By Dr. Norman Berdichevsky ——Bio and Archives--September 24, 2010
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"We strongly protest against the attitude of the said delegation concerning the Zionist question. We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary, we consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country, We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development in our country as may be judged from the fact that the town inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre and Nazareth, where no Jews reside, are steadily declining."Shukri's fate was sealed from that moment and although he enjoyed immense local prestige and authority among the Arab population of Haifa, he was the target of a failed assassination attempt in May 1936 just weeks after a successful one ended the life of his brother-in-law and former mayor of Haifa, Ibraham Bey Khalil, a member of one of the richest families in the city. These distinguished leaders were part of the major opposition element among Palestinian notables who feared the Grand Mufti, al-Husseini. They were labeled as the "Nashashibi opposition" whether or not they were actually members of that clan. From the very beginning of the Mandate, the Zionist movement sought out Arab leaders willing to cooperate offering a variety of rewards that would tempt collaborationists, running the gambit from bribery, raising the general standard of living, manipulating inter-clan rivalries and providing convincing arguments that Zionism could not be extirpated and that an accommodation would be a much more farsighted policy than the eternal confrontation offered by the Mufti. By the late 1920s, David Ben Gurion and Moshe Shertok (later known as Moshe Sharret who later became Israel's second Prime Minister) rejected the approach of offering "carrots". They believed that however real the material benefits enjoyed by the Arab population as a result of Zionist activity, a policy of cooperation would inevitably be doomed to failure. No moderate Arab segment of public opinion could openly confront the extremists for whom terror, blackmail and threats rather than elections or policy debates were the established way of dealing with an opposition. The only hope lay rather in convincing extreme Arab nationalist currents that confrontation would ultimately lead to an Arab defeat. Among those Arabs who did openly express opposition to the Mufti, many eventually had to flee the country and felt abandoned by their Jewish allies. They had cooperated due to a variety of motives. Many were land owners who cared for their tenants (fellahin) and made decisions to sell mostly marginal and poorly drained uncultivated land in areas with a scant and dispersed population. Some were speculators who acted solely in their own selfish interests while others truly tried to derive maximum benefit for their loyal followers. The income from these sales enabled prominent rural families to live a more comfortable and secure existence in sharp contrast to the past and to cement the loyalty of their followers and tenants in clan rivalries. A few had married Jewish women and were regarded with suspicion by both sides, others had welcome the medical, agricultural and economic benefits provided for their villages due to close proximity and cooperation with Zionist settlements while there were others who had been attracted to the social and intellectual horizons offered by the new metropolis of Tel Aviv. The legacy of almost thirty years of coexistence within the British Mandate left many ties between the two communities in areas that brought tangible benefits to many Arabs in technical and agricultural assistance, trade union activity, transportation, medical treatment and employment. These were not simply jettisoned to satisfy the demands of the power hungry and corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Nationalist movement Inter-Arab rivalries took on larger proportions as a result of the 1936-39 uprising against the British instigated by the Grand Mufti and his supporters. A large part of the Arab public was appalled by the vicious terrorist tactics and wholesale purges carried out by the rebels to force them into cooperation. Many supplied information against the terrorists to the British authorities and Jewish settlements. The most fascinating segment of the book deals with the smuggling of arms by Arabs to the Jewish underground forces including the Irgun and the "Stern Gang" (also called the FFI - Fighters for the Freedom of Israel or by the acronym in Hebrew as "Lehi"). The participation of a few Arabs in the Jewish underground movements as "brothers in arms" in attacks against the British authorities on the eve of partition is fact and not fantasy no matter how strange it appears today. During Israel's War of Independence, many Bedouin and the entire Druze community switched sides to join the Jews in opposing the invasion by the regular Arab armies. The war also conclusively demonstrated the considerable apathy or outright refusal of a large part of the Palestinian Arab population to take up arms and fight the Jews for control of the country. The invading Arab armies took the major brunt of the fighting and were often looked on with mistrust by the Palestinian civilian population. The leader of the most prominent Palestinian fighting force, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of Jerusalem and the Mufti's close relative, found most of the population indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms much as many French peasants avoided conscription into Napoleon's Grand Army. He was unable to recruit volunteers for the salaried force he tried to raise in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya, all towns reputed to be hotbeds of radical Muslim sentiment and Palestinian opposition to Zionism. In Beit Safafa, his forces were driven out by angry residents protesting the misuse of their homes for anti-Jewish attacks. What is the significance of this historical research for today? Is it of more than purely academic interest? First of all, the total disinterest of the media in presenting an accurate account of inter-Arab rivalry and the multiple motivations for cooperation by Arabs with Jews and the Zionist movement in Palestine only serves to expand the already grossly distorted picture created by many Left Wing "activists" of good guys vs. bad guys that comes across on television screens (where pictures are supposed to be worth 10,000 words) showing the Palestinian civilians as humble underdogs and the outmatched victims of a super aggressive arrogant Israeli military machine. The same bias operated throughout our involvement in Iraq and for quite some time was oblivious to the 1400 year old dissension within Islam between the Sunni and Shi'a divisions. Several recent polls have demonstrated that the prospect of any border change that would involve the loss of their Israeli citizenship in favor of a new one as a result of a territorial exchange with The Palestinian Authority is adamantly rejected by a large majority of Arabs living in border areas. Finally, whereas there existed real moderates on the Arab side during the mandate who actively promoted collaboration that envisioned a future coexistence, the much misnamed "moderate" Palestinian leader Abbas, the darling of today's international media and European "statesmen" is a transparent sham whose record of Holocaust denial would have embarrassed any Western head of state immediately after World War II no less than the pro-Nazi Palestinian leader, the Grand Mufti. Contemporary events thus bear out the central thesis of Cohen's research and it is this: The version of Palestinian Arab Nationalism as envisioned first by the Mufti during the Mandate and today by the PLO (Yasser Arafat and currently Mahmud Abbas) or the extremist religious organizations of Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah, all have expected their followers to unconditionally submerge their personal, regional, religious identity within the concept of THE NATION, a view they hold as indistinguishable from their leadership. Any other loyalty that challenges total subordination is regarded as intolerable and is the equivalent of treason; thus, the spectacle of Hamas "warriors" throwing PLO supporters off the roofs of some of the tallest buildings in Gaza and recent confirmed reports of the "round up and punishment of collaborators", by Hamas. It is no wonder that now as well as then (period of the Mandate and Israel's War of Independence), Jewish forces could count on an "Army of Shadows".
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Dr. Norman Berdichevsky nberdichevsky.com, Ph.D. - Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974, is an author, freelance writer, editor, researcher, lecturer, translator and teacher with sophisticated communications skills.