Radio Free Palestine : A Story of Betrayal - Part 1

by Stuart Littlewood
Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 

 Second part in My Catbird Seat‘s serialisation of the Opening chapters of Radio Free Palestine

A Story of Betrayal – 1 

A seventeen-year-old girl trembling with grief and rage told me how she witnessed her teenage cousin being shot through the head by Israeli soldiers.

They had been walking to school together and the soldiers were taunting him. In response he had picked up a rock. She accused me and all Americans of knowing about these daily abuses against Palestinians but not caring. I tried to tell her that most Americans do not know about these tragedies, and that we would never support those who perpetrate them. But her belief that the average American is savvy about international politics was as strong as it was naive. “Of course Americans know we’re suffering over here,” she retorted.“ You’re the most powerful nation on earth. And everyone has a television. I know you know.”

These words are borrowed from David Hazard’s excellent book Blood Bothers, which charts the life of Father Elias Chacour, a remarkable Christian Palestinian who grew up on the shores of Galilee and saw his beautiful world shattered by the Israeli occupation.

Like countless others he was made a refugee in his own country.

The beautiful shores of Galilee: a land of milk and honey, now with a bitter taste. (photo: Stuart Littlewood).

Americans aren’t alone in their ignorance. British people too seem largely unaware of how tragedy was allowed to overtake the Palestinians, and how this once-peaceful province of the Ottoman Empire, renowned for its antiquities and culture, became a land scarred by conflict, where everyday humiliation stokes the fires of hatred. You cannot get in or out, or move around, without running the gauntlet of Israeli customs, baggage searches, roadblocks and checkpoints under the sneer of contemptuous, sunglassed troops. Even in remote countryside you’ll run into one of 700 armed checkpoints.

Young guns : Tasked with dispossessing Palestinians and expanding the Jewish State… Israeli troops: They call themselves “the most moral army in the world”.

The Israeli Defence Force is largely made up of National Servicemen and women – teenagers drafted in and trained to use lethal force. They have a reputation for being trigger-happy. On the other hand they don’t all wish to play the ‘heavy’ or necessarily agree with their orders. The two pictured here were likable lads and cracked a smile for the camera. But all the time I was aware of a third guard nearby with a gun on my back.

To understand why, one must at least dip a toe into the complicated history of the last 90 years. To help readers over this hurdle, I offer this ‘potted’ version. At least it will explain why I grabbed my camera and went to see Palestine for myself.

For centuries long our land enslaved
by Turkish kings with sharpened blade.

We prayed to end the Sultan’s curse,
the British came and spoke a verse.

“It’s World War One, if you agree
to fight with us we’ll set you free.”

The war we fought at Britain’s side,
our blood was shed for Arab pride.

At war’s end Turks were smitten,
our only gain, the lies of Britain.

Stephen Ostrander’s simple verse manages to cut through mountains of rhetoric to the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There was a Jewish state in the Holy Land some 3,000 years ago, but the Canaanites and Philistines were there first. The Jews, one of several invading groups, left and returned several times, and were expelled by the Roman occupation in 70AD and again in 135AD.

Since the 7th century Palestine has been mainly Arabic. During the First World War the country was ‘liberated’ from Turkish Ottoman rule after the Allied Powers, in correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca in 1915, promised independence to Arab leaders in return for their help in defeating Germany’s ally.

However, a new-Jewish political movement called Zionism was finding favour among the ruling elite in London, and the British Government was persuaded by the Zionists’ chief spokesman, Chaim Weizman, to surrender Palestine for their new Jewish homeland. Hardly a thought, it seems, was given to the earlier pledge to the Arabs, who had occupied and owned the land for 1,500 years – longer, say some scholars, than the Jews ever did.

Arthur Balfour (left) and Lord Rothschild conspired to betray Britain’s guarantees to the Arabs who fought alongside us in the First World War

The Zionists, fuelled by the notion that an ancient Biblical prophecy gave them the title deeds, aimed to push the Arabs out by populating the area with millions of Eastern European Jews. They had already set up farm communities and founded a new city, Tel Aviv, but by 1914 Jews numbered only 85,000 to the Arabs’ 615,000. The infamousBalfour Declaration of 1917  – actually a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to the most senior Jew in England, Lord Rothschild – pledged assistance for the Zionist cause with apparent disregard for the consequences to the native majority. Calling itself a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”, it said:

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 and non-Jewish communities….

But Balfour, a Zionist convert, later wrote:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land.

Charles Poulett Thomson, 1st Baron Sydenham

There was opposition, of course. Lord Sydenham warned:

The harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country may never be remedied. What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.

 The American King-Crane Commission of1919 thought it a gross violation of principle.

No British officers consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. That, of itself, is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme.

There were other reasons why the British were courting disaster. A secret deal, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, had been concluded in 1916 between France and Britain, in consultation with Russia, to re-draw the map of the Middle Eastern territories won from Turkey. Britain was to take Jordan, Iraq and Haifa. The area now referred to as Palestine was declared an international zone. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration and the promises made earlier in the McMahon-Hussein letters all cut across each other. It seems to have been a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing in the confusion of war. More>>  Radio Free Palestine : A Story of Betrayal - 1