Any eviction has consequences. Sometimes the consequence may be that the tenant comes back and shoots the landlord. That hardly means the tenant is right, though.
No, it doesn’t. But again, I think you are missing the context here. These estates contained entire villages, sometimes thousands of people. A single sale, in 1920, involved the eviction of 8000 tenants in 22 villages (compensation was 3.5 Lebanese pounds each). It is easy to say that the owner of land has the right to evict tenants (though in many cases the ownership rights of the sellers were acquired in fairly dubious transactions). The fact remains that if you simultaneously deprive several thousand people of their homes and livelihood without providing any alternative, you will face a violent backlash. I’m not saying that backlash is right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate, but it is going to happen. The Zionist may have been within their legal rights to evict the tenants on the estates they acquired, but they would have had to have been pretty stupid, or pretty callous, not to recognize that in doing so they were creating a situation that would endanger their own security.
You can no more escape right and wrong here than you can jump off the planet.
If you want to try and work out the rights and wrongs of it, you’re a braver man than I am, but start with the idea that you’re seeing a collision between two different systems of law. In one system, defined by custom and tradition rather than written codes, the tenants are an inseparable part of the estate. In the other, the owner has absolute control over the property and can treat the tenants in any way desired. The second system is, from our remote perspective, better, in that it creates greater flexibility and ultimately more opportunities for rich and poor alike. Those who lost their homes and livelihoods to an abrupt transition between the two systems were not likely to appreciate these advantages.
This touches on a problem that is very common in transitions out of feudalism. Economies cannot function without recognized property rights, but ratifying the existing system of property rights in these cases institutionalizes a skewed and grossly inequitable distribution that was usually imposed by armed force or legal chicanery in the first place. Very few good solutions have been found, and many attempts have ended in prolonged cycles of violence and political instability. The appeal of communism in post-feudal societies was largely driven by unsatisfactory resolutions of this problem, which remains a major source of conflict in much of the world. The confrontation between the Zionists and the Palestinians was particularly difficult because the transition was very abrupt, and because it was forced not by trends within a society, but by an artificially introduced foreign population supported by resources that the local population could not dream of matching.
This discussion began with someone asking where the cycle of violence began. The first major outbreak of violence was in 1921, and the causes of that violence are very clear. It was a reaction to the large scale evictions and to the declared Zionist intention to found a Jewish State in an area where the existing population happened not to be Jewish. The Zionist settlers aimed, quite openly, to obtain sovereignty over the entire area, to establish a state “as Jewish as England is English”. The evictions were interpreted as evidence that when Zionists gained control of territory, the first step they took was to expel anyone who wasn’t Jewish. The conclusion of the locals was that the Zionists intended to evict them all eventually, and if you read the Zionist documents that circulated at the time, you see that this conclusion was neither unreasonable nor entirely inaccurate. British inquiries into the causes of the 1921 riots found that a major factor behind anti-Zionist sentiment was that Zionist pamphlets were widely read by Arabs, who found the contents threatening and inflammatory. The evictions by themselves might not have provoked violence. The goal of a Jewish State, alone, might not have provoked violence. The combination made violence inevitable.
It may very well have been “wrong” for the Arabs to resort to violence. With the British Government declaring formal support for Zionism in 1917, and flatly rejecting any Arab input on immigration questions in 1921 (only a few months before the riots, not coincidentally) what recourse did they have? When people feel threatened, and are subject to a foreign authority that is openly siding with those who threaten them, they take matters into their own hands, often in violent fashion. Right? Wrong? Hardly matters. One thing led to another.
The historical record surrounding the 1921 incidents has been grotesquely distorted by both sides, and there is very little secondary source material around that treats it fairly. The only way to get a clear grasp of what happened and why is to get your hands on a copy of the report of the Haycraft Commission, which was assigned by the Colonial Office to inquire into the causes of the violence, and into possible remedies. They conducted hundreds of interviews, and produced by far the most detailed and objective existing account of Arab-Zionist relations before 1921. I wouldn’t say it is completely objective – nothing produced by humans ever has been – but it is far more objective than accounts coming from Zionists or Palestinians. Nadine hates it, because it does not conform to her opinions. When I read it – in the late ‘70s – it didn’t conform to my opinions either. I had to reconsider the opinions, and ended up changing a lot of them. It changed some opinions in London as well: the near-complete support for Zionist goals began to erode when it became clear that these goals could not be pursued without provoking violence.
Some people would rather change reality to fit opinion, of course, but that’s their problem, not mine.
Life is not fair; that does not justify terrorism.
I assume that this applies as well to the terrorists who blew up the King David hotel, and to the ones who slaughtered several hundred Arabs at Deir Yassin after the brief battle for the village had ended. That was by far the most aggressive use of terror in the conflict to that date, upping the ante of violence by a considerable margin. The Arabs were not the first to resort to terrorism. When the Zionists found it convenient, they used it without hesitation. When their enemies used it, it became evil. |
