“The Arabs of the land”

The other day I came across a long tweet ‘explaining’ why there are still refugee camps in Gaza and other Palestinian territories and neighbouring Arab countries years after the wars that made them refugees. The tweet is from one Einat Wilf (“Feminist. Zionist. Atheist. Yes.”) and alleges that the UN has incubated the violent strand of the Palestinian national cause by continuing to indulge the notion that the state of Israel is a temporary problem rather than being there to stay, and by inflating the number of refugees in ways that would not be applied to any group of ‘true’ refugees. The crux of her argument is that Palestinians, or rather ‘Arabs’, lost and should just get over it, but she displays ignorance about what an Arab is.

In her first paragraph, she reminds us that during the 20th century, a lot of populations were on the move as a result of the change from empires to ethno-states; some ‘lucky’ new states were based on popular self-determination and their peoples shared a common culture, language and connection to the land; other ‘unlucky’ states “were artificially created by receding empires drawing boundaries, forcing different peoples to share one state, leading almost always to civil war, dictatorship, or both”. The latter type of state was mostly found in Africa, where the imperial powers had divided up the land among themselves to better aid the extraction of Africa’s resources, and were succeeded by a political class which did not want to relinquish any power, hence they enshrined the colonial borders through OAU policy. She continues: “In the bloody process of empires receding and new states emerging to replace them, tens of millions of people were displaced, fleeing across newly created borders, typically to new countries with an ethnic makeup similar to their own. This was true of Hindus and Muslim, Ukrainians, Poles and Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Jews. This was not unique”.

In fact, there were two major centres of population displacement: Europe, where borders were shifted by force first by the Nazis and the Soviets in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and then by the victorious allies, and India, where the departure of the British in favour of a Hindu-dominated democracy led Muslims to believe they were not safe, correctly as we now know, and needed a state of their own. These two situations did not need to have any bearing on any other part of the world, and did only because one of the major colonial powers which was on the allied side in World War II ruled Palestine at that time. Poles moved west because their eastern territories, in which they were a large minority among a majority of Ukrainians (and in the north, Lithuanians) were occupied by the USSR; they moved to better lands in the west, territories which had been seized from Germany as a punishment for its aggression and to ensure a natural border between it and Poland, the Oder-Neisse river. Germans were expelled from other lands because their presence had been a pretext for a German invasion, which most of them supported (as with Czechoslovakia). None of these issues are relevant to Palestine; there was no other mass migration of people in that region than the one forced on it by the influx of Jews from Europe.

In subsequent paragraphs she refers to the Palestinians as “the Arabs of the land” who lost the 1948 war. It’s odd that nobody questions the national identities of any other Arabs, despite those names being fairly new as national identities; people identified with Islam, the city they came from, their tribe, sometimes their region, but a person from Benghazi only became a Libyan when that parcel of land was taken by the Italians, much as the concept of a Palestinian national identity was forced on the people there by lines drawn on the map by outsiders after the First World War. People could and did move freely between regions in a way that is unthinkable now. But an Arab is only someone who speaks Arabic; just because there are “other Arab countries” does not mean that one whole group of Arabs is just like another and could just move. Outside of the Arabian peninsula, the majority of people are Arabised natives, not descendants of tribal Arabs who came out of the Arabian peninsula in the early years of Islam. (The exception is Iraq, where large numbers of tribal Arabs were settled in some regions.) Tribal Arabs have migrated to other regions and intermarried with the local population, some of whom spoke Arabic and some did not, but that does not change the fact that the people are Pakistanis, or Egyptians, or Indonesians, or whoever. Palestinians are not just a bunch of interchangeable Arabs. They are native to Palestine, descendants of peoples who have lived there over the centuries, including Jews. The seizure of Palestine is not just a minor loss to “the Arabs” but the loss of a whole country to its own people.

I agree with her about one thing: there shouldn’t be people living in “refugee camps” decades after the events of 1948. This is not just an issue in Gaza but also in Lebanon and Syria; in Lebanon in particular, Palestinians are denied democratic rights because that would upset the country’s demographic balance because they are mostly Sunni Muslims, which are only the third largest religious group in Lebanon. This is indefensible when they have been living in the country for more than 70 years and there is no other remaining democracy, apart from Israel, where subjects are denied democratic rights for this long because of where they came from. But the matter of refugees is only part of the Palestinian problem; not all Palestinians live in the refugee camps but all are facing persecution from Israel’s armed forces and the Jewish settlers. Not all those who are opposed to a negotiated peace are Palestinian; over the years extremist Israelis have fostered the growth of extremist groups among Palestinians, by both channeling money to them and by giving Palestinians no shortage of reasons to support them rather than the ‘moderate’ Palestinian politicians, giving the Israeli public the impression that they have no serious negotiating partner, and themselves licence to step up harassment, commit massacre after massacre, and now moving to outright destruction if not genocide.