The Land That Was Already Home

There is a word you need to learn before we start.

Nakba.

Say it out loud. Nak-ba. It is an Arabic word, and it means catastrophe. Not a small one. Not a bad day. It means the kind of disaster that breaks a whole world into pieces and leaves the pieces on the ground.

For Palestinians, the Nakba is one particular year. 1948.

In that year, somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 people lost their homes. Not for a week. Forever. More than 500 towns and villages were emptied out, and hundreds of them were knocked flat so that nobody could come back to them. Thousands of people were killed. Families ran with whatever they could carry, and many of them carried the front door key of a house they were certain they would return to in two weeks.

Some of those keys still exist. Grandchildren keep them in drawers. The houses are gone.

That is where this story ends up. But you can’t start a story in the middle, and if somebody tries to tell you the Nakba began in 1948, they are starting halfway through the book. The Nakba took about a hundred and fifty years to build. It was planned in offices in London and Paris and Basel, by men in suits, most of whom never saw a Palestinian village in their lives.

So we are going to start at the beginning. And the beginning is a place.

What Palestine actually was

Picture a strip of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Not big. You could drive from the top to the bottom in a day, if you had a car, which almost nobody did.

Most people were farmers. In Arabic, fellahin. They grew wheat and barley and lentils. They kept goats. They pressed olives into oil every autumn, and the olive harvest was the biggest week of the year, when everyone climbed into the trees together and the whole village smelled green.

Some of those olive trees were a thousand years old. A farmer would show you a tree and tell you which great-great-grandfather had planted it.

The villages had a shape to them. Stone houses packed close, a well, a mosque or a church, a threshing floor where the wheat was beaten. Each village had a mukhtar, a chosen elder, who settled arguments and spoke for everyone when the tax collector came.

And there were cities.

Jaffa sat right on the sea, and it was famous across the world for one thing. Oranges. Big, thick-skinned, absurdly sweet oranges that travelled well on ships. If you were in London in 1900 and you ate an orange, there is a decent chance it grew in Jaffa.

Nablus made soap. Olive oil soap, cut into cubes and stacked into tall towers to dry. Haifa was a busy port curled under a mountain. Acre was a walled sea fortress that had beaten off armies for centuries. Gaza was an old trading town on the road to Egypt. Safed sat high in the hills where the air was cold. And Jerusalem was Jerusalem, holy to three religions at once, with the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Western Wall all inside the same set of ancient walls.

Palestine, and the cities in this chapter. Notice the Negev, the desert filling the southern triangle. It is more than half the land and almost none of the people, which is worth remembering when you get to chapter four and men in London start dividing this country up by percentages.

Who lived there

This part matters, so read it slowly.

Palestine was mostly Muslim. It also had a large and old Christian community, Arab Christians whose families had been Christian since before Europe was. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ramallah and parts of Jerusalem were full of them.

And there were Jews.

Jewish families had lived in Palestine for a very long time, especially in four cities they considered holy: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed. Around 1840 there were roughly 3,000 of them in the whole country. Mostly religious families who had come to pray and study and be buried in the holy land. They spoke Arabic in the market. They were neighbours.

Remember that number. It comes back.

Three religions, same streets, same water, same tax collector. Was it a perfect paradise where nobody ever argued? No. Real places never are. There were disputes and there were bad years. But Muslims, Christians and Jews in Palestine were not enemies. They were people from the same towns. They went to each other’s weddings.

Altogether, around half a million people lived there.

Hold on to that picture. Because in about eighty years, people in Europe would start describing this exact place, in their newspapers, as “a land without a people.”

A land with a name

So who was in charge of all this?

In the 1800s, Palestine was part of the Ottoman state. That word “state” can fool you, so let me be clear about what it actually was.

The Ottoman state was the Muslim caliphate. Its Sultan had a job that came with the crown: looking after the sacred places of Islam. Makkah. Madinah. And Al-Quds, which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.

So a farmer outside Nablus in 1850 was not living under somebody else’s flag. He was living in Muslim land, under a Muslim ruler. If he had a quarrel with a neighbour, he took it to a Muslim judge, who settled it by Islamic law. That had been true for four hundred years, since 1517.

Here is something you can still go and touch. The great stone walls around the Old City of Jerusalem were built by an Ottoman sultan called Suleiman, in the 1530s, and they are standing today. That is the kind of care it was. They did not just hold the city. They looked after it.

None of that made it a paradise. Some later governors taxed people hard, and the army took village boys away for years at a time. You will see very soon what that cost.

But this was not a foreign country sitting on top of a conquered people, and that matters.

Palestine was not a nameless patch of ground either. It had a name, and it had edges, and it had held both for a very long time.

Within a few years of the Muslims arriving in the 630s, this land was organised and given a name. Jund Filastin, the district of Palestine. It had its own capital city, Ramla, built for the job around the year 715. That name sits in the records for thirteen hundred years.

One day somebody will tell you Palestine was never a real country, because it had no flag and no parliament. Europe made up that rule, then used it looking backwards, on a land that already had a name, a border, a capital and a people long before most European countries existed.

There is more to it than lines on a map. In the Qur’an this land is called al-Ard al-Mubarakah, the Blessed Land. Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem was the first qiblah, the direction Muslims turned to face when they prayed, before Makkah. It is one of the three sacred mosques.

You do not need a flag to be a place.

Who the land actually belonged to

Now the boring bit. Stay with me, because almost everything later hangs on it.

How did a village own its fields?

Not the way you might think. Most village land was shared. The Arabic word for it is musha’. The village held its fields together and split them between the families, and every few years they swapped the strips around, so no family was stuck forever with the stony corner and no family kept the good soil by the water for three generations running.

It was fair. It was ancient. It worked.

What it was not was written down on paper, the way a European lawyer would want it.

So here is the question that decides everything. What made a piece of land yours?

In Islam, and in the way those villages actually lived, you do not own land because a clerk wrote your name in a book in a city you have never visited. You own it because your family cleared it, watered it, planted it and worked it. Season after season. Grandfather to father to son. And because your neighbours knew it and agreed.

The Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, said that whoever brings dead land back to life, it belongs to him.

So picture a family in the village of Ma’lul. Their grandparents farmed those fields. Their grandparents’ grandparents farmed them too.

Did that family own their land? Yes. Completely. Everybody in the village knew it, and that was the only rule anybody there was using.

Then a piece of paper arrived from far away.

In 1858 the Ottoman government brought in a new land law. From now on, land had to be written into a government book, called the tapu, under one person’s name. The reason was tax. If the government knows who owns what, the government can collect.

The villagers were not fools. They knew exactly what a government list was for.

If your name is in the book, the tax man finds you. Worse, the army finds your sons, and the army took boys for years at a time, and plenty of them never came back.

So they dodged it. They put the land in a dead relative’s name. Or the village elder’s name. Or the name of some rich merchant far away in Beirut or Damascus, who was happy to hold it on paper, and who seemed completely harmless.

Frightened farmers, hiding from the tax man in the 1860s, made a small quiet decision.

That decision is the crack that everything else comes through.

The family in Beirut

This next part runs ahead of our story, in places by more than fifty years. I am telling it here anyway, because it is the only way to show you what that government book was really for.

The Sursocks were a Christian family from Beirut. Merchants and bankers, enormously rich, with a palace, a French education, and friends in Istanbul and Paris.

In 1872 they bought a huge stretch of land from the Ottoman government. It was called Marj Ibn Amir, English maps call it the Jezreel Valley, and it is some of the best farmland anywhere between Egypt and Turkey. Flat, dark, generous soil. Around 230,000 dunams, which is the local unit for land. Roughly twenty villages’ worth. And they got it cheap.

They never moved there. They never farmed it. Most of them never even saw it. They sent agents to collect rent from the families who had been working those fields since long before any Sursock was born.

Ask a farmer in Ma’lul in 1890 who owned his land, and he would tell you his family did. By every measure his faith and his village knew, he was right. He was wrong by one measure only, a name in a book in Beirut, in a system his own grandfather had dodged on purpose.

Within his own lifetime, that one exception took everything he had.

In 1910 the Sursocks agreed to sell the fields of a village called al-Fula. The buyer was the Jewish National Fund, an organisation set up in Europe to buy land in Palestine and hold on to it forever. You will meet them properly in the next chapter.

One Ottoman official tried to stop it. Shukri al-Asali, governor of the Nazareth district, refused to sign, then took the fight to newspapers right across the Arab world. A family sitting in Beirut, he argued, has no right to sell the ground out from under a village full of living people.

He was overruled, moved out of his job, and the sale went through anyway.

Then, between 1921 and 1925, the Sursocks sold nearly the whole rest of the valley to organisations buying land for Jewish settlement. The price was around £726,000, a colossal sum in those days. Every document was in order.

Around 8,000 people, in about 22 villages, were put off that land.

Not in a war. By purchase.

Al-Fula. Ma’lul. Indur. Shatta. Jinjar. Tell al-Shammam. Some of those are now the names of nothing at all.

That is the first time a mass of Palestinians lost their homes in this story. It happened decades before anybody fired a shot. It was done with a pen, a signature and a receipt.

The first man to offer somebody else’s country

Now come back with me, all the way back, and this time we are leaving Palestine. Because while those villages were farming, other people across the sea had started talking about them.

The year is 1799. A French general named Napoleon Bonaparte has marched an army into Egypt and then north into Palestine, and he is standing outside the walls of Acre, trying to smash his way in.

He can’t. Acre is holding. Napoleon is stuck, hot, and losing men.

So he tries something else. He issues a letter to the Jews of Asia and Africa, offering them Palestine as a homeland, under French protection, if they will rise up and support him.

Stop and look at what just happened. A French general, who does not own this land, who has never lived on it, who is losing a battle on it, offers it to a people who mostly are not there, in exchange for military help.

It didn’t work. Nobody took him up on it. Napoleon lost at Acre and went home.

Go to Acre today and there is one thing left of Napoleon. A statue of him on a hill outside the walls, looking at the city he never managed to get into.

Which is the right monument, when you think about it. A European, standing on a hill, staring at a place that was never his.

But the idea had been put into words for the first time. Palestine as a card a European power could play.

The letter from London

Forty-one years later, a British politician picks the card back up.

In 1840, Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, writes to the British ambassador in Constantinople. He wants the ambassador to encourage the Ottoman Sultan to open Palestine up to Jewish immigration from Europe.

Why? Was Palmerston lying awake at night worrying about Jewish suffering?

No. Britain had a problem. An ambitious ruler in Egypt, Muhammad Ali, was getting strong and grabbing territory, and Britain wanted something in the middle of the region that would be loyal to Britain and would sit right on the road to India. A friendly population planted in Palestine, grateful to Britain and dependent on Britain, would be very useful.

And now that number comes back. At the moment Palmerston sat down to write, there were about three thousand Jews in the whole of Palestine, in a country of half a million people.

So he was not responding to a population that was already there. There barely was one. He was proposing to build one, as a move on a chessboard against Muhammad Ali.

That was the reason. Not kindness. Position on a map.

Historians who have worked through the British and Zionist archives, people like Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Salman Abu Sitta, all end up in roughly the same place on this. Europe did not look at this coast and see a homeland question. It looked at a map and saw the short road to India, and the gap where Russia might come down from the north, and the spot where France might get ahead of Britain. Palestine was a square on a chessboard. The people standing on it were not pieces anybody was counting.

This is a pattern you are going to see again and again in this story, so learn it now. Again and again, powerful countries in Europe made promises about Palestine. Every single time, they were thinking about themselves.

The part nobody should skip

There is another half of this story, and it would be dishonest to leave it out.

While Palestinian farmers were picking olives, Jews in Europe were being hunted.

That is not an exaggeration. For centuries in Christian Europe, Jews had been shoved into ghettos, banned from owning land, blamed for plagues, expelled from entire kingdoms, and murdered in mobs. In the Russian Empire in the 1880s came the pogroms, organised riots where Jewish villages were burned and Jewish families were killed while police stood and watched. Thousands fled with nothing.

In France in 1894, a Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason, and crowds in the streets of Paris, the most civilised city in Europe, screamed for Jewish blood.

So when Jewish people in Europe started asking, where on earth can we be safe?, that question was real. It was not made up. It came from a wound that had been bleeding for a thousand years.

Here is the thing you have to hold in both hands at once, and it is the hardest idea in this whole series.

That wound was real. And Palestinians did not cause it.

Not one Palestinian farmer in Lydda took part in a pogrom. Not one villager in Deir Yassin sat on the jury that convicted Dreyfus. The people who spent a thousand years persecuting Jews were Europeans. But when Europe finally decided to do something about the problem it had created, the bill was sent to a village in Palestine.

The quiet before

So hold the whole picture in your head, the way it stood before any of this reached the villages.

A land full of people. Villages with names. Trees with owners. Cities that made soap and shipped oranges. A place where a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew could argue about the price of lemons in the same market in the same language.

Nobody in those villages was reading European newspapers. Nobody in Nablus knew that in a hotel in Switzerland, a group of men were about to sit down at a long table and make a plan about the ground under their feet.

The farmers went out to the trees that autumn like they had every autumn.

They had no idea the clock had already started.