The Palestinian Situation… the West Bank

It Was Called Palestine

In the aftermath of the First World War, and pursuant to the decisions of the San Remo Conference of April 1920, a new geopolitical entity was proclaimed in the Middle East under the name of the State of Palestine, constituted of the sanjaks of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre according to the administrative division of the defeated Ottoman Empire, with the addition of the Transjordanian Badiya.

The constitution of the State of Palestine was signed on 10 August 1922, and the population census was likewise completed on 23 October of the same year.

The League of Nations, designated guardian of human civilization and guarantor of its flourishing, had issued a document specifying the conditions imposed on Great Britain, the mandatory power over the State of Palestine, the mandate being due to enter into force on 29 September 1923 and to expire on 15 May 1948.

In order to resolve the question of the sanjak of Acre, which extended northward to the south of the vilayet of Beirut, a border demarcation was established between the French and British mandatory authorities, and the two parties concluded the Paulet-Newcombe Agreement on 23 December 1920, defining what we know today as the Lebanese-Palestinian border, which became the Lebanese-Israeli border upon the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine at the expiry of the mandate on 15 May 1948 and the proclamation of the independence of the State of Israel.

As for mandatory Palestine, whose recognized government was placed under the presidency of the British High Commissioner, the Colonial Office judged it necessary to separate the Transjordanian Badiya, with a surface area of 90,000 km², and to create an emirate with autonomous administration, two years after its annexation to the State of Palestine, entrusting it to Emir Abdullah ibn Hussein, one of the sons of the leader of the Great Arab Revolt.

This emirate in turn transformed, under the British mandate, into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The separation of the Transjordanian emirate responded, in the view of certain historians, to a British necessity: to facilitate Zionist immigration to Palestine stretching between the river and the sea and to foster the emergence of the 'national home for the Jewish people,' as phrased in the declaration of British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917.

In mandatory Palestine, the labour market developed and the country experienced accelerated economic growth; Jerusalem established itself in its rank as the second capital after Cairo, while the port of Haifa took the lead among the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. The various spheres of political, social and cultural life flourished; parties, associations and chambers of commerce were formed, part of the agricultural sector adopted modern production methods, and the labour market expanded to meet the needs of the British armies that had made Palestine their operational centre for the administration of their colonies.

In this context, three consulates were opened in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa to meet the needs of the Lebanese community and its remarkable presence, whose numbers reached some one hundred thousand residents, most of whom returned to their homeland during the Nakba.

Added to these were Saudi, Iraqi and Syrian communities of comparable size, until the hour of the end of the British mandate over Palestine, the hour that marked the birth of the State of Israel, following the defeat of the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. These armies had mobilized some 25,000 soldiers, in addition to the Arab Liberation Army whose ranks counted three thousand volunteers under the command of the Lebanese officer Fawzi al-Qawuqji, while the armed Zionist movements had succeeded in building a more modern army that began the fighting with an effective strength of 30,000 soldiers, rapidly brought by field recruitment to some 115,000 men in the space of a year.

The battle was thus decided on the basis of Israeli quantitative and qualitative superiority, while the Arab armies remained positioned in the rear, far behind the partition lines approved by the United Nations.

What Happened in Jericho?

Jericho, the land that witnessed the birth of the first human settlement aspiring to sedentariness, construction and production, thirteen thousand years ago, in the Neolithic era. It is there that the concepts of society and city began to form, in their embryonic state, before appearing in their full maturity in the Sumerian civilization.

The Canaanites built it, the Babylonians inhabited it, the Romans passed through it, and it finally came to rest with the Palestinian Arabs.

Jericho, city of warmth in the depths of winter, beside the Dead Sea that sinks four hundred meters below the level of the Mediterranean, where the baptismal waters descending from Mount Hermon find their rest — it is a symphony of history, geography and humanity, in all the dimensions of its singular uniqueness.

It was there, in Jericho, that the Palestine war came to an end, a part of the cities and territories remaining under the control of the Jordanian army commanded by the British general Glubb Pasha. It was there that a congress was held, in several stages, gathering Palestinian notables in order to acclaim King Abdullah ibn Hussein as sovereign over all Palestinian territories and to proclaim the union of all Palestine with the Transjordanian emirate.

That was the first Arab union of the modern era!

Thus the Transjordanian emirate transformed into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose capital was Amman and not East Jerusalem.

At the beginning of 1949, the law of Jordanization of the Palestinians was promulgated to deprive all Palestinian passport holders of the rights of Jordanian citizenship. By this measure, the Palestinian territories west of the river took the name 'West Bank,' the country being thus named after the river and not after its people.

At the conclusion of the first armistice agreements with Israel on 12 December 1949, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon took part in the negotiations, while the president of the State of Palestine in exile in Cairo, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and his Prime Minister Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi were prevented from representing the Palestinian people, despite the Arab League's recognition of the All-Palestine Government that had emerged from the National Council convened in Gaza on 30 September 1948. Thus General Glubb Pasha prevailed, the Palestinian president failed, and Palestine became either Israel or Jordan.

It Came to Be Called Palestine

The first decade following the Nakba was devoted to the reconstruction of the refugee communities in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and in the diaspora, as well as in what the language of that era designated as the 'cordon' countries — Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

The condition of Palestinians in the West Bank likewise changed: the designation of their institutions shifted from Palestinian chambers of commerce to Jordanian chambers of commerce, and this change spread to associations, clubs and newspapers — every sign bearing the name of Palestine was converted to Jordan. There was henceforth a king, a crown, a state and an army, but without the word Palestine.

The Jordanian king being protected by the British Crown and American goodwill, the minds of the Palestinian Nakba generation turned toward the leader of the Egyptian revolution — or coup d'état — Gamal Abdel Nasser, to the point of believing they saw his image in the moon. Other minds rallied under the banner of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath, little matter whether the allegiance was to Damascus or Baghdad. In the context of the conflict between the 'Arab reactionary right' and the 'progressive national forces,' a Palestinian majority aligned itself with the nationalist and leftist currents contemporary to that era.

Within this climate, at the dawn of the second decade of the Nakba, the interests of the Nasserist leadership in its confrontation with Arab reaction — Saudi Arabia and Jordan — converged with Palestinian longing and the passion for the recovery of Palestine. This is what came to pass at the Arab Summit of 1964, where a political entity was proclaimed under the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to which an organized army was attached, the Palestine Liberation Army, with the Egyptian command over the Ain Jalut Brigade, the Syrian command over the Yarmouk Brigade, the Iraqi command over the Qadisiyya Brigade, and the Jordanian command over the Badr Forces Brigade.

From this point began the march of the contemporary Palestinian entity, which embraced several nationalist and leftist currents, but rested in its essence on the Fatah movement as the central current, tracing an independent path from the Arab capitals and characterized by conservatism, moderation, alliance and confrontation when necessary.

Between Two Wars

Between the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in the war of 5 June 1967 and the October War of 1973, the war of the crossing of the Suez Canal, an urgent need was imposed on the Arab leaderships: to allow Palestinian organizations to 'light fires in Israel's environment,' in the phrase of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The left Ba'athist leadership in Damascus outbid the Egyptian leader by demanding a war of 'prolonged popular liberation,' while the Ba'ath leaders in Iraq displayed an arrogance and condescension that General Hafez al-Assad was incapable of bearing.

Thus was summoned the Palestinian armed struggle, emanating from a people eager to fight for its homeland, its identity and its political future, and it was to this rhythm that the march toward the recovery of Palestine on the political map was undertaken, whatever the cost.

The cost was truly heavy in blood, destruction and battles: the confrontation with Israel did not constitute its only dimension, despite the wish of the ordinary Palestinian; each time the interests of any Arab state entered into collision with the Palestinian armed project, the results proved harmful to all, as was the case in Jordan and Lebanon: if the Jordanian regime succeeded in three years of conflict in putting an end to the armed Palestinian presence on its territory, the Lebanese regime experienced a different course at the moment of the signing of the Cairo Agreement in 1969, whereby the Lebanese state relinquished its sovereignty over a part of its territory, whether in the South or in the refugee camps.

And so, as soon as the October War ended, Lebanon and all its inhabitants, Palestinians included, found themselves caught in the catastrophic consequences engendered by the Arab-Israeli negotiations under the banner of 'peace' — but this is another subject.

As for the journey of recovering Palestinian national identity, it was concluded only with the decision of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to disengage from the West Bank and to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative.

The Organization thus obtained official Jordanian recognition, without however receiving the Arab West Bank — until the Oslo Accords of 1992, in the wake of the revolution of the Intifada of Stones.

Judea and Samaria

When Sunni political Islam — Hamas — launched its war against the Oslo Accords, it advanced no slogan relating to national identity or to the future of the Palestinian human being.

Hamas made the Al-Aqsa Mosque the compass toward which it directed its military and political operations, as well as the point of popular polarization, and the central mission, broad and undefined, was to 'liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque'; nothing fortuitous there: Hamas crowned it with the operation of 7 October, through which the commanders of the Qassam Brigades wanted, according to their own statements, to achieve this goal or die in its pursuit.

The 'Al-Aqsa Flood' operation is a model of hardline religious thought, and of the most radical extremism in converting the course of the national liberation struggle into a course of Islamic-Jewish religious conflict.

It is the very path followed by contemporary Israeli extremism against the backdrop of religious Zionism.

I consider that both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are victims of the intersection of a terrorism of religious extremism that exchanges services and feeds each other on both sides: an intellectual, political and cultural terrorism that uses violence and ever more violence, in the service of a conflict whose only outcome is the destruction of societies from within. This result appeared rapidly in the Palestinian case, and manifests in the Israeli case at a slower pace, but with striking clarity.

The example is that the first measure taken by the Israeli government was to substitute for the name of Palestinian territories enshrined in international law at the demarcation of the Oslo Accords at the United Nations the biblical name 'Judea and Samaria.' Just as Hamas had abolished the national and secular definition of the conflict, leading once again to the erasure of Palestine and the return to the term 'Judea and Samaria.'

Since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, 44% of the surface area of Palestinian territories in the West Bank has been annexed and Judaized; 90,000 dunams have been confiscated under the name of state property, while the occupation army has seized 27% of the lands as military zones; the number of settlers has tripled; nearly all Bedouin encampments and their villages in the communal lands and the Jordan Valley have been razed — not to mention the siege of cities, the destruction of three camps through 1,900 armed attacks, the destruction of 1,022 residential, agricultural and industrial installations, the issuance of demolition orders for 1,167 buildings, and finally the arrest of 11,000 citizens, the killing of 835 people and 6,450 wounded, men, women and children.

Such is the balance, to date, of the intersection of two extremisms on Palestinian territories, territories that lost their name, recovered it, and now face renewed dispossession. It was called Palestine, it came to be called Palestine, but they now want to make it Judea and Samaria.