50 years ago this month, from June 12 to 19, the Argentinian newspaper Noticias printed the articles that its editor Rodolfo Walsh had written in Lebanon and Palestine the previous month. The two texts that follow are the first two articles in that series. Noticias belonged to the revolutionary Peronist organization Montoneros, which Walsh had joined a year earlier. In Beirut, Walsh made contact with Fatah, one of the early links in the relationship that would eventually lead to Montoneros training alongside PLO combatants in Lebanese and Syrian camps.
1974 was a key year in the history of the Palestinian Revolution. Yitzhak Rabin, author of the Lydda Death March, became Prime Minister of Israel. The messianic settler movement Gush Emunim was founded. In May, the DFLP attacked Ma’alot; in response, Israel bombed Nabatieh and other refugee camps in Lebanon (Walsh saw the aftermath of the bombing with his own eyes). In June, the PLO adopted the Ten Point Program. In November, the UN adopted Resolution 3236, recognizing the Palestinians' inalienable right to self-determination and the PLO as the Palestinian people's representative. Walsh himself notes that in June, history’s page for 1974 has not yet been turned. But his analysis was just as applicable for the rest of the year, and it has not lost its bite yet.
Thanks for reading Noah’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
THREE MILLION PALESTINIANS STRIPPED OF THEIR HOMELAND QUESTION ANY PEACE DEAL IN THE MIDDLE EAST
- What’s your name?
-Zaki.
-How old are you?
-Seven.
-Is your father alive?
- He died.
- What was your father?
- A fida’i.
- What are you going to be when you grow up?
- A fida’i.
The blonde boy with the shaved head and striped uniform giving these answers in a school for orphans in south Beirut, Lebanon, sums up the best option left, after 26 years of frustration, for the three million Palestinians stripped of their homeland: becoming fedayeen— combatants in the Palestinian Revolution.
“Palestinians? I don’t know what that is,” former Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir once said. The illusory efficacy of the argument— used in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies to deny the existence of their liberation movements—is well known. Mujahideen? Connait pas. Libération Front? Never heard of it. FRELIMO? Não conhece. The enemy does not exist and everything is fine. Each one of these denials has set rivers of blood flowing, but none has been able to stop the course of history. For a quarter century, the official policy of the state of Israel consists in pretending that the Palestinians are Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, or Lebanese who’ve gone crazy and call themselves Palestinians but who are also seeking to return to the lands they left “voluntarily” in 1948 or that were taken from them, not so voluntarily, in the wars of 1956 and 1967. Seeing as they cannot, they turn to terrorism. They are, in short, “Arab terrorists.”
The fact that these arguments have been pulled apart in the Middle East, broken down to their last inconsistencies, is useless. Israel is the West, and in the West a lie will circulate as truth until the day it becomes militarily indefensible.
The page of this story corresponding to 1974 has not yet been turned, and it already has several bloody lines: Kiryat Shmona, Kfair, Ma’alot, Nabatieh. It is difficult to understand if we ignore the pages for 1967, 1948, 1917, and even earlier ones; even ones that leave history and sink down into religious literature.
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS…
First, they say, were the Canaanites, and then the Hebrews. The birth of Christ was still a thousand years off when Saul founded his kingdom, which later split into two. Almost 2700 years ago, the kingdom of Israel was brought down by the Assyrians. 2560 years ago, the kingdom of Judah was liquidated by the Babylonians, and in the year 70 of our era, the Romans burned Jerusalem to the ground. These are the historical precedents of the state of Israel: its title to Palestine.
The Shah of Iran could claim similar title based on the Persian invasion of the 6th century before Christ; the Greek military junta might recall that Alexander occupied Palestine in 331; Paul VI could remember that the Catholic crusaders founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099. Arab historians themselves have noted sarcastically that the Canaanites who occupied Palestine prior to the Hebrews came from the Arabian Peninsula and were thus “Arabs.”
With the destruction of Jerusalem, they say, began the Jewish diaspora— the scattering. Since then, according to modern legend, the Jews have wandered the world, awaiting the moment when they can return to Palestine. How many really returned? English historians affirm that less than 4,000 Jews lived in Palestine in the 16th century, 5,000 in the 18th century, and 10,000 by the middle of the last century. It was only at the end of that century that some Jews began to propose large-scale return and that that return took on a political form and an ideology: Zionism. Why?
A LATE FRUIT OF CAPITALISM
One possible response to that question came out of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. It was written in 1944 by Abram Leon, a 26-year-old Jewish Marxist, in his last year of life: “Zionism, which seeks its origins in a two-thousand-year-old past, is in reality a product of the last phase of capitalism.”
In this phase, the nationalisms of Europe have already built their states and no longer need the Jewish bourgeoisie that helped build them and which is now a competitor for native capitalism. ‘Suddenly,’ antisemitic chauvinism appears in these countries, and Jews who have been integrated into their national lives for centuries— Jews who, in Leon’s words, “have as little interest in returning to Palestine as does the American millionaire today” —become undesirable foreigners.
The persecutions of the 19th century affected the Jewish middle class more than the upper class, whose most prominent representatives achieved a new integration at the level of international financial capital The persecuted Jews of Europe who identified capitalism as the real source of their troubles joined the revolutionary movements of their actual countries. Zionism, evidently, did not, and took shape as the ideology of the petit bourgeoisie— though it was nevertheless encouraged by bankers who, like the Rothschilds, saw the wave coming and wanted their “brothers” as far away as possible. At the end of the last century, that ideology found its prophet in the Budapest journalist Theodore Herzl, its program in the resolutions of the 1897 Basel Congress, and its instrument in the World Zionist Organizations.
The return to Palestine, however, came up against the inconvenient fact that the country was occupied by a population of 500,000 which had been Arab since the Muslim conquest of the 7th century.
The founders of Zionism denied the problem. In 1898, Herzl traveled to Palestine and produced a report in which the word “Arab” never appears. Palestine was a land without a people where the people without a land had to go. The Palestinian became the “invisible man” of the Middle East. Even still, some managed to discover him. One day the French writer Max Nordau saw Herzl, telling him in astonishment: “But there are Arabs in Palestine!” “We are perpetrating an injustice,” Nordau added.
IN 50 YEARS ZIONISM REPLACED THE ARAB POPULATION OF PALESTINE WITH EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS
“Palestine is my country,” Ihsan says. “I’ve never been to Palestine,” he says, “but some day I’ll go back because our commandos are fighting so that we can go back.”
“My father died in Abar el Djelili,” Naifa says. “I’m not sad my father died, because he died for us.”
“My father’s name was Salah,” says Randa. “He was fighting and he died.”
None of the 480 orphans in the Suq el Garb school in south Beirut has ever seen Palestine except through the eyes of a dead father.
In the classroom, the girls stood up to greet the visitor who had come from so far away. There was a phrase written in Arabic on the blackboard. It read “Palestinian History.”
The idea of a Jewish state appeared at the end of the past century, the last project for a European state when there was no more room in Europe for a new state. So the state had to be installed somewhere outside of Europe, and the place chosen turned out to be the East. The contradiction was resolved through ideology— Zionism —and the ideology was nourished by Biblical myth and the pretense that Palestine was uninhabited. Historically, these mental premises produce victims. In 1900, there were 500,000 Arabs in Palestine and 30,000 Jews. If in 1974 there are three million Israelis and 350,000 Arabs, there is no need to ask where the victims are: they are outside of Palestine, expelled from their homelands. It is appropriate to ask— because this is the underlying issue —how this unprecedented transfer took place, in which the population of a country was replaced by another.
The first immigrants did not provoke the Arabs’ mistrust. In 1883, the inhabitants of Safarand received 10 new settlers with these words: “Since time immemorial we have been brothers to our neighbors, the children of Israel, and we will live with them as brothers.” Eight years later, however, the notables of Jerusalem asked the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine, to prohibit Jewish immigration. And in 1898, the Arabs of Transjordan violently expelled a Jewish population.
Despite official prohibition immigration continued, taking advantage of the corruption of Turkish officials and of absentee Arab landlords selling their lands. 1907 saw the establishment of the first kibbutz, the collective farms that excluded Arab workers from the beginning. When the Turks took their first and last census in 1914, it turned out that 690,000 people lived in Palestine, 60,000 of whom were Jews. That year, the world war gave Zionism its big chance.
ENGLAND GIVES PALESTINE AWAY
Foreign Office, November 2nd, 1917.
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
This seemingly innocuous piece of paper is the modern basis for the state of Israel. It is known as the Balfour Declaration and bears the signature of the English foreign secretary.
Two years later, Balfour clarified what he meant: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land […] Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them.”
Two years prior to the Declaration, Great Britain had promised Shariff Hussein the independence of the Arab countries in exchange for his help in the war against Turkey, Germany’s ally. Sure enough, it was Arab soldiers who wiped out Ottoman dominion in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration became public knowledge later and, once the war was over, provided the basis for the League of Nations resolution that turned Palestine into a British mandate. The World Zionist Organization participated in the drafting of that document.
From then on, immigration grew uncontrollably, organized by the Jewish Agency, which was part of the British administration.
When the English took their first census in 1922, there were 760,000 people living in Palestine, 80,000 of whom— 11 percent —were Jews. By 1931, that proportion had risen to 16. By 1936, it stood at 28. That year saw the first Palestinian revolt against the English, which lasted three years and left thousands dead.
A MANUAL FOR COLONIALISM
Even in 1917, David Ben-Gurion affirmed that “in a moral and historical sense,” Palestine was “a country without inhabitants.” Ben Gurion was well aware that 90% of inhabitants were Arabs: he simply meant that they did not exist as historical or moral beings. In the same period, according to Fanon, French professors at the University of Algiers were seriously teaching that Algerians were closer to monkeys than to men.
This line of thinking, taken to its logical conclusions, can be found in Zionism’s very founder, Theodore Herzl. “If we wish to found a State today, we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one 1,000 years ago,” he wrote. “Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the task in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we would organize a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst.”
Some settlers admitted that the Palestinians were men, although they were closer to the redskins. “Who says,” the Zionist Organization of Great Britain asked in 1921 “that the colonization of an undeveloped territory must be carried out with the consent of the inhabitants? Were it so […] a handful of redskins would reign over the endless space of America.”
A GREATER GHETTO
The colonial mentality left a profound mark on the establishment of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Settlers formed closed, exclusive communities in which Arabs were intruders. Reselling land to Arabs became a sin that Jewish terrorist organizations punished violently.
Even at the level of the working class, a perversion took root that transformed Arab workers first into immigrants’ competitors, then into enemies, and finally into victims. The Histadrut, the Jewish trade union confederation, refused to admit Arab workers, boycotted them, and forbade Jewish businesses to buy materials Arabs had worked on.
David Hacohen, Histadrut member and later a member of the Israeli parliament, has recalled the difficulty he had in convincing other English “socialists” that “in our country we admonish housewives not to buy from the Arabs, picket citrus plantations to keep Arabs from working on them, pour kerosene over Arab tomatoes, harass Jewish women who buy Arab eggs in the market and break them in the basket…”
Racist arrogance shaped this society in total isolation, as if all the world’s ghettos had come together as a greater ghetto; but this time, a ghetto purposefully locked up inside itself.
Simon Luvich, an Israeli exile in London, recalls this part of his childhood in astonishment: “For us, the Arabs were a kind of exotic ethnic minority who sometimes came down from the mountain in their keffiyehs… We never understood what they were like because we never saw them."
Galili, Israel’s information minister, still could not see them in 1969: “We do not consider the Arabs of the country to be an ethnic group or a people with a defined national character.”
If it is blindness not to see something that exists, the blood that has run and will keep running in Palestine must be attributed to that blindness.
