(From Irish Political Review, August 2002)
"The Palestine News”
(Note:
The Palestine News started publication in 1918. It described itself as The Weekly
Newspaper Of The Egyptian Expeditionary Force Of The British Army In Occupied
Enemy Territory, and was published from “G.H.Q. First Echelon, Palestine”.
The paper is clearly intended as reading matter for British soldiers.)
[In
the issue for 6th March 1919, P.N. Waggett continued his series on The
New Palestine (the previous issue had carried his Benefits
Wrought By The Occupation, the chief of which appeared to be a policy
of even-handedness by the occupying authorities, in place of the Turkish pro-Muslim
bias). In this issue the theme was Setting The
Law On Its Feet, which explains that, though Turkish officials had left,
their Confessional system of law remained. (This regulates personal matters,
such as marriage and divorce, according to the law of the religious authorities
of each denomination, which conduct their own legal hearings: these Turkish
practices continue into modern-day Israel.)]
[On
13th March, Palestine
News carried an article, The Jewry Of
Palestine. Jerusalem And The Colonies, written anonymously by a Zionist
settler, who was concerned to differentiate the new colonisers of Palestine
from existing Jerusalem Jews, who were regarded as parasitic rather than progressive:]
We Zionists must frankly admit that the weakest point in our armour is the Jewry of Jerusalem. When you ask: “Is this the type of Jew you hope to redeem Palestine with?” we can only answer: “No.” But, it must also be kept in mind that the origin of this peculiar element was not at all so disgraceful. The establishment of agricultural colonies in Palestine was impossible before 1880; the backwardness of the country afforded no chance either for the merchant or artisan; so the only way to retain at least a few Jewish families in the Holy Land was to support them with alms from abroad. It was only natural that orthodox Jewish communities in Europe wanted somebody to pray on their behalf at the Wailing Wall on Friday nights and were prepared to provide sustenance to the person employed in this pious function and their families. This was the origin of the “Halooka” (literally, dispensing of alms). In the beginning its members had really been men of learning and enthusiasm, men who had abandoned good positions in Poland or Hungary to be near the ruins of Old Glory. But they gradually died out, and with the epigones the Wailing Wall became a perfunctory ritual and “Halooka” the real thing. At the same time their number grew out of all proportion. Alms came steadily in, but the total was just sufficient to save these men from actual starvation—and to demoralise them. Always in rags, always a bit hungry, some of them got nevertheless accustomed to think that they need not work, that work was beneath their dignity, that life did not contain any responsibility except performance of certain rituals—and perhaps not even that.… If accurate statistics could be taken, it would most probably appear that the real, undiluted “Halooka” type is only a minority…
We must state most emphatically that Zionism is not responsible for this type of Jerusalem Jewry and that it is not with “this sort of Jew” we propose to colonise and reconstruct. The “sort of Jew” we hope to get is represented by Tel Aviv, on one side, by the agricultural colonies on the other…
[After
a reference to “the depot of the Jewish battalions in the British Army”,
the article continues by describing the way large-scale colonising settlement
continued, despite efforts by the Turkish authorities to prevent it—efforts
thwarted by the insistence of ‘the West’ on having legal jurisdiction
over their own citizens in all the Sultan’s territories (These Imperial
practices were customary in other countries also, such as Egypt and China.):]
In 1890 the Sultan issued a decree prohibiting foreign Jews from settling in Palestine. they were only allowed to visit the Holy Land for a period of no more than three months on religious pilgrimage. After three months they had to leave the country voluntarily or be arrested and expelled by the police. Of course, they had no right to purchase and own estates. Fortunately, there were the so-called “capitulations”—international treaties binding the Ottoman Government to deal with foreign subjects in Turkey not immediately but through the channel of their respective consuls. In order to enforce the expulsion of a Russian or Galician Jew, the local Turkish police had to apply for assistance to Russian or Austrian consuls. Now these latter, for purposes of their own, were not very keen on helping the Turk in this particular enterprise; on the contrary, increase of numbers of their respective subjects meant for them increase of their own influence. This was one cause why expulsions after three months’ stay could not always be carried out; the second cause was, of course, that old Turkish substitute for citizens rights—baksheesh… even more precarious was the condition of their land tenure. They had to buy their estates through substitutes who, being Ottoman subjects, had the right to appear in documents as the legal owners. Were these substitutes trustworthy? Not always… Palestine is almost a desert where… every acre in some Jewish colonies has cost twice as much as an acre in Buckimshire [sic]…
[The
colonists built roads on the lands they acquired without benefit of mortgages
and provided their own security against thieves by establishing their own police
groups, though the Turkish police had to be bribed if prosecutions were required.
The author continues by describing the achievements of the previous thirty years:]
Seen in this light, the Jewish colonising work in Palestine can proudly challenge fair comparison with the achievements of any colonising Power on the Asiatic or African coast of the Mediterranean, and perhaps elsewhere.
The Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine are about 50 in number, with 110,000 acres of cultivable land and about 15,000 inhabitants… A few of the colonies are of the co-operative type, based on more or less socialistic principles.
In the following I quote a specialist’s opinion on the Zionist colonies:—
“The value of their work can best be judged by comparing the yields of their crops with the yields of the crops of the surrounding inhabitants. Normally cereals (wheat and barley) yield an average gross produce of about £1 per acre; but in the better Jewish colonies, the fields yield up to £2 and £3 and more. In orange groves 350 cases of oranges are considered a very good average crop; but Jewish orange groves, as a rule, yield about 40-50% more… These figures are an eloquent testimony to the skill of the Jewish colonist.”
[Further
statistics deal with vineyards, keeping of cows, the increased value of land
after colonisation and the general benefit to the State derived from the tax
revenues from Jewish colonial production. The author continues quoting from
his expert as follows—]
“What our pioneers have achieved in Palestine is, of course, not much. It is even very little when compared with the tremendous task Zionism has set himself [sic]—to bring into Palestine Jewish settlers from all the countries of the universe, and to convert not a few acres but the whole of the waste areas of the Holy Land into green fields, green woods and green gardens. But what these pioneers achieved—achieved under most unfavourable conditions—serves one purpose at least; it has clearly shown to all those who judge straight and fair that the Jewish Nation is second to none in its capacity for colonisation.”
This was, indeed, the main thing our pioneers were out to prove. They foresaw that a day would come when the leading civilised nations of the world would have to settle the fate of Palestine and of the Jewish aspirations, and that on that day they would ask: “But is the Jew able to colonise, to redeem deserts, to champion civilisation in a wilderness?”
To this question our colonies are a clear and sufficient answer.
[The
Rape Of Palestine by William B. Ziff was published in New York in 1938.
It is a hard-headed Zionist argument which states things that idealistic ‘Zionist
theoreticians’ thought it advisable to avert their minds from. An extract
from the chapter on Arabs—sarcastically entitled A
People In Despair—is given below. This kind of thing was not often
said in print by Zionist publicists, whose business was the influencing of Western
opinion. But the racial contempt which it expresses was an attitude which I
found to be common amongst civilised Jews in Israel a generation ago, before
the Intifada modified it into an apprehensive hatred. BC.]
"A
People In Despair"
Does
An Arab Race Exist?
The British, who were later to talk imposingly of 'Arab nationalism in Palestine,' were of a quite different view in 1918. British Peace Handbook No. 60 declares briskly that "the people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arab speaking. . . . In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." As late as 1921 the Administration was still officially claiming that the word 'Arab' as applied to Palestinians was a misnomer.
Actually there are no 'Arabs' anywhere. There is not even a fairly homogeneous mixed race. Throughout the Peninsula the Arab has ceased to exist. Those who have taken his place are a motley assortment of peoples, low in the scale of human development, who speak the Arabic tongue. Even the courtly Saladin was no Arab, but a Kurd. Hussein of the Hejaz, himself, was mothered by a Circassian and had his official heirs by a woman of Turkish blood.
The countless cities, tribes and nations incorporated at sword's point into the swollen host of Allah, soon drowned the Arab out by the very suffocation of their numbers. An even more dreadful revenge was exacted by that cruel institution, the Harem. How enormous this practice was can be seen in Sykes' description of the empire of fabled Haroun-al-Raschid, with its tremendous seraglios stocked with women from every conceivable corner of the globe. He marvels at the unending supply of female slaves, of every color and kind. Since purity of blood in the community of Mohammed always gives way to purity of line, where are the descendants of Qoraish now? Even in the very core of desert Arabia, the race has been steadily adulterated by an incoming flow of slave girls, most of them, in recent centuries, from the Sudan and other places in Africa. The offspring of these stolen creatures are not slaves but free Moslems, since the moment a woman conceives she attains the status of a legal wife.
Pilgrims from such faraway places as Java and Morocco, streaming like columns of magnetized ants toward the holy cities of the Hejaz, contribute liberally to this mélange. The Moslem habit of giving a slave girl to an overnight guest for his comfort, the frequent looting of visiting caravans of the devout, all sweetened the mixture. "If we make exception of the Sherifian families—the descendants of the Prophet—and some very few other people of undoubted Arab origin," writes the great Turkish scholar, Dr. Riza-Tewfik, "all the population of Mecca is alien to the Semitic race." The Syrian author, Rihani, describing the population of the Arabian coast, is even more emphatic.
History gives it as a fact that the Arabs never settled Palestine, merely taking control and providing the usual military and administrative caste. They imposed their religion on the native peoples but failed to exterminate them. Here, too, gradual racial suicide was the price of uncontrolled lust. As far back as the Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem, Edris comments on the vast number of captive females required to satisfy the wants of these amorous gentlemen. He reports slaves brought from all parts of Africa and the East, with good-looking Nubian girls most in demand. The Crusaders found a country peopled by a mixture of all the races of the Orient, intermarried with Greeks. On the founding of the Kingdom they had to recognize the existence of five types of Moslems (each of different racial antecedents), as well as Jews, Druses, Samaritans, and others. By 1120, when the Council of Nablus was held, the Latins themselves were already reported half absorbed in this churning stew of races.
Of even greater significance than the loose social habits of the Moslems was the physical position of this little land, which turned it into a bloody charnel house for unending centuries. Spoliation; destruction, rapine, extermination, claimed the land…
As for the Christian population, we are told by the learned Dr. Christie that it is made up of fragments of all the Levant races. The native Christians of Nazareth come from the Hauran and from Merj-Ayun; while the Christians of Safed are the children of immigrants from Hasbeiya who came in the second half of the last century.
In the Arabic language only the Bedouin is designated by the word 'Arab.' But here, too, unless the eyes cannot be trusted, there is little evidence of common descent. The Ghawarîneh tribe of the Jordan Valley have strongly marked African features, fuzzy hair, black skin and guttural voices. A short distance away is the tribe of Ghazawîyeh, shrill-voiced, gaunt and large-featured. Nearby are the blue-eyed blondes of Bethlehem. Several tribes of alleged Jewish stock have even been described in Transjordan.
Until English political maneuvering recast their viewpoint for them, the townspeople were insulted if they were referred to as Arabs. They wanted to be known for what they were, Syrian Levantines. Count Sforza designates the inhabitants of this entire region as a medley of peoples "with not the slightest bond between them." Mrs. Andrews remarks drily that "in Jerusalem today there are two or three families that claim to be of the fine Arab stock which entered the country in the Seventh Century." Dr. Christie doubts whether there is any Arab blood in the peasantry or villages at all.
As long as these masses have lived side by side, they have been at each other's throats. Tribe hated tribe, city man hated fellah, the Bedouin despised both, sect cursed sect, and even family disdained family as unworthy scions of an inferior race. That all this ill-assorted, explosive mixture can be organized into one autonomous nation may also be doubted for the future.
Arab Types And Traits
From steppe, mountain, jungle and desert, an agglomeration of primitive, savage man had swarmed in successive waves over Palestine, and left their seed there. These with a vast admixture of slaves and a leavening of nobler blood represent the racial antecedents of the people we call 'Levantine' today.
Many of these people are shrewd, clever and even charming. The studied gentility of the upper-bracket Arab leaves little to be desired. Dressed in his Abaye and red tarbush he is a colorful figure. His bearing is languorous and courtly, in vivid contrast to the direct speech and often uncouth manners of the immigrant Jew. Beneath this thin stratum, the balance of the Arab population is primitive in the extreme. For the most part it can hardly be said that they have risen above the stage of barbarism. They are, on the whole, of poor physical type and of low mentality. It would be hard to pose a wider disparity of culture, instinct and mind than lies between these people and the returning Hebrew. It is on this cold reality that all the finespun visions of the Zionist theoreticians run afoul.
English as well as American observers, where they are free from the corrosion of Empire politics, give a none-too-flattering estimate of this population. Laconically the American, Commander Lynch, reported that they were "far inferior to the North American Indian" then being held on reservations by the United States Government. Drawing a sharp difference between them and his desert tribesmen, Lawrence refers to the Palestinians as "an ape-like people, having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow." The late Governor of Sinai Peninsula, C. S. Jarvis, sweepingly disposes of the Arab as "undoubtedly the most striking example of decadent and decayed gentry in the world." He finds that "the Arab works about 10 days out of the 365," and that "all forms of manual labor are abhorrent to him." Like Petrie and other English observers, Jarvis calls the tribesman a bane to the country he inhabits, asserting that this once prosperous area “will remain wilderness as long as he encumbers the land." While "the Arab is sometimes called the Son of the Desert," he continues, quoting from Palmer, "this is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father of the Desert, having created it himself, and the arid waste in which he lives and on which practically nothing will grow is the direct result of his appalling indolence, combined with his simian trait of destroying everything he does not understand."
Almost a century ago Lieutenant Lynch wrote that "the ruling passion of an Arab is greediness of gold, which he will clutch from the unarmed stranger or filch from an unsuspecting friend." In 1935 Jarvis remarks that "his love of money is such that he loses all sense of proportion whenever currency is discussed, whilst if actual coins and notes are displayed before him he not only loses his sense of proportion but his self-control as well." St. John Ervine adds that "when I hear an Englishman sentimentalizing about the noble Arab and remember the dirty and greedy baksheesh hunters I saw wherever I went, I feel rage rislng within me."
Any attempt to judge these people by European standards is anomalous in itself. Their language, for example, contains 100 words for camel and 99 for woman, but none for murder. There is not a single Arabic word by which one can distinguish between the slaughter of a sheep and the premeditated killing of a man. Under his Abaye the Arab wears a long, wicked-looking stiletto which he will use with lightning quickness on the slightest provocation. Brutality is common to Arabs of all classes. Their "utter callousness . . . for the suffering of animals," comments Reverend H. V. Morton, "is a terrible thing." "All their horses, in the tourist season, have bleeding knees," adds the Reverend Mr. Jannaway.
Among all strata of Arabs woman is regarded as a mere animal. The Moslem does not believe that a woman has a soul. If two men begin to make complimentary inquiries about their respective families, the wives are mentioned last, the boys and cattle being named before them. "A father who has several daughters," writes Pierotti, "regards them just as he would sheep or cows, and sells them in the same way."
Girls are often not even counted in the figures given census takers. A woman who bears a female child may be beaten and reviled as if it were her fault. If she bears a large number of daughters, she is despised. Merrill mentions a typical unfortunate, thus described by sympathetic neighbors: "Poor thing, poor thing! She's got no children—only girls." A barren woman is promptly divorced, and her life made a constant series of humiliations. An amusing side-light on this attitude is contained in the petition submitted to the Government in 1935, asking a ban on the showing of motion pictures to women; asserting that such entertainment was "contrary to Moslem law" and "had a demoralizing effect on women."
The Arab's sanitary arrangements do not bear mention. They are long past the stage where they could be described as vulgar or offensive. He has an incurable habit of using the middle of a busy street for a latrine, shocking visiting European ladies beyond measure.
Contrary to what might be expected, the Arab is of generally poor physique. The geographer, George Adam Smith, describing a locality, speaks of the inhabitants as "a sickly and degenerate race." Tuberculosis and malaria are rampant. Syphilis is a chronic affliction which few escape. The dread amoebic dysentery, meningitis and cholera are common. The Arab's medical arrangements are elementary. He continues to tend wounds by the application of fresh cow dung; and in the case of eye disease, applies bandages soaked in camel's urine. An Arab will come to a fountain and wash his hair, ears, face, mouth and feet in it, before drinking. He is much amused over the European's ideas of hygiene. St. John Ervine speaks the mind of most visitors when he remarks that "the man who can cure the Arab of his filthy habits will be his benefactor."
The Arab believes religiously in occult powers, in Shaitan, the evil one; in afrits, malicious little devils; in Djinnieh, wicked female spirits who suck the life from men's bodies. They cure illness by prayer at a sacred tree or shrine. Slips of paper with verses of the Koran on them are soaked in water and the drink is given to patients; or they use the froth from the mouth of a mania dervish who has fallen in a fit. They believe a wolf's jawbone, worn around the neck, to be a potent charm.
The Arab is stubbornly opposed to modernity of any kind. He has no conception of civic duty. Broadhurst found that he could not even organize a voluntary fire brigade in Jaffa, and that the city had to be served by the Jewish group in Tel Aviv. There is no intellectual life. The only Arab writer of any consequence is Aref-al-Arif, whose book on Bedouin life could not even find an Arabic publisher and had to appear first in Hebrew translation.
There is no denying the fact that the Arab is on the whole likable—as are all primitives. When not aroused by cupidity or anger, he can be openhanded to a fault. His very ineptness is engaging. Even his knavery is tolerable and amusing. In a typical instance given by Meltzer, an elderly woman in a law court, obviously not less than sixty, claimed to be twenty-seven. "But your son says he is twenty-three years old, so how can you be only twenty-seven?" asks the red-faced English judge, on the verge of apoplexy. "My Lord," answers the hag, "upon my head be it if I am lying. That is how it is. Everything is in the hands of Allah. He alone knows the ages of women."
Like the heroes of old, Arabs think it a stain on their reputations if they do not gorge. To say how much a man can eat or drink is their way of expressing how strong he is. They are also inordinately fond of perfumes and unguents. Men who can afford it will walk around smelling as if they had fallen in a vat of attar of roses.
Few of them have family names. They are simply called after the tribe to which the family belongs. There is no set style. A child may be called by name, followed by his father's name, as 'Yakub Ibrahim'; or the father might be called 'Abu Yakub' (father of Yakûb), and the mother, 'Umm Yakûb' (mother of Yakûb). Sometimes they are merely known by the trades they ply, as Hadâd (blacksmith), Hajjâr (stoneworker), etc.
Perched atop of the social scale is the Effendieh class, characterized by Duff as "those masters of low intrigue." They have not altered since Turkish times when the engineer Pierotti described them in an ironic simile as "a curse to the country—a greater evil to Palestine than the plagues were to Egypt, because those were temporary and these are permanent." They consider work of any kind to be degrading; poverty and loss of face, unpardonable crimes. They used to extort money from Christian travelers and convents, but this easy source of revenue has been stopped since British occupation. Their usual method of living is by usury. Blackmail is another accepted feature of their system of existence. It is this class which provides the politicians who have kept the country in so much turmoil.
The sex habits of this gentry are notorious. Their word is valueless, even under oath. Most of them have immense families, with many wives and concubines, purchased with money derived from Jewish immigration. "A Moslem family of five wives and thirty or forty children," says Mrs. Erskine, "is no rarity."
In the cities is a mongrelized horde of ruffians whose presence makes it impossible for any European woman to walk alone on the streets after dark. Their insolent eyes undress every woman they see, with lingering deliberation. The 'middle class,' as in all undeveloped peoples, is neither numerous nor well-defined. European opinions of this group are not complimentary. Duff terms them "absolutely incapable of loyalty. . . If money or advantage is to be gained by betraying partners, there are very few of them that will not snatch at the opportunity."
At the bottom of the social scale is the Bedouin, whose black hair tents can be seen today exactly as in the time of the first Pharaoh. He has seen Abraham and Solomon pass. Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Alexander, the Ptolemies, a dozen civilizations rising and falling, have flitted before his eyes. He remains the same. If his horizon was altered at any point, it speedily shifted back again as soon as the disturbing element was removed.…
The settled Arabs, known as the fellaheen, are considered by the Bedouin to be of different (and inferior) race from himself. The fellah lacks nearly all the undeniable charm of his Bedouin countryman. He is incredibly backward and fanatic, and usually of low intelligence. He wears a long plain cotton dress resembling the old-fashioned nightshirt, which is never washed and lasts him for years. He is generally undersized and sickly.
The villages of gray mud huts invariably nestle on the side of a hill, with an evident eye to safety from surprise attack. The dwellings themselves are rude structures made of mud or camel dung thatched with straw, without windows or ventilation. In one part of the shack lives the owner and his family, sleeping together on straw mats. In the other part is housed the cattle, together with the hired hand, if one is employed. The place is heated by a rough oven which burns the usual fuel, dried cattle dung.
In the house is not the slightest evidence of artistic or creative impulse to remind the visitor that these people are lifted above the stage of simple animal appetite.… [pp355-377]
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Articles From "Palestine News"