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Vol. 73/No. 5      February 9, 2009

 
Israel created on land taken from Palestinians
(Books of the Month column)
 
Below is an excerpt from Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in February. The book explains that the formation of the state of Israel fits into the pattern of 19th and 20th century colonial conquest. Following proclamation of the state of Israel in 1948 based on a United Nations-imposed partition of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states, Israeli troops terrorized Palestinians into fleeing their land and homes and defeated surrounding Arab governments that sought to block the seizure of these territories. Through the course of this fighting Israeli troops seized four-fifths of land partitioned as the Palestinian state. The Jordanian monarchy took possession of the rest. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MAXIME RODINSON  
The relations between the Israelis and the Arabs have in fact been less relations of exploitation than of domination. Let us take an overall view of the matter, sticking to the bare minimum of what cannot be disputed. Whatever the particular motives in the flight of the Arabs from Israeli territory, which reduced their number from two-thirds to one-tenth of the population,1 the general cause was undeniably the determination of the new settlers who infiltrated into Palestine little by little over a period of some sixty years, to become the ruling element in a Jewish national state. I quite agree that this was less a determination to rule over the Arab ethnic group than it was to rule over a territory. But since no one can claim that they were freely given said territory by the Arabs, it was clearly a question of a successful effort to impose their will upon the other side.

I do not want to dwell here on the situation of the Arabs in Israel; for that, I refer the reader to the fine, sensible, and balanced, but also lucid book already mentioned, by Walter Schwarz.2 In spite of the recent relaxation of the most blatantly discriminatory measures, it is obvious that the Jewish majority is imposing its rule on the Arab minority. “The main impression,” writes a perceptive Jewish-American sociologist, “is that the sympathies of the Israeli Arabs lie in the highest degree with their Arab kindred and that Arab allegiance is not to the Jewish majority that now governs, but rather to their kindred in Egypt or Jordan who promise to free them. There may be many exceptions, but this is certainly the attitude among the majority of the Arabs.”3 This is a quite normal consequence of the situation, and it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. The Arabs in Israel, like the Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel, are in a situation that they have not accepted and that the Yishuv has imposed upon them by force.4 [The Yishuv was the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the declaration of the state of Israel. Since 1920 it began functioning, in effect, as a state within a state.] Whatever justifications one might be able to find for this act, no one should be able to deny that it is a fact.

I will conclude by briefly mentioning the Arab argument that, in addition to its domineering role at home and, historically speaking, the colonial nature of the creation of its state, Israel participates in the economic exploitation of the Third World alongside the industrialized European-American powers and Japan as part of the world system that is referred to as imperialist. A study of the problem would require a great deal of space and attention to nuances. If one sticks to generalities, it seems obvious that Israel’s technical superiority gives it possibilities for exerting economic pressure on underdeveloped economies. But on the other hand, these possibilities are greatly diminished by the smallness of its territory, its difficulties with its nearest neighbors, and perhaps especially its own economic dependence on the European-American powers. It is rather by political choice that Israel has generally turned up as an ally of the imperialist powers, and it can be said that this political choice was in large part imposed by the circumstances surrounding the formation and birth of the state. This was another almost inevitable consequence of the initial choice made by the Zionists. At least it made any other attitude difficult. Roughly speaking, it is certainly true that, as [founder of the Zionist movement Theodor] Herzl wanted, Israel constitutes a beachhead of the industrialized, capitalist world in an underdeveloped world.

1. The most common motive for the flight of the Arabs appears to have been quite simply panic at the prospect of war, as in Spain in 1939 or France in 1940. In any case, there can be no doubt that the Israeli Oradour, the deliberate massacre the night of April 9-10, 1948, by the Irgun of 254 men, women, and children in the Arab village of Dir Yassin, had a dramatic effect on this flight. The only person to deny that it was a massacre was the head of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, who nonetheless bragged about the effect of the “lies” about Dir Yassin: “All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting Dir Yassin!” (The Revolt, Story of the Irgun, p. 165, corroborated by J. and D. Kimche, Both Sides … , p. 124; cf. M. Bar-Zohar, Ben Gurion, the Armed Prophet, pp. 107-108). Many Jews like the supreme leader D. Ben Gurion hoped, very logically, that the greatest possible number of Arabs would leave. His hagiographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, candidly writes: “The fewer [Arabs] there were living within the frontiers of the new Jewish state, the better he would like it… . (While this might be called racialism, the whole Zionist movement actually was based on the principle of a purely Jewish community in Palestine. When various Zionist institutions appealed to the Arabs not to leave the Jewish State but to become an integral part of it, they were being hypocritical to some extent).” (Ben Gurion, p. 103 f.) It could not have been said any better!

2. Walter Schwarz, The Arabs in Israel, London, Faber and Faber, 1959.

3. Alex Weingrod, Israel, Group Relations in a New Society, London, Pall Mall Press, 1965 (Institute of Race Relations), p. 70 f.

4. The annexation of the non-Israeli West Bank by the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, placing the Palestine Arabs under a sovereignty they did not want, was a consequence (one Israel hoped for) of proclaiming the Jewish state and of the 1948 war.
 
 
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