The Iron Cage by Rashid Khalidi
This is the first book I have read, written by a Palestinian, that really impressed me. He appears to give an even-handed approach by criticising the Palestinian leaders and leadership as well as the Zionists/Israelis but never states that the refusal to compromise in any way with the Zionists doomed Palestinian society once the Mandate took effect. The actual Iron Cage was the Palestinian Islamic worldview, racist, xenophobic, Islam-centric, uncompromising. Khalidi fails to make a compelling case that the British and Israelis created an Iron Cage to imprison the Palestinians though it's obvious why the metaphor appealed to him so much. The Iron Cages that the book revealed to me were those created and controlled by Hajj Amin al-Husayni and Yasser Arafat who held the Palestinians captive to their wills. It was more dangerous to be an ally of these men than to be their enemy. Their talents lay in maintaining control of Palestinian society through violence, treachery, assassination while maintaining total rejectionist policies to the the Zionists/Israelis. This policy failed and created the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people that al-Husayni ruled and under Arafat the Palestinians continued the policy of violence against the Israelis until today. al-Khalidi is a scion of one of the most powerful and respected elite families of Ottoman Palestine and has been at the centre of the modern Palestinian struggle as a respectable front-man for the PLO. The book could hardly portray the 80 year role of the effendis and Palestinian leadership in a worse light but it also shines a romantic light on much of the fellaheen actions, violence and "heroes" and states the most extreme negative views about Zionist and Israeli actions as facts.
He glosses over the violence that was always initiated by Palestinians. He claims 750,000 Plestinians were expelled by the Israelis (al-Nakba) though he knows full well that all of his tens of thousands of his ancestors and their relatives in the other 'notable' families had all fled to the upmarket suburbs of Beirut and Cairo before fighting began apart from 1 or 2 who stayed to be in charge of the fighting.
At the same time, however, it should be noted that by the 1930s there were many Palestinians who were highly critical of the mufti and his faction, because they, too, were seen as having close links with the British, and because they were perceived to be just as responsible as the Nashashibi faction for the passiveness, torpidity, and general ineffectiveness of the notable leadership of the forces that composed the Palestinian nationalist movement. In fact, in fairness to al-Nashashibi, until the mid-1930s his public position vis-à-vis the British (to be distinguished from what he might have said and done in private) was no more and no less conciliatory than that of the mufti. Indeed, until only a few years before the outbreak of the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine, virtually the entire Palestinian leadership remained individually on relatively cordial terms with senior British officials. Their actions indicate that for well over a decade they believed that by simply continuing to negotiate with British officials, combined with a little genteel pressure, they would eventually be able to persuade Britain to change its policy and hand over the reins of power to the country's "natural" rulers, that is to say themselves. This comes through clearly in the entirety of the records we have of meetings between Palestinian leaders and the British, such as the London meetings of 1930 described in Chapter 2. The mufti shared fully in this approach; indeed, he was a leading member of the 1930 delegation that met with Lord Passfield.
We are left with a picture of a Palestinian elite that was hopelessly divided internally, and many of whose most prominent members had a variety of more or less entangling connections to the British overlords of the country, while some had links to the Zionists as well. The primary modus operandi of these Palestinian leaders vis-à-vis the British differed little from one individual to another, in spite of their apparent political differences and whatever else may have divided them: negotiate courteously, not to say obsequiously, with the British in private, while criticizing their policies loudly in public, and doing very little else to oppose them. They generally eschewed giving speeches, leading demonstrations, and other manifestations of mass politics.
Again, this situation can in part be explained by the fact that the men who dominated Palestinian politics at this stage felt themselves to be the natural rulers of the country. Like their fellow notables in other Arab countries, they considered themselves to be the legitimate heirs to the Ottoman dominion.
Related to this profound concern about the dangers inherent in the progress of Zionist colonization of Palestine was al-'Isa's strong sense of the salience of an independent Palestinian identity, which was an Arab identity to be sure but had a specificity of its own nevertheless. For al-'Isa and others of his generation, their Arabism was directly related to their sense of being Palestinian and their love of country. This in turn was related to an acute social consciousness, based on a belief that the struggle for Palestine would be decided at the level of the individual peasant and the individual Zionist settler. As a result, a large number of lead articles in Filastin were devoted to agricultural matters, and in particular to the state of the peasantry.106
In an editorial describing the success of Palestinian farmers at the Haifa agricultural fair of 1927, al-'Isa underlined one of the main reasons for his concern for the Palestinian peasant: the conflict on the land with the Zionist movement. Thus, he noted, "If a tenth of a tenth as much of the concern and efforts and wealth were spent on the local fellah as is spent on the Zionists, Palestinian agriculture would be in an enviable situation."107 This concern for the peasantry was linked to a fear that social divisions weakened the Palestinians in the face of what al-'Isa perceived as a unified Zionist movement. Thus the subtitle of another editorial stated: "Whoever humiliates a worker, humiliates the nation."108 Such sentiments were understandable coming from a resident of Jaffa, which together with Haifa had a large working-class population and was the natural destination of dispossessed peasants who had lost their land as a result of land purchases by the Zionists.
The sale of land to the Zionist movement by large absentee landowners, many of them non-Palestinian, was a major topic in Filastin and other newspapers during the prewar years,109 and during the Mandate. The paper frequently carried articles about land sales on Page 1 with titles like "Selling Wholesale" and "The Party of the Brokers and the Party of the Government."110 The anger of al-'Isa in the face of the apparent blindness of so many of his compatriots, especially the rich and powerful ones among them, to the danger that he perceived, was often expressed, sometimes intemperately, in the columns of his paper. A theme touched on before the war-that of the Arabs going from masters of the land to outsiders- recurred in later years. A typical title for an article warning against this danger was one published in 1929: "Strangers in Our Own Land: Our Negligence and Their Awakening."111 As we have seen, by the end of the 1930s, the yishuv had grown to nearly a third of the population of the country, the exclusively Jewish economy that it controlled was larger than that owned by the Arabs, and land purchases, which amounted to a small fraction of the country's total area, nevertheless provided the strategic backbone for a Jewish state. Even at this stage, the warnings of al-'Isa and others like him had already been proven to be prescient indeed.
Like much of what he wrote, this editorial was implicitly a criticism of the leaders of the Palestinian community. Beyond furthering our understanding of the common themes and ideas that increasingly bound Palestinians together as a people over the decades after its founding in 1911, Filastin exposes us to a critique of the failures of Palestinian leadership from within Palestinian society. Unlike critiques sympathetic to the parties the Palestinians were struggling against, the British and the Zionists, it is animated by a deep Palestinian patriotism and an expert knowledge of the country. Subjective, partisan, and often acerbic, it remains one of the best sources for understanding the failure of Palestinian leadership in the years leading up to 1948.
Perhaps the most costly action of the mufti before he left the Middle East for Berlin in 1941 was his role in opposing Britain's 1939 White Paper. This episode reveals in full the deep divisions among the Palestinians, the weakness of their national institutions, and also the force of the mufti's personality and of the position that he had developed. Following the crushing of the 1936-39 revolt, the British sense that they were obliged to make a concession to Arab sentiment in order to bolster their position in the Middle East paradoxically created a small opening in the iron cage that had encircled the Palestinians since the beginning of the Mandate. This opening was small indeed. It first became apparent at the St. James Palace Conference in March 1939, convened by the Chamberlain government to resolve the Palestine imbroglio, which brought together British cabinet ministers, the leaders of several Arab states, and a number of Palestinian leaders (with Zionist representatives meeting separately with the British). There and in the White Paper, issued two months later as a consequence of this conference, Britain for the first time promised to impose limitations on Jewish immigration and land purchase, both central Palestinian demands for two decades-indeed there had been demands for limits on Jewish immigration during the late Ottoman period. Britain also abandoned the 1937 Peel Commission plan to partition Palestine and to create a Jewish state, offered instead responsible government within five years, the opening of senior positions within the government to officials recruited in Palestine (at a ratio of two Arab to one Jewish official), and a promise of full independence within ten years. These offers were far less tantalizing to the Arabs than they may have appeared, for they were hedged around with conditions meant to rob them of some of their substance, including the necessity to secure the approval of the yishuv for the final steps envisaged, notably independence. There were many other hidden traps and reservations in the proposals contained in the White Paper, as we saw in Chapter 2.
In spite of these drawbacks, and in spite of the opposition of the leaders of the rebel forces, now dispersed and in disarray, many members of the Palestinian political leadership, including initially most of the Arab Higher Committee, were inclined to accept the White Paper, as were all the Arab governments. This was partly a result of weariness on the part of the Palestinian public with the crisis situation that had dragged on for years, and of the fact that the British initiative, which for the first time met some long-standing Arab demands, had been furiously opposed by the Jewish Agency in Palestine and its supporters abroad. Moreover, in the lead-up to the St. James Palace Conference, the British had acted to appease Arab feeling. After years of asking for tighter restrictions on the mufti's activity (indeed at one point demanding his exile to the distant Alawite region of Syria), the British in 1939 had asked the French authorities to loosen the conditions of surveillance over al-Husayni in Lebanon,15 had released several members of the Arab Higher Committee from detention in the Seychelles to enable them to engage in consultations with the mufti and go to London to attend the St. James Palace Conference, and had taken a number of other conciliatory measures.
Initially, the mufti seemed favorable to this process of détente with the British, and at one stage it even appeared as if he might go along with the general thrust of the White Paper. After extensive consultations, he assented to members of the Arab Higher Committee, including his cousin Jamal al- Husayni, and the latter's brother-in-law, Musa al-'Alami's, attendance at the St. James Palace Conference in London as representatives of the Palestinians. Even after the breakdown of the conference, he attempted to keep a line open to the British. Speaking to intermediaries with the French authorities in Lebanon in March 1939, the mufti asked for French mediation between the Palestinians and the British, and asserted that the Arab world would not sympathize with Germany and Italy in case of a conflict between them and Britain and France.16 But when in May the Arab Higher Committee finally had to take a position on the White Paper, the mufti imposed his views on his colleagues and secured a rejection of this ambiguous British initiative. It appears that a majority of the members of the Arab Higher Committee opposed the mufti and favored accepting the White Paper, and although there is some disagreement among historians about this, it is definitely the case that his opposition never wavered, and that he carried the day.17
Hajj Amin al-Husayni was acting in part out of fear of forces he did not fully control, but that his actions, and his earlier inaction, had helped to unleash: these were represented by the remaining scattered rebel bands in the hills of Palestine. Before the crucial May meeting of the Arab Higher Committee in Lebanon, a number of the remaining leaders of the disorganized guerilla groups had in April issued a strident statement rejecting the White Paper, calling for complete independence for Palestine and stating that the Palestinian people had not staged an uprising in order to get high positions for a few effendis (educated members of the upper classes). It concluded by saying ominously that the Palestinians were subject neither "to the Nashashibis or to the Husaynis, nor to the Arab kings, who were ruling by the grace of Britain."18 The mufti could not have misunderstood this barely veiled warning to him not to accept the White Paper and thereby return to the path of cooperation with Britain, a path that he had previously followed for so long, and for which he had long been criticized by younger and more militant activists.
Yasser 'Arafat dominated the Palestinian political scene for over two generations. However, if he deserved much of the credit for returning to center stage a people who momentarily appeared to have disappeared from the Middle Eastern scene after 1948, to him also belonged a share of the blame for the problems with which his people were saddled at his death. This is particularly true of the flaws in the political structures that developed during 'Arafat's era of dominance of Palestinian politics. Yasser 'Arafat, an easily caricatured figure who did not arouse sympathy in most Western, and many Arab, observers, readily lent himself to the personification of everything relating to Palestine. Indeed, in some measure he encouraged it. He was egocentric, reveled in attention, and was jealous of rivals. He worked tirelessly to keep all the strings controlling Palestinian politics, particularly the financial ones, in his hands alone. He lived single- mindedly for his political work, and he worked incessantly, putting in longer hours than his colleagues in the Palestinian leadership. He had few distractions, took little recreation, and never vacationed. In everything he did, he exploited to the full his capacious memory, his relentless drive, and his powerful, domineering personality.
The political structures 'Arafat was largely responsible for creating, while they mirrored aspects of other patriarchal regimes and political movements in the modern Arab world, also closely reflected his personal characteristics, notably in terms of his indomitable desire to be in charge. As the preeminent founding leader of the major Palestinian political formation, Fateh, as the chairman beginning in 1969 of the PLO Executive Committee, and as the first elected president of the PA, 'Arafat left his mark on styles of authority, forms of organization, and structures that have endured after his passing.
While 'Arafat deserves credit for some of the successes, and can be blamed for some of the failings, of Fateh, the PLO, and the PA, he cannot be considered as solely responsible for either. Some of these failings were a result of problems that were manifestly structural and deeply seated, notably the failure of the Palestinian polity during the Mandate period to develop the attributes of stateness, or even to appreciate the importance of developing quasi-state structures as a paramount national goal. 'Arafat's preference for the personal over the organizational, his notorious tendency to create duplicate lines of authority (and often duplicate structures, notably within the security services), his systematic undermining of administrative routine, and his general preference for controlled chaos over order, can be faulted in part, but in part only, for the Palestinians' failure to move much further than they had during the Mandate period toward a stable, unified quasi-state structure.
While Palestinians coped with this inhospitable environment, Palestinian political structures suffered from the efforts of several Arab governments to dominate them, even as they continued to be the object of the hostility of Israel and the Western powers. And while the PLO struggled to resist Arab pressures, under the slogan of "preserving the independent Palestinian decision," its weakness and dependence on different Arab states for diplomatic support, bases, and money often drew it into a delicate and exceedingly dangerous balancing act. 'Arafat was a past master at this, and indeed it may have been his greatest skill. One consequence of decades of this constant leaping from one ice floe to another, however, was that by the end 'Arafat had exhausted the patience of many of the leaders, Arab and others, with whom he dealt over the decades.
But 'Arafat alone cannot be blamed for all of the many strategic errors made by the PLO after it came under the control of independent Palestinian groups in 1968. Among them were the multiple mistakes made in Jordan before 1970 and in Lebanon until 1982, involving the PLO in bloody and ultimately disastrous conflicts in both countries. Claiming to be a movement of resistance to the Israeli occupation that did not interfere in the politics of its host countries, the PLO was inexorably drawn into Jordanian and Lebanese internal affairs, and became embroiled in costly wars, leading to its expulsion from both countries.3 Equally harmful was the PLO's equivocation about a two-state solution and an end to armed violence long after that course had supposedly been conclusively decided upon. This was shown in the failure to impose internal discipline on a pro-Iraqi splinter faction, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), headed by Muhammad 'Abbas (Abu al-'Abbas), after the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of a U.S. citizen,4 and after another PLF seaborne attack on a beach near Tel Aviv in March 1990 jeopardized ongoing negotiations with the United States.5 A blunder of a different sort was the PLO's disastrous alignment with Saddam Hussein after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In spite of the enthusiasm of many Palestinians for the reckless action of the Iraqi dictator, it should have been obvious that this adventure was doomed to fail and would drag the PLO down with it. Finally, there was the lamentable error of accepting a series of flawed accords with the Israelis, beginning with the 1993 Oslo agreement.
It cannot be stressed strongly enough that many of these strategic blunders grew out of collective decision-making by the entire Fateh-PLO- PA leadership. In the end, all of them were the responsibility of the entire leadership, not of one man alone. There was, however, dissent over several of these decisions, notably Abu Iyyad's strong disagreement with the PLO's support for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, for which he may well have paid with his life. Abu Iyyad fully recognized the many dangers for the PLO inherent in aligning with Iraq in 1990-91. He understood, as 'Arafat and some other Arab leaders apparently did not, that the United States was without rivals or constraints in the new post-Cold War world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that it could and would easily drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait, completely changing the Middle Eastern strategic map. He understood further the disastrous impact of such an alignment for the PLO's vitally important relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries, which stood squarely in opposition to Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Finally, Abu Iyyad understood that this ill-considered decision spelled doom for the well-to-do Palestinian community of a quarter of a million people in Kuwait, a crucial pillar of the PLO's prosperity and independence. He did not live to see his forebodings realized: he was assassinated in Tunis with two other PLO leaders on January 14, 1991, the day before the U.S.-led offensive against Iraqi forces in Kuwait began, by a double agent whom the Palestinian intelligence services, headed by Abu Iyyad, had utilized to penetrate and destroy the Abu Nidal group, a terrorist organization sponsored by the Iraqi regime.