
also hurt our education, progress and success … Are you going, after all
that, to celebrate a national day we have nothing to do with?
Cohen studies the tension between national feeling, on the one hand, and
the need to survive and feed a family, on the other, without judging
those who chose either way. Yet the reality he describes makes it clear
why the Palestinians couldn’t put the catastrophe of 1948, the Nakba,
out of their minds: not because Israeli attempts at re-education weren’t
powerful enough but, on the contrary, because Israel’s treatment of the
Palestinians was a constant reminder.
The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem, published in Hebrew in 2007 and in
English in 2011, predicts the most recent wave of violence to have hit
Jerusalem: the so-called knife intifada, which began in October 2015 and
mostly involved attacks by Palestinians from the West Bank on Israeli
soldiers positioned around the Muslim Quarter in East Jerusalem. Cohen
shows that Israeli attempts to erase any Palestinian political claim to
Jerusalem – next year Israeli schools will celebrate the 50th
anniversary of its ‘unification’ – and the destruction of Palestinian
institutions in the city during the Second Intifada has led to a
situation in which Palestinians are still discriminated against, East
Jerusalem is still occupied, house demolitions there continue, and the
Palestinian national leadership has been taken away from the city. This
is the context for the latest round of Palestinian violence. By giving
Palestinian Jerusalemites ‘special status’ and building a seven-metre
concrete wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israel has continued
to divide and rule. Not only have Muslims, Christians, Druze and
Bedouins been separated from each other, but so have Palestinian
Jerusalem, Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Divide and divide
and divide and rule.
Cohen doesn’t try to portray the connection that Palestinians have to
Jerusalem as stronger or weaker than that of the Jews. Rather, he wishes
to revive the possibility of sharing the city. How many Jewish Israelis
know that the Palestinians made Jerusalem their capital before Israel
did? And how many know that the founding convention of the PLO was held
in the Intercontinental Hotel in Jerusalem? And how many Palestinians
know about the place of Jerusalem in Jewish literature, religious
ceremonies and thought? When Cohen speaks about Jerusalem he means both
Palestinian and Jewish Jerusalem, and when he speaks about
‘Jerusalemites’ he includes the Palestinians; Yerushalmim in Hebrew
usually refers only to Jewish Israeli residents.
We are in a period of despair. Israel has an extreme right-wing
government and a spineless opposition; its prime minister refers
cynically to the evacuation of illegal settlements as ‘ethnic
cleansing’; its minister of education approves of a wounded, prostrate
Palestinian being shot through the head; a majority of Israeli MKs pass
a bill that allows them to dismiss fellow members – that’s to say, Arab
members – if they feel inclined to do so. Meanwhile, the historic
municipal elections that were to take place in Gaza and the West Bank
this month were cancelled, probably because the Palestinian Authority
feared Hamas would have a resounding victory; the occupation will be
half a century old next year and the siege of Gaza will mark its tenth
anniversary. Cohen’s work is a valuable resource in these horrendous
times. Neither ‘pro-Israeli’ nor ‘pro-Palestinian’, it is impossible to
requisition, which may, in part, explain why he was never elevated to
the rank of Israel’s ‘new historians’. He writes critically about
Zionism and sympathetically about Jews who ran to Palestine for their
lives; he writes with great honesty about Palestinians who were forced
to co-operate with Israel, and those who chose to fight. He has a rich,
dialectical understanding of the Jewish-Arab relationship, and though he
would never compare the occupier to the occupied, his writing will make
Jewish and Palestinian readers equally uncomfortable.
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