Tracing Gaza's chaos to 1948

Tracing Gaza's chaos to 1948
By Mark LeVine
Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7205AFFD-7B62-4F40-BCDE-94242112BA82.htm

flag of Israel flies over Gaza before the 2005 withdrawal [GALLO/GETTY]

The roots of Gaza's misery today can be traced back to the late
Ottoman period, decades before the war of 1948 transformed the Gaza
Strip from a minor port and agricultural hinterland into one of the
most overcrowded places on earth.

It was then, in the middle of the first great age of globalisation,
that Gaza's fate was sealed, although it would take half a century for
it to unfold.

At the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman empire
was undergoing a process of modernisation that was opening provinces
like Palestine to greater economic and cultural penetration by Europe.

It was during this period - the heyday of high imperialism - that
Zionism arrived on Palestinian soil.

By the early 20th century, thousands of young and
relatively unskilled East European Jews were arriving each year in
Palestine desperate for work and housing.

While Gaza was never a primary location for Zionist
settlement, Gaza City had a small but longstanding Jewish community,
and several settlements, including Kfar Darom, were established during
the British mandate (1917-1948) period and re-established after 1967.

Most of the young settlers who came during the first
three waves of Jewish settlement, from the late 1880s until World War
I, were unable to compete with the better-trained and cheaper
Palestinian Arab work force, which itself was sustained by a larger
Palestinian economy that had undergone a significant development,
albeit with ups and downs, in the last century and a half.

This reality led the emerging Socialist Zionist leadership to develop
two strategies, the "conquest of labour" (kibosh ha-avodah) and when
that failed, the "conquest of land" (kibosh ha-karka'a)
to ensure the creation of autonomous, exclusively Jewish settlements
that would be free of competition from non-Jewish workers.

The bourgeois town of Tel Aviv, founded in 1909,
copied the Jews-only policy of the first kibbutz, or collective
agricultural settlement, Degania, which was founded the same year.

Both sought to create modern exclusively Jewish
environments that would, culturally, economically, and politically, be
as autonomous as possible from the surrounding environment - the older
Arab/Sephardi and non-Zionist Ashkenazi Jewish communities as much as
from Palestinian Arabs.

Transforming Zionism

Crucially, this early competition for jobs and land
helped transform Zionism, in the words of Israeli sociologist Gershon
Shafir, into a "militant nationalist movement" by the time Tel Aviv
and Degania were established.

The exclusivist nationalism of the movement was
exacerbated by the reality that Zionism, like American, Australian and
South African nationalisms, was at the same time colonial.

A Jewish security group dedicated to protecting pioneering Zionist
settlements [Getty]

All were examples of "settler colonial" movements which were unique in
their desire to replace rather than exploit the indigenous population
of the colonised land. This strategy went well with the socialist
ethos of the emerging Zionist leadership, which was ideologically
committed to avoiding the exploitation of the Palestinian population.

At the same time however, many senior Zionist leaders
had experience working in Europe's African colonies, which would be
put to use in developing Zionist policies in Palestine.

Following the thinking of other colonial enterprises, Zionist leaders
justified their project by arguing that Zionist Jews had the right to
rule Palestine because they - not the Palestinians - had the ability
to develop the land to its full potential and usher Palestine out of
its supposed slumber and stagnation into the modern world.

In response, the Palestinian nationalism that emerged soon after the
first stirrings of Zionism was equally exclusivist in its claim to the
right to rule Palestine.

A "spirit of resistance" that had defined Palestinian responses to
foreign incursions, whether by Napoleon's France or Muhammad Ali's
Egypt, became evident as Palestinians harassed Europeans who bought
land in the country even before the first Zionist settlements were
founded.

Conflict with Zionist settlers occurred almost from the start of the
Zionist movement's colonisation efforts.

Transition of rule

Once Palestine transitioned from Ottoman to British
rule, a zero sum conflict over the country's future was inevitable,
especially when the level of Jewish immigration and land purchases
increased dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s.

The fact that the British government was, literally,
"mandated" to facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home in
Palestine while merely protecting the existing civil and religious
rights of the native population, exacerbated this situation.

Thousands of East European Jews arrived in
Palestine desperate for work and housing
The very structure and aims of the British mandate necessitated that
any independent Palestinian leadership should be crushed.

Meanwhile, the most logical and "efficient" way to
develop the economy would be through relying on the development
programmes of the Zionist movement, whose ideology, political and
economic discourses appealed to European imperial sensibilities and to
the powerful Christian Zionist impulses that had emerged in England in
the latter part of the 19th century.

Equally important, the Zionist enterprise brought a
huge influx of capital into the country that enabled its development
without great expense to the British tax-payer.

Ironically, Zionist leaders like Felix Frankfurter,
the supreme court justice, would argue that "no cordon sanitaire"
could protect Palestine from the modern world that he believed only
arrived with the Zionist movement and British rule.

But in truth neither had brought modernity to Palestine because it had
arrived decades earlier.

The Zionists merely replaced an emerging and increasingly cosmopolitan
Ottoman modernity, one which saw Palestine undergo a rapid development
in the last decades of Turkish rule (in which Arab Jews and early
Zionists, as well as increasing trade and contact with Europe, played
a part), with a European, colonial modernity that would ultimately
push Palestinians off of, and for more than half of them out of, their
land.

In the case of Gaza specifically, this meant herding Palestinians,
first in 1948, then in 1967, and again during the Oslo decade of
"separation" and "divorce" between Israelis and Palestinians, into a
prison from which they are still trying to escape.

Flood of refugees

At the outset of the 1948 war, the population of the Gaza region was
approximately 60,000 to 80,000. By the end of the hostilities, at
least 200,000 refugees had flooded what would become the Gaza Strip,
whose rectangular shape roughly corresponded to (but was smaller by at
least a third than) the area of the Gaza District during the mandate
period.

Israel built 17 settlements in Gaza from 1970 to 2000 [Getty]

The exact shape of the Gaza Strip was determined by the position of
Egyptian and Israeli forces when the ceasefire was announced.

The majority of the refugees came from the almost wholesale eviction
or evacuation of Palestinian towns and villages from Jaffa southwards
to Gaza City and the surrounding villages to the north and east that
were depopulated during the war.

These refugees were housed in the ensuing years in eight camps
throughout the region, many of which were former British military
bases. By 2000, the last year of the Oslo peace process, the number of
refugees and their descendants had swollen to well over 400,000.

The Gazan hijra

Based on several years of fieldwork interviewing refugees in Gaza,
Ilana Feldman, a New York University professor, describes the typical
experience of becoming a refugee in the Gaza Strip in what has been
described by many Gazans as the "hijra", (adopting the Islamic
terminology for the flight of the still small Muslim community from
Mecca to Medina in 622) as having "happened almost without awareness...."

"They crossed no international border, but simply went down the
road.... Few people imagined that they would be gone for longer than a
few days or weeks," she wrote. In this thinking, Gaza's refugees were
a microcosm of the larger Palestinian experience of the Nakhba, or
disaster of the 1948 war.

Unlike the West Bank, which was effectively annexed by Jordan in 1950
and its population offered Jordanian citizenship, Egypt maintained
Gaza under military rule until a legislative council was elected in 1957.

Moreover, unlike Jordan, Egypt had little ties with or concern for
Gaza, and thus the Strip received little attention or investment in
infrastructure between 1948 and 1967.

Jewish settlements

A Palestinian farmer looks on with his daughter as Israeli tanks sweep
through Gaza [Getty]

After its conquest by Israel, 17 Jewish settlements would be
established inside the Gaza Strip between 1970 and 2000. While housing
well under 10,000 settlers, the settlements came to dominate the
geography of the Strip, securing access to much of the best land,
water, and shore areas.

Their presence justified the transfer of only 60 per cent of the Gaza
Strip to Palestinian control during Oslo. The settlers, only half a
per cent of the Strip's population, controlled 40 per cent of its
territory and even more of its resources.

This situation would not change significantly during the Oslo period,
and when the last settler left, five years into the al-Aqsa intifada
in September 2005, Gaza effectively became the world's largest prison.

Mark LeVine is professor of history at UCI Irvine and author or editor
of half a dozen books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and globalisation in the Middle East, including Overthrowing
Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine,
Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel and
Palestine, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of
Evil, and the forthcoming An Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens of
History.

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