British recognition of a fictional Palestinian state continues a century-old strategy of granting official status to proxy leaders working to sustain Jewish supremacist rule
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Photo is Crown copyright and re-usable under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated
Earlier this week, several European countries – including Britain and its settler colonies Canada and Australia, though with the notable exception of the United States – recognised a non-existent “State of Palestine“, to be ruled by the unelected, collaborationist quisling regime of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its head, Mahmoud Abbas.
This was not the first time Britain recognised Palestinian collaborators to speak for the people. That practice began as soon as it conquered and colonised Palestine at the end of 1917.
Following the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in November and the British military conquest of Palestine in December of that year (with full control over its territory by September 1918), more than 40 Palestinian organisations were formed between 1918 and 1920 to oppose British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism.
They demanded independence, convened national congresses and adopted resolutions affirming Palestine’s Arab character and calling for its liberation and unity within a Greater Syria.
Still, Britain consistently blocked Palestinian bids for recognition, which it always conditioned on their acceptance of the Zionist project.
Such tactics reflected a central colonial strategy across much of the world to deny the colonised their own representatives, then secure collaborators from among them and install those willing to betray their people as leaders. Palestinians are no exception, and are indeed a prime illustration of this strategy, whether under the British or the Zionists.
Over the century, every legitimate Palestinian body that spoke for the people was refused recognition, while collaborators were legitimised. It was only when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) abandoned its representative role in 1993 and recognised Israel’s right to colonise Palestine at Oslo that it was accepted as the official voice of the Palestinian people.
The PA, now recognised as the head of a fictional state, is the latest expression of this century-old colonial strategy to elevate a collaborating regime that denies Palestinians their own leadership and agency.
Early resistance
The most prominent among the organisations to emerge after the British conquest of Palestine was the Palestinian Muslim-Christian Associations (MCA), the first branch of which was founded in Jaffa in 1918. They sought unity across religious lines in the struggle against British colonialism and Jewish Zionism.
In November of that year, the Jaffa MCA submitted a memorandum to General Gilbert Clayton, the chief political officer and policymaker of the military administration, affirming the Arab character of Palestine as “our Arab homeland, Palestine” and rejecting Britain’s policy of creating a Jewish national home.
The MCA convened the first Palestinian National Congress in Jerusalem from 27 January to 9 February 1919. The delegates called for the liberation of Palestine and all of Syria, including Lebanon, and demanded an independent and unified Greater Syria. A delegation was chosen to deliver these resolutions to the Paris Peace Conference, but the British blocked them from leaving the country. Even so, the resolutions had reached Paris.
Meanwhile, at the conference, Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist Organisation (ZO), met with US Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
In his later account of the meeting, Weizmann recalled telling Lansing that the goal of the Zionists was for “Palestine [to] become as Jewish as England is English”. He added that Lansing “took as [his] example the outstanding success which the French had at that time made of Tunisia”.
A French settler-colony at the time, Tunisia was cited as a model: “What the French could do in Tunisia”, Weizmann argued, “the Jews would be able to do in Palestine, with Jewish will, Jewish money, Jewish power, and Jewish enthusiasm”.
Refused recognition
In June 1919, the American King-Crane Commission, dispatched by President Woodrow Wilson, arrived in Palestine to investigate the wishes of the peoples of Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, as part of efforts to mitigate British-French rivalry over their spheres of influence.
In Palestine, the commission interviewed dozens of Palestinians from the MCA and other clubs, all of whom demanded independence, with the younger nationalists calling for unification with Syria.
All Palestinians interviewed vehemently opposed Zionist settler-colonialism.
The commission submitted its report to the Paris Peace Conference in August 1919. It conveyed the Palestinian people’s support for independence, albeit claiming they were not yet prepared for it. As a second choice, it recommended an American Mandate with a democratically elected assembly – rather than British or French control.
By then, however, London and Paris had already reached their own understanding and simply ignored the findings. The report itself was not published until 1922, after the US Congress had endorsed the Balfour Declaration.
In July 1920, the same month France conquered Syria, Britain replaced its military occupation in Palestine with a civilian administration and appointed the Zionist Jewish politician Herbert Samuel as the first high commissioner of its new Mandate.
A second Palestinian National Congress, scheduled for May 1920 in Jerusalem, was banned by the authorities. As a result, the MCA convened a widely attended third National Congress in Jaffa that December, with participants from all Palestinian clubs, organisations and associations.
The congress called for the independence of Palestine and elected a committee, the Palestinian Arab Executive (AE), to represent the people to the British government and in international forums. Samuel rejected the demand outright and refused to recognise the committee as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians managed to send a delegation to Cairo in March 1921, which met briefly with Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, a Zionist and notorious antisemite
More extensive meetings followed during Churchill’s visit to Palestine days later. In response to Palestinian demands that Britain abrogate the Balfour Declaration, prohibit Jewish colonisation and grant independence, the anti-Arab racist Churchill declared that the British right to rule rested on its military conquest.
He added that the colonial administration “will continue for years, and step by step… shall develop representative institutions leading up to full self-government”, stressing: “All of us here to-day will have passed away from the earth and also our children and our children’s children before it is fully achieved.”
When a delegation of Palestinian Anglicans petitioned him that August, Churchill dismissed them, reminding them that a great racial gulf separated them from English Anglicans, as the Palestinian Anglicans belonged to the “Semitic races”.
Conditions for recognition
In 1921, the MCA appointed a delegation to travel to London. That July, the British colonial secretary wrote to Samuel, making clear that any administrative reform “can only proceed on [the] basis of acceptance of the policy of creation of a National Home for the Jews, which remains a cardinal article of British policy… No representative bodies that may be established will be permitted to interfere with measures (i.e., immigration, etc.) designed to give effect to principle [sic] of a National Home or to challenge this principle”.
These would be the unshakeable terms under which Britain was willing to recognise indigenous Palestinian representation, which the Palestinians rejected throughout the Mandate period. The League of Nations likewise denied legitimacy to the Palestinians on similar grounds.
When the British offered to establish a legislative council for Palestine in 1922, they insisted that all candidates and parties recognise the legitimacy of the Mandate and its Zionist settler-colonial project.
The fifth Palestinian Congress, convened that year, launched a campaign to boycott the elections, denouncing them as a ploy to legitimise Jewish settler-colonialism and reiterating the demand for independence.
Coincidentally, this was also the year that Tunisians demanded equal rights with French colonists and proportional representation in an elected parliament. The sixth Palestinian Congress, convened in June 1923 after the League of Nations formally granted the Mandate to Britain, stressed non-cooperation with the authorities, including refusal to pay taxes.
As a result of British divide-and-conquer tactics that pitted the Jerusalem-based notable families, whose elders collaborated with the British but not with the Zionists, against families whose elders collaborated with both, the national movement split, delaying the convening of a seventh Congress until July 1928.
Colonial collaborators
Chaim Kalvarisky, a senior Zionist official in the Jewish Agency and head of the Zionist Executive’s “Arab Department”, funded the establishment of the Palestinian sectarian National Muslim Society (NMS) as an alternative to the MCA.
He encouraged sectarian Muslims to attack the MCA as vehicles of Palestinian Christian influence. Kalvarisky also financed members of elite families to form the “Agricultural Party” (al-Hizb al-Zira’i), which challenged rival notables who led the national Palestinian organisations.
Anti-colonial Palestinians considered both the NMS and the Agricultural Party as traitorous for accepting Zionist funding and accommodating Jewish colonisation.
The Agricultural Party would later serve as a model for Palestinian collaborators during the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39, when the British and Zionists sponsored “peace bands” to assist them in killing Palestinian revolutionaries. The “peace bands” in turn would become the model for the PA security forces, which, since 1994, have suppressed Palestinian resistance on Israel’s behalf.
The West’s refusal to recognise the 1948-53 All-Palestine Government‘s (APG) sovereignty was yet another instance of denying Palestinians legitimacy while recognising those who did not represent them.
Instead of recognising the APG, the West upheld King Abdullah I of Jordan as the legitimate ruler of what remained of Palestine after 1948. This dynamic continued after the rise of the PLO in 1964, especially after the popular Palestinian guerrillas assumed leadership in 1969.
Much of the formerly colonised world recognised the PLO in 1974, particularly following PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 address to the United Nations General Assembly and the UN’s subsequent recognition of the PLO as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestine people”.
Nevertheless, the US and its Western European allies refused to grant the organisation representational legitimacy.
Following the 1973 war, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat proposed a peace conference under UN auspices in Geneva, which convened in December of that year. Egypt, Jordan and Israel attended, but Syria refused to participate because the PLO was not officially invited.
Sadat had, in fact, extended an informal invitation to the PLO at the end of October, prompting major internal debate within the organisation about attending. Arafat even sent feelers to Henry Kissinger, signalling his readiness to take part.
In the end, with no official invitation forthcoming, the PLO opted not to participate, particularly as the conference was based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which required recognition of Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal “from territories” it occupied in 1967. The US, Israel and Jordan all opposed PLO participation.
Recognising submission
Indeed, despite the PLO’s compromising of many Palestinian rights after its 1988 unilateral declaration of independence of 22 percent of historic Palestine in Algiers, the West and Israel adamantly refused to recognise the legitimacy of the organisation.
At the international Madrid Middle East Peace Conference of 1991, the US and Israel blocked the PLO from participating, instead insisting that a Palestinian delegation solely from the West Bank and Gaza join as part of the Jordanian delegation and not participate independently. Even then, the Americans and Israelis vetted the participants, rejecting those seen as “hardliners” or because they were from East Jerusalem, while approving others.
It was not until 1993, when the PLO ceased to represent the Palestinian people and submitted to Israeli and US demands at Oslo to affirm Israel’s colonial domination over Palestine, that it was recognised as the “legitimate” representative of the Palestinians.
This was in line with British colonial conditions since the late teens, namely that only Palestinians who recognise the right of European Jews to colonise and steal their country would be recognised as legitimate representatives of their people, even when they lacked such legitimacy completely.
The PLO had transformed itself from the equivalent of the 1920s anti-colonial MCA to its collaborationist rival, the Agricultural Party.
When Hamas chose to run in the post-Oslo legislative elections sponsored by the PA under Israeli and US diktat in 2006 – resulting in a landslide victory for the resistance group – the US, Israel and Western Europe yet again refused to recognise it as the legitimate government representing the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.
They sponsored a coup in 2007 to remove Hamas from power, which succeeded in the West Bank but failed in Gaza. The experience of those elections convinced Israel and the western imperial powers that no further vote could be permitted under the quisling PA regime unless the outcome was guaranteed in advance, ensuring no challengers could threaten its collaborationist role.
Since 1994, the PA has gladly served as enforcer of Israel’s occupation, helping to repress all resistance, especially in the past two years of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Just last week, the PA regime of Kapos helped Israel uncover a planned resistance operation in the West Bank.
Adding insult to injury, infighting among PA officials recently led to the arrest of Brigadier General Riyad Faraj by the military intelligence agency on charges trafficking in antiquities and selling land belonging to the Deir Qal’a monastery in Jericho to Israeli settlers. He is the brother of PA intelligence chief Major General Majed Faraj, a favoured candidate to replace Abbas.
Britain and its settler-colonies’ recognition of a fictional State of Palestine this week is a reward not for Hamas, as the Israelis are claiming, but rather for the PA’s faithful service to the settler-colonial enemy of the Palestinian people, and for its insistence on recognising the right of foreign Jews to colonise their country.
Legitimising Jewish supremacy
In their very recognition of a fantastical state of Palestine, the historic enemies of the Palestinian people insist on removing Hamas, the last democratically elected political party chosen by a majority of the Palestinians living under occupation, from any political equation for the future of Palestine.
The British prime minister emphasised that “recognition was not a reward for Hamas” and vowed that “the UK will also take further action to sanction senior figures in the Hamas leadership in the coming weeks”. Canada’s prime minister insisted that its recognition “would empower those seeking peaceful co-existence and the end of Hamas”.
The Australian prime minister spelled out the formula most explicitly: “The President of the Palestinian Authority has restated its recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and given direct undertakings to Australia, including commitments to hold democratic elections and enact significant reform to finance, governance and education…The terrorist organisation Hamas must have no role in Palestine.”
As Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza continues unabated, this week’s statehood theatrics were designed above all to recognise its right to remain a Jewish supremacist state.
For their part in sustaining this order, the quisling PA collaborators were consecrated as the official representatives of the Palestinian people.
What the British started in the 1920s endures a century later in the 2020s. Plus ca change.
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