Debbie Prentice and the Art of Persuasion

by

Howard Adelman

A picture of Debbie

4 days ago

In response to my last blog, a very insightful reader wrote: “I thought the vice chancellor’s address was brilliant in every respect. It became obvious as she delivered it that she is a significant person and her time in office will be very influential.” Today’s blog is merely an elaboration of that point.

Given her demeanor, her address started before she even spoke. To say the least, Debbie is diminutive; she is not an imposing physical presence. Secondly, amongst that august and even stiff audience, she seemed the most relaxed and even bemused at times. Third, look at the jacket she chose to wear; in a colouration dominated by black and gray, her jacket was both classic and colourful.    

Further, her speech was set against a foreground of ancient Latin and what I believed was the famous Gaudete Choir of Clare College at Cambridge but turned out to be the Lucy Cavendish Choir. The choirs at Cambridge have an international reputation as leading university choral groups in the world. They tour to perform at concerts and festivals globally. The contrast between this foreground and Debbie’s address could not be more striking.

It is the contrast between Debbie as an undergraduate student and performing pianist and her graduate work, research and teaching as a social scientist. It is the contrast between Cardinal Newman (The Idea of the University, 1851) and The Multiversity. In Newman’s terms, the university had as its core a liberal education and was a place for the cultivation of the mind in order to “develop a disposition toward God,” for theology is the highest intellectual discipline. Bracket the theology and we inherited the university as a Sanctuary of Method with the various liberal disciplines at its core. In contrast, a contemporary university is a Social Service Centre conducting research and educating students to enable them to address social problems in the real world. The goal is to solve problems and not just cultivate the intellect.

Debbie’s address began with a question. “Why did I take the job?” Some may think the answer was obvious. Look at the prestige of leading an ancient university. Look at the opportunity. But she mentioned neither. It was the challenge. After all, as the outstandingly successful Provost at Princeton University, head-hunters had tried to lure her into positions at many universities in the United States and even UBC in Canada. Though she was tempted by a few such offers, she in the end decided against considering any of them. So why Cambridge?

Only thirty years ago, from the late fifteenth century until 1992, the Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge was chosen from amongst the heads of colleges as first among many, elected annually from amongst those Heads of Cambridge Colleges and usually serving only for a two-year term – explaining why Debbie is the 347^th vice-chancellor of the university. Now, the Vice-Chancellorship is a full-time position appointed for up to seven years by the Council in an attempt to imitate the American model of academic leadership at universities. The post can no longer be held simultaneously with a College Headship or any other University post.

The Vice-Chancellor’s role is to provide academic and administrative leadership to the whole of the University, to shape its academic direction and ensure that the University’s overall mission is met and that policies established by the various governing and legislative bodies are fulfilled. The Vice-Chancellor also exercises leadership to secure a sustainable financial base sufficient to allow the delivery of the University’s mission, aims, and objectives by representing the university both locally and externally to governments in the UK and overseas and, even more importantly, to major donors and supporters. The V-C is the chief fundraiser for the university. How very different from Cardinal Newman’s vision of the university’s mission and his personal role at the University of Dublin!

However, in spite of the reorganization and change of mission, the V-C, unlike the president of an American university, has a salary set by the British government. She is a de facto civil servant.  Why would a highly successful American academic leader accept a much lower salary than she could earn (and did earn) in America? More importantly, an American university president has titular power. In Cambridge, the V-C has to perform a balancing act between the university and the powerful colleges. Thus, although the V-C chairs the Council of the University and the General Board of the Faculties while also carrying out numerous ceremonial and civic duties, the structure acts as an inhibitor to institutional innovation and creativity.

That is the challenge. In my estimation, that is the challenge that induced Debbie to take the position much more than the prestige and in spite of both the financial personal costs and the structural impediments she will face. Hence, she began her speech with a general reference to the challenge of the position, a theme continued through her entire address, while omitting any of the specifics. Brits are brilliant diplomats and Debbie proved that she could fit right in. Even though she is the first American in that position, she passed the first step in the art of persuasion – that of establishing likeness.

She then developed the theme of gratitude, gratitude to all those at the university who had helped orient and already offered her their advice. And her gratitude extended over time. After all, she was but the carrier of a baton in a centuries-old relay race and was grateful to all who passed before her, especially those immediately so, who had met with her as well to share their experience and suggestions. She accepted the responsibility that she had assumed of passing the baton on in the future to a successor and the duty to ensure that she would leave the university as well-off intellectually and financially as she had inherited it. “Colleagues, students, friends,” is how she began her address.

What was really being said? The words conveyed unity of purpose and complete identification with the institution. But the underling message with respect to the content of the job was that she planned to be an enabler of innovation and an agent of transformation. That is the contemporary role of the university – as an agent of transformation rather than a primary emphasis on preservation. For what projects did she cite?

Enlisting King Charles to head a drive for innovation to reduce the carbon imprint of the aerospace industry. The Whittle Laboratory at Cambridge was the focus with its efforts in improving the aero-thermal performance of turbomachines as the principle technology for the world’s energy conversion processes. Improving their efficiency is crucial for reducing the environmental impact of power generation and aviation. Expanding the frontier research of the bio-medical campus was also emphasized because the school was so important as a contributor to the well-being of the region and the nation. Hence, the importance of the new oncology and new pediatric hospitals. No mention of Latin. No mention of Greek. No mention even of the classics of modernity and a liberal education – English literature and history. The collegium was defined as an eco-system. And Cambridge University contributed $30 billion dollars annually to the national economy.

Instead, though identification was established, reciprocity became the key, not only among the faculty and administration, but between and among the students and faculty through fora and, even more importantly, between academia and the larger society. For implicit in Debbie’s message was a signal that she would push the university in the direction of an academic institution concerned primarily with addressing social problems with research focused on the need for interdisciplinary research on those problems rather than an emphasis on the superiority of disciplines and disciplinary methodology. When Debbie finishes her term, Cambridge will have taken enormous strides in moving from a Sanctuary of (Disciplinary) Method to a Social Service Station model of a university. (See my volume, The Holiversity.)

Debbie is an eminent psychologist with both academic and practical expertise in the study and application of social norms that govern human behaviour. The executive leadership of Cambridge has recognized what it needs to do to ensure the university’s contemporary relevance and has hired the ideal person for the job. Debbie will retain her integrity and commitment to her vision of academic excellence while leading Cambridge through its new stage in its evolution as a leader in global excellence.

I ended my last blog with the sentence: “I have not and will not consult Debbie in advance of my analysis.” Aside from the bad grammar – it should have been written: “I have not consulted and will not consult Debbie in advance of my analysis,” – I was remonstrated by several readers independently for including that sentence. “What was wrong with it?” I asked. It was rude. It was abrupt. It appeared exclusionary to the very person who I claimed to be basking in her honour.  

But all I intended was to take full responsibility for what I wrote and not implicate one internationally reputable social psychologist with my analysis of another. “But that is not how the sentence reads.” We were talking past one another. The critics were concerned with the impressions and the effects of what I had written. I defended myself by referring to my intent.  They insisted that it should be re-written, and a corrected version sent out. I got my back up. What is worse, I suffered from mindblindness, for as much as they explained why it was rude and hurtful, I could not initially see it.

The reality is that they were concerned about civility and the art of persuasion, about the effects of the words one chooses on another. I was only concerned with what I meant and, further, was blind to seeing that it could have meant something other than what I intended. Put simply, I would appear to be a poor choice for commenting on the art of persuasion.

But let me try. The art of persuasion is about influence. In one of my early writings, I had written and published in 1976 in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (6:4) an article entitled, “Authority, Influence and Power,” an analysis which I have used in subsequent writings. I had distinguished each of the concepts and found that each had two very different meanings. Authority referred to both “formal” authority that arises from a position held and “authentic” authority that arises from expertise. Influence was divided into material influence as in quid pro quo payments or favours versus the influence of thoughts and ideas. Power was divided into coercive power, the use or threat of the use of force, and the power or energy one invests in a project. I argued that it was necessary both to distinguish the three concepts and the dual meanings of each.

Robert Cialdini made his scholarly reputation on empirical studies of influence. His concern was how influence worked. How did what was said or the symbols or clothes one wore affect others positively or negatively. He offered empirical studies to reveal initially six principles and not a conceptual analysis. In doing so, his studies were very revealing about such interactions. But in the process, there was some confusion.

For example, one colleague and admirer noted a footnote in Cialdini’s writings which the colleague claimed demonstrated that Cialdini entertained a seventh principle. It was material influence, the influence brought by money. Cialdini claimed that he did not enunciate that principle because it was too self-evident and obvious and could be taken for granted. What he did not say was that material influence was of a very different order than the influence of words and thoughts and was itself divisible into different sub-types, included some of the types he had identified.

When one examines the six articulated principles, other problems emerge. The six are:

1. Reciprocity or what is called ‘the economy of small favours’; you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. “People will help if they owe you for something you did in the past to advance their goals.” After someone thanks you, reply: “Of course; it’s what partners do for each other.” This, as articulated and upon reflection, is merely and clearly but one sub-species of material influence. There is no “persuasion” really involved. When we are defined as partners, especially when an exchange of favours has gone both ways, the prework for persuasion has been prepared and the probability of success in persuasion has been increased. But this form of reciprocity is not itself influence in the non-material sense. When Cialdini writes that, “the key to using the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to give and to ensure that what you give is personalized and unexpected,” as when a waiter leaves a mint after dinner and even returns once to offer a second because the customers were such delightful and appreciative clients, this is really a form – and a very inexpensive one at that – in exchange for an increased reward or tip. However, where established interpersonal connections are important, true non-material reciprocity rises to the top. In Yiddish, it is called schlep.
2. Consistency or the propensity to maintain a position to which you have publicly committed yourself or to which you have attested in writing is offered as a second principle. It is most important in individualistic versus communal cultures for in a communal culture, fealty to a person in a position of power may be more important. In individualist cultures, people who contradict themselves seem less credible than those that do not. But what about JFK Jr. currently running for the Democratic nomination of the United States. He has forthrightly admitted on some topics that he misspoke or that he exaggerated or that he was even in error. In an individualist culture, admissions of inconsistency made him a more credible candidate than others who failed to own up to errors or inconsistencies whereas in a communal culture where fealty to a superior is more important, the same words can be read as an act of betrayal.
3. Consensus or the Herd Instinct or peer pressure and the tendency to accept the power of personal testimonials and group approval, as in assessing which movies or which streaming series to watch on TV or which vacation properties have better value, is offered as a third principle. With social media, this principle has risen in importance. It is the power of we when people see themselves as part of a larger group with shared interests and identity so that they may even make personal sacrifices to advance the well-being of the group. This principle is more active and has a greater priority in communal cultures. The Herd Instinct descriptor itself suggests that the process is unthinking when we may, in fact, judge that with different genres of movies, the wide appeal, most likely to a similar audience, may simply be a clue that there would be a greater probability that we ourselves would enjoy that movie or series. We may simply be relying on the probable combination of a commonality of interests and respect for the experience of others, that is, on the wisdom of crowds. In some cases, it may lead to a willingness to self-sacrifice.
4. Identification with another by establishing similar likes or perspectives, especially when commonalities are not immediately visible, is offered as a fourth principle. Localized and personalized pieces of information can be crucial in binding the interests of two persons who are initially strangers. A good salesperson will offer genuine compliments, discover and highlight commonalities before discussing business. “Finding something in common is powerful because we like people who are like us.” This principle is equated with the persuasive power of celebrity endorsements and the desire of many if not most to identify with those celebrities. But celebrity identification, which is not really interpersonal and may be totally anonymous, is very different than trying to establish a connection with another by conveying and establishing a commonality of interests.
5. Scarcity is a principle established to project onto an article or person rarity, a phenomenon used in a clock auction – the reverse of a bidding auction – used by flower wholesalers to influence you to push the button in a bid before another does and lest the opportunity to obtain a rare batch pass you by. This, is, of course simply another sub-species of material influence.
6. Fear versus desire – when facing situations of change, emphasize the loss that will be incurred if change is not made rather than the rewards. Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that fear of loss is a far greater motivator than the desire for gain. This is not usually  articulated as a separate principle, for it is but a negative form of material inducement.
7. Authority when we rely on the expertise of another is NOT really influence or a form of persuasion but a situation in which influence is bracketed because we rely on expertise as a form of authority and a substitute for the need to be persuaded.

What are we left with? Reciprocity as articulated (# 1 above), scarcity (# 5 above) and fear of loss (#6 above) are but sub-species of material influence. The authority of expertise (# 7 above) is the absence of the need for influence. What remains is consistency (#2), the desire to present a continuity in thought and action rather than hypocrisy; the RFK Jr. example is but a method of establishing an even higher regard for truth than when dogmatically defending a position that may no longer be defensible. What remains is also identification (#4 above) and the effort to establish commonality between people. Finally, what remains is a form of reliance on community – as distinct from characterizing it as a herd instinct – a version of #3 above.

Further, if we introduce another principle, that of coherence, that is, a position in which the integration of the diverse elements, principles, relationship and values that are said to constitute influence coexist to constitute a coherent whole, then we may find that within Cialdini’s empirical studies of the art of persuasion we may find such a coherent conceptual pattern to exist.

Recall that we are bracketing material influence whether it is a matter of payoffs, mutual benefits or enhancement of one’s personal material position. We are interested in the art of non-material influence. I suggest the following schema may help clarify the different sub-types. All the sub-types are but variations of E. M. Forster’s dictum in Howard’s End to “only connect.” If we only connect both the prose and the passion, then in any interpersonal relationship, both will be exalted, human love will live at its height, and we will no longer live fragmented and alienated lives.

	UNITY	DIFFERENCE
INDIVIDUAL	Consistency	reciprocity
COLLECTIVE	identification	similarity or likeness

 
This schema moves us away from any presumption of manipulation of the other and an over-emphasis on benefit to the self. It does not mean that they are not found in acts of persuasion, perhaps in many or even most, but the essential common character does not assume the necessary ingredient of self-benefit and use of the other. And the schema absorbs principles 2, 3 and 4 and converts reciprocity to a mutually beneficial exchange when there are fundamental differences instead of reducing reciprocity to you scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

Persuasion works best when the message is consistent even when inconsistencies are admitted in favour of a higher fealty to truth. Further, the reference to herd instinct concerning collective identification suggests unthinking behaviour when reciprocity at its highest level may entail listening and attending to the other as well as attempting to convey a message in a way that can be comprehended and grasped by the other. Further, persuasion does not depend on convincing the other to enjoin one’s position. As in many cases of reciprocity, it may only mean respect and acknowledgement of differences. Or it may entail the revelation of similarities.

This does not mean these conceptions are non-utilitarian. One may use small talk when introduced to discover and establish connections and commonalities so that mutuality is established to replace a disconnected connection with a truly connected one. We owe to behavioural psychologists like Robert Cialdini the unveiling of these other dimensions of the art of persuasion which, however much he may attend to respecting cultural differences, is too often examined and exercised for the benefit of manipulation of the other.

One last word on the mindblindness of philosophers and my introductory paragraphs. If you were introduced to philosophy through Platonic dialogues with Socrates as the hero who played to the crowd with his brilliant demonstrations of logic, wit and illustration to put down any intellectual competitor and demonstrate to the audience the intellectual inferiority of his challengers, then the only art of persuasion you master is that of consistency. Sensitivity to the intelligence and perspective of others and the value of discovering commonalities are ignored. Further the wisdom of crowds and not just a herd instinct can then be recognized.

I apologize in advance for my shortcomings as a philosopher. But I do learn. And to demonstrate that learning, in my next blog I will dissect the art of persuasion as employed so brilliantly by both a theoretical as well as practical expert in the art of persuasion as demonstrated by Debbie’s inaugural speech for her induction last week.

In the meanwhile, you may wish to read the Time’s profile of Debbie – https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/FMfcgzGtwCsLRcZqGhDmdHKDzJkKkwQc?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1.

I am basking in the glory of an Other – in my case, that of my daughter-in-law, Deborah (Debbie) Prentice, the wife of my eldest son, Jeremy, a highly distinguished scholar in his own right. Debbie is the mother of three of my grandchildren. Last week, she was inaugurated as the 347^th Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. For those unfamiliar with British academic norms, practices and terms, the Vice-Chancellor is the equivalent of president of a North American university.

The inauguration can be viewed on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8UugihE_R8. The ceremony is worth watching if only in appreciation of the wonder of British pomp and ceremony – its precision, its sense of reverence and respect, its formalism, its aesthetic delight, the sustained applause, the absolute quiet of the ceremony – no squirming in seats or shuffling – and the total seriousness with which the British treat such occasions. The way Latin is pronounced is itself a wonder to behold. The gorgeous performance of the women’s choir and the celestial performance on the harp are added as a bonus.

The only one that I noticed that broke from a stern and serious oral expression was Debbie herself who occasionally broke into a thin and half-hidden American smile as if reflecting – what is a California daughter of a single mother doing as the head of one of the oldest and most revered universities in the world. It is one thing to be academic head of Princeton University following a career as chair of psychology for a dozen years and then dean of faculty. It is quite another to be invited to have lunch with the king the day after arrival in Britain and then to assume the presidency of Cambridge University.

Last week, I was driving in the front of my contractor’s truck when I casually mentioned – or was it an indirect boast? – that my daughter-in-law was being inaugurated that day as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. He expressed astonishment and immediately called his friend who was a graduate of Cambridge University and was about to begin a position as a professor of engineering at Waterloo University. His friend was absolutely exhilarated at the news. Wow! How amazing!

My contractor was basking in my vicarious glory and his friend in turn joined in. All three of us were being warmed by the pleasure and honour of the occasion, together “basking” in the warmth of a sun. We reveled in the delightful pleasure. But why were we all experiencing such joy? None of us had done a thing to earn the honour and glory due to Debbie.

Social psychologists have given basking – or BIRGing – a bad name. They define it as reflected glory, even though not one of the three of us claimed or assumed or even experienced any such thing. Were we glorying in associating ourselves with success, fame and celebrity status? Is that what a Jewish mother does when she boasts of her son, the doctor? In the depiction of many social psychologists, mentioning one’s association with a Nobel prize winner, someone who has been awarded the Israeli Prize or the Order of Canada, are examples of basking in reflected glory. If my wife once played backgammon with Mick Jaggar, that is offered as an example of basking “in reflected glory.” If you are a fan and wear the shirt of a winning team, you are by definition of such psychologists “basking in reflected glory.”

But sharing the warmth and delight of the bright sunlight does NOT, in fact, mean that you accrue any responsibility for either producing that light or attracting the light itself. It is quite sufficient to enjoy the sunshine, to celebrating its pleasure without any notion or implication that you yourself have done something that makes you worthy of such a delight. It suffices that you are close enough to share, however indirectly or sparsely, in the glory and pleasure accrued to the individual in the centre of the spotlight.

A phenomenon that has been observed is the propensity of social psychologists to reduce such experiences to an expression of self-interested behaviour intended to advance the position of an individual when the sharing rather than the personal accrual my be the more important and ofttimes the exclusive benefit of the experience. If it wasn’t shared, it would not be true basking. Relaying the experience is then not intended for personal self-aggrandizement, but to allow others to share the pleasure even as it diminishes with distance.

I write in defence of “basking” because I am critical of the self-interested reductionism of those researchers – primarily social psychologists – who, I believe, have distorted the meaning of basking in the glory of another. That does not mean the some or many or most people do not bask in the glory of others primarily for such reasons. But because many do something does not mean that what they do can be reduced to their purported motives. More significantly, in the effort to demonstrate this behavioural “defect,” there is a great danger of projection. Even more significant is the possibility of such interpretations reinforcing a shift in our ethics to an increasing emphasis of reinforcing actions motivated by self-interest.

The grandfather of social psychologists who initiated, advanced and expanded upon this thesis has been Professor Robert Cialdini of the University of Arizona. Whether it is those who wear Mega caps or those who adopt the colours of a sports team, the actions are interpreted as a “management tactic” to impress others. Again, this may or may not be a primary function. Even if it is for many, it need not be universally so, and the claim may merely reinforce a propensity in that direction.

Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book, Influence: Science and Practice, and its subsequent many editions and translations, investigated the reasons that people comply with requests in everyday settings and laid out six principles used in impressing others. Cialdini of Arizona is to influence what Daniel Kahneman of Princeton is to bias. Some have found him to have exposed seven or even eight principles of influence. Whatever, the precise number, Cialdini has been two-faced, not in the sense of being deceitful or even simply insincere, but in the sense of looking in two directions at the same time – first how easily ethical lines can be crossed in the effort to manipulate others and, secondly, in advancing the arts of persuasion to run organizations more effectively for either commercial or altruistic reasons.

In the Cialdini lexicon, basking in the glory of others is viewed as an effort to manipulate and control the impression people have of you. It is called influence or persuasion. Of the many dimensions of influence,  “basking in the glory of others’ would appear to fall under the principle of unity whereby, at one and the same time, we demonstrate our fealty or loyalty (they are not the same) to the same group or culture at the same time as we advance our own status by emphasizing the unity of purpose and achievement in our behaviour as a reflection of the achievement of another.

In my next blog, I will parse Debbie’s speech delivered at the inauguration. It will be helpful if you hear it first. It is not long but succinct, to the point and very clear. I will offer my dissection in relationship to Cialdini’s principles.

We usually restrict reviews to books (fiction and non-fiction) as well as works of art or theatrical performances. I believe it is helpful to review rhetorical exercises as well for much can be revealed in doing so. I have not and will not consult Debbie in advance of my analysis.

Join us in thanking Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly for speaking out against settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank!

I would like to thank Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly for Speaking Out Against Settlement Expansion and other JSpaceCanada campaigns.

As a Canadian Jew who cares deeply about Israel and the future of the two-state solution, I am writing to you today to thank you for your joint statement along with the foreign ministers of the UK and Australia, voicing concerns about recent events in Israel and the West Bank which further reduce the prospects for peace.

I oppose the Israeli government’s approval of over 5,700 new settlement units in the West Bank and the changes to the settlement approval process, which facilitates swifter approval of construction in settlements. I am also concerned about the current cycle of violence in Israel and the West Bank, and believe both Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in peace, with self-determination and sovereignty in Israel, and in a future sovereign Palestinian state.

I am therefore thankful to your department and the Canadian government for listening to the voice of Canadian Jews like me, and condemning the dangerous actions of this current Israeli government.

The actions of the Netanyahu government undermine the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the establishment of a viable two-state solution. I am hopeful that, as a strong ally of Israel, the Canadian government will continue to push back on these dangerous and unilateral actions from the current Netanyahu government, and speak out forcefully in the future.

                                   ……………………………….

I received the above email from several friends asking me to sign a draft letter to Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mélanie Joly, thanking her for joining with Australia and the UK to “voice concerns” “about recent events in Israel and the West Bank which further reduce the prospects for peace.” I did not agree to sign the letter even though I shared the following sentiments:

• I am “a Canadian Jew who cares deeply about Israel and the future of the two-state solution;”
• “I oppose the Israeli government’s approval of over 5,700 new settlement units in the West Bank and the changes to the settlement approval process, which facilitate swifter approval of construction in settlements;
• I “believe both Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in peace, with self-determination and sovereignty in Israel, and in a future sovereign Palestinian state;”
• I agree: “the actions of the Netanyahu government undermine the prospects of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the establishment of a viable two-state solution.”

So why would I not sign the letter?

Though the letter applauding the initiative of the foreign ministers expresses opposition, the foreign ministers do not go that far. They simply state that they are “gravely concerned” over expansion of settlements, but only “concerned” about the approval process.  “Deeply troubled!” Who cares about the UK, Canada, Australia emotional turmoil stirred up by Israeli government actions or whether the initiatives heighten the anxiety of these countries. Who cares whether those countries are “bothered” or “distressed” or “perturbed”! What matters is whether those countries change policies because they are upset.

And note that when the joint government statement goes beyond an emotional response to a condemnation – the three countries “unequivocally condemn all forms of terrorism and violence against civilians, including the terrorist attack on June 20 in Eli targeting Israeli civilians” and “the reprehensible and ongoing settler violence targeting Palestinians” – two types of actions are conjoined when the only equivalence is the use of violence and the extremist goals of both sides. 

The letter of applause also expresses “concern” “about the current cycle of violence in Israel and the West Bank.” However horrific Palestinian terror attacks against civilian Israelis are – and they are despicable in the harshest terms – they are not the same as pogroms – mob violence, further mob violence instigated, incited, and expedited by ministers of the governing authority. Even if the intent may not have been a massacre, the actions were deliberate efforts to advance ethnic cleansing and individual civilians were killed in the process. This is repulsive and repugnant, particularly when perpetrated by Jews who were the prime victims of Russian pogroms that gave rise to the term.

Hamas terrorism is NOT the same as if it was executed by the Palestinian Authority, though the latter’s implicit endorsement may make the denial of responsibility only rhetorical.  In addition, the Israeli government uses such attacks to advance its claims for exclusive ownership of more and more of the West Bank. These are not just actions that are obstacles to peace and the possibility of a two-state solution. They are denials and disavowals of both peace and a two-state solution. And this is precisely the position of the Palestinian terrorists. The overall purpose is a mirror image of the other.

This is important. Because the violence is NOT cyclical. One violent act on one side does not beget an act of violence on the other. Rather, the acts of violence of one side are used as opportunities to carry out violence by the other side. Opportunistic decisions are not automatic cyclical responses. 

To suggest that the violence is cyclical where Palestinians instigate terror and extremist Israeli settlers respond with mob violence is but an endorsement of Netanyahu’s rationale that is opportunistic rather than responsive. The issue is not “the cycle of violence,” but two very different types of violence, one carried out by an extremist terrorist anti-Zionist group, unfortunately with support in Gaza and increasing support in the West Bank, and violence carried out by mobs with the acquiescence at the very least of the strongest military power in the Middle East.

The Australian, Canadian and UK governments need to sanction Israel and the extremist ministers responsible and even Netanyahu, the cover-up artist of all the Israeli government actions even as he urges Israeli settlers to be law-abiding. The threat of undercutting a Saudi-Israel harmonization agreement is insufficient. Western countries must act with greater resolve, greater outrage, and much more severe consequences. They must demand recantation and actions by Israel and promise actions themselves if there are no appropriate government responses, such as widespread arrest of those involved in mob violence, trials, and imprisonment, and then effective use of the IDF and border police to prevent any recurrence. Similarly, the treatment and mild- mannered rebuke of Palestinian terrorism must also invite very active and much stronger counter measures.

One final point. The mild diplomatic action, and applause for it, may be considered as simply approval of an advance forward by tiny steps from an even milder and more impotent diplomatic response. But when the forces favouring the total victory of one national group over another rather than the traditional divide and compromise solution is so ascendent, then only very tough actions against such policies are appropriate in order “to save the day.”

Howard Adelman

On Sunday morning, the Israeli air force struck targets in the Syrian city of Homs. Subsequently, a Syrian anti-aircraft missile exploded in mid-air over Israel. The powerful explosion was heard from central Israel, Jerusalem down to the Negev. The IDF destroyed the air defence battery from which the missile was launched. Yet the possible escalation of the mostly hidden war between Israel and Syria was barely noticed in the media. Instead, another story became very prominent.

On Sunday evening, ostensibly in coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and after warning the US of its plans a week earlier, and with full support of the opposition [Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid: “Our children are being slaughtered and Israel has every right on earth to defend itself and we from that position support the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli government;” National Unity party chairman Benny Gantz: “We are all one front against terrorism. Any determined and responsible action by the government will receive full backing.”], the IDF launched its long-expected but very limited attack against Jenin Refugee Camp.

The Goal: to uproot the entrenched terrorists that have embedded themselves deeply in the camp. 18,000 Palestinians live in the quarter square mile camp and another just over 30,000 live in the remainder of Jenin. The IDF deliberately and carefully did not attack any Palestinian Authority security forces. It also did not attack the Freedom Theater in Jenin nor bomb the major mosque in the camp even though militants were firing from that mosque. However, the attack was large enough so that there would not be a repeat of the IDF use for the first time since 2006 of helicopters to rescue ambushed soldiers. Two days later, the IDF for the first time in 17 years used a drone trike to take out a terrorist cell in the West Bank. It had become clear that in Jenin the tactics had significantly escalated.

Yet I wrote “ostensibly” re the coordination with the PA because one day after the operation was underway, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the US and the international community “to intervene urgently to halt the Israeli raid on Jenin.”  The PA went further. The Ministry held the Israeli government fully responsible for the repercussions of its ‘crimes’ against the residents of Jenin and called on the International Criminal Court to “end its silence and start holding Israeli war criminals accountable.”

Either the PA is cooperating with Israel or hiding that fact and using rhetorical denunciations to disavow the Israeli attack to disguise its involvement. Alternatively, the PA is sincerely expressing its views about the incursion. In either case, the Palestinian Authority reveals itself as an impotent bystander and its reputation continues to decline. In which case, Netanyahu’s purported goal of supporting and strengthening the PA by means of the raid is totally counter-productive and the ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas loses more support to Hamas, (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya — Islamic Resistance Movement). Hamas currently is the largest and most capable militant group in the Palestinian territories, one of the territories’ two major political parties, and is in control of Gaza.

But did not the brigade-strength counterterrorism attack on Jenin involving troops from the commando brigade, paratroopers from Golani as well as the ten or more air sorties, weaken the terrorists – the Jenin Brigade, Hamas, Iran’s proxy Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Lion’s Den, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and others? Using both ground troops and the air force, Jenin was encircled. With bulldozers in the lead to protect against IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) like the one used against the IDF in their last raid, the IDF:

• Destroyed several labs used to make the devices; one of the larger laboratories had hundreds of improvised explosives ready for use and another one had dozens of the same;
• Destroyed manufacturing and storage facilities for constructing weapons and producing ammunition, including the recent rockets launched against Israel;
• Destroyed the headquarters and communications centre where attacks were planned and coordinated, and reconnaissance missions were launched;
• Located and attacked hideouts for terrorists sheltering in Jenin that had become identified as a “sanctuary city” for terrorists on the run;
• Arrested 20 terrorists;
• Targeted and killed 10 Palestinian terrorists;
• Wounded up to 50 alleged terrorists.

Palestinian sources claimed that only three Palestinians were killed — Sameeh Firas Abu al-Wafa, Aws Hani, and Hossam Abu Theebeh — and only 27 injured, though seven of them were critically wounded. Whatever the actual numbers, the count is bound to increase.

IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari noted that:

• in the last two years, 50 shooting attacks had originated in Jenin;
• 19 terrorists had fled to Jenin;
• 3 Israeli citizens were killed and 14 were wounded in terror attacks originating in Jenin.

How did the terrorists, more importantly, the PA, respond to the assault? The PA not only denounced the attack, but PA presidential spokesperson Abu Rudaineh insisted that the Palestinians “won’t surrender and will remain steadfast on their land in facing this [Israeli] aggression.” Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem sounded a similar note: Jenin and other Palestinian communities will continue the “revolution and intifada notwithstanding the crimes of the occupation.” More ominously, to offset the growing strength of Hamas, Fatah has grown closer to Iran through its proxy, PIJ.

A week earlier, PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhaleh revealed that his organization was arming Fatah groups in the West Bank. “Palestinian Islamic Jihad has worked and is working to form combat battalions in all Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and the size and ability of these battalions vary from one place to another, according to our ability to arm them.” Avi Issacharoff in Yediot Ahronot wrote that, “This Iranian behaviour is different from the behaviour we had been accustomed to seeing for many years, in which the Iranians made do with bankrolling terror organisations … something has changed in recent months. Tehran made a clear decision to ratchet up its pressure on Israel, possibly in response to the series of Israeli operations on Iranian soil and the Israeli operations in Syria. The Iranian conclusion was that only a focused effort to produce terror attacks against Israelis in the West Bank and inside Israel would be effective… today a very large number of Iranian units that belong to different Iranian organisations are involved.” PIJ insisted that Jenin would never surrender. With dozens of gunmen in Jenin Refugee Camp, he stressed that the “fighters are determined to confront [the Israeli troops] regardless of the sacrifices.”

If the IDF goal was to uproot the terrorism apparatus in Jenin, it is clear that it at least partially succeeded. However, at the same time, did the operation push the various terrorist organizations into greater cooperation than had already become apparent in Jenin? Further, did the Israeli government shift in policy from “creeping annexation” to “leaping annexation” exacerbate the crisis in the West Bank? In the words of one of my readers, “What can possibly be gained at all in Israel, in the Diaspora, in the world with this nahrischekeit? It will just make terrorists regroup and rise again.” My correspondent feared that, “Israel will inevitably be cast as the cruel ‘heavy’.”

I will take up the latter question indirectly in a follow-up blog by examining the joint Australian, British, Canadian recent critique of Israel and the claim that the violence is cyclical, violence on one side stimulating more violence on the other side and vice versa in an endless cycle of escalating mayhem.

P.S. I promised myself – and you – summer relief from my blogs. But events will not leave me alone and my only mental recourse is to write. My apologies.

Israel and Refugees: Explaining a Failure in Peace-making[i]

by

Howard Adelman  

Structure

1. In Context
2. Prefatory Remarks on a Prefatory Remark: Owls
3. Introduction: On Peacemaking
4. Refugee Return as an Imperative
5. Refugee Return: Jewish and Palestinian Identity
6. The Possibility of Overcoming the Problem and Facilitating Peace
7. Conclusion

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on peacemaking as a prerequisite to peacebuilding. Using the case study method and the background to the Israeli-Palestinian already provided in a series of blogs[ii], this paper zeroes in on a key, and perhaps the key, obstacle preventing a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, namely REFUGEE RETURN. Contrary to other analyses which focus on the differences between the hawks and doves on each side, and which often surreptitiously cheer on the doves as well as often ignoring the eagles which dominate the centre, this paper argues that hawks, doves and eagles play complementary roles on each side. It is that complementarity combined with the incongruency between the positions of the two parties in conflict that stand as an insurmountable barrier to peacemaking.

A. In Context

I first encountered Astri Suhrke through her writing on refugees with Ari Zohlberg and Sergio Aguayo when I was asked to review the manuscript by the Ford Foundation of what would become their 1989 book, Escape from Violence. Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. We all know what an intellectual historical breakthrough that was.[iii]  The book highlighted refugees that escaped violence, the vast majority of refugees, more than ones who fled persecution as individuals or as members of targeted groups. This study focuses on refugees, both Jewish and Arab, who fled violence and persecution rather than those defined by the subsequent United Nations 1951 definition that zeroed in on persecuted refugees only and their need for protection.

The international institutions then designed to deal with them focused not on legal protection and new memberships (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees – UNHCR – created in 1951), but on humanitarian aid, development and resettlement – namely the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees [both Jewish and Arab] in the Middle East – UNRWA – created in 1949.[iv] Ironically, achieving that objective failed and UNRWA became the educational, health and welfare ministry for only Arab refugees from what became Israel. As such, UNRWA unintentionally helped propagate refugees as warriors determined to return under force of arms, as had the Tutsi refugees that Astri and I had dealt with in our study of the Rwandan genocide. The issue for them has been return, not settlement, resettlement or legal asylum as a form of protection. Nor was it then a “right” of return. Might at the time was to make right.

Further, the Aguayo/Suhrke/Zohlberg volume probed deeper into the “root causes” of the refugees who fled violence. This essay clearly suggests that being a refugee in itself can be a mode of reproducing violence, particularly when one group is in contention with another for a national homeland that will protect them. These are refugees who are not just seeking protection by a foreign state but, rather, creating a state in a territory that will guarantee their protection.

There is a third overlapping issue with respect to refugees with which this essay does NOT deal, namely “the right of return,” that is, not the right to be free from violence or even the right not to be displaced, but the right of return once displaced. I allude to that discussion and have a long endnote in reference to the issue, but I add nothing here to that dialogue.

On a quite different angle than refugees, the issue of failed or failing states (see Susan Woodward), in the long prolegomena that I wrote in a long series of blogs on Israel and its one-hundred-year war with Arab Palestinians, it is clear that though Israel has never been identified as a failed or even failing state, Israel has failed in one of the most important functions of a state, that is, to save its citizens from the scourge of war. At the same time, Israel is in the midst of a double paradox. It has reached a level of unimagined success, not only in economic and innovative terms, but even in terms of peace with its neighbours. Israel is currently in the “best position it has ever known.”[v]

On the other hand, both as a result of internal legal and political conflicts (issues which I never managed to analyze in my long series of blogs), as well as Israel’s interactions with: a) its own Palestinian citizens increasingly under the control of violent Arab mobsters; b) the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank; and c) the Palestinians boycotted in Gaza, Israel is “at its most dangerous moment ever.”[vi] I wanted to make clear that success and failure were not polar opposites, but overlapping and interrelated categories. Further, I wanted to focus on failing as a process not on failure as a reified state.[vii]

There is another dimension to this paper. Though on the surface there seems to be no relationship between this paper and the many papers on Afghanistan, there is a critical overlap that I allude to, but one that needs much greater exploration. It is the relationship between religion, identity, theology and politics. After all, as I mentioned in my blogs, Zionism began as a Christian religious and ideological endeavour before it became a secular Jewish ideology.[viii] In its current phase, we are witnessing the re-fusion of the Jewish religion and nationalist ideology at war with its secular liberal heritage that, in the context over the fight over the Israeli judicial system, is proving to be the greatest internal threat Israel has ever faced. Religious convictions and views on judicial reform are strongly correlated. Currently, religious and ethnic conflicts have come to the forefront in defining Israel as a polity. Unfortunately, I never reached analyzing that aspect of Israel’s development.

However, some of the papers on Afghanistan do deal with many relevant themes alluded to in this paper:

1. disinformation and distortion entailed both in the alliance of religion and ethnicity as well as in the analyses by outsiders coming from a post-modernist and post-objective historical perspective;
2. the stress on both memory and its continuing reconstruction to create a driving and core belief versus the use of forgetting that creates mind blindness in analyzing an issue;
3. the role of liberal compromise in intervention and attempting to resolve problems;
4. the ideological differences among traditionalists, fundamentalists and Islamicists in the resistance movement.

I do, however, attend to the intersection of religion and secular nationalism in forging a new ideology that threatens to undermine what I will call the alliance of hawks, doves and eagles to the extent that it might even threaten the underling alliance among them despite all their differences.

There is one final contextual element I want to mention – my concern with owls or with what Susan Woodruff refers to as influencers on policy advisers and decision makers. I would contend that this is one of the most important as well as most disguised and camouflaged themes in my essay.

• Prefatory Remarks on a Prefatory Remark: Owls

Owls are traditional symbols of wisdom. At the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel wrote: “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old, the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.”[ix] This is correctly interpreted as wisdom being retrospective rather than scientific knowledge which is predictive. Self-conscious reflection only takes place when one has matured in life and recollects upon one’s personal path of thought and action. But the shape assumedis old rather than embodying the creativity (and the self-ignorance) of youth.[x]

Philosophy also then paints a portrait of grey in grey so that the body is difficult to distinguish from the colour behind the object. The frame and the camouflage will make it exceedingly difficult to differentiate and separate foreground and background, frame and content. “They [owls] wear the look of the land around them to meld into it, a strategy known as crypsis. Masters of camouflage — streaked like grasses; mottled, speckled and striped like tree bark; pale like snow — they baffle the eye of both predators and prey.”[xi] Owls epitomize disguise. They are extremely hard to observe because they blend in with their background. Further, the reference to the owl spreading its wings at dusk suggests becoming more independent and self-confident as one rethinks one’s past and recollects everything anew, and, sometimes, radically new. The novelty of thought now rebalances the life of action.

What is surprising for many about Hegel’s metaphor is how embodied it is rather than being abstract. Other than their hoots, when owls flap their wings, they have the most silent flight of any bird. They are enigmatic creatures. Further, in contrast to philosophers in the footsteps of Aristotle (and some believe Plato) for whom philosophy is associated with enlightenment, with the bright sunlight of daytime, the owl is a bird that hunts at night. Rather than being pronounced, wisdom becomes inconspicuous. Soundless in flight but not voiceless, almost invisible but perceived when one attends closely, the owl is the very antithesis of a bird like a peacock that spreads its feathers widely and proudly to attract a mate.

Recall that in the theatre, peacocks bring disaster and bad luck and adumbrate failure. With pride and vanity comes the fall. But when offered well wishes – “go break a leg” – one anticipates an impressive performance. In contrast, Lord Shri Krishna, proud and vain, wore a peacock feather in his hair and was addicted to astrology, to a pseudo-science of prediction rather than retrospective reflection. Owls, by contrast, appear out of nowhere only to vanish just as suddenly.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the enlightenment who expanded upon Descartes’s dictum about clear and distinct ideas, in the preface of his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason, set out the circumstances that gave rise to his volume, the end it was intended to achieve and the strategy for getting there. Hegel found such a preface to be inappropriate, misleading and superfluous. What then should a preface do? What purpose can it serve? First, it can indicate what it means to be superfluous. Distinctness and clarity do not entail univocal and specifically defined words. Owls are difficult to see but their profile stands out; they are easily recognizable. There is no other bird that looks remotely familiar to them. They stand upright. Their eyes look directly at you. They are unmistakable even though rarely seen except in a zoo. Yet they stay hidden during the day under our very noses,

When the owl flaps its wings at dusk, they fly high and with stealth. They lack the speed of an eagle or a falcon; they are slow flyers and remind us of Astri Suhrke’s dictum about peacebuilding – “Make haste slowly.”[xii]  The prey of owls neither see nor hear them approach. Owls evade any type of radar. They are silent and soundless, slow and surreptitious.[xiii]  Philosophers, too, must NOT be philosopher kings, but instead move quietly and possess a stillness to allow them to observe otherwise unnoticed sounds and sights in our phenomenological experience. They must think and reflect in the tradition of Machiavelli and Hegel rather than Aristotle and Kant.

C. Introduction: On Peacemaking

Ignoring spoilers, there are generally three main divisions on each side of two violently conflicting bodies. To continue our reference to birds, there are hawks who lead campaigns of force against an alien other;[xiv] as birds of prey, hawks are predators that attack and devour their prey. There are doves who insist on empathy with the other and searching for a resolution to violent conflict; doves symbolize gentleness and peace, love and devotion. They are also domestic prey for hawks, but usually escape that fate and elude hawks who, as versatile, fast and skillful fliers as they are, hunt doves down. The latter escape because they explode into flight at a remarkably high speed to escape being preyed upon.

What is often forgotten is that when two doves are put in the same cage, even a male and female, instead of their usual practice of preening each other with gentle nibbles around the neck, and although doves are known to care for and mourn their mates when they die, one will often peck the other to death when both are trapped in a single cage.[xv]

Hawks and doves are viewed as immortal enemies in the process of peacemaking. However, there is a third party in any peace process that is often dominant over both hawks and doves. Eagles and owls both often feed on hawk eggs and young hawks, eagles in direct attacks and owls in surreptitious ones. Bracketing owls for now, eagles occupy a mid-field between hawks and doves in the search for peace. Eagles, like hawks, are equipped with great curved talons and subsist mainly on live prey. While “hawk-eye” connotes sharpness of vision, the vision of a hawk does not compare to that of an eagle which can spot and focus on a mouse two miles away. While hawks are considered fearless, the adjective only truly applies when they are defending their own nests and will attack anyone or anything venturing too close. Eagles, in contrast, are very high-fliers with an enormous range and can be considered imperialists compared to protectionist hawks which hunt prey and dash out from a hidden perch. But eagles and hawks are both tenacious, grasping, holding and squeezing their prey with their sharp talons and strong feet ridged like a ratchet.

Thus, though hawks and eagles (as well as owls) are all considered raptors[xvi], eagles in many ways are not war hawks, but may be greater promoters of war under the guise of defending an ideal like democracy or human rights. It is not by accident that the symbol adopted by the United States is a bald eagle and not a hawk. A hawk’s territorial claim is relatively limited compared to an eagle. If Americans had been primarily hawks, they probably would not have expanded to appropriate a good part of Mexico as well as expand to the Pacific and even buy Florida and Alaska.

The eagle, unlike the hawk, is viewed as a formidable enemy of the evildoer, able even to slay dragons. In Revelation, when the dragon “persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child … two wings of a great eagle” were given to her “that she might fly into the wilderness.” On the other hand, the psalmist prayed for “wings like a dove.” John the Baptist envisioned “the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.” Does peace depend on the might and vision of an eagle protecting a large territory or the olive branch of peace carried in the beak of a dove so that we will someday suffer war no more? This analysis of peacemaking focuses on the three main players – hawks, doves and eagles, viewed, of course, through the eyes of a fourth predator, an owl.

However, this analysis does not consider them primarily as contending forces even if that is how they appear, behave, and are generally regarded. Rather, they serve complementary roles in peacemaking. The hawks are akin to the comb of feathers on an owl’s wings with its barbs or serrations that project up on the leading edge of the wing and are critical in combating turbulence. The eagles are like the tailing ends of the rear of the wings brought into play to counteract eddies. And the doves are like the soft coating that cover an owl’s feathers that serve to suppress friction between the feathers, and, therefore, sound. Thus, the owl is a dialectical but relatively passive raptor that brings together a system to reduce turbulence, eddies, and feather friction to give owls their distinctive silent watchful glare.

These analogies are not just metaphors. Rather, they are ways of viewing what are usually seen as competitive forces as, in actuality, also complementary. Each plays a different role to create a united front beneath the differences. In a Freudian psychological model, the hawk is the id, the dove is the superego, and the eagle is the ego. In an analogy to artificial intelligence, the eagle is the central object while the dove is its refraction as a simulacrum, a spiritual ideal that is an imitation and representation, but without the object’s embodiment. In Jean Baudrillard’s terms[xvii], the hawks replace reality, not with an unrealizable ideal, but with a false image – false to such an extent that one can no longer distinguish between the real and unreal. As other authors in this volume have noted, we live in a post-modernist age of disinformation and distortion, an age in which objectivity is not only superseded by subjectivity but is denied altogether.

In political theoretical terms, doves serve as covers for idealist-realists as they do battle with hard-hearted realists or hawks for the minds and soul of the body politic. By reference to one key issue in the Israeli-Arab conflict to which I have given my most attention, namely refugees, I will try to demonstrate why the Palestinian refugee problem has remained an intractable obstacle to peace and how the hawks, doves and eagles are not only competitors but complementary aspects on each side that have in reality joined forces to ensure the problem remains intractable and peacemaking becomes an impossibility.[xviii]

D. Refugee Return as an Imperative

Jeremie Maurice Bracka in his very recently completed LL.B. thesis for the Faculty of Law at Monash University in Australia on the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees, correctly described the issue of refugee return as “the lung through which the Israeli-Palestinian struggle breathes.”[xix] Most commentators believe that only a comprehensive peace agreement can resolve the refugee issue and that the refugee issue, along with the status of East Jerusalem, even more than the issue of borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, are the key irresolvable problems in arriving at a peace agreement. This paper will restrict itself to the Palestinian refugee issue as a political and peace problem rather than a debate over rights.[xx] The Palestinian-Israeli Oslo peace process did not include a reference to Palestinian refugee return let alone a right of return[xxi], but, instead, left such discussions for a final agreement supposedly within five years.[xxii] Let the discussion continue, but it will be irrelevant to peacemaking.

There is a general scholarly consensus that:

• About 30,000 of the Palestinian leadership in what became Israel left their homes BEFORE hostilities broke out to avoid the conflict
• The number of Palestinian refugees resulting from the 1948-1949 War of Independence and the Nakba totalled 720,000, give or take 20,000[xxiii]
• 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel within the boundaries of the 1949 armistice agreement
• A small percentage of those were internally displaced and were not permitted to return to their villages, which were demolished
• There is now a general scholarly consensus that most of those who went into exile were forced to flee by the Israeli military forces[xxiv]
• Except for Haifa, Arab leaders did NOT request that the population leave their homes[xxv]
• Arab armies invaded Palestine both to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state and to advance their own strategic positions[xxvi]
• Jerusalem was divided between the Jordanian forces that occupied East Jerusalem and the Old City and the Israeli forces that occupied West Jerusalem
• The efforts of the UN to take control over Jerusalem as per the UN resolution authorizing partition were completely ignored by both sides
• About 37.000 Jewish refugees who fled the Old City, East Jerusalem and the West Bank became refugees within Israel leaving the Arab occupied areas Jüdenrein, empty of Jews
• Palestinian refugees in the West Bank or Jordan proper were granted citizenship[xxvii]
• Those Palestinian refugees who fled to Gaza occupied then by Egypt were not granted Egyptian citizenship
• Those Palestinian refugees who fled to Syria were given work permits but those that fled to Lebanon were not.[xxviii]

Disagreement remains over whether those of the 720,000 Palestinian refugees forced to flee were the result of a general Zionist plan or simply a product of the exigencies of war and/or a then widespread endorsement of population exchange as a method of resolving inter-ethnic conflicts. This issue emerges as important in the latter years of the one-hundred-year-war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine when the prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict came to the fore based on a mutual recognition of self-determination. In the immediate aftermath of the 1948-1949 conflict, refugee repatriation was a non-issue because the Arabs were determined to return behind a victorious Arab onslaught.

In this paper dealing with the politics rather than the right of return, much has been made of Count Bernadotte’s recommendations on the refugee problem which became reified in Article 11 of the UN General Assembly Resolution 184, namely that: “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”[xxix] The dilemmas emerge when you parse the proposition.

First, return only applies to those who both wish to return and who also agree to live in peace with Israel. Since the Palestinians continue to be in a state of war with Israel absent a final peace agreement, there is no way of ascertaining which Palestinians wish to live in peace with Israel. More importantly, the proposition depends also on the conjoined condition that permission is required by Israel and, therefore, implies there is no return by right. Though the resolutions reads “should” as an imperative pressed upon Israel, the wording is hortatory rather than an international legal or even political obligation.

There is also the issue over the date of implementation. The original recommendation used the word “possible” rather than “practicable,” implying a much greater sense of urgency. Practicable could mean spreading out any intake over a number of years. The clause related to compensation also waters down the force of any imperative suggesting that this approach based on both the willingness of the refugee and of Israel – and/or the other political bodies held responsible for the flight of the refugees – to provide compensation could substitute for return. Finally, there is the fact that Resolution 184 only applied to those that fled and only later interpretations enlarged the circle of those to which it applied to descendants of those that fled.

Israel has refused permission for refugee return on a number of grounds:

• The Palestinians rejected Jewish immigration when Jews were desperate to get to Palestine to save their lives when Arabs were in a position of influence prior to 1948; why should Israel then reciprocate with humanitarianism when Palestinian Arabs are hosted by their ethnic cousins but not absorbed by most of them, when they are not in fear for their lives and when Israel is in a position of sovereign authority with the right to determine its own membership;
• In 1949, Palestinians rejected the offer of Israel to repatriate up to one-hundred thousand on humanitarion and family reunification grounds[xxx];
• Nevertheless, despite that rejection, an estimated 50,000 did return via this route;
• Neither the Arab states nor the UN has offered to compensate an equal or slightly larger number of Jews forced to flee Arab states in response to pogroms and persecution following the start of the Israeli War of Independence;

Though Arabs prior to 1948 used the argument of a limited absorptive capacity in Palestine making large scale immigration of Jews impossible, this is an argument rarely used by Israel against Palestinian refugee return, perhaps because it would be openly hypocritical since Zionists still position Israel as a haven for Jews around the world.

On the other hand, Israelis repeatedly attack the United Nations Works and Rehabilitation Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, for reinforcing through their education programs an antipathy to Israel. What is forgotten is that UNRWA was set up to serve all Palestine refugees, Jewish and Arab alike, but UNRWA became irrelevant for Jews because the 37,000 Jewish refugees from the areas occupied by Jordan were resettled in Israel. Further, any study on UNRWA makes it clear that UNRWA was set up initially to facilitate the resettlement and integration of Palestinian refugees in their host countries.[xxxi] This alone is a reminder that refugee return had not been part of the expectation of the international community at the time.

• Refugee Return, Jewish and Palestinian Identity

The intractability of the refugee problem is not just a matter of moral and legal right or of pragmatic politics. The refugee issue goes to the heart of how both the Jews and Palestinians see themselves. It is the identity issue and the accompanying symbolism that makes this aspect of the conflict so difficult to overcome. To quote Bracka again,

“the return to one’s ‘homeland’ is an essentially symbolic right, a matter of principle.” It is inscribed: “in the communal memories and ethos of two competing nationalisms. For Palestinians and Israelis alike, narratives of return are inextricably bound to mutually exclusive political identities, and in a sense constitute ‘the bare bedrock upon which other layers of the conflict are mounted’.”

After all, Zionism was built on the premise of return of Jews to their ancient homeland. Further, this continues to be part of the purpose of Israel until this day and moving forward. In 2022, Israel welcomed 100,000 more Jews. Further, the rejection of Palestinian Arab return is viewed as an existential security issue lest such return undermine the self-determination of Israel as a Jewish state even if doves and eagles prefer to depict Israel as a state for all its citizens. It does not help that Palestinian past nationalist claims and current positions reinforce a fear that Jewish majoritarianism in its own state will end or that critics of current Israeli creeping annexation depict Israel and Palestine as a de facto unitary state.[xxxii]

This is also true of the Palestinian identity for whom return (awda) restoration (isit’adah) and liberation (tahrir) have always been the ultimate goal of all leaders of the Palestinians – hawks, doves and eagles. Citing “return” and holding out the keys to the family’s home in Israel are nostalgic rites signalling the centrality of return to the Palestinian identity as well as their collective quest for self-determination and recognition.[xxxiii] As I and Elazar Barkan wrote in our 2009 volume (see endnote xxii i), the PLO was founded on the presumption of armed conflict, defeat of Israel and return behind an Arab military force.

In the end, though he initially indicated a determination to sign, Yasser Arafat could not conclude a peace agreement with Israel despite the very generous terms on offer because he did not want to be seen or go down in history as betraying the central tenet of Palestinian identity with respect to refugee return.[xxxiv] For It is the key (no pun intended) symbol for righting the injustice that Palestinians feel was inflicted upon them by the international community. As Bracka wrote, “The right of return is the existential umbilical cord linking the Palestinian people to selfhood and nationalism.” In opposition to the creeping annexation of the Israelis, the Palestinians countered with the doctrine of a phased recovery of land by first creating a Palestinian state in whatever territory that could be initially liberated even though that could be perceived as recognizing the de facto reality of Israel.[xxxv]

Explaining the willingness to engage in extreme self-sacrifice may be a conundrum, certainly for those who stress self-interest as the predominant or even sole motivating force behind behaviour. However, whether characterized as heroism or terrorism, individuals sacrifice their lives for the sake of the group to which they belong. Why? Courage, adventurism, group hostility, or kin psychology? Or perhaps all of these to different degrees wherein extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by identity fusion according to some social-psychologists – an evolutionary-cultural adaptation in the face of threats from another group characterized as “a visceral sense of oneness with the group, resulting from intense collective experiences (e.g., painful rituals or the horrors of frontline combat) or from perceptions of shared biology.”[xxxvi] This is what may motivate extreme self-sacrifice. Facilitated by changes in communication, from its primitive origins, fusion has spread to much larger groups based on religious belief, ethnic loyalties and ideology.

On the other hand, there are those who claim that a conscious cognitive bias determines the willingness of individuals to make extreme sacrifices[xxxvii], for people do go out of their way at significant personal expense to help others, including refugees. In that case, the context of principles, institutional framing and pragmatic opportunities may play a crucial role.

It is not for me to determine which motivation is the correct one. Nor do I need to do so. Whether it is the ‘wisdom of crowds’ or ‘conscious collective decision-making,’[xxxviii] it suffices to say that wars are more about the willingness to sacrifice oneself, to die rather than to kill others. And wars are often won by the smaller and even objectively weaker side based on the stronger will of one group rather than another. Witness the current Ukraine-Putin War. Witness the Irish rebellion against the might of the British Empire.[xxxix] The one-hundred-year war between the Zionists and Arabs in Palestine might offer another example, particularly in the first third of that long conflict.

However, my focus is not on providing an account of motivation but simply noting the importance of group loyalty in facilitating the willingness to engage in extreme self-sacrifice. And when the identity issue is virtually identical, though from opposite perspectives, AND when a conflict is over the same territory, the combination of group identity and territorial conflict emerges as a lethal combination.

This portrait behind the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been noted many times. And different observers have bet on different factions on each side to break the logjam. However, my claim is that it is because of the underlying unity of purpose of the factions on each side, whatever the differences in ideals, strategies and world views, that is, the unity in terms of fundamental identity of hawks, doves and eagles, when combined with an essential and irreconcilable incongruency, that makes a conflict immune to any peacemaking solution.

With very minor dissent from outliers, Israeli doves share with hawks and the eagle middle-roaders the commitment to a right of return – but for Jews only. This is also true on the Palestinian side. Doves provide the moral cover for hawks without surrendering that fundamental commitment. Eagles try to forge a leading and far-sighted bridge that embraces both the power of group survival and the commitment to lofty moral principles.

If this bleak picture is indeed the case, how can a peace be forged?

• Overcoming the Problem and Facilitating Peace

My answer is that one cannot overcome such struggles. However, one can mitigate the severity of such conflicts. Mitigation, not resolution, becomes the byword. One attends to minimizing risky outcomes and inputs. I have a heart condition. Doctors cannot heal my heart. But they can surgically intervene to reduce the risk of a fatal outcome. They can also offer medicines that reduce dangerous symptoms. But they do even more. I am required to monitor my blood pressure, the oxygen in my blood, the degree of edema in my legs. In inter- or intra-state conflict, early warning systems can be helpful if used with serious intent. Fearing the worst, one can prepare for the worst. One can also prepare by improving conditions through exercise, diet and recreation. But what if all the exercises in anticipation, intervention, and mitigation fail? Communications can be crucial – between the sides and with interested bystanders. And parties can plan for and prepare contingent responses that instead of exacerbating a crisis, cool the temperature.

All of these are well-known truisms to avoid and minimize the outbreak of violence. Some areas of conflict can even be rectified, at least over time. However, I would also suggest emphasizing the reduction of the impact when violence does break out and providing peace reinforcing and violence compensation measures and mechanisms in advance. Unfortunately, political leaders may do the reverse and stir up trouble for their own benefit.

To explicate the most dangerous condition that can exacerbate a conflict and bring it to a boil entail introducing two other birds to the panoply of doves, hawks, eagles and owls – ostriches and vultures. Though ostriches will eat lizards and snakes, fish and frogs, they are primarily herbivores unlike the raptors. The latter category includes vultures, but the latter primarily eat carrion in contrast to other raptors that love live prey.

Ostriches, unlike raptors – or other birds for that matter – cannot fly. But, contrary to the popular myth, they do not bury their heads in the sand when attacked or even just frightened. Though very anxious birds prone to panic, they, in fact, do not suffer from the Ostrich Effect, the cognitive bias of people who avoid negative information that can assist them in determining how to respond and instead bury their heads in the sand. Ostriches will, however, roll over and play dead.

They have very small heads (as well as brains) relative to their huge bodies. When they bend over to nibble at grass, they only appear to be burying their heads in the sand. Since they scratch holes in the sand where they lay their eggs and nurture their young, again they may appear to be burying their heads when, in fact, they are preoccupied with the task of rotating their eggs and feeding their babes. Further, ostriches, like chickens, and unlike raptors, are communal birds. They even will lay their eggs in a common nest in the sand with other ostriches.

Though very large, indeed huge, ostriches are birds with small heads but astoundingly enormous eyes, yet they still do not have the visual acuity of an eagle or a similar ability to see in the dark like an owl. Nevertheless, they do have acute long-range vision and can see for fifty meters in pitch darkness. But their vision is not there to hunt prey; they are wary defensive birds not normally prone to attack.

If attacked, they can run away when they can, for they have long legs and can travel at enormous speeds over land – up to 70 kilometres an hour and, unlike chetahs, they can sustain that speed for quite some time. They are marathoners and not just sprinters. Further, using their wings as rudders, they can weave and brake.

But what if the opportunity to flee is no longer available? The real danger comes when they cannot flee and when flopping to the ground and remaining still in the effort not to be noticed and to blend in with the environment does not work. In the expectation of an attack, when flight is not available, when the ostrich feels trapped, an ostrich in desperation will fight for its life, especially in defence of its eggs or young offspring. They have mighty kicks. Ostriches can kick with a force of 140 kilograms per square centimetre. Their sharp claws can cut through the neck of a lion.

When ostriches are panicked and stirred from their propensity to attend primarily to eating and nurturing their young, they either flee in panic or can become a formidable force. Given a proneness to anxiety and panic, in one type of response, they can be stirred into attack mode by enemies disinterested in their well-being and, sometimes, more entranced by their performance. Ostriches are not the most rational of creatures. They have even been known to engage in their exotic and erotic performances to seduce an automobile. If they are led to believe that their offspring or territory is under attack, they can turn from tame birds to fearless and dangerous opponents.

Here, we have to introduce vultures who can provoke ostriches to flee rather than fight. When a flock of vultures repeatedly harass a group of ostriches sitting on their nests but keep enough distance to avoid the sharp beaks or powerful feet of the ostriches, eventually the ostriches become disoriented and abandon their nests to escape the onslaught.

For vultures, ostrich eggs (and hatchlings) are gourmet meals. But the shells of ostrich eggs are thick (1/8”) and strong. No other raptor can break into them – except vultures. Vultures are not simply the garbage-picker-uppers, cleaning up the remains of other kills, but they are very clever intelligent birds, one of the very few types that have learned to use tools. Once they have frightened the parents to leave their nests, and to do so away from the source of the rocks they need, they select rocks that they can handle that are properly rounded so the inside of their mouths will not be injured. They fly to the sources of rocks and carefully select a rock, usually egg-shaped, with the appropriate weight. They return to the nest and thrust the rock with tremendous force and drop it repeatedly against the very same spot on the surface of the eggs until the egg finally cracks. After they toss their heads back, forcefully drop the rock heavily against the hard shell, they retrieve the tool and repeat the motion. Whether the behaviour is innate and part of their DNA or learned by mentoring, or a combination of both, weight, force of the thrust, accuracy in targeting and repetitive hammering together finally break open the egg and provide vultures with a feast equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs, unless, of course, the egg robbers are robbed in turn by crows such as the even more intelligent Egyptian raven.

That is why one of the greatest dangers in exacerbating violent conflict is the emergence of populist leaders who dress like eagles but lack their courage, strength and vision and are more akin to vultures. They certainly lack the moral principles and peaceful presentation of doves and easily ally with hawks, though given their cowardice, they are vastly different than hawks. Instead, they rely for their strength on stirring up and panicking masses.

In our polity, ostriches are not the high-fliers. They are not fliers at all, but the ordinary and average, largely apolitical, inhabitants of our society. Both intelligent and caring, they endanger no one despite their huge size. They are focused on their families. However, they are subject to the strategizing, manipulation and tool-users, the vultures who may interrupt a diet of dead meat bought at the supermarket to feed off the offspring of others in a hierarchy of manipulation and deception, parasitism and exploitation, though, in turn, they may be tricked by the even more intelligent, and much trickier, black ravens – but the latter is a story for another day.

Just as societies can suffer from periodic epidemics beyond human control, populism may also emerge to stir up mobs and offer pseudo leadership that uses deception and manipulation to keep the masses distracted. Further, the polity, like ostriches, may turn aggressive and go into attack mode even when no substantive attack is underway.

• Conclusion

I began with owls. In particular, the Owl of Minerva. But I have paid no attention to Minerva, only owls. Minerva, from menos thought, is both the Roman goddess of wisdom and poetry and heir of the Greek goddess, Athena. Medicine and entrepreneurship, artisan crafts and courage in warfare, science and technology, politics and justice, are all part of her purview. Minerva is NOT a patron of violence but of strategy in preventing and conducting defensive wars. Her sacred companion is the owl, the famed Owl of Minerva. In both Greek and Roman culture, Athena and Minerva occupied the pinnacle of what it is to be a god or, more importantly, a goddess.

Minerva’s birth and her early conception were unique. She was born fully armoured and grown when Vulcan used a hammer to split open the head of Jupiter (in Greek mythology, Zeus), Minerva’s father, and ruler of the heavens and earth. Vulcan did so to relieve Jupiter of his agonizing headaches. Athena was always more of a pain in the head for irresponsible rulers than a pain in the ass.

Minerva’s mother was Metis, the goddess of good counsel and daughter of the Titans, Oceanus and Tethys. Jupiter ate Metis when she was pregnant, either inadvertently or deliberately. Why would he do so? Because he was paranoid that she would give birth to a son who would, like he did, become a rival to the father and commit patricide.

Minerva inherited her father’s paranoia, but it was directed more to mortals who might aspire to be godlike or rivals to the gods. For example, Arachne was known as a brilliant and highly artistic weaver and embroiderer. She even claimed that she was better in those arts than Minerva (Athena). Minerva, furious at such an upstart, took up her challenge. Arachne wove a tapestry revealing the weaknesses and shortcomings of the gods. Minerva wove a tapestry warning humans not to get above their station. Rather than entranced by what Arachne had produced, Minerva was furious at her chutzpah and touched Arachne so that she became ashamed that she had challenged Minerva. Arachne hung herself in remorse. Minerva felt guilty, resuscitated Arachne, but turned her into a spider as punishment.

So much for the simplistic version of the men and women who occupy the spires of academe. Minerva may have been a goddess of wisdom, but she was also competitive and fully capable of irrational fears, jealousies and prone to vengeance. So much for dispassionate reason! So much for the owl on the surface being impassive and impenetrable. Rational detachment could serve as a cover for jealousy, rivalry, and revenge even if counteracted by shame for her own excesses. After Minerva caught Medusa kissing Neptune, it was Minerva who turned her into a monster with wriggling and hissing snakes instead of hair.

But perhaps the most telling tale of Minerva is what happened to Medusa after her head was cut off by Perseus. From her blood emerged the horse Pegasus, who was domesticated by Minerva and gifted to the Muses. Like Moses hitting a stone with his shaft to allow water in the desert to gush forth, a kick from Pegasus as powerful as that of an ostrich opened the fountain of Hippocrene and subsequently led to Pegasus partnering with Bellerophon to fight the Chimera, in other words, to allow reason and truth to beat back lies and illusions. Thus, does the Owl of Minerva serve truth very indirectly. Though driven by passion, jealousy and rivalry herself, Minerva is self-conscious of her shortcomings and, in the end, would fill Agueros, the very jealous sister of Herse, with so much envy that she turned into an unfeeling stone.

Thus, word to the wise and a final warning. Owls have their place in the panoply of raptors and great birds. But their superficial passivity is but another form of camouflage. They may serve truth and wisdom, but the route they take may be indirect and full of their own passions, rivalries and jealousies. It is important not only to recognize the shortcomings as well as strengths of hawks, doves and eagles, but of the owls who spread their wings at dusk and interpret past experience for the rest of us. But their ultimate greatest virtue is that they have the best hearing. They are terrific listeners.

---

I This paper focuses on peacemaking given the distinctions Boutros Boutros-Ghali made in his Agenda for Peace between peacemaking that aims to resolve violent conflicts, and peacebuilding that requires “rebuilding institutions and infrastructures of nations” damaged or destroyed in civil or inter-state wars, and a bridging mechanism, peacekeeping.

[ii] The series of thirty blogs distributed to participants in the symposium prior to that symposium dealt with the question of whether Israel was a failing state, but only reached the period before the Israeli War of Independence and the Nakhba where this paper starts. The series did not reach the stage of attempting an answer.

[iii] Cf. the papers by Terj Einharsen, Kathleen Newland and Alex Aleinikoff

[iv] Some commentators viewed this change as a shift from the particular to the universal even while acknowledging that the universal legal category left out the vast majority of refugees from the protection regime. (See Terie Einarsen ) I believe this is the wrong way to characterize the shift. I also suggest a critique of taking the thoughts and intentions of the framers of the Refugee Convention as too authoritative in interpreting history. Providing a rational explanation of why they decided the wording of the refugee convention in terms of their thoughts and words does not mean that these were predominant reasons. Other, and perhaps more powerful, motives, may have been in play, such as the desire of states to limit entry. That motive may have been omitted from the deliberations.

[v] Daniel Gordis blog, 13 June 2023.

[vi] Op. cit.

[vii] Cf. Susan Woodward (2017) The Ideology of Failed State: Why Intervention Fails, Cambridge University Press. My essay is not on failed states and is tangential to Woodward’s thesis. Further, my analysis of why intervention failed in this case is quite different than Susan’s approach.

[viii] Philip Earl Steele (2023) Birthing Zionism – Studies of 19th-century British Christian Zionists: George Eliot, Laurence Oliphant and Rev. William Hechler, Fathom eBooks. “19th-century British Christian Zionism did more than to shape thinking across British society and to hone the aims of a host of political figures including Lord Shaftesbury, prime ministers Palmerston, Disraeli and Salisbury, and Princess Helena and her brother Edward, the later King Edward VII.” It had a profound influence on both the first Zionist movement of the 1880s, Hoverei Zion, but also Theodor Herzl’s second Zionist iteration in the 1890s.” See also Gershon Shafir (2017) Balfour 100: Christian Zionism and the Balfour Declaration.

[ix] Howard Adelman (1984) “Hegel’s Phenomenology: Facing the Preface,” Idealistic Studies 14:2, 159-170.

[x] Cf. for example, Clark Clifford’s 1969 essay where he wrote that, from a cold war hawk and his role as President Johnson’s Secretary of Defence, he  “plodded painfully from one point of view to another, and another, until he arrived at the unshakable opinion he possesses today,” namely a severe critic of the Vietnam War.

[xi] Jennifer Ackerman (2023) What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds.” See the extracted essay, “What Owls’ Silent Flight Tells Us About the World,”

New York Times, 10-06-2023.

[xii] Astri Suhrke et al (2002) “Reflections on Peacebuilding” Bergen: CMI. 13-14.

[xiii] This results not only because owls have big wings and hollow bones for their body size, but use a dialectical interplay of three types of wing feathers: a comb, a row of fine hairlike bristles that extend forward along the leading edge of the wing where it meets the oncoming air; a belt of wispy vane fringes on the wing’s trailing (or rear) edge; and a soft layer of velvet coating the whole wing that together reduce turbulence, wind eddies and act to suppress sound.

[xiv] In the build up to the War of 1812 between Britain and its colonies, Upper and Lower Canada, US Republican Congressman dubbed others in his own party, Henry Clay and John Calhoun, as “war hawks”.

[xv] In the most domestic of birds – chickens, doves, etc. – can turn a peaceful bird into one that pecks its mate even unto death.  

[xvi] For my still meagre knowledge of raptors, I am indebted to the Raptor Rescue Society which operates a sanctuary on 1877 Herd Rd. in Duncan, British Columbia, just north of where I am now living.

[xvii] Cf. Jean Baudrillard (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press.

[xviii] That it is intractable becomes forcefully clear in Eyal Lewin’s 2016 essay, “The inevitable dead end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” (Cogent Social Sciences 2:1) Lewin analyzes the five subjects in contention at the 2000 Camp David summit where it becomes clear that even endorsing the right of return in principle if not in practice is an insurmountable barrier to peacemaking in this conflict.

[xix] Cf. Jeremie Maurice Bracka (2023) “Past the point of no return? the Palestinian right of return in international human rights law,“ Melbourne Journal of International Law  6, which is  a modified version of his thesis.

[xx] Ruth Lapidoth, ‘The Right of Return in International Law, with Special Reference to the Palestinian Refugees’ (1986) 16. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights both endorse the right to move, leave and return to one’s own country. See also Adina Friedman (2003) “Unraveling the Right of Return, Refuge 21:2 and Kurt René Radley (1978) “The Palestinian Refugees: The Right to Return in International Law,” American Journal of International Law 72 (published online by Cambridge University Press, 27 February 2017). The problem is that the Palestinians claimed what became Israel as their own country by right while the Zionists made Israel their country de facto. There are other reasons for sidestepping the rights issue, quite aside from the enormous difficulty of applying such standards in a violent conflict. Rights, which appear to be universal, have exigencies. The right to move, enter, leave or re-enter a state requires not only membership in that state for the person making the claim, but the caveat that such movement cannot interfere with the freedom of others. Israelis argue that massive Palestinian repatriation would undermine their right to self-determination, an argument that Arabs in Palestine once made with respect to Jewish refugees. Public order and the welfare of a democratic society might also be threatened. While acknowledging that refugee return has increasingly been defended as a right, especially when applied to Palestinian refugees, and especially in the United Nations General Assembly, and that such a right has increasingly been recognized in international customary law, this paper largely brackets the long debate over whether refugee return is a right and focuses instead on the impact of the debate on peacemaking. It is noteworthy that not one of the peace agreements (with Egypt and Jordan), or normalization agreements with Arab states, include any provision that Israel recognize a right of return of Palestinians. Finally, reference needs to be made to the writings of the young Palestinian refugee scholar, Hadil Louz. She is a research scholar in a double sense as both a Palestinian refugee from Jabaalia Refugee Camp in Gaza and an academic engaged in work on Palestinian refugee issues. She has focused on social anthropology and the way memories are used and reconfigured relative to current experiences to reinforce Palestinian solidarity and a core principle of the Palestinian resistance. Her 2019 Masters thesis at Oxford Brookes University is entitled “Refugees: ‘right of return’ to their homeland, with special reference to Palestinian refugees.” In that thesis, she claims that ‘the right of return’ is a “legally binding, unconditional, and inalienable right”. The evolution of international customary law has confirmed it as a right even if it has not been applied in practice in reversing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine which began more than seventy years ago. The UN has been ineffective in enforcing this customary international right that has systematically been undermined by Israeli laws – the Israeli Law of Return and its Law of Nationality. Louz is currently working on her PhD at St. Andrews University. In contrast to her position, Andrew Kent in his 2012 article, “Evaluating the Palestinians’ Claimed Right of Return” published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 34 refutes Louz’s claims. His abstract is worth quoting in full. “This Article takes on a question at the heart of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian dispute: did Israel violate international law during the conflict of 1947-49 either by expelling Palestinian civilians or by subsequently refusing to repatriate Palestinian refugees? Palestinians have claimed that Israel engaged in illegal ethnic cleansing, and that international law provides a “right of return” for the refugees displaced during what they call al-Nakbah (the catastrophe). Israel has disagreed, blaming Arab aggression and unilateral decisions by Arab inhabitants for the refugees’ flight, and asserting that international law provides no right of the refugees to return to Israel. Each side has scholars and advocates who have supported its factual and legal positions. This Article advances the debate in several respects. First, it moves beyond the fractious disputes about who did what to whom in 1947-49. Framed as a ruling on a motion for summary judgment, the Article assumes arguendo the truth of the Palestinian claim that the pre-state Jewish community and later Israel engaged in concerted, forced expulsion of those Palestinian Arabs who became refugees. Even granting this pro-Palestinian version of the facts, however, the Article concludes that such an expulsion was not illegal at the time and that international law did not provide a right of return. A second contribution of this Article is to historicize the international law relevant to the dispute. Many relevant areas of international law have changed significantly since 1947-49-such as the law of armed conflict, refugee law, human rights law, and law regarding nationality, statelessness, and state succession. Previous scholarship and advocacy finding that international law requires return of Palestinian refugees have impermissibly sought to hold Israel to legal standards developed decades after the relevant events. This Article’s third contribution is to assemble detailed data, summarized in several tables in the Appendix, on the actual practices of states regarding expulsions of ethnic groups and repatriation of refugees. Analysis of these data sets allows the Article to conclude that Israel’s actions regarding the refugees of 1947-49 was legal and consistent with the actions of many other members of the international community.”

[xx] Cf. Are Hovdenak (2009) “Trading Refugees for Land and Symbols: The Palestinian Negotiation Strategy in the Oslo Process,” Journal of Refugee Studies 22:1, March, 30-59. Between 1993 and 2001, the peace process failed. The PLO flirted with the idea of getting land in return for conceding on the right to return in execution though not in principle, for the latter concession would undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership and, even more importantly, the core belief in the Palestinian nationalist ideology.  However, separating the principle of return from its implementation was insufficient and unpalatable for the Israelis given their own nationalist ideology.  The Palestinian unwillingness to surrender return as a principle and the Israeli refusal to recognize such a principle even as a face-saving gesture became the straw that broke the camel’s back. See also Susan M. Akram and Terry Rempel (2000-2001) “Recommendations for Durable Solutions for Palestinian Refugees: Challenge to the Oslo Framework,” Palestine Yearbook of International Law 11, 1-72. In examining the international

legal framework for refugee protection, the protection of stateless persons and the alleged regime created to provide protection for Palestinian refugees, they reinterpret the legal provisions applicable to Palestinian refugees in light of the drafting history and scope and purpose of the provisions. They also offer a legal analysis of the right of return in comparison to restitution as a durable solution. See also Terry Rempel (2009) “The Right of the Palestinian Refugees to Return to their Homes in Theory and in Practice,” International Conference on Palestinian Refugees, Conditions and Recent Developments.

[xxii] The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Israeli-Palestinian Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, that entered into force 28 September 1995, Israel–PLO, 36 ILM 557 (1997). Oslo’s demise is commonly attributed to the political intractability over the right of return conundrum. Op. cit. Bracka, 148.

[xxiii] Cf. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan (2009) Rites of Return. New York: Columbia University Press. See also Howard Adelman (2010) “Refugee Return: By Right and By Law,” in Dan Avnon and Yotam Benziman (eds.) Plurality and Citizenship in Israel: Moving Beyond the Jewish/Palestinian Civil Divide,London: Routledge, 31-52; Howard Adelman (1986) Middle East Focus, Guest Editor, Palestinian Refugees, 9:2; Howard Adelman (2002) “Repatriation of Refugees Following the Signing of Peace Agreements: A Comparative Study of the Aftermath of Peace in Fourteen Civil Wars” in Stephen Stedman et al Thematic Issues in Peace Agreements Following Civil Wars. Boulder, Lynne Rienner Publishers; Howard Adelman, (1996) “Refugees, the Right of Return and the Peace Process,” Economics of Peace in the Middle East, Bashir Al Khadra, ed., Yarmouk University; Howard Adelman (1995) “Report of the Working Group on Refugees,” in Promoting Regional Cooperation in the Middle East, Policy Paper # 14, ed. Fred Wehling, University of California: Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation; Howard Adelman (1995) “The Palestinian Diaspora,” in Robin Cohen, ed., Cambridge Survey of World Migration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 414-417; Howard Adelman (1995) “The Multilateral Working Group on Refugees: Cover-ups in Preparation for a Breakthrough,” in Practical Peacemaking in the Middle East: The Environment, Water, Refugees, and Economic Cooperation and Development, ed. S. Spiegal and David J. Pervin, New York: Garland Publ., 199-214; Howard Adelman (1994) “Refugees: The Right of Return” in Group Rights, ed. Judith Baker, University of Toronto Press, 164-185; Howard Adelman (1988) “Palestine Refugees, Economic Integration and Durable Solutions,” in Refugees in the Age of Total War, ed. Anna Bramwell, London: Unwin Hyman, 295-311; Howard Adelman (1986) “Palestinian Refugees and Politics,” Middle East Focus, 9:2; Howard Adelman (1984) “Palestinian Refugees and the Peace Process,” Perspectives on Peacemaking, eds., Janice Stein and Paul Moranz, London: Croon‑Helm Ltd.; Howard Adelman (1983) “Palestine Refugees: Defining the Humanitarianism Problem,” World Refugee Survey, Washington, DC.: US Committee for Refugees, 20-27.

[xxiv] Benny Morris (1987) The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1948.

[xxv] Simha Flapan (1987) The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. When I interviewed Flapan in 1973, he claimed that it was absurd to believe that the invading Arab armies, dependent on the local population for food, sustenance and intelligence, would encourage Palestinians to leave their homes. Flapan died in the year his book was published in English. However, in spite of illogic and factual evidence, there are still apologists who insist that Muslim leaders encouraged the population of Arabs in Israel to leave. Thus, in spite of this scholarship, Toby E. Block wrote in a critique of an article in Jewish Currents that, “The article operates under the framing that Palestinians were forced from the land that became Israel. The reality is that two-thirds of the Arabs who fled Palestine in the 1940s left the area before the events of 1947–48. It is well documented that the Arabs who deserted left on the heels of the elite, who had moved to their summer homes, or fled at the behest of Arab leaders so as to minimize collateral damage. The Zionist community in Palestine, the leaders said, would be quickly crushed, and the Arab population would be able to return and enjoy the spoils.” June 15, 2023. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?hl=en&shva=1#search/Currents/FMfcgzGsnBjsJhcGjwKMHmtWJbgbhdGg

[xxvi] Robbie Sabel (2003) “The Palestinian Refugees, International Law and the Peace Process,” Refuge 21:2.

[xxvii] While it is normally the case that refugees who acquire citizenship surrender their refugee status, this has not been the case with Palestinian refugees. In fact, some scholars argue that this should not be the case for any refugee. Cf. Mazen Masri (2015) “The Implications of the Acquisition of a New Nationality for the Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees,” Asian Journal of International Law 5:2, 356-386. “The paper argues that since the right of return is independent of refugee status, the cessation of the latter should not necessarily abrogate the former. By examining the underpinnings of the right of return to one’s own country, especially the link between the individual and her territory, this paper argues that this link is somehow weakened in a situation of naturalization in a different country. However, this weakening of the link should not automatically lead to the deprivation of rights. The circumstances that lead refugees to leave their country of origin, the circumstances preventing their return, and the decisions made by the individuals in view of their available options, should be examined.”

[xxviii] Rosemary Sayigh (1995) “Palestinians in Lebanon: Harsh Present, Uncertain Future,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25:1, Autumn, 37-53.

[xxix] Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine Submitted to theSecretary-General for Transmission to Members of the United Nations, otherwise known as the Bernadotte Report, UN GAOR, 3^rd, sess, Supp 11, UN Doc A/648, 16 September 1948.

[xxx] At the Lausanne Conference in the summer of 1949, the Arab delegations rejected partial repatriation and Ben Gurion withdrew his offer to absorb 100,000 Arab refugees on humanitarian grounds.

[xxxi] Howard Adelman (1992) “On UNRWA,” Review Article of Milton Viorst, Reaching for the Olive Branch: UNRWA and Peace in the Middle East in Middle East Focus, 14:2, 11-15. See also Wadie E Said (2003) “Palestinian Refugees: Host Countries, Legal Status and the Right of Return,” Refuge 21:2.

[xxxii] Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami (2023) “Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s time to give up on the two-state solution,” Foreign Affairs May-June, 14 April. In a follow-up issue on 30 May, Foreign Affairs published a number of critiques, including those of Michael Oren and Martin Indyk, and then a defence by the original authors  – “Can the Two-State Solution Be Saved? Debating Israel’s one-state reality..” 30 May 2023.

[xxxiii] The assertion of return as a principle and a symbol of justice is forcefully stated by Salman Abu Sitta in (2004) “The Palestinian Right of Return: The Unfulfilled Human Right,” Mediterranean Journal of Human Rights, 8, “While the enslaved people in the world are enjoying their freedom, the opposite was happening in Palestine. The national majority of the inhabitants of Palestine, who lived there from time immemorial and have never left it en masse, suddenly found themselves in 1948 the victims of the largest planned ethnic cleansing operation in modern history. The Palestinian society has been destroyed in its homeland; the inhabitants of 530 towns and villages, representing 85% of the population of the occupied land in 1948 found themselves dispersed by expulsion, massacres and military assaults; their physical landscape destroyed, their culture and history erased, their identity and mere existence on their homeland denied. Who did this? The latent settler European colonial movement which came from the very same European countries which now proclaimed the rule of law and justice. Soldiers, money, ideology and political clout have been extracted by Jewish Europeans from the old colonial powers and thrust themselves on a new part of Asia, while other European soldiers and colonial officers were leaving it. It was an aberration of history. It was an anomaly in colonial history itself and a challenge to the very same elementary principles of justice for which the UN was created, not to speak of the geopolitical odds it had to overcome.”

[xxxiv] Ibid, endnote.

[xxxv] Cf, Rashid Khalid (1992) “Observations on the Right of Return,” Journal of Palestine Studies 22:4, 417–438.

[xxxvi]  Harvey Whitehouse (2018) “Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice,” Cambridge University Press, Online, 07 February.

[xxxvii] Christopher Y. Olivola (2018) Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 41, 27 December..

[xxxviii] The wisdom of crowds refers to the aggregation of many independent judgments without deliberation and consensus; collective decision-making is aggregation with deliberation and consensus.

[xxxix] David Fitzpatrick (1995) “The Logic of Collective Sacrifice: Ireland and the British Army, 1914-1918,” The British Journal 38:4, December, 1017-1030.

The Zionists needed two more votes to support partition by the members of UNSCOP. They had the support of Garcia Granados of Guatemala, Enrique Fabregat of Uruguay and Karel Lisicky of Czechoslovakia before the proceedings of UNSCOP had even begun. Zionists gradually became convinced that Emil Sandstrom would support partition. Three of the eleven seemed unreachable. Of the remaining four, Ivan Rand of Canada was a committed federalist and Arturo Salazar of Peru seemed to be singularly focused on protecting and enhancing the role of the Catholic Church in Palestine. That left John D.L. Hood from the Foreign Ministry of Australia and Dr. N.S. Blom from the Foreign Ministry of the Netherlands.

The problem was that these two did not seem to be actively interested or involved in the committee’s proceedings. Hood was well known for spending his evenings and late nights carousing with his alternate. Blom excused himself from attending many of the proceedings and events of UNSCOP claiming he had a sprained ankle. What is less well known is that both these men, instead of being impartial individuals responsible for hearing the evidence and observing what was going on in Palestine as the basis for making their recommendations, were civil servants appointed by their foreign ministers to interpret and defend their governments’ policies.

What government policy? In the case of Australia, Herbert Evatt, the Foreign Minister, had the ambition of being elected as President of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Hood was given explicit instructions to do nothing that might alienate the Arab and Muslim vote from supporting his candidacy.

Blom was also under the thumb of the Dutch Foreign Ministry. Blom had been a high-level civil servant in Indonesia. Indonesia was then a colony of the Netherlands. Blom was given unequivocal instructions not to take any actions or utter any words that might alienate more Arab countries in the Arab League to support Indonesian independence. In 1945, the Dutch had already recognized that Indonesia would attain independence in the future. This was known as de facto recognition. But the Netherlands was still opposed to Indonesian de jure independence.

Serendipity intervened on behalf of the Zionists. The change in the positions of both of these members of UNSCOP switched in August and September 1947, not because they were persuaded by the words or information fed to UNSCOP by the Jewish Agency and certainly not for any feeling of guilt over the Holocaust.

The first to dramatically switch positions was Blom of the Netherlands. And it was not necessarily because Indonesia and 60% of the population in Palestine was Muslim. And it may seem counter-intuitive for the Netherlands to have even considered support for self-determination for the Arabs in all of Palestine. After all, led by Sheik Muhammad Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine and Supreme Lead­er of the Council of Palestine who had received support from Nazi Germany, Palestinians were the first to recognize Indonesian independence in 1944, even before Indonesia had even declared in 1945. On 6 September of 1944, while in Berlin, Husaini announced in Arabic on Radio Berlin Palestinian recognition and support for Indonesian independence. In October, he urged and implored the Japanese government to grant Indonesian inde­pendence. He continued to use his various positions to lobby other Middle Eastern states to recognize Indonesian inde­pendence.

His main target was Egypt. Indonesia had declared independence in 1945. Egypt became the first state in the world to recognize de facto Indo­nesian independence on the 22 March 1946. Since Egypt itself was not yet independent, it was not in a position to recognize de jure Indonesia as an independent state.[i]  The Netherlands, the US, UK and Australia followed and recognized Indonesian de facto independence in November 1946.

On 14 June 1947, the Dutch Am­bassador to Egypt protested against a treaty that had been signed between Egypt and Indonesia. More importantly, for our purposes, the Dutch Ambassador to Egypt, on instructions from his government, prom­ised Egypt that the Dutch would fully support Palestinian self-determination if Egypt withdrew its recognition of Indone­sian independence.

However, a stream had been opened up. On 29 June 1947, Lebanon, and on 2 July 1947, Syria recognized Indonesian independence. Up until the end of July, the Netherlands continued its efforts to prevent any further slippage of Arab support for Indonesia. However, when in July 1947, Australia granted de facto recognition of Independence for Indonesia, the Dutch realized the game was up. By August, the flow of diplomatic water by the Arab states was already unstoppable. In November, Saudi Arabia would follow the lead of Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.[ii] After all, the Arab League foreign ministers on 18 November 1946 had already agreed to recognize Indonesian independence.

By August 1947, the Netherlands had seen the writing on the wall and gave up on its futile efforts to win Arab support for its position on Indonesia in exchange for Holland supporting Palestinian self-determination in all of Palestine. Blom was freed up to determine his own position on UNSCOP. Eventually, on 27 December 1949, Indonesian independence was officially recognized by the international community.[iii] Blom switched positions and supported partition.

Australia had followed a different path with a different end. Dr. Herbert Vere Evatt, who eventually became the President of the third regular session of the General Assembly, had previously been a candidate in 1947. Evatt had a distinguished career in Australia.  At the age of 36, he became the youngest High Court Judge in the history of the British Empire. He resigned in 1940 when he was elected to the Australian legislature and became Deputy Prime Minister, Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs during WWII. He had played a prominent and distinguished role in the San Francisco Conference in 1945.

Evatt is revered in Australia by the Jewish community there.[iv] When in November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly voted by 33 votes in favour, 13 against and with 10 abstentions, to partition the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River into two states, Jewish and Arab, Evatt cast the first vote in favour of partition. Evatt was viewed as the leading figure in guiding the partition plan through the Ad Hoc Committee of the UN and getting the UN to recognize the fledgling Jewish state. In 1947, as chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine,[v] a position which is generally believed that he received as a consolation prize for losing the election for the presidency, Evatt pushed partition based on UNSCOP recommendation and against the minority report favouring a federation or the Arab states’ push for self-determination in the whole of Palestine.[vi] In 1949, when he eventually became General Assembly president, he pushed Israel’s admission as a UN member state and called his successful effort the “most significant moment” of his presidency. He was eventually awarded a medallion by the State of Israel. But Hood had already made too many statements on record opposing partition.

However, up until his loss to his Brazilian opponent in 1947 for the Presidency of the UN, Evatt had maintained his instructions to Hood on UNSCOP to avoid any speech or action in favour of partition lest he lose the Arab vote for him in the presidential election. It was only when he lost that he released Hood from those instructions.  Hood, however, had already made too many statements on record opposing partition. Lest he be accused of hypocrisy, on a very questionable technicality, he decided to abstain. Thus, via serendipity and timing, the Zionists had gained one vote in favour of partition and prevented another vote from supporting an Arab dominated single state or a federated state.

One more vote was needed in favour of partition. It came from what was initially an unlikely source – Ivan Rand of Canada. He had been a leading proponent of the federation recommendation and had been influential in convincing Rahman, Simic and Entezam to support a federal solution. However, when he could only muster four votes for a federation, and believing in compromise and the importance of a clear recommendation from UNSCOP, he switched positions and supported partition.

Finally, there were six votes in hand for partition, three for a federal structure and one abstention. There was one other vote at play. With Rand using his persuasive powers, he forged a compromise to get the Peruvian representative, Gracia Salazar, to support partition in return for a separate polity for a greater Jerusalem under a UN trusteeship with guaranteed protection for religious sites, in particular, for Christian religious sites that were of such great importance to Salazar.  The Catholic Church could then play a significant role in ensuring that protection through the UN.

Luck, timing, personal convictions, persuasion in support of compromise as well as other factors – particularly what to do about the Jewish refugees still in camps in Europe – resulted in a majority recommendation on UNSCOP for partition.

---

[i] The two Egyptian key figures on the Arab League were Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmy el-Naqrasyi and For­eign Minister Abdulrachman Azzam Pasya who was also the secretary general of the Arab League. The Egyptian leadership, Palestinian leadership and leaders of the Indonesian independence were already “in league”.  A conference in Cairo agreed on setting up a Lajnah al-Difa’ ‘an Istiqlal Indunisi­ya or a Committee for the Defense of Indonesian Independence which asked all Arab and Islamic peoples to support Indonesian independence and to pressure the British whose troops were already in Indonesia ahead of the Dutch, not to support the Netherlands.

[ii] Cf. Rizal Sukma (2003) Islam in Indonesian Foreign Policy: Domestic Weakness and the Dilemma of Dual Identity, Routledge.

[iii] Canada played a role. General Andrew McNaughton as the then President of the United Nations Security Council, led the effort to break the deadlock between Indonesia and the Netherlands and the adoption of Resolution 67/1949 endorsing the establishment of the Tripartite Commission that lead to the international recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty in December 1949.

[iv][iv] Cf. Cf. Gareth Narunsky (2022) “’Doc’ Evatt: An Enduring Legacy,” The Australian Jewish News, 22 November.

[v] At its first meeting on September 25, 1947, the ad hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question charged with dealing with the UNSCOP Report, elected Evatt by acclamation as Chair.

[vi] A telegram to Evatt from the Jewish Agency for Palestine on December 2 stated, “We beg to convey to you our grateful appreciation of your wise and untiring guidance in the deliberations of the Ad Hoc Committee which prepared the ground for the United Nations’ historic decision for the re-establishment of the Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”

UNSCOP – 1947

How did the Zionists pull off the victory in 1947 of getting 7 of the 11 votes on UNSCOP recommending partition? Or should the Zionists even be credited with the result? Alternatively, did guilt over the Holocaust play a significant role? Of the many factors alleged to have contributed to that result – the new-born optimism of the UN in attacking an international crisis, the inflection point in history when de-colonization was emerging as a dominant priority, and others – two factors stand out as claims explaining the UNSCOP recommendation – the power of the Jewish lobby and world guilt over the Holocaust. This blog will deal only with one of the potential five members of UNSCOP seemingly open to persuasion. The Zionists needed 3 of the remaining 5 seemingly uncommitted members to support partition.

The dominant purveyors of the first thesis of the influence of the Jewish lobby were Israelis, especially Abba Eban.[i] “Zionist envoys would divide the map of the world and go out and seek the support of countries whose votes could become critical.” This they did tackling the Latin American countries from the Jewish Agency (JA) in the USA, the Czechs and Yugoslavs from the JA base in Paris, and Sweden and the Netherlands from the JA base in London, as well as preparing detailed documentation fed directly to UNSCOP and, as well, allegedly planting listening devices to monitor UNSCOP proceedings. Many academics supported the thesis, stressing the importance and effectiveness of the Zionist lobby.[ii]

Prominence was also given to world guilt over the Holocaust generally and by individual members in particular. “The Holocaust had created a sense of guilt throughout the Western world,“ the conscience of which was deeply marred by the Holocaust. “This almost deeply inconceivable tragedy loomed like a great shadow over the world affecting the situation in Palestine in a variety of ways.” “It was the input of the Holocaust and the plight of Jewish refugees that convinced them (the members of UNSCOP) that the establishment of a Jewish state was a sine qua non for any settlement.”[iii]

In the last blog, I believe I demonstrated that the views of the delegates from Guatemala and from Uruguay were not products of the lobby in Washington, but rather the prior convictions of those members.  To confirm this uncontroversial statement, Garcia Granados not only voted for partition and the creation of a Jewish state, but appeared afterwards in October 1947 before the UN Ad Hoc Committee considering the UNSCOP Report to launch a frontal attack on two fallacies and a third argument in favour of the Jews being allocated 62% of the land of Palestine even though, at the time, they only made up one-third of the population.

The claim that partition was an answer to “the Jewish problem” was fallacious because there was no Jewish problem per se, only a problem of antisemitism and persecution of Jews in some countries and, in other countries with Jewish citizens who enjoy the protection of the state, Jews are not a problem at all. The claim of a limited “absorptive capacity” in Palestine that required limiting Jewish immigration was equally fallacious and the phrase as used “does not pretend to be a forecast of future conditions and is irrelevant to the general intention of recommendation XII.” Finally, “According to any reasonable estimate, the proposed Jewish State will be able to absorb at least 1,500,000 immigrants, within a reasonable lapse of time” though “If all the Jews now living in assembly centres in Germany, Austria and Italy and those living in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, North Africa and the Arab countries wanted to go to Palestine, the number of prospective grants would not exceed the figure of 1,500,000…”[iv] 1,400,000 prospective Jewish immigrants and refugees entering over two years would yield a Jewish population in Palestine of 2,000,000 compared to 1,200,000 Arabs or 67.5 not 62.5% percent.

E.R. Fabregat of Uruguay, while agreeing with Granados in opposing confederation as unworkable, cumbersome and contrary to the principle of self-determination and the expressed will of the people of Palestine, supported partition and the creation of both a Jewish and Palestinian state. While overwhelmed with his visit alongside Granados to the refugee camps in Europe[v], unlike Granados, he defended the recommendations by referring to “the Jewish problem” and the need for “reparations.” Further, he qualified his support with respect to the division lines. Omitting ending the British role, which was unanimously accepted on the committee, Fabregat defended the main points of the recommendations, namely: a territorial solution of Palestine, agreeing with Granados on a division favouring the Jews “on the basis of the potential population which can readily be foreseen [on this score, Granados and Fabregat were both prophetic]; the creation of both an independent Jewish and Arab State within Palestine; a system of economic co-operation between the two states; a separate and special administration for the City of Jerusalem and other Holy Places in Palestine without creating “a third, semi-theocratic, semi-political state.”

But the Uruguayan delegate disagreed with the division of the Galilee and the inclusion of the western part with a number of important Jewish settlements, particularly Nahariva and Hanita, ending up within a future Palestine state, a land area that was needed for the resettlement of Jews still abroad and for pioneering in technological development. Fabregat also disagreed with the incorporation of the Arab city of Jaffa into the Jewish territory and the incorporation of the Arab city of Beersheba and the surrounding area into the Jewish territory.

Though Fabregat was unique on the committee when he alluded to the “conscience of the world” with respect to the Holocaust, it was not in terms of guilt over the six million murdered, but over the failure in prevention. However, his primary concern was the need to resettle the Jewish refugees. “The children who survived this great and terrible tragedy now, in innocent distress, people in the places destined to hold the refugees and persons driven from their homes by persecution and war. The situation of these children is absolutely desperate,” and it would be “very difficult for many of them to survive the hardships of the coming winter.”

Like Granados and Fabregat, Karel Lisicky was also a true member of a group of pro-Zionist believers, in his case, from Czechoslovakia.  Those dispositions were present long before UNSCOP was even created. What about the other eight members. Three of them were already convinced anti-Zionists and what they saw, heard and read did not affect their prior position opposing an independent Jewish state. What about the remaining five? The rest of this blog will only deal with one of them.

Emil Sandstrom’s views were critical. After all, he was chair. Unlike the delegates for Guatemala, Uruguay and Czecholsovakia, he did not appear preconditioned to vote for partition without any pressure from the Jewish Agency. The Zionists needed his support. Did either the Jewish lobby targeting Sweden from Paris or guilt over the Holocaust influence his decision? There is no evidence in the UNSCOP or Swedish archives that I could find supporting such a thesis. Rather, it appears that Sandstrom arrived at his conclusion supporting partition by a process of elimination.  

First, he eliminated any prospect of continuing British involvement in the continuation of the trusteeship, for the British empire had always been a “brutal” affair, a position reinforced when the British refused the committee’s request to commute the execution of three young Jewish insurgents[vi] who allegedly facilitated the escape from Acre prison on 4 May 1947 of both Jews and Arabs held there. The three had not had a legal defence since they did not recognize the authority of the Military Court and of the Defence Regulations under which they were tried, had not inflicted any casualties, and, in any case, the proof that they participated was weak.

Though this played a part in opposing any continuing role for the British, there were other more important reasons for supporting partition and the creation of a Jewish state. Sandstrom eliminated both the options of a federated state of two nations or of a single nation made up of individual equal citizens. With regard to the first, a federal state, he saw no possibility since his contacts in Palestine convinced him that the Arabs there were antisemitic; he saw no prospect of Jewish-Arab cooperation. Even the Norwegians and Swedes had been unable to co-habit within a single state. Hence, he was even more dismissive of the proposal for a unitary state, especially after his meeting with Judah Magnes, President of Hebrew University, whose views he found to be impractical without any substantive content regarding implementation.

Sandstrom’s visit with King Abdullah of Jordan convinced him that the Palestinians Arabs would be best off within a Jordanian polity. Further, that was the only route to ensure that bloodshed and a war between Jews and Arabs could be avoided. He was not able to convince a majority of the committee on this proposition, though the recommendation on a union of the Arab part of Palestine with Jordan crept into the recommendations as a possible future outcome.

Second, his visit with other members to a Palestinian Arab cigarette and cigar-making operation that employed child labour appalled him and reinforced a view that he was developing that the Arabs were backward and even more exploitive of their own people than the British. The third and most powerful experience was watching, with Vladimir Simic, what happened when the Exodus[vii], a ship carrying over 4,500 Jewish refugees, that tried to land in Palestine, but was turned back when the British military boarded the ship, took control and forced the ship to return to Europe.[viii] Both Sandstrom and Simic witnessed British soldiers transferring Jewish refugees from the Exodus in 1947 to the deportation ships.

Though the incident is given prominence in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, in fact it was the plight of the refugees that began to obsess Sandstrom, not the Holocaust. Given restricted entry to Western countries other than the Dominican Republic, Palestine as a refuge for Jews could only take place if restricted immigration into Palestine for Jewish refugees – there would soon be 300,000 of them and potentially many more from Arab countries – was lifted.

There is virtually no indication that the Jewish lobby influenced Sandstrom. In his secret meeting with Menachem Begin, then wanted as a terrorist by the British, the conviction settled within him that an Arab war with the Jews was inevitable unless the British Legion stationed in Jordan intervened on behalf of Jordan to annex Arab Palestine as a province. Further, ironically given the number of jurists on the committee, international law was not a decisive factor in the recommendation for any of the members.[ix]

Support for partition had acquired one more supporter who made his decision based on what he heard and experienced in Palestine and not as a result of any influence from the Zionist lobby or any overwhelming guilt over the Holocaust. Where would partition get at least two other supporters from the remaining four presumably uncommitted members of the committee?

---

[i] Cf. Abba Eban (1972) An Autobiography. Random House as well as his documents held in the Israeli archives. While crediting D.W. Eytan with the general plan, primary credit for implementation was given to both himself and David Horowitz

[ii] See also Jørgen Jensehaugen; Marte Heian-Engdal & Hilde Henriksen Waage (2012) “Securing the State: From Zionist Ideology to Israeli Statehood,” Oslo Peace Institute, Diplomacy & Statecraft 23, 280–303. “What processes allowed a non-state actor, the Zionist movement, to secure international acceptance for the creation of a Jewish state in highly ambiguous circumstances? … By stablishing state-like institutions in Palestine whilst building international support, the Jewish Agency was able to secure for itself a unique place from which to declare statehood.” The Zionist movement worked not only to create facts on the ground within Palestine but lobbying effectively to secure support for its state-building project at the international level. In contrast, see also Elad Ben-Dror (2022) UNSCOP and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Road to Partition, Routledge who asks how the methods and motivations of the various members of UNSCOP, with special attention given to the personal viewpoint of each member of the committee, resulted in recommending partition. The inquiry, debate, and compromise depended primarily on the characters and circumstances of the individual members of the committee. I agree and add my own slant on that perspective.

[iii] Cf. Hassan Husseini (2008) “A ‘Middle Power’ in Action: Canada and the Partition of Palestine,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 30:3, Summer 41-55. Hassan Husseini quotes the historian David Bercuson (1984) in support. But Bercuson wrote (correctly) that the “fate of the Holocaust survivors,” was the issue, not guilt over the Holocaust. Cf. (1985) Canada and the Birth of Israel: A Study in Canadian Foreign Policy, University of Toronto Press.

[iv] Other than the addition of J. D. L. Hood of Australia, the other members of the European refugee camp delegation from 8-14 August were alternates: Leon Mayrand of Canada; Richard Pech of Czechoslovakia; V. Viswanathan of India; Ali Ardalan of Iran; A. I. Spits of the Netherlands; Paul Molin of Sweden, Joze Brilej of Yugoslavia, though the delegates from India, Iran, Yugoslavia and Peru all had strongly objected to the visit.

[v] Document A/297 from the archives of the UN Ad Hoc Committee https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-186346/.

[vi] They were Abshalom Habib (20), a student, Meir Nakar (21), a labourer who had served three years in the British Army, and Jacob Weiss (23), a recently arrived Holocaust survivor whose entire family, with the exception of his sister, perished in the Shoah.

[vii] The Exodus, made famous in Leon Uris’ novel and the film by that name based on the novel, was an “ancient, leaky, 1,814-ton Chesapeake Bay excursion boat, once known as the President Warfield, but now grimly called Exodus 1947,” Time Magazine, July 28, 1947.

[viii] Michael J. Cohen (2009 “A New Look at Truman and ‘Exodus 1947’,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 3:1, 93-100.

[ix] Cf. Ardi Imseis (2021) “The United Nations Plan of Partition for Palestine Revisited: On the Origins of Palestine’s International Legal Subalternity,” Stanford Journal of International Law, Winter. While focusing of the UN partition resolution in November 1947, the argument applies even more critically to the proceedings of UNSCOP.  The arguments made therein were NOT governed by the objective application of international law weighing partition versus the self-determination of the Arab majority.

Blog 28: The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine

The Formation of UNSCOP in 1947

Eight years after the British suppression of the Palestinian Arab 1936-1939 uprising and the Woodhead Commission recommending increased restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, two years after the end of WWII in which six million Jews were exterminated and following the 1945 American Harrison Report to President Harry Truman requesting that Britain admit 100,000 Holocaust survivors and refugees into Palestine, following the joint 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry tasked with dealing with the recurring Palestine issues of political sovereignty, Jewish immigration and land purchases resulting in the 20 April 1946 “Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine” that also dealt with economic development and security and which recommended the admission of 100,000 displaced Jews in Europe into Palestine along with the annulment of the Land Transfer Regulations restricting Jewish purchase of Arab land but denying both Jewish and Arab claims to sovereignty in line with the Morrison-Grady Plan that called for a federal polity in Palestine under British Trusteeship, and after two years of violent rebellion by both Arabs and Jews against British rule, the British threw up their hands in frustration over the seeming intractability of the problem and despair over the large costs of maintaining 100,000 British troops in Palestine when the UK was on the verge of bankruptcy following the inordinate expenditures in fighting WWII.

The UK referred the problem to the newly created United Nations for recommendations, but made clear that it would not be bound in advance by any recommendations, namely, the UK would not necessarily take sole responsibility for implementation unless the United Nations found a just solution acceptable to both the Arabs and Jews of Palestine that could also be reconciled with the British conscience. Britain expected to have its mandate extended, but with shared responsibility. It did not expect the one unanimous recommendation: that Britain surrender its mandated authority over Palestine. With some relief, the UK bitterly acceded, many regarding the withdrawal on 15 May 1948 as carried out with undue great haste.

The UN created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947. The committee would have eleven members appointed by countries in different regions of the world, but deliberately excluding any members coming from a Great Power. The members were not supposed to be representatives of the states from which they came, but independent individuals[i] with various kinds of experience and personal preferences, though most came with a diplomatic or legal background.

Eleven countries were ultimately asked to appoint members: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. Omitting the names of alternates, with the exception of Peru where the alternate became far more important than the representative, the individual members appointed to UNSCOP were:

Australia                       John D.L. Hood from the Foreign Ministry

Canada                          Justice Ivan C. Rand, Supreme Court of Canada

Czechoslovakia             Karel Lisicky, Czech diplomat

Guatemala                    Dr. Jorge Garcia-Grandees, politician and diplomat

India                              Sir Mohammad Abdur Rahman, Muslim High     Court of India judge

Iran                                Nasrollah Entezam from the Foreign Ministry

The Netherlands          Dr. N.S. Blom, Foreign Ministry

Peru                               Dr. Alberto Ulloa; alternate – Dr. Arturo Garcia Salazar lawyer and diplomat

Sweden                         Justice Emil Sandstrom, Supreme Court

Uruguay                        Prof. Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat, educator and                                    liberal activist, Colorado Party

Yugoslavia                     Vladimir Simić, a relative (brother?) of Stanoje Simić, and ambassador to the USSR and Foreign Minister

Dr. Ralph Bunche, an African American who occupied important positions in the US State Department, was named as the personal representative of the UN Secretary-General to UNSCOP and ran the secretariat for the committee. Subsequently, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as United Nations Mediator in the Palestine Conflict. In his role on UNSCOP, it became reasonably well known that he favoured the continuation of a trusteeship of some kind since the only alternative, as he perceived it, was open warfare between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. What was most remarkable, in spite of his own personal preferences, he served as the indefatigable and totally impartial secretary of the committee which never seriously considered a continuation of some kind of trusteeship.

If one surveyed the biases or preferences of the members of the committee in April of 1947, one would be hard pressed to expect a positive recommendation for Jews having an independent state in Palestine. The Zionists had only 3 of 11 supporters on the committee – Lisicky of Czechoslovakia, Granados of Guatemala and Fabregat of Uruguay, and Lisicky was not a sure vote. Granados[ii] and Fabregat[iii] were died-in-the-wool nineteenth century Latin American liberals who could be expected to be on the side of the much more liberal and progressive Jewish role in Palestine. They performed true to expectations.

Given the federal structure of Czechoslovakia at the time, which combined Czechs and Slovaks in a single polity, one might have expected Lisicky to support a federalist rather than a partition plan. However, recall that Tomáš G. Masaryk, an early president of the state and a Zionist even before Theodore Herzl, and Jan Masaryk, his grandson who was Minister of Foreign Affairs, were committed Zionists. In 1935, Jewish organizations throughout the world hailed the election of Edvard Beneš as President of Czechoslovakia because he would continue the strong support of Zionism by the leaders of that state. Before the communist takeover, Edvard Beneš resumed his role as president. Leaders from Czechoslovakia could not possibly appoint a representative to UNSCOP that did not support Zionism. Finally, in his appearance before the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine on 16 October, Karel Lisicky, following the appearance of Arthur Creech-Jones and other anti-Zionists before the committee, made it abundantly clear that he was an unqualified supporter of Zionism.[iv]

But where were the Zionists to get at least three others to vote in favour of their case for Jewish self-determination in Palestine? The Palestinians had three unapologetic supporters of the Palestinians on UNSCOP. Sir Mohammad Abdur Rahman, a Supreme Court judge born in Delhi, and initially strongly opposed to Muslim self-determination in India or even a federalist Hindu-Muslim state, became the first Muslim Vice Chancellor of Delhi University. At the time, he was an ardent opponent of the idea of political division and of religious/ethnic self-determination. In 1948, he would strongly oppose the practice of partition and of Indian partition in particular, and adumbrated the vision of India becoming a leader of the third world.[v]

Nasrollah Entezam was the representative of Iran at the founding of the UN in San Francisco in 1945, represented his country as the first Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations from 1947 to 1950 and would soon after be elected President of the UN General Assembly during its fifth session in 1950 with overwhelming support from what would become known as the Third World. What were his views on Palestine in 1947? It would be incorrect to project backwards from post-1979 Iran when the Iranian revolutionary government would become ardent advocates of the Palestinian cause (Muslim Palestinians were overwhelmingly Sunni) in the interests of projecting that its Shia perspective appealed to all Muslims.[vi] It would also be incorrect to read back into 1947 the congenial relations that the Shah of Iran enjoyed with Israel after the British and American supported overthrow of Iran‘s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in the 1953 coup and the reinstatement of the Shah‘s absolute monarchy that repressed, suppressed and coerced Iranian dissidents, including the Islamicists. In 1947, while the pre-revolutionary Iranian opposition to the Shah embraced not only anti-imperialism and anti-monarchism but anti-Zionism, and when traditional Iran recognized Jews as the “people of the Book” under the protection of Islam, but not an ethnic or nationalist group, Entezam compromised any Iranian opposition to Zionism and eventually supported the view that Palestine should become an Arab state with two semi-autonomous minority Jewish enclaves in a federal state. The Zionists could write off Entazam as a potential supporter of self-determination for Jews.

Another assured opponent of the Zionist cause was Vladimir Simić of Yugoslavia, a state then dedicated to oppose self-determination of its various nationalist components. Simić blamed the British for “divide-and-rule” and responsible for the antipathy between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The Brits failed to prepare the Jews and Arabs for self-government in a united state, but reinforced a local government system that favoured the separation of the two groups. He would be the primary author of the minority report that recommended a federalist solution over partition and the 12,000-word annex to the UNSCOP report.

The Zionists needed the support of at least three of the remaining five members of UNSCOP.  Where could they come from? Ivan Rand was a strong Canadian federalist and ill-disposed to favour the secession of a nationalist group. Dr. Arturo Garcia Salazar of Peru was deeply Catholic and manly concerned with the protection of the rights of the Catholic Church in Palestine. Many Arab Palestinians were Christian, mainly Greek Orthodox, so he was naturally more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Jews who were ill-disposed to Rome given its failure to protect Jews from the Nazis and the Church’s historical persecution of Jews. Further, the Muslim Waqf had by and large protected Christian sites for centuries. Finally, he was unsympathetic to the remnant of Jewish refugees, attested by the fact that he was the fourth vote along with Entezam, Rahman and Simić opposing UNSCOP visiting the refugee camps in Europe.

The Zionists needed all three of the remaining votes. The views of Justice Emil Sandstrom of the Supreme Court of Sweden were unknown, an important factor behind his election as chair of UNSCOP. Nor were those of John D.L. Hood of Australia or Dr. N.S. Blom from the Netherlands. If the Zionists knew then what we know now, especially of the positions of the latter two explored in detail in the next blog, they would have despaired of a positive outcome. Yet they ended up with seven rather than six votes in favour of partition.

How did it happen? (to be continued)

---

[i] In the face of the failure of Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin to convince the Americans to support provincial status for Palestine under UK jurisdiction, Arthur Creech-Jones, the UK Colonial Secretary, had called for an impartial review by an international independent authority. Cf. Ritchie Ovendale (1980) “The Palestine Policy of the British Labour Government 1947: The Decision to Withdraw,” International Affairs 56:1, 73-93. Later, on 16 October 1947 in his appearance before the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, he both defended Britain’s role and continued to advocate that Jews be absorbed “in countries other than Palestine.” (UN Department of Information)

[ii] Jorge Gracia-Granados would go on to publish his views and experiences on UNSCOP in the 1948 book, The Birth of Israel: The Drama as I Saw It published by Alfred A. Knopf, but currently available in a digital edition by the University if Michigan Press.

[iii] Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat, for his whole life an academic activist on behalf of underdogs everywhere, was known on the committee for pushing for three necessary general principles: the British mandate must end by establishing Arab and Zionist states; the Jewish people must have a state as a haven against persecution; and a federal state should be the prerogative of the two nations decided by plebiscites in each state within 10 years.

[iv] “For anyone who has seen the Jewish people at work in Palestine, there can be no doubt about their unshakable will to live as a nation with all the attributes of nationhood.” Extract from his remarks before the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, 16 October 1947.

[v][v] Cf. Rami Ginat (2004) “India and the Palestine Question: The Emergence of the Asia-Arab Bloc and India’s Quest for Hegemony in the Post-Colonial Third World,” Middle Eastern Studies 40:6, 189-218.

[vi] Cf. Seyed Ali Alavi (2017) “Iran’s relations with Palestine: roots and development,” PhD thesis, University of London.

The Wikipedia entrée on the revolt in its opening paragraph offers a very succinct and accurate portrayal of the revolt. “The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, later known as The Great Revolt (al-Thawra al- Kubra) or The Great Palestinian Revolt (Thawrat Filastin al-Kubra), was a popular nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a ‘Jewish National Home’. The uprising coincided with a peak in the influx of immigrant Jews, some 60,000 that year – the Jewish population having grown under British auspices from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935 [almost one-third of the total population] – and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centers to escape their violence and abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized.”

Though the revolt was against British rule, it ostensibly began with Arab-Jewish inter-ethnic violence that had evolved into tit-for-tat exchanges. Two Jews were murdered by a Qassimite band[i]; Jews killed two Arab labourers in reprisal. In fact, it began earlier when the Qassemites killed a British police officer and the British hunted down al-Qassam and killed him.

While 15 May 1948 is now commemorated as Nakba Day in remembrance of the 720,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee Palestine in 1948, a day later was the initial commemoration day when Amin al-Husseini, the rabidly anti-Zionist Mufti of Jerusalem, declared that date, Palestine Day, to honour those killed by the British and Zionists during the previous month and back to the riots of 1929. After an initial strike in Nablus, Husseini, on behalf of the Arab High Committee (AHC) called for a general strike that lasted six months. It was called off on 11 October 1936.

Unlike 1933, this time the Palestinian leadership seized control and direction to channel the rage of the bottom-up extreme discontent. Though ended by a combination of repressive tactics and international diplomacy by Britain (enlisting the Saudis and others to pressure the Palestinians to end the strike), the General Strike was simply succeeded by the 1937 rural spontaneous uprising that was also repressed. Between 1936 and 1939, the British hung 108 “revolutionaries” and killed at least 2,000 in direct combat, though Rashid Khalidi estimated more than twice that number were killed and another 1200 died in intercommunal violence which resulted in over 200 Jewish dead. Khalidi also claimed there were 20,000 Arab casualties.[ii] Many of them were killed by Arabs in response to waverers, dissenters and collaborators, usually under orders of the euphemistically labelled “Boycott Committee,” more appropriately titled the Assassination Committee.

The dead and wounded were not the only casualties suffered by Arab Palestinians. They lost much of their leadership through death or exile. Their store of arms was largely confiscated, used or destroyed. The economic cost to the Arab community was enormous, especially in the agricultural sector. Since the Arab community became split between the peace committees and the rebels, the cost to social cohesion in the Arab sector also suffered. However, what ultimately emerged was a more cohesive and consolidated Palestinian national identity with a determination to acquire self-rule.[iii]

The revolt was a very violent one with attacks both on infrastructure (oil pipelines and railway lines) and British police and armed forces. By September, the number of British troops deployed to support the police numbered 20,000. It would eventually grow to 50,000 and include both the Air Force and Navy. Jews were killed in the 1936 strike in attacks on Jewish neighbourhoods in mixed cities (Jews fled Acre and Beisan) as well as Jewish settlements, destroying orchards and farms in adumbration of what Jewish settlers do in the West Bank to Arab farmers over the last three decades.

Brutality was not the exclusive prerogative of Arab Palestinians. The British used extrajudicial killings, collective punishment and blew houses up of the families of militants. Civilians were used as shields by the army. Whole villages, like al-Bassa near Haifa-Acre with almost 600 inhabitants, had their populations forcefully expelled and the villages were burned to the ground. Al-Bassa was rebuilt afterwards, but once again, in 1948, the inhabitants were forcefully expelled, this time by the Hagana, and the village again was almost entirely destroyed.

The Peel Commission was launched by Britain between the General strike of 1936 and the wider uprising of 1937. Governance under the Mandate Authority since the 1920s had been divided between the Jewish Agency and the Supreme Muslim Council. The Peel Commission Report of 7 July 1937 recommended that this de facto partition become a political one with a division of the land between the Jews and Arabs, but with significant parts of the land continuing to be controlled by the British thus setting the basis for the tripartite division recommended in the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) Report in 1947, but with the United Nations replacing the British and the Jewish Zionists allocated an even larger area than the larger option in the Peel Commission Report. Peel had offered two options – a very small Jewish Zionist state and a large Arab one linked to Transjordan (Option 1) and a somewhat larger Jewish one, but requiring the transfer or relocation of 275,000 Arab Palestinians (Option2).

The Arabs adamantly rejected partition altogether as did the Revisionist Zionists.[iv] The Labour Zionists led by Ben Gurion revised its initial rejection to accept the larger plan subject to negotiations on the size and the recommendations to restrict immigration.

The revolt resumed in the autumn of 1937 with the assassination by the Qassemites on 26 September of Lewis Andrews, the pro-Zionist Acting District Commissioner of the Galilee. By 1938, the Irgun Revisionist Zionists initiated militant operations against the Arab Palestinians at the same time as the British introduced de facto military control or military rule over the Mandate and systematically set out to repress the revolt. About half the Arabs who were killed had been attacked by Revisionist Zionists beginning in late 1937. But the violence had become much more widespread with abductions, sniping, murders, bombings, armed robberies and destruction of commercial properties as well as infrastructure.

In 1938, the Woodhead Commission was initiated by the British. Initially, the idea of partition had been accepted in principle, but the Woodhead Commission eventually rejected not only partition but the prospect of a Jewish sovereign state in any part of Palestine. Further, anticipating a possible war with Germany with the necessity of eliminating Arab rage against the British, much more severe restrictions on immigration and land sales were proposed.

One result was Irgun guns turning against the British in 1938 using mines or, more accurately, what became known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), offensive weapons favoured in a guerilla war or insurgency.  The beginnings of the Jewish revolt against the British had started even before WWII. For with the British recruitment of about 20,00 Jewish policemen, the building of a nascent arms industry by the Hagana, the consolidation of the Jewish leadership and its increased experience not only in military and political matters but in intelligence gathering as well, the Jews had been given a head-start in preparation for the Jewish-Arab war less than a decade later.

---

[i] Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian who participated in many revolts across the Arab world and migrated to Palestine after the defeat of the Libyan uprising, became a religious leader and anti-Zionist and anti-British agitator. Tom Segev the Israeli historian dubbed him the Arab Joseph Trumpledor.

[ii] Rashid Khalidi (2007) The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood Beacon Press. For an earlier account, see George Antonius (1938; 1945) The Arab Awakening. The Story of the Arab National Movement.

[iii] Oren Kessler (2023) Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.

[iv] Eric Kaplan (2005) The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy. University of Wisconsin Press.