RASHID KHALIDI interviewd by TARIQ ALI
Let’s start with the present, not just in the sense of the horrors being inflicted on Palestine right now, but the present as part of Palestine’s still-active past. The brutal Anglo-Zionist repression of the great Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was followed by the Nakba of 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967, the 1982 siege of Beirut, led by Ariel Sharon, and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the two Intifadas, the continuous raining down of terror by Israel since then. Yet the post-October 7 genocide seems to have had a bigger global impact than any of these.
Yes, something has shifted globally. I’m not sure why those historic episodes did not have the effect of completely changing the narrative—the popular narrative, in particular. I don’t want to speculate about things like social media. But this has been the first genocide that a generation has witnessed in real time, on their devices. Was it the first in recent times in which the us, Britain and Western powers were direct participants, unlike others, in Sudan or Myanmar? Did the work of pro-Palestinian advocates over a generation or more prepare people for this? I don’t know. But you are right that as a result of the horrors that have been inflicted on Gaza over eight continuous months, and which are still being inflicted now, something new has happened. The displacement of three quarters of a million people in 1948 did not produce the same impact. The 1936–39 Arab Revolt is almost completely forgotten. None of those earlier events had anything like this effect.
The Arab Revolt has always fascinated me as one of the major episodes of anti-colonial struggle, which has had far less attention than it deserves. It began as a strike, became a series of strikes, then developed into a huge national uprising which had British forces tied down for over three years. Could you give us an explanation of its origins, development and consequences?
The Arab Revolt was essentially a popular uprising, on a massive scale. The traditional Palestinian leadership was taken by surprise, just as Arafat and the plo leadership were surprised by the First Intifada in 1987. Both uprisings were sparked by minor incidents; in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the death in battle of Shaikh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, killed by British forces. Born in 1882 in Jableh, on the Syrian coast, al-Qassam was a religious scholar, trained at Al-Azhar, and a militant anti-imperialist, who fought against all the Western powers in the region, beginning with the Italians in Libya in 1911, then the French-Mandate forces in Syria in 1919–20. He ended up in British-Mandate Palestine, where he lived and worked mainly among the peasantry and the urban poor. Al-Qassam’s killing had an enormous amplitude, such that within a few months it had helped to detonate the longest general strike in interwar colonial history. The best account is by Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian writer assassinated by the Israelis in 1972; it was to be the first chapter of his history of the Palestinian struggle, unfinished at his death.footnote1
Kanafani’s analysis stands to this day. Among other things, he underlined the economic impact on the popular classes of increased Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1930s, after Hitler came to power; the sacking of Arab workers from factories and construction sites, in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy of ‘Jewish Labour Only’; the eviction of 20,000 peasant families from their fields and orchards, sold to Zionist settlers by absentee landlords; rising poverty. These popular revolts erupt when people reach a point where they just cannot go on as before, and in this case social anger combined with powerful national and religious feelings. The Palestinians rose up against the full might of the British Empire—which, in a century and a half, had not been forced to grant independence to a single colonial dependency, with the sole exception of Ireland in 1921. The Arab Revolt was crushed by what was still the world’s most powerful empire, but the Palestinians fought for over three years, with perhaps a sixth of the adult male population killed, injured, in prison or in exile. In the annals of the interwar period, this was an unprecedented attempt to overthrow colonial rule. It was only suppressed by the deployment of 100,00 troops and the raf. This is a forgotten page in Palestinian history.
Did not this defeat also lead to a demoralization within the Palestinian masses, so that when the Nakba proper began in 1947, they still had not recovered from the terror of 1936–39?
The defeat of the Arab Revolt created a heavy legacy that affected the Palestinian people for decades. As Kanafani wrote, the Nakba, ‘the second chapter of the Palestinian defeat’—from the end of 1947 to the middle of 1948—was amazingly short, because it was only the conclusion of this long and bloody chapter which had lasted from April 1936 to September 1939.footnote2 What the British did was later copied in almost every detail by the Zionist leaders from Ben-Gurion onwards. For that reason alone, it’s worth recalling the cost to Palestinian society. At least 2,000 homes were blown up, crops destroyed, over a hundred rebels executed for possessing firearms. All this was accompanied by curfews, detention without trial, internal exile, torture, practices like tying villagers to the front of steam engines, as a shield against attacks by freedom fighters. In an Arab population of about a million, 5,000 were killed, 10,000-plus wounded and over 5,000 political prisoners were left rotting in colonial jails.
In the process of crushing the Arab Revolt, the British gave the Zionist forces that were working with them valuable training in counterinsurgency.
Yes. The Zionists were taught every underhanded colonial technique by counterinsurgency experts like Orde Wingate, and other specialists in torture and murder. The British imported veterans from India, like Charles Tegart, the notorious Chief of Police in Calcutta, the subject of six assassination attempts by Indian nationalists. The same forts and prison camps built by Tegart are still in use by Israel today. They brought in people from Ireland and other places in the Empire, like Sudan, where Wingate started, and where his father’s cousin, Reginald Wingate, had been Governor-General and an intelligence officer before that.
Orde Wingate, a long-forgotten name. I doubt many readers would even have heard of this demented figure, of whom Montgomery said the best thing he ever did was to be in the plane crash that killed him in Burma in 1944. Who was he and did he have any special links to the Zionist forces? I vaguely recall a bbc tv series on him in 1976 where he was portrayed as a hero.
He was a cold-blooded colonial killer, ending up a major general, who was loathed by many on his own side, as Montgomery’s remark suggests; Montgomery also described Wingate as ‘mentally unbalanced’. Churchill, no slouch when it came to inflicting suffering on subject populations, called Wingate ‘too mad for command’. He was born in British India in a pious Plymouth Brethren family. A Christian fundamentalist and a Bible literalist, he promoted the Old Testament version of Jewish redemption. He arrived in Palestine as a Captain in military intelligence, just as the 1936 uprising was beginning. He knew Arabic, learnt Hebrew and became a key figure in training Haganah fighters as ‘Special Night Squads’—in other words, death squads—to target and kill Palestinian villagers in the mountains, as the Israeli military and settlers do today. His notoriety was such that on the outbreak of the European war in 1939, the Arab notables demanded that Wingate be expelled from the region. He was. His passport was stamped, prohibiting his return. His job was done. He had trained many of the men who became commanders of the Palmach and later the Israeli military, like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. Several sites in Israel bear his name, and he is rightly considered the founder of Israeli military doctrine.
He taught them well.
Yes. What was once a British colonial speciality became an Israeli colonial speciality. Everything the Israelis have done they learned from the British—including the laws, the 1945 Defence Emergency Regulations, for example, that the British used against the Irgun. The same laws are still in force, now used against Palestinians. It all comes from the British colonial playbook.
A victory—or even a draw—for the Arab Revolt would have laid the foundations of a Palestinian national identity and strengthened their forces for the battles that lay ahead. Like Kanafani, you’ve argued that the vacillations of the traditional Palestinian leadership played a key role in the defeat, kowtowing as they did—at the St James Conference, for example—to the collaborationist Arab kings, who had been put on their thrones by the British?
Then as now, the Palestinian leadership was divided. They were stymied by their own inability to agree on an appropriate strategy—to mobilize the population and create a representative national forum, a popular assembly where these matters could be discussed. The British, unlike in India, Iraq and parts of Africa, denied Palestinians any political access to the colonial state. So the argument for a people’s assembly to break decisively with the structures of colonial control was very important.
The other background condition for the Revolt was the rise of fascism in Europe.
From the moment the Nazis came to power, the whole situation changed for Jews in their relationship to the world and to Zionism. That’s entirely understandable. It produced changes in Palestine too: between 1932 and 1939, the Jewish proportion of the population rose from 16 or 17 per cent to 31 per cent. The Zionists suddenly had a viable demographic base for taking over Palestine, which they didn’t have in 1932.
The Palestinians became indirect victims of the European Judeocide.
Absolutely. Palestinians are paying for the entire history of European Jew-hatred, going back to medieval times. Edward I expelling the Jews from England in 1290, the French expulsions in the following century, the Spanish and Portuguese edicts in the 1490s, the Russian pogroms from the 1880s and finally the Nazi genocide. Historically, a quintessentially European Christian phenomenon.
What if there had been no Judeocide in Europe and the German fascists had been ordinary fascists without the obsession to wipe out the Jews?
What a might-have-been. But look at the situation in 1939. There was already a Zionist project, with strong British imperial support, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews or Zionism. It had to do with strategic interests. The Balfour Declaration was made by the man responsible for shepherding through the most antisemitic bill in British parliamentary history, the Aliens Act of 1905. The British ruling class didn’t care for the Jews per se. They may have cared for their reading of the Bible, but what they cared about most was the strategic importance of Palestine and the Middle East as a gateway to India, long before 1917. That was what concerned them, from the beginning to the end. When they were forced to leave in 1948, they could do so because they’d already quit India in 1947 and didn’t need Palestine in the same way. Had Hitler been assassinated, there would still have been a Zionist project, with British imperial backing. Zionism would still have tried to take over the entirety of the country, which was always its objective, and would still have tried to create a Jewish majority through ethnic cleansing and immigration. I couldn’t speculate beyond that.
But weren’t there also anti-Zionist currents within the Jewish communities?
Certainly, there were Jewish communists, Jewish assimilationists. The vast majority of the persecuted Jewish population of Eastern Europe chose emigration to the white-settler colonies: South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, above all, the United States; some also went to Argentina and other Latin American countries. These were the majority and that’s where the bulk of the Jewish population of the world went, besides those who stayed in Europe. Anti-Zionism was a Jewish project, up until Hitler. Before then, Zionists were a minority and their programme was deeply contested in Jewish communities. But the Holocaust produced a kind of understandable uniformity in support of Zionism.
Defeats usually have the effect of stopping everything for a time; then the resistance rises again, in different forms. But in the case of 1936–39, the defeat was immediately followed by the eruption of the Second World War—which started in China, though many call it the European war. What was the attitude of the Palestinian leadership in that period? In Indonesia, Malaysia, India and parts of the Middle East, some sections of the nationalist movement said: the enemy of our enemy is our friend, if temporarily. Since our enemy is the British Empire, that means the Germans or the Japanese. In his book on Egypt, Anouar Abdel-Malek recounts how, as it appeared that Rommel might take Egypt, huge crowds gathered in Alexandria chanting, ‘Forward, Rommel, forward!’ They wanted anyone but Britain. What was the attitude in Palestine?
The attitude in Palestine was deeply divided. A minority faction of the leadership aligned themselves with the Germans, following the Grand Mufti. He had an extraordinary wartime career: the French kicked him out of Beirut, the British chased him out of Iraq, when they reoccupied it in 1941, then they chased him out of Iran. He tried to go to Turkey, but the Turks wouldn’t let him stay, so he ended up in Rome, and then Berlin. But most Palestinians did not adopt that line. Many joined the British Army and fought with the Allied forces. Of course, many leaders had been killed by the British, either on the battlefield or executed. Others were exiled. The British loved to exile their nationalist opponents to island possessions: Malta, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, the Andamans. My uncle was sent to the Seychelles for a couple of years, together with other Palestinian leaders, then exiled to Beirut for several more years. And so the leadership for the most part understood that Britain could never be their friend. You can read my uncle’s memoirs—he became virulently, venomously anti-British. He was always a nationalist and anti-British, but the degree to which the Revolt changed Palestinian views is remarkable. Previously, the leadership had always tried to conciliate the British, along the lines of many co-opted colonial elites. This changed with the crushing of the Revolt.
Ultimately, the defeat of the Revolt and then World War Two left the Palestinians ill-prepared for what came after, when the two new superpowers—the us and the Soviet Union—supported Zionism, while on the ground the British collaborated with the Zionists and Jordanians to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians were not sufficiently organized to face the assault of the Zionist military, which began in November 1947, months before the Mandate ended on 15 May 1948, when the un Partition was supposed to go into effect and the Arab armies joined the fray. By then, Zionist forces had taken Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Safad and dozens of villages, expelling around 350,000 Palestinians, and had already overrun much of what was to have been the Arab state under the un Partition Plan. So the Palestinians were already defeated before the State of Israel was proclaimed and the so-called Arab–Israeli War began.
We’ll come to the United States’ role in all this. But how do you explain the Soviet Union’s support for the Zionists, supplying them with Czech weapons in order to carry on fighting?
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