From the Nakba to a Surrender That Collides with Resistance

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Nakba that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 was neither an accident nor solely the doing of Zionist forces — it came about with the contribution of Arab leadership generally, and Palestinian leadership specifically.

The Zionists were not isolated from the surrounding Arab political environment of the time, and Arab leaders generally were not far removed from taking part in the Zionist project, even indirectly. For instance, Arab leaderships did not move to confront Britain after learning of the Balfour Declaration, which stated Britain’s sympathy for establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Even the Ottoman state was entirely incapable of preserving Palestine, and Jews were immigrating to Palestine and establishing settlements in full view of Ottoman Turkish officials. It was well known that foreign envoys to the Ottoman state were buying land and transferring its ownership to Jews, and the greatest proof of this lies in the vast areas European states purchased in Jerusalem.

Palestinians waged a general strike against the British Mandate in 1936 that lasted about six months, the longest popular strike in history, but it failed, even though Palestinian leaderships had sworn to continue the strike until Palestine’s independence was achieved. Several Arab leaderships intervened at that point, led by the Emir of Transjordan, who later became King of Jordan, King Abdulaziz Al Saud, and King Farouk of Egypt, and convinced Haj Amin al-Husseini to end the strike because “our friend Britain will meet the Palestinians’ demands.”

The strike ended without result. And with the strike’s end, the Great Palestinian Revolt that had erupted in 1936 also began to falter. It lost the popular momentum necessary for its continuation. As for 1948, before Israel’s establishment, Arab forces advanced on the various fighting fronts against the Zionist army, but Arab leaders accepted a truce and halted the fighting for a month. The Palestinian people watched as the Arab forces withdrew from the areas they had captured once the month ended, redeploying mostly in the areas now known as the West Bank.

People’s view — and my own conclusion from the research I have conducted — is that the Arab leaders dismissed the field commanders of the armies and replaced them with new leaderships carrying new military maps showing new positions for redeployment. The country was handed over to the Zionists, largely as part of political deals in which Britain guaranteed the survival of the tribal ruling regimes in exchange for those political regimes preserving Israel. The Palestinian leaderships were no better off than the Arab leaderships. It is well known that most of those leaderships sold land to Jews, though there is nothing to indicate Haj Amin al-Husseini was involved in any such sale.

Dialectically speaking, it was never to be expected that leaderships created by Britain would work to preserve Palestine, since their thrones were tied to the British administration. And dialectically, the Arab regimes and Israel cannot help but cooperate, because they are the creation of a single master. Israel and most of the Arab regimes come from the very same root, and no party can deviate from the will of the one who made them.

For this reason, the Palestinian people ought to have reached the correct conclusion as early as 1948. But I do not believe the people had, at the time, anyone capable of connecting the dialectical relationships and drawing on theoretical and field-based philosophical reasoning. Perceptiveness was absent, and had it not been absent, the Palestinian people would have fortified itself and protected its sons from the assaults and pains of the years that followed, and would have developed a penetrating vision of how to work toward liberating the land and restoring rights.

How can ruling regimes now sheltering under the American security umbrella, or unable to pay end-of-month salaries without Western financial aid, possibly stand against Israel? Dialectically, this is impossible, however loud Arab rulers’ statements against Israel may grow. This is a conclusive matter, not open to discussion or debate — it is closer to an airtight mathematical equation.

For this reason, Arab-Israeli relations remain encompassed by this very logical dialectic. Arab-Israeli cooperation, and Palestinian-Israeli cooperation, is an implicit result, structurally built into Western money and Western protection.

Most of the Arab leaders who dealt with the Nakba of 1948 are still present today, through their tribes, if not their own persons. Sons are nothing but extensions of fathers and grandfathers. This applies to a large degree to Palestinians as well, since many sons of those who sold land to Jews now hold positions of responsibility, and it is they who normalize with the occupation and insist on security coordination, they who are friends of Britain and the American consul in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian National Council, convened in the city of Gaza, declared independence on October 1, 1948, and proclaimed the Palestinian constitution, which stipulated the establishment of a parliamentary system of government, and the All-Palestine Government was formed under the presidency of Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, with Haj Amin al-Husseini remaining the foremost leader. Afterward, the Egyptian regime under King Farouk detained Haj Amin al-Husseini in Cairo, and sent a military force to Gaza that arrested Palestine’s prime minister and cabinet members and transferred them to Cairo, thereby ending the existence of Palestinian governance.

The present is an extension of the past, and it was never to be expected, dialectically, that today’s Arab leaders would deviate from yesterday’s Arab leaders. The Arab Peace Initiative, launched by the Arab rulers from Beirut in 2002, does not differ from the truce they accepted in 1948. Nor do the defeats the Arabs have suffered across the decades differ much from one another, with the exception of the 1973 war. There was no real fighting — Arab rulers generally waged battle in order to achieve defeat. Victory is forbidden, and the ruler must wage battles in order to be defeated, because in defeat lies something that convinces the masses of the Arab nation that victory over Israel is impossible, and that it is better to search for a political solution, even at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Nor was the Palestinian matter any different. They led the Palestinian people from defeat to defeat, from frustration to frustration, from failure to failure, so that part of the Palestinian people would, in the end, accept a shameful, humiliating agreement like Oslo, and Palestinian crowds would pour into the streets celebrating this fallen “achievement.” And this was always done with national slogans and revolutionary chants. It is noteworthy that at both the Arab and Palestinian levels, there is no crushing defeat the Arabs have suffered that was not spun as a triumph. All our defeats are victories — except for the one true victory we achieved, the victory of July 2006.

The rulers insisted that July was a defeat, and tried to convince Israel that it was the one that had won. These are leaderships that have grown comfortable with defeat, internalizing it, capable of finding pleasure only in defeats, and we must not delude ourselves into thinking they are leaderships that could ever be at ease with the defeat of the Zionist entity, which shares their own interest in their continuing to hold their leadership positions — positions that constitute nothing but centers of disappointment and frustration.

Despite this, organizations have developed among us that grasped this bitter truth and decided to move beyond their own limitations, forging new characteristics that have come to constitute a powerful deterrent to Israel. Among the Arabs, Hezbollah, the Hamas movement, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Resistance Committees have developed. Hezbollah constitutes a deterrent to Israel, and is strong, continuing to accumulate strength. Palestinian resistance has astonished the world with its patience, its military capabilities, and its high morale across three successive wars on Gaza.

Israel is no longer capable of achieving victories except against Arab regimes; before the resistance, its army’s fate is defeat. The Arabs once had greater numbers and the Zionists a greater mobilization; now the Zionist enemy has greater numbers and the resistance a greater mobilization. Defeats have weighed heavily on the Palestinian people, carrying it from one displacement to another, but hope remains, expectation is abundant, and God grants victory to whoever supports Him, and for the unjust, their injustice and conspiracy carry their own reckoning.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “من النكبة إلى استسلام يصطدم بالمقاومة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.