Good articles
Histories of the Canadian Zionist movement roundly acknowledge that its interwar support for colonisation in Palestine was generated by appeals that ‘stressed the connection of Britain and Palestine, of Zionism and imperial patriotism’. What is erased from the record is indigenous Palestinian society. In 1927, for example, the Canadian Zionist movement made its largest pre-1948 contribution to the struggle for Palestine: a $1,000,000 commitment to the JNF to finance the purchase of Wadi al-Hawarith. This was a territory on central Palestine’s coast – known to Zionist writers and Israeli map-makers as ‘Emek Hefer’ – where a Bedouin community had been living for generations. The JNF resorted to bribery to get the land put up for auction, secured the deed, and appealed to the British authorities to evict the inhabitants. The Palestinian novelist Emile Habibi, Freeman-Maloy: Remembering Balfour then growing up in Haifa, later singled out the struggle over Wadi al-Hawarith as emblematic in the eyes of his generation of Britain’s role in dispossessing Palestinians. ‘Greater Britain’, it turns out, provided the funds as well as the means of eviction.
The case of Wadi al-Hawarith suggests the application to Palestine of an accumulated experience of disparaging indigenous peoples. At the time, yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a future president of Israel, justified the evictions with words that could have been plucked from Buchan’s The African Colony. Buchan had asserted that in the entirety of southern Africa there were no ‘autochthonous’ peoples, since he felt the histories of all peoples south of the Zambezi river could ‘be fixed within the last five centuries. Five centuries do not give a long title to a country, as savage titles go.’ Ben-Zvi evaluated the claims of ‘the Wadi-Hawareth Arabs’ in the same spirit, citing British studies of the Holy Land to assert that these Arabs had been in Palestine for ‘only about 150 years’. A less historically minded rationale for eviction came from one of the British officials on the ground. He remarked that the community in any case comprised nothing better than ‘primitive Seminegroid Beduin’, destined for displacement by efficient settlers. Perhaps the richest rationale comes from Canada. Here even contemporary scholarship maintains that Wadi al-Hawarith was ‘uninhabited’. The irony is that its eviction was publicised to the point that Britain’s assistant governor in Jerusalem at one point warned Palestinian newspaper editors to moderate their coverage of the case or have their newspapers shuttered.
Speaking in 1994 at a human rights conference in the Gaza Strip, Eqbal Ahmad reflected on what had once seemed to him the paradox of 1948 – the massive dislocation of Palestinian society, a colonial tragedy at the dawn of decolonisation. ‘Later’, he said, ‘I understood this was a warning, not a paradox.’ Ahmad described Palestine as a symbol of the postcolonial condition and a barometer of imperialism’s enduring force in world affairs.
In 2003, amidst a global surge of war and occupation, Arundhati Roy wrote along similar lines. She described the perpetual crisis in Palestine as one of ‘imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world’.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10. ... 6817733877