SAYING NO: THE ROLE OF REJECTION
IN NATIONAL IDENTITY FORMATION:
THE CASE OF PALESTINE
 Roger Heacock |
by Roger Heacock, Professor of History,
Chair, Graduate Prgram in International Studies
Birzeit University
Contemporary journalism and to some extent even scholarship deals with the questions of nationalism and ethnicity as though they were third world phenomena which, like other scourges, are beating at the doors of the West.
Nationalism is now viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life. What had once been banished to the outer peripheries of the earth is now seen picking its way back toward Europe, through the long-forgotten provinces of the Habsburg, the Czarist, and the Ottoman empires. like drugs, terrorism and illegal immigration, it is one more product of the Third World that the West dislikes but is powerless to stop.(1)
In fact, needless to say, the reverse is of course true. The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars began the dialectical process through which the ideologies and practices of national movements moved south, east and west to encompass most of the regions of the world in the course of the nineteenth century.
There is an ongoing debate as to the essentialist or voluntarist/historicist nature of these phenomena.(2) This debate is led by scholars, but with the enthusiastic participation of journalists and growing numbers of politicians.(3)
For the sake of the present argument, it suffices to point out that there exists a continuum in the historical phenomenon of nationalism, based on the dual paradigm of group identity formation: positive (staking out the social, geographical and ethnic boundaries of identity in relation to the local environment) and negative (rejecting a definition imposed by external forces and substituting a new one for it). Specific cases fall somewhere on a continuum between these two ideal models. France and England can be placed at one end of the continuum (one needs but point to Shakespeare's and Du Bellay's expressions of early national consciousness), Palestine at the other.
THE HISTORICAL CASE OF PALESTINE
"Palestine" as a geographic designation dates back to Antiquity. The Greeks knew the coast better than inland regions, and therefore, the Philistines, coastal dwellers, were more familiar to them than the Canaanites, inland peoples speaking Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.(4) Under the long rule of the Ottomans, Palestine was an integral part of Greater Syria (Bilad ash-Sham), which also encompassed present-day Syria, Lebanon and Jordan (but which was never a single administrative entity). By the second half of the 19th century, Palestinians are part and parcel of the growing Syrian- or Arab nationalist trends (which were not in fact clearly distinguished from or strongly competing with one another.(5) Anti-Ottoman secessionism was, however, not a major movement until the Young Turks, with their active pan-Turanian and laicizing policies, took over in Constantinople in 1908, and actively pursued their policies everywhere in the Empire including its Arab provinces. The Arab population (in its majority Sunni Muslim) felt that both its culture and its religion were at risk. Had it not been for the effectiveness of Turkish repression early in the First World war, the Arab national struggle would very likely have been led from inside the Empire, in Greater Syria, rather than from the Hijaz (Arabian peninsula), from which the call for the Arab revolt went out in 1916. The Palestinians were part and parcel of the development of Syrian and Arab nationalist consciousness. However, they occupied an area which for historical and religious reasons had been increasingly distinct ever since the Napoleonic invasion. From the end of the eighteenth century on, political circumstances begin to give rise to a genuine Palestinian entity: the administrative district of Damascus, which extends to the Red sea along the Jordan rift, defines its eastern limit; the autonomous region of Mount Lebanon and the coastal province of Beirut border it to the north; in 1907, the border with Egypt is internationally recognized; the question of the Holy Places leads the Ottomans to make the governor of Jerusalem and of southern Palestine depend directly on the capital of the empire. The local cults of Muslim saints, such as the prophet Moses, point to the existence of a distinct character.(6)
As mentioned above, the Palestinian national movement is rather close to the second paradigm, of the affirmation of national identity through rejection. What was the identity projected on the Palestinians from the outside, during the period we are concerned with, and which begins with the First World war? The exchange of ten letters between the Sharif Hussein of Mecca and Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, resulted in the agreement that an Arab Khalifate would be restored under the Hashemites, and that it would encompass all of Syria to the Turkish border (with some ambiguity as to the future of Lebanon, with the Holy Places being put under British 'protection' and Jerusalem under an international regime).(7) But in 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France (in which Russia acquiesced) carved Syria up into several parts, without dealing with Palestine as a unit. One year later, with the Balfour declaration, there had been some movement for the British, in their famous document, ratified by many of the world's chancelleries and adopted by the League of Nations in the preamble to the British mandate, proclaimed the policy of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even as it defined Palestinians in purely negative terms, as "non-Jews" ("...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities"), who were of course expected to do nothing to impair the establishment of the Jewish National Home. There is in this view of course no ethnic, much less national, identification of the region's inhabitants. And it is correctly that most students of the Palestinian national movement date its rising self-consciousness to the publication of the Balfour declaration, with which the entire 'non-Jewish' population (and we are here speaking of the overwhelming majority) could only disagree. Clearly there were many contradictions between the various agreements and documents (Hussein-McMahon, Sykes-Picot, Balfour declaration) but their sum-total was not only to negate future Arab self-determination in Palestine, but also to suggest a future for the area in which the inhabitants themselves would lose the symbiotic and primary relationship to the land which they had, despite centuries of Turkish occupation, enjoyed until then. It is not surprising under these circumstances that the term of "nation" as applied to the Palestinians began to be employed at the end of the war.(8)
Given the mounting confusion and tension, it was not surprising either that the Paris Peace conference (with the blessing of Wilson, but also of Clemenceau) should have dispatched an investigative commission to the Arab Mashreq, especially Syria. It was in the event made up of an American team (the British and French having for different reasons declined to participate). The result was the King-Crane Commission report (1919) presented to Woodrow Wilson and the Paris conferees.
The conclusions of the Report are well known (though, because they contradicted the policies of the Powers, they were not published for years): it was clear that the people of Greater Syria felt they should achieve "absolute independence" (73.5% of all petitioners)(9) which did not exclude foreign "assistance" limited to the economic and technical fields; as to a mandatory power, an idea which, according to King-Crane, they were willing to consider "rather under protest" (and which simply connoted technical and economic assistance for a limited period),(10) the vast majority (60.5%) preferred the USA, which reflects the popularity of a state which did not have the colonial past of France and Britain, both of which were regarded askance as potential mandatory powers by the Syrians (with the exception of a handful of people originating from Lebanon who preferred France in case there had to be a mandate.)
A majority of people were in favor of "the establishment of a 'democratic, non-centralized, constitutional' kingdom" (a small number of Christians were in favor of a republic, and thus against a Syrian kingdom under the Emir Faysal.(11)
The definition of the desired independent country is clear. It was to encompass greater Syria, or "united Syria", as the petitioners called it. 80.4% spoke in favor of such a state, "including Cilicia, the Syrian desert and Palestine." The boundaries of this area are usually defined as "The Taurus Mountains on the north; the Euphrates and Khabur Rivers, and the line extending east of Abu Kamal to the east of Al Juf on the east; Rafa and the line running from Al Juf to the south of Akaba on the south; and the Mediterranean Sea on the West". Such a united Syria also "received strong support from many Christians..."(12)
As noted by the Commission itself, the Syrian Congress at Damascus held also in 1919 (which had been selected by surviving elected members of the pre-war Turkish parliament coming from the region) issued resolutions which were in most cases identical to the results of their own investigations. Among other things, that Congress had stated (paragraph 8):
We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, nor of the littoral western zone, which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country. We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed against partition under whatever circumstances.(13)
While there was among the inhabitants of greater Syria an overwhelming majority in favor of a united Syria, some (originating from Palestine, and particularly among the Christian petitioners) asked for "an autonomous Palestine" within the Syrian state (in addition of course to the pro-Zionist petitioners who were in favor of separating Palestine from Syria).(14)
The King-Crane commission carried out something close to a public opinion poll, which it viewed itself as reliable, particularly given the concordance of opinions among disparate social, religious and economic groups. From it we can deduce that a Syrian national consciousness clearly existed, endowed with a desire for independence in a united state. That state, however, was to be "decentralized", and by implication, the two areas of Lebanon and Palestine would have had autonomy and unified representation in the Syrian government.(15)
The interesting question becomes: how did the consciousness of belonging to a Syrian nation, albeit with strong regional particularities, transform itself progressively into an even stronger sense of Palestinian national identity? The answer to this question spans seven decades and a particularly complicated process. Our purpose here is to concentrate on the initial stage, the first fifteen years of the British mandate. In this period, the essential shift occurred, and it occurred essentially through the phenomenon of rejection. The Palestinians refused the mold into which the Zionists, the British and the international community were casting them. In the process, they cemented their unifying cultural identity, now cloaked in terms of national self-determination, as an essential mechanism for collective survival.(16)
Unlike other peoples in the region who developed a national consciousness along physical and cultural lines traced by an outside power (the Lebanese and the Quwaitis for example) the Palestinians developed this consciousness in opposition to the identity which was being defined for them by the outside world. That externally applied identity was itself a notion which took some time, again in the early nineteen twenties, to formulate. It came in the wake of a period (which for some continues to the present day) when the identity, indeed the existence of a people in Palestine was contested. Chaim Weizmann had noted at a Zionist meeting in Paris in 1914 the early Zionists' tenet that
there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country?
For him and for the Zionists in general (followed in this unique case by many Western secular thinkers who could not conceivably apply such a criterion to any other case), the problem was essentially a financial one: that piece of land needed to be bought from its erstwhile owners by the Zionist movement, then settled, and then claimed as a sovereign Jewish state.(17)
British measures and laws, imposed by the military government before even the formal installation of the Mandatory administration, reinforced this link between property and sovereignty, and the indirect result (which cemented the rejection along vertical lines within Palestinian society) was the dispossession of large numbers of peasants, expelled from lands they had farmed and grazed on for generations, and which had been sold to Zionist settlers, minus the people who lived and worked on them.
[T]he dispossessed peasants organize themselves in 'armed bands'. The organization, by the settlers, of so-called 'self-defense' militias, who practice a particularly active form of defense (reprisals, punitive operations, etc.) was going to launch an escalation, the process of which is underway until the present time.(18)
Although taking a certain distance from the totally uninformed postulate of the earliest Zionists, Weizmann and the movement he led maintained the connection between landed property and political control, hoping to transform the land-as-real estate into a basis for sovereignty.(19)
By 1930, Weizmann had noted a shift in international opinion on the question of Palestinian identity and rights, when he defensively asks that
whoever thinks that the Mandate was a mistake and an injustice to the Palestinian Arabs, let him say so. If any Jews feel that way, let them say so too. All I can say to people who have suddenly been converted to that view is that in honesty they should have thought of that twelve years ago, before so many hopes were raised, so many sacrifices made...
But he resolutely clung to what was for him essential, the connection between business transactions and political consequences:
Our presence in Palestine must be judged by the same standards as the presence of the Arabs; that is the meaning of a National Home, as distinct from a land of immigration. A Jew must be able to buy land from an Arab on the same terms as Arab from Arab, and must not be made responsible for what may or may not happen to the willing seller, or possibly to his grandchildren...We wish to spare the Arabs as much as we can of the sufferings which every backward race has gone through on the coming of another, more advanced nation...(20)
This phenomenon goes far towards explaining the rapid development of a separate, and one must add, a rebel consciousness among the Palestinians by the early twenties. For as Eric Wolf(21) notes, peasant uprisings in the twentieth century have pitted a people against others who are attempting to impose upon them a system in which "land, labor and wealth are commodities, that is, goods produced not for use, but for sale." In the Palestinian case (and he could have added the three-year Palestinian rebellion of 1936-1939 to his six cases of twentieth-century peasant wars) there is an even stronger linkage, on the part of the outside rulers, between land-as-commodity and political sovereignty which is deemed to flow from it.
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY AND THE MANDATE
The debates and reports of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates commission are revealing of the outside world's attempts to define Palestinian needs and aspirations, as well as group characteristics. This is true, not only for the mandatory power, which was constantly called upon by its peers in the commission (representing both powers which were themselves entrusted with mandates by the Leagues of Nations, and non-mandatory powers) to explain and justify its actions, in addition to the yearly report which it had to submit, but for the state system as a whole. It is interesting in this regard to note that the perception of the Palestinians was during the interwar period (as it is today, for that matter) very much a projection of processes internal to the various countries, such as the presence of a large (and, because of the rise of ethnically-based nationalism, partly unwanted, Jewish population in the case of Poland and Romania, which made them enthusiastic supporters of Zionist settlement in Palestine)(22) or the fact that it was itself a Moslem state located in the Middle East in the single case of Iran.(23)
The League of Nations, through the voice of William Rappard of its secretariat, was from 1921, before even the mandate had been approved by the League, supporting the promotion of the Jewish National Home in the face of strong Arab resistance. In a note for the files, Rappard notes that
[a] conflict has erupted between the [Greek Orthodox] Patriarch of Jerusalem and his subordinates, the bishops of Palestine, regarding the administration of the Holy Sites placed under the protection of the Patriarch. The Bishops reproach the Patriarch for neglecting the defense of the interests with whose protection he is entrusted by abusively alienating the lands of the Orthodox Church for the benefit of Zionism. The Patriarch of Jerusalem submitted the conflict to the High Commissioner for Palestine, who entrusted its examination to a commission made up of two British civil servants. The report of those two civil servants and the decision of the High Commissioner based on that report were favorable to the thesis of the Patriarch and contrary to that defended by the Bishops of Palestine.
As for Rappard (and the League of Nations), "I feel naturally that I have absolutely no competence."(24) That "technical" approach to the question of Palestine endured in the League, until Britain, under the pressure of events, and notably of the Palestinian and Arab rejection of the premises of the mandate, began to shift policy, most markedly in the late nineteen-thirties.
The looming issue of self-determination and statehood, brought about by Palestinian reaction to the creation of facts on the ground deemed threatening to the indigenous population, began to influence the Mandates Commission and the British government with respect to a series of elements, such as space (borders), "good neighborly relations" (between the Palestinians and Transjordan), and an Arab role in the mandate's Consultative and Legislative Councils. When it came to a discussion of the percentage of Arab representation on the Legislative Council, however, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuels, pointed out that the Arabs had to be kept from achieving a potential voting majority even though the latter were only consultative in nature, the High Commissioner preserving veto power. If, for example, there occurred some type of "political agitation" in the country, "and if the Arabs had the majority in the Legislative Council, they could reject the budget for political reasons" and the entire policy of the government would be compromised. And when the Mandates Commission found itself the recipient of a petition by the Arab Congress for Palestine, demanding constitutional government for the country on a proportional basis, it responded by tabling the petition (i.e., refusing to deal with it) because it conflicted with the primary goal of the establishment of the Jewish National Home.(25) On another occasion, the High Commissioner informed the Mandates Commission that it has distributed guns to "isolated Jewish villages"(26), and he was generally optimistic, despite all the verbal and social violence Britain's and the League's policy had brought about, feeling that he could create a moderate Arab leadership which would be more compliant. This despite the fact that he recognized that rejectionism characterized the attitude of all the thirty Arab notables he had recently met, and that they "were representative of all of the fractions of Arab opinion in the country".(27)
In marked contrast to the external definitions of needs and drives among the Palestinians, the latter, as a distinct group, were during the nineteen twenties becoming the center, not only of their own aspirations, but of those of the rest of the Arab world, at least, at this stage, where the Mashreq (including Egypt) was concerned.
Especially in the [Arab] east, the struggle against Zionism was present in all [anti-colonial] programs. Whatever the ideology which led the revolt, this project for foreign penetration in an Arab country, oriented towards the amputation of that territory, was an affront to Arabism, to Islam and to anti-colonialism.(28)
The deliberations of the Mandates Commission over the next decade and a half are indicative of this transformation, at the Palestinian and also the Arab level. From the repeated insurrections beginning in the nineteen-twenties through the general strike of 1936 and the 1936-1939 Palestinian uprising, official assessments of the Palestinian Arabs and their movement underwent a transformation, which is not in its various stages the object of the present study.
By 1939, Britain had issued a new White Paper, in which it gave up on the concept of partition, and promised to grant self-determination to Palestine within five years. The League of Nations took stock of the evolution, but did not know what to make of it, nor how to deal with it. While the Palestinian uprising failed to achieve its goals and resulted in the decapitation of the national leadership, from which the Palestinians were bitterly to suffer in 1947-1948, it had achieved the aim of convincing the mandatory power that Palestinian national aspirations existed and needed to be addressed.(29) Malcolm MacDonald, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, appearing before the Commission to explain the White Paper,(30) seemed, in the face of objections from the Chair of the League of Nations' Mandates Commission, William Rappard, and various bemused members of the Commission, to be trying to justify apparent British revisionism in the matter of Palestinian rights. This exercise in and of itself testifies to the role of rejection in transforming the nature of the Palestinian national consciousness and in projecting the re-definition of the movement onto the international stage.
Mr. MacDonald could see that the text of his statement was a little ambiguous, but the sentence in question spoke of the statement of policy being the final act of a prolonged consideration of the problem. What he meant to convey was that, during the past two or three years, His Majesty's Government had been uncertain as to what the more clearly defined policy within the mandate should be. They had considered the possibility of partition and various other policies during those three years. The statement of policy was the final act at this state of attempting to define policy more clearly and to set a course more definitely towards the next stage: it certainly was not the final act of the drama...Mr. Rappard doubted whether the interpretation which had been put upon the phrase "civil and religious rights" [as used in the Balfour Declaration] was not too wide...Mr. MacDonald was quite sure that other Governments which were concerned with the mandate were anxious to put into it the spirit and intention of the Balfour Declaration... He thought that the spirit of Article 22 [of the League] required a mandate to pay heed generally to the wide political rights, the wide natural rights, belonging to a people who had been settled, as the Arabs had been, for many centuries. [Concerning a previous speech by Mr. MacDonald in the House of Commons] in which he asked whether, if Palestine (instead of being inhabited by a million Arabs whose forefathers had lived in the country for centuries) were inhabited by a million British, American of French people who were similarly circumstanced, it would be claimed that they had no right to object to further immigration beyond a certain point, M. Rappard agreed that it would not be possible to claim that those people would not have the right; but he went on to say that the Americans, British or French would never have agreed in the first place to the establishment of a Jewish National home in their territory. But that was precisely the position of the Arab population...Furthermore, the Arabs of Palestine, as M. Rappard had said, had, from the beginning objected to the establishment of a Jewish National Home and were therefore in exactly the position of the British, the American or the French whom one had tried to imagine living in Palestine. If, therefore, the supposed British, French or American population would have had certain rights, it must be admitted that the Arabs had the same rights...
Rappard saw it somewhat differently (and in this respect, aside from his very strong personal Zionist sympathies, he reflected the built-in inertia, conservatism and, in a sense, legalism, of the international system in relation to specific Great Powers or hegemons within it), and noted that it was true that, for example,
the Scots would never have accepted the Balfour Declaration. but the Arabs were subjected to the Balfour Declaration at the same time as they received their independence. That was an historical, constitutional fact. If the Scots had been consulted, for instance, about the choice of a climate for their country, they might perhaps have objected to the climate which they had; but the climate was a fact beyond discussion. The Balfour Declaration was, so to say, the climate of Palestine! ...It was perfectly clear that, if Scotland were compared with Palestine, one could be led to admit that the Scots would object to the establishment in their country of a national home for another people just as the Arabs had done. But such had not been the historical destiny of the Scots. The Arabs, on the other hand, had been obliged to submit to that fatality...M. Rappard repeated that the task of the Mandates Commission was not to judge the wisdom or justice of the Balfour Declaration or its consequences, but merely to examine the administration in the light of the mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was enshrined.(31)
CONCLUSION
A history of Palestine in its relations with the international community would show that in an initial stage, based on common historical and cultural traits, the Palestinians found a national consciousness and identity, through the events of the first World War and immediately after it. In a second stage, a national movement came into being, through a dialectical interaction with the mandatory power and the Zionist movement.
Finally, in the nineteen-sixties, the Palestinian national movement, which had been temporarily silenced by the trauma of the "catastrophe" of 1948, but never extinguished, re-focussed its objectives and increasingly oriented itself towards the option of a national state, an objective which became primary for the Palestinian leadership in the nineteen sixties, and especially after 1967.(32)
The fact of the matter is that one year after the issuing of the Balfour declaration, with the collapse of the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman empires based on religious or ethnic communities, the premises for its issuance had radically changed. The recognition that the population of Palestine (more than half a million people at the time) had civil and religious rights but, by implication, no political rights, was a formula hearkening back to the times when, in the Ottoman empire, there were no national rights. In an era of national independence movements, it was an unworkable formula, and could only result, if it were not opposed, in one or another form of ethnic extinction.
It is with a certain amount of retrospective historical irony that one reads such sentences as the following, pronounced just over a decade ago by the enlightened leader of what was at that time the second most powerful country in the history of the world:
The intentions of the Leninist founding fathers of the USSR were in fact internationalist, but the policies of the Soviet Union were an inconsistent picture of genuine ethnic egalitarianism and Great Russian chauvinism. If that formula failed to prevent the evolution of a Russian empire in new garb and the eventual secession of subject nationalities, then it follows that the creation of an explicitly ethnic-based social formation was going to achieve the same result, from the very moment of its conception, not to speak of its inception.
A great deal more empirical research must be done on the historical evolution of ethnic and national consciousness, and on its relationship to the evolving international system. The case of the Palestinian national movement, and its interaction with Britain, the League, the UN and the Zionist movement, is a complicated one, but one which, as an example of the correlation of nationalism with rejectionism, sheds some useful light on the question.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. 1988. "Territorially-Based Nationalism and the Politics of Negation." In Said and Hitchens, 1988, pp. 193-206.
Baumgarten, Helga. 1991. Palaestina: Befreiung in den Staat. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlaag.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gorbachev, Mikhail. 1988. Perestroika - New Thinking for our Country and the World. London: Fontana Paperbacks.
Hokayem, Antoine and Bittar, Marie Claude, ed. 1981. L'Empire ottoman, les Arabes et les grandes puissances, 1914 - 1920. (L'Histoire par les documents, vol. VI). Beirut: Editions universitaires du Liban.
Laurens, Henri. 1991. Le grand jeu. Orient arabe et rivalités internationales depuis 1945. Paris: Armand Colin.
League of Nations, Mandates Commission Reports, 1921-1939.
Ligue internationale pour le droit et la libération des peuples. 1991. Le dossier Palestine - la question palestinienne et le droit international. Paris: La Découverte/documents.
Litvinoff, Barnet, ed. 1978. The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann (Vol. XIV, Series A: July 1929 - October 1930). Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1993. Pandaemonium - Ethnicity in International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rodinson, Maxime. 1968. Israël et le refus arabe. Paris: Le Seuil.
Said, Edward W. and Hitchens, Christopher. 1988. Blaming the Victims - Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso.
Sanbar, Elias. 1984. Palestine 1948: l'expulsion. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1972. Geistige und koerperliche Arbeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Suny, Ronald. 1993. The Revenge of the Past - Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wolf, Eric R. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
NOTES
1 Chatterjee, 1993, p.4.
2 See Ronald Suny, 1993, pp. 3-19 for a summing up of the scholarly-ideological debate.
3 For example, the US Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has written a book (Pandaemonium, 1993) centered around his own prophetic foretelling of the collapse of the Soviet Union because of internal ethnic strife. The only problem is, the weight of the currently available evidence points to the predominance of other, economic and central/political reasons for its implosion.
4 Laurens, 1991, p. 52.
5 Laurens, 1991, p. 23.
6 Laurens, 1991, p. 55.
7 "La correspondance McMahon-Hussein", in Hokayem and Bittar, 1981, pp. 1-17.
8 Rajeeb Dajani of Jaffa uses it for example in an address amended by the British military authorities and Haim Weizmann of the Zionist movement. British Public Record Office, FO 371/3383.
9 Hokayem, "La commission King-Crane", 1981, p. 158.
10 P. 159.
11 P. 158.
12 P. 157.
13 P. 169.
14 P. 157.
15 The fact that the King-Crane commission report, as well as the Syrian congress in Damascus, did not make a claim for immediate pan-Arab unity does not signify an erosion of that position, but points rather to the realism of the area'_ social and political elites, who were trying to deal with the complicated and treacherous world they lived in, with its contradictory promises (Sykes-Picot agreement, Balfour declaration, etc.) and the reality of British and French military and colonial supremacy.
16 The historical, and, indeed, the theoretical connection between nationalism and rejection has been noted here and there among scholars (for example Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Berque among students of Arab societies). But as far as I know there is no systematic study of its role. " Islam would thus prove to be one of the roots of Algerian nationalism. In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the attitude of refusal and withdrawal would issue in a new and active movement, founded in an attempt to return to the purity of the Quran." (Wolf, 1969, p. 226).
17 Quoted in Abu-Lughod, 1988, p. 200.
18 Ligue internationale, p. 70
19 The implications of such an approach to philosophical, ethical and political matters are set forth in Sohn-Rethel, 1972, p. 68, where he points out that "[o]nly when it has been moved away from the market does [the structure of the exchange of merchandise] become an object of abstract reflection, but the systematization which it then undergoes is the reason why its historical origin has become unrecognizable."
20 Letter to Felix M. Warburg, dated 17 January 1930. Litvinoff, 1978, pp. 208-209. The neo-Darwinist racial characterization of the Arabs was at that time characteristic of the British intelligentsia; Weizmann was residing in London.
21 P. 277
22 League of Nations Official Journal, December 1937, p. 902.
23 The Iranian representative noted that his Government's position was, as ever, "that the legitimate rights of the Arabs who were natives of Palestine would be completely safeguarded." League of Nations Official Journal, 17 September 1937, p. 851.
24 League of Nations Document No. 11963, 5 April, 1921.
25 Permanent Mandates Commission Minutes, October 1924, pp. 60-66.
26 October, 1924, p. 98.
27 October 1924, p. 71.
28 Rodinson, 1968, pp. 28-29.
29 Sanbar, 1984, pp. 66-67.
30 League of Nations, Permanent Mandates Commission Minutes, VI A (June, 1939), pp. 103-115.
31 League of National Permanent Mandates Commission Journal VI A, pp. 103-107.
32 See Baumgarten, 1991, pp. 168-176.
33Gorbachev, 1988, p. 122.
return to history