Kenneth Stein, “Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939,” John Waterbury and Farhad Kazemi (eds.), Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, Florida International University Press (1989), pp. 143-170….
Winter 1979 By Shlomo Avineri “Zionism as a National Liberation Movement,” Jerusalem Quarterly 10 (Winter 1979): pp. 133-144. At the root of Zionism lies a paradox. On the one hand, there is no doubt about…
By Yehoshua Porath, 1973 Historian Yehoshua Porath wrote “Social Aspects of the Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement” as a chapter for the book Society and Political Structure in the Arab World, Menachem Milson…
Otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence, or, “the nakbah” or disaster to the Arab world because a Jewish state was established, the war was fought between the newly established Jewish state of Israel opposed by Palestinian irregulars, and armies from five Arab states. Official beginning of the war is usually given as May 14, 1948, the date Israel declared itself an independent Jewish state, but the war’s first of four phases began in November 1947. Lasting for two years, the war ended with armistice agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and four Arab states.
The Palestinian Arab elite chose to boycott in virtually all British and U.N. overtures to them from 1920 to 1948, with egregious consequences. The Palestinian Arab elite shunned British officials who were staunch supporters of…
In “The Arabs and the Approaching War with Israel, 1945-1948,” Yaacov Shimoni reviews in detail the period from the early 1940s to May 1948, examining decisions made by Arab leaders toward Palestine and Zionism. He concludes that disunity among Arab states, jealousies, and disorganization plagued Arab preparations for the expected coming war with the Zionists.
In the months before the UN vote to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states in November 1947, the Jewish Agency leadership there had to overcome a series of foreign policy obstacles working against the Jewish state’s establishment.
Irrefutable evidence shows Palestinian Arab collaboration with Zionists during the British Mandate greatly assisted Jewish state building. Cohen further asserts a general absence among Palestinians of a sense of national feeling, with loyalties instead tied to families, villages and other localities. Quite certainly without Palestinian Arab collaboration, Zionists would not have succeeded in building a nucleus for the Jewish state. Arabic newspapers in Palestine and British scrutiny show the constancy of the Arab population’s engagement with the Zionists, and this included Arabs resident inside Palestine.
The 1937 plan to partition Palestine was never implemented. It did, however, remain a workable political option for resolving the conflict between Arabs and Zionists. Britain needed to placate Arab state opposition to Zionism, so it refrained from actively revisiting the partition plan.
Steady disintegration of Palestinian Arab society from 1945-1949 is detailed by five Arab and non-Arab historians citing local social cleavages, economic impoverishment, fear, indebtedness, and political dysfunction.
Primary sources, reputable scholarship and archival materials collectively show major communal (Arab-Jewish) socio-economic separation, factors that foreshadowed geo-spatial partition.
November 2, 1917 The Balfour Declaration was the Jewish charter that Herzl failed to obtain from the Ottoman sultan 20 years earlier. The terms were included in the preamble of the Palestine Mandate’s Articles in…
