One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Tom Segev. Holt Publishing, 1999. 612 pages.
When I was in journalism school, taking a required marketing class, the instructor coached us on making cold calls. “Call first,” he said, “the president of the company. The president, of course, won’t be involved in marketing decisions, but will tell you who to call. Then, when you call that person, you say ‘the president said I should talk to you.’ The lower level person will be flattered but also moved as if by a directive from above.”
In the earliest days of Zionist hopes, November 1917, the Balfour Declaration was published in Britain endorsing and pledging resources to development of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a watershed moment for European Jews who had been hoping and working for such a thing since the late 1800s. Among those activists was Chaim Weizmann, a prominent figure but holding no official authority. Even so, he began a campaign of calling on high ranking officers and sitting in meetings, then sending summaries of the meetings to lesser ranking officers, to shore up his lack of credentials and presenting himself as someone of diplomatic importance in the British Jewish community.
It worked; his effectiveness, in fact, his ability to shape policy in the region, is nothing less than stunning. Over several years, his influence grew to the point that even Winston Churchill would take his calls and British forces would do as he said. He was savvy and persistent and bold and shameless. He is a thread that runs throughout the decades of the “British Mandate,” the post-WWI assignment of to Britain of managing Palestine, “liberated” from the the Ottoman Empire.
There are other threads: propaganda, anti-Arab bigotry and terrorism, elevation of Eastern European, Ashkenazi, Jews over Sephardim — darker skin Jews from Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East. (Weizmann himself was born in Russia and emigrated to Britain.)
There is also the thread of Arab trust and acting in good faith, then being betrayed by Jews bolstered by British power.
The other thread is a ruthless campaign for control and sole occupancy of Palestine. Israel today is said to be a great democracy in the model of the US, which is dishearteningly true — a democracy born of removing everyone the power brokers didn’t want voting. In our US case, it was primarily Indigenous peoples and enslaved people and their descendants. In the case of Israel, it was non-Jewish Arabs (and Jewish Arabs were only embraced to help Jews outnumber non-Jews).
“‘Disappearing the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream…. The Jewish Agency spoke about transferring at least 100,000 Arabs; (Zionist leader Menachem) Ussishkin thought in terms of 60,000 families. ‘I do not believe in the transfer of an individual. I believe in the transffer of entire villages,’ (Zionist leader) Arthur Ruppin said.”
It wasn’t a straight line. There were glimmers of light when it seemed the British might employ some compassion or seek political equity, but the Zionists would erupt, calling them traitors or threatening to oust them somehow. “It was hard to know when they truly felt victimized and when they were feigning bitterness as a tactical move.”
It is often supposed that the Holocaust was the impetus for the establishment of a Jewish state. It is not true. The effort began decades before Hitler. Segev notes: David Ben-Gurion “began to view the rise of the Nazis in Germany as a means to advance Zionism. ‘We want Hitler destroyed, Ben-Gurion said, ‘but as long as he exists, we are interested in exploiting that for the good of Palestine.’” He and they knew they a Jewish state wasn’t a solution. “(E)ven at the most optimistic estimate, only a small fraction of Europe’s increasingly beleaguered Jews could have immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s.”
One Palestine, Complete fills a 30 year gap in the history of the region, the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the 1947 UN declaration of Israel, followed immediately by the Israeli war to take more land than the UN had given it. It is my latest attempt to understand the dynamics of the region and the Palestinians’ generations-long cry for help.
Tom Segev is an Israeli journalist and historian, a master storyteller in my view. It is my second Segev read (the other, about the 6-day war, 1967, is reviewed here) and while the book is told largely from the Jewish point of view, he seemed clear-eyed about the fault and failings of the Zionists, but tends to slip into anti-Arab rhetoric from time to time. (He at one point refers to the “Arab Rebellion” against the Zionist incursion, as if anyone could blame them.)
As is his style, he includes fascinating info in footnotes (but all references in end notes), such as an observation that Ben Gurion’s absence from the scene of a bombing in Jerusalem was because he was in Paris having daily meetings with Ho Chi Minh. Ben Gurion also compared Menachem Begin to Hitler, but that’s not in the footnotes.
There are a lot of “key people” in this book, as is Segev’s style, so read it when you can focus. He is skilled at fleshing out characters and tells a good story. As this was part of a history, a slice, I noted that there is no overarching story arc or premise, no judgment or frame, but just slogging through a time; as if stepping into the middle of play and leaving before it ends. (For a comprehensive overview of the entire period from a Palestinian perspective, read Rashid Khalidi’s Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, reviewed here.
All of which is to say this is a helpful, engaging history of a brief time that was part of a larger time; read it but don’t read only it. And be prepared: every book I’ve read has convinced me more thoroughly that Israel is an oppressor and the Palestinian people never had a chance.