My Trip to Palestine Ended Early

 

Last week I left the West Bank to visit a friend in Amman, Jordan. Little did I know that this was the last time I would be in Palestine. Upon return last Wednesday Israeli immigration denied my visa application to re-enter the West Bank. They believed that I was pro-Palestinian.

 

The manager of the hostel in Amman that I stayed in told me that this is common for people re-entering the West Bank through Jordan, and I think this is true for two reasons. First, if you are boycotting Israel Jordan is the logical place to enter the West Bank because you are avoiding Israel's airport. Israeli security suspects that people who enter the West Bank through Jordan (as opposed to Tel Aviv) are more likely to be pro-Palestinian. In retrospect I should have entered through Tel Aviv. Whether you enter through Tel Aviv or Jordan you are entering occupied Palestinian lands. Also the West Bank is about an hour drive away from Tel Aviv so you can still respect the boycott if you fly into Tel Aviv.

 

The hostel manager in Amman told me that tourists returning to the West Bank from Jordan are more likely to be turned away because they have seen the occupation in person. Once someone sees Israeli apartheid and the occupation even from a foreigner's eyes they tend to be more aware of how racist Israeli society is. They may not put it in those words yet it is there. Israel's occupation cannot allow people to believe that Palestinians are human beings.

 

Due to my abrupt exit from Palestine I have a slight change in my blogging schedule. My roommate in Ramallah is sending back my personal belongings, which includes my camera and my computer. Without these items I cannot upload my pictures or the blog posts that I have already written. So I will continue to write up blog posts and once I receive my camera and computer I will hopefully begin posting several times per week. My apologies for taking so long with the posts. I will do my best to capture what I saw and to give the reader a sense of the occupation.

 

Introduction to Israeli Apartheid

Dear friends and family,

I'm sorry I didn't post earlier. I've been busy traveling and meeting with Palestinian communities in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel. I wrote the following post a week ago and haven't had time to publish it. I think that I will try to catch up and describe the various communities I visited throughout the month of July in more detail.

From June 15-24 I will participate in the Health and Human Rights Delegation, during which time I will be learning about Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jerusalem as well as in Israe and meeting with pro-Palestinian organizations. During the month of July I will most likely be filming testimonials of students and faculty at Birzeit University in Ramallah for the Right to Education Campaign. After that I hopefully will visit Cairo, Egypt before flying back to California.

As way of introduction to my journey, I thought I would share with readers a short history the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. While a comprehensive report is far beyond the scope of 1 short blog post, I thought I would provide some historical context before I spend most of my time writing about my travels in Palestine.

The Palestinians have lived on their lands for a long, long time. There is substantial evidence that they were in various locations during Biblical times and have had a continuous presence over since. More recently, Palestinians lived under the Ottoman Empire before World War I, which was when European settlers first began immigrating to Palestine. The latter point is essential to understand what Zionism is and is not. 

In his foundational manifesto for the Zionist movement, Der Judenstaat (which translates to "the state of the Jew," though it is often interpreted as meaning "the Jewish state"), Theodor Herzl explicitly called Zionism a project that would displace the "savage" Palestinians with European Jews. Herzl also considered Argentina or Uganda as possible locations to establish the Zionist colony, though he ultimately decided on Palestine.

During the 1890s Herzl argued that rising anti-Semitism in Europe meant that Jews must build their own Jewish settlements on the colonial frontier. The main point here is that from its beginning the architects of the Zionist movement envisioned the Judenstaat to be a European colonial-settler project that would expand its territory at the expense of their Arab neighbors, which includes not just Palestine but also nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. In other words, the fundamental precondition of Zionism is the displacement of Palestinians and eventually their Arab neighbors for the sake of "Greater Israel." Hence Zionism both immediately threatens Palestinians and in the long-term their Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, and Jordanian neighbors.

In international institutions have been promising to create a Palestinian state for almost a century, a promise that predates any official mandate for the establishment of Israel. After World War I, the League of Nations established a Palestinian Mandate to create a Palestinian state that was to be implemented by Britain. As was true throughout the Arab World, World War I was a time when Europeans lied to protect elite interests at the expense of Palestinian rights. (For more on secret European agreements to divide Arab lands, see the Sykes-Picot agreement.) Without ever creating a Palestinian state, Britain occupied Palestine from 1919 until 1948, the year that the Zionist movement established the state of Israel.

In a 1917 letter to Baron Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour stated that "his Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," which Balfour openly acknowledged would infringe on the rights of Palestinians. There is evidence that the influential Zionist and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizman, made this arrangement possible by offering the British government valuable weapons research to help kill Germans during the war in exchange for creating a Jewish state.

As European Jews continued settling in Palestine from the 1890s until the Great Depression, the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany resulted in a significant number of German Jews immigrating to Palestine during the 1930s. Many of these German Jews did not want to go to Israel and believed the move would be temporary. In the meantime, from 1936-9 Palestinians organized a major uprising against the British colonial government and Zionism immigration.

The relationship between Zionists and Palestinians to the Nazi movement was complicated and is a contested question among scholars today. Various Palestinian and Zionist factions either collaborated or resisted the Nazi movement. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, at first collaborated with Zionists and eventually the Nazi regime. Major Zionist organizations, going back to Theodor Herzl himself, were willing to collaborate with anti-Semites, including Nazi leaders, to achieve their goal of a Jewish state. Hitler himself was intrigued by Zionism as a means of expelling German Jews. Nazi SS colonel Adolf Eichmann, who Hannah Arendt made famous while reporting on his trial in Israel in 1961, visited Mandate Palestine in 1937 to explore the possibility of relocating German Jews there.

Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad is probably the most controversial and in my opinion courageous scholar regarding the question of Zionism and the Nazi movement. Massad argues that before World War II most European and American Jews opposed Zionism. For Massad, after the Nazi Empire murdered millions of Jews a much larger proportion of surviving Jews were Zionists than had been before the Holocaust. In other words, the Holocaust destroyed much Jewish resistance to Zionism and gave the Zionist movement an opportunity to establish Der Judenstaat. 

Zionists did just that from 1947-8 when they expelled approximately 800,000 Palestinians from their homes, roughly a third of the total Palestinian population of 2.5 million. This occurred while the United Nations deliberated a Partition Plan to divide Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish states. It called for roughly 50% of the land to be distributed to each "nation" but the UN never actually implemented the plan. According to the recently deceased Israeli left-wing activist Akiva Orr, there was a backroom deal between Israelis and the Jordanian monarchy for Israelis to annex roughly half of lands allocated to Palestinians under the UN's Partition Plan, which had allocated control of Palestinian lands to Jordan.

Before the UN could fully implement its Partition Plan, Egypt, Jordan (who was at that point probably already compromised), Iraq, and Syria declared war on the Zionist militias with the aim of protecting Palestinians facing imminent expulsion. The Zionist militias won the war, remembered by many Israelis as the "Israel's War for Independence." Palestinians remember it as the "Nakba," which in Arabic means "catastrophe." I believe the Palestinian narrative, which that holds that this was an atrocious instance of ethnic cleansing. For elaboration on this argument, see Ilan Pappe's famous article called "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."I'm told the book is even better.

As a result of these events, Palestinians only controlled half of the territory granted to them by the Partition Plan and only 22% of the original Palestinian Mandate. Roughly a third of all Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and there was still no Palestinian state. After 1948, Jordan controlled the West Bank and Jerusalem, Syria controlled Golan Heights, and Egypt the Gaza strip, all of which had large Palestinian refugee communities (many refugees also ended up in Lebanon). As a sidenote, I believe that any agreement between Palestinians and Israelis must include the right of Palestinian refugees, now numbering roughly six million people living outside of historical Palestine, to return to their homes. Anything less is a gross injustice.

Egypt, Jordan, and Syria maintained control over those Palestinian territories until 1967, when Israel surprised its neighbors with assaults by land and air. The "Six-Day War" resulted in Israel capturing the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan, and Gaza from Egypt. These territories have been occupied by the Israeli military ever since, making it the longest military occupation of the modern era. In accordance with Theodor Herzl's vision for Der Judenstaat, after the 1967 war Israel began demolishing Palestinian homes and building Jewish-only settlements in these territories.

A few last events of historical significance since 1967:

• From the 1960s until the 1980s, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was a major leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This organization was very powerful in refugee camps in Lebanon.
• Lebanon suffered from a brutal civil war from 1975-90, with the PFLP siding with the Shiites against US-backed Maronite Christians.  Israel took advantage by invading southern Lebanon and murdering about 20,000 people in 1982. It was the Sabra and Shatila massacres that earned Ariel Sharon, then an Israeli general, the title of "The Butcher of Lebanon."
• In 1987 there was a major Palestinian uprising called the "first intifada" (intifada means "uprising" in Arabic), during which time the Hamas party was formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. By now the PFLP had declined considerably within the PLO.
• The first intifada eventually led to the Oslo Summit, where Israel agreed to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank and begin a process of working towards Palestinian self-government. In return Hamas' rival Fatah party agreed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Oslo Accords were completely ineffective, with Israel continuing to occupy with West Bank and controlling the air and sea of Gaza, enforcing a brutal blockade on the latter that today keeps Gazans on the brink of starvation.
• After the failure of Oslo there was a second intifada in 2000, which eventually led to Israel building the apartheid wall (the most expensive construction project in Israeli history) in 2002 and withdrawing Zionist settlements from Gaza in 2005. 
• Hamas won relatively free and fair elections in Gaza in 2006. Anticipating a US and Israel-backed coup de'tat by rival faction Fatah, Hamas preemptively expelled (in some cases violently) Fatah members of Gaza's security apparatus. Israel responded with a brutal blockade of Gaza that continues until today. In contrast to Hamas, many Palestinians perceive the Palestinian Authority to be a puppet of the US and Israel. In light of Mahmoud Abbas' recent statement regarding the right of return for Palestinian refugees, who can blame them?

In light of Israel's settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem and the apartheid wall, Palestine's map now looks something like this:



So that's my brief overview of the history of the conflict. I left out a lot of things and brushed over quite a few others, but hopefully over the course of my time in Palestine I provide lots of additional facts and statistics to describe what is happening there.

And briefly, here's where I am at personally in my life: I just shipped my belongings back to California and have left NYC for good. I feel happy and sad and am in the process of a large transition in my life, and that would be true if I weren't traveling to Palestine! I love NYC and have many dear friends there. I will miss it a lot, and am the same time I'm looking forward to being with family and old friends again.