Twenty Years of Warnings Nobody Wanted

Two years after Balfour wrote his letter, somebody finally came to Palestine and asked the people who lived there what they wanted.

It happened once. It happened properly. And it never happened again.

Britain, France and their allies won the First World War. The Ottoman state had fought on the losing side, so its lands were now the winners’ to hand out as they pleased. In 1919 they gathered in Paris to draw the new map.

But the American president had been telling the world something different. People, he said, should be allowed to choose who governs them. And he appeared to mean it.

So he sent two Americans, Henry King and Charles Crane, to go and ask. In the summer of 1919 they spent six weeks travelling through Syria and Palestine. They met group after group. They read the letters people sent them. They listened to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Then they wrote down everything they had heard.

The report that got filed in a drawer

Nine out of every ten people in Palestine were Arabs, Muslim and Christian together. They did not want a Jewish state built in their country, and they said so to anyone who asked.

Then the two men asked British officers a question. If Britain builds a Jewish state here anyway, how many soldiers will it take to hold the country down?

The officers worked it out. At least fifty thousand.

So the report told Paris what to do. Britain should stop letting so many Jewish settlers in, and should give up the plan for a Jewish state.

Nobody in Paris argued with it. They just put it in a drawer, and did not even print it for another three years.

Fifty thousand soldiers. Keep that figure somewhere safe. Britain would end up with about that many armed men in Palestine, and even then it could not hold the country.

One more thing happened at that same meeting in Paris. Prince Faisal, the son of the Arab leader Britain had made its promise to, sat down with Chaim Weizmann, and the two of them signed a friendly agreement about Arabs and Jews working side by side.

Then Faisal picked up a pen and added one line in Arabic at the bottom. This agreement only counts if the Arabs are given the country they were promised.

Britain never gave it. Instead Britain and France carved the Arab lands up between themselves, following the lines of Sykes-Picot, the secret deal the two of them had made during the war.

The Arabs who had fought for Britain never got the independent country they were promised. Faisal was handed a throne in Iraq, with Britain still in charge of it. His brother was handed one across the river in Transjordan, also under Britain. And Sharif Hussein, the man Britain had made the promise to, lost even the small kingdom he had. A rival family drove him out of Makkah, and he died far from home.

So Faisal’s one condition was never met, and the agreement he signed never counted for anything.

Britain moves in

In 1920 Britain chose a man to govern Palestine.

You already know who. Herbert Samuel. The same man who, five years earlier, had written the secret paper telling Britain to take Palestine and grow a Jewish majority in it.

So the man who had thought up the plan was now the man running the country. And Britain acted surprised when Palestinians did not trust him to be fair.

Two years later, the rest of the world agreed to the whole arrangement.

In 1922 the League of Nations, a new club of countries set up after the war to settle things together, officially gave Britain the job of governing Palestine. And right at the start of that agreement, Britain was given a job to do. Help build a Jewish national home in Palestine.

So Balfour’s promise was no longer just a British promise in a letter. The League of Nations had put its name to it, and that gave Britain what it wanted most. Permission.

Not one Arab country had a seat in that League.

Then Samuel got to work.

Hebrew became an official language of Palestine, beside Arabic and English. The doors opened wider for Jewish settlers. And one Jewish organisation was given the right to speak for every Jew in the country. It had its own money, its own schools, its own hospitals, and its own office for buying land.

It was not a government yet. But it was being built like one.

Palestinians were offered something too. A council where they would always be outnumbered, and could never win a single vote. They said no.

Then they were blamed for saying no.

Watching the numbers climb

By 1925 you could see the change with your own eyes.

In that one year alone, about 33,000 Jewish settlers arrived. That was three times as many as the year before. Thirteen new settlements went up. And Tel Aviv was growing fast into a city of its own.

There was also a large Jewish workers’ organisation, run by David Ben-Gurion, the man you saw marching into Jerusalem with the British army. It was building a second Palestine inside the first one. Its own jobs, its own shops, its own wages, its own rules.

One of those rules had a name. Hebrew labour. Jewish bosses should give the work to Jewish workers.

Now set that beside the land rule you met in the last chapter, the one that said land bought by the Jewish National Fund could never be sold again. For an Arab family, the two of them added up to this.

Land you could never buy back. Jobs you could never take. Two Palestines in one country, and the wall between them growing higher every year.

That same year the new Hebrew University opened in Jerusalem. Balfour came all the way from London for the opening. Samuel was there. So was the general who had walked in through the Jaffa Gate.

Palestinians answered in the only way they could. All across the country they shut their shops for the day and hung black flags out of their windows. Black is the colour of mourning. They were saying that a day Britain was calling a celebration felt to them like a funeral.

Nobody at the ceremony took the slightest notice. The speeches were given, the building was opened, and not one plan was changed because of it.

Al-Buraq, 1929

Then came the summer of 1929, and the trouble began on the holiest few metres of ground on earth.

In Al-Quds, which English maps call Jerusalem, there is an old stone wall.

Muslims call it the al-Buraq Wall, after the night journey of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. It stands at the foot of Al-Aqsa, with the Dome of the Rock rising behind it, and it had been in Muslim hands for centuries.

Jews call the same wall the Western Wall. They believe it is all that is left of their Second Temple, and it is the holiest place they can pray.

The same stones. Two faiths. One narrow alley.

For two years there had been arguments at that wall.

Jews had been coming there to pray for a very long time, and nobody had stopped them. But there was an old rule that went with it. You could come and pray. You could not build anything there, because the wall and the ground in front of it were not yours.

Then Jewish worshippers began bringing benches to sit on, and tall screens to separate the men from the women, and leaving them standing there.

To a Muslim watching, that was how taking a place over begins. First the furniture arrives. Then, one day, somebody says the ground is theirs. British police came and carried a screen away, and after that both sides were angrier than before.

Then, in August 1929, a crowd of young Zionists marched up to the wall waving flags and shouting that the wall belonged to them.

By the next day the city was full of stories. Jews were told that Arabs were about to attack them. Arabs were told that Jewish crowds were coming for Al-Aqsa. Some of the stories were true. Some were invented. All of them were frightening, and frightened people do terrible things.

And the whole country caught fire.

For about a week there was killing in town after town.

In Hebron, Arab crowds attacked the city’s old Jewish community and killed 67 people, including women and children. That was a massacre, and it should be called one.

Other families in Hebron hid their Jewish neighbours inside their own homes and saved dozens of lives. That should be said too.

In Safed, 18 more Jews were killed. And British police and soldiers, firing into Arab crowds, killed well over a hundred Palestinians.

By the end of that week about 133 Jews and at least 116 Arabs were dead.

Three men at Acre

Britain wanted to frighten Palestinians into staying quiet.

Hundreds were arrested. Twenty-six were sentenced to death. In the end three of those men were actually hanged, and all three were young.

Fuad Hijazi, from Safed. Ata al-Zir and Muhammad Jamjoum, both from Hebron.

They were held in the prison at Acre. On 17 June 1930 they were taken out, one after another, and hanged.

The story that came out of that prison, and that Palestinians have told ever since, is that each of the three asked to go first. Not because he wanted it over quickly. Because whoever went last would have to stand and listen while his two friends died.

A poet wrote a song about them, and Palestinians have been singing it for nearly a hundred years. It is called Min Sijn Akka, which means “From Acre Prison”. Ask a Palestinian grandmother. She will know the tune.

Their graves are still in Acre.

The report Britain wrote, and then tore up

After the killing of 1929, Britain did what Britain always did. It sent men to investigate.

Their report said what Palestinians had been saying for ten years. Arabs were afraid of losing their country, settlers kept arriving, land kept being sold, and Britain had never given Palestinians any real say in running the place.

A second man came in 1930 to look at the land. He found there was not enough farmland to go round, and that almost three in ten Palestinian farming families already had none. Once the Jewish National Fund bought land, Arabs could never buy it back and could never work on it. Every sale left a family with no land and no work.

So in October 1930 Britain published a plan. It would reduce the number of Jewish settlers coming in. It would reduce the amount of Arab land being sold. And, for the first time since Balfour’s letter, it would take seriously what the Arab majority wanted.

For about four months, Britain was finally doing what its own investigators had told it to do.

Four months.

Then the people who did not like the plan set to work on it.

Weizmann was the head of the worldwide Zionist movement by now, and he resigned in protest. That put the argument on every front page. Newspapers attacked the plan. Members of Parliament attacked it. Rich and powerful friends of the movement went to the Prime Minister privately and pressed him to drop it.

In February 1931 the Prime Minister wrote a letter to Weizmann.

He did not cancel the plan. That would have looked like giving in.

Instead he took the plan apart, one promise at a time.

Fewer settlers? Britain had never meant to stop Jewish people coming. Settlers would keep arriving.

Less Arab land sold? Britain had never meant to stop that either. The land would keep changing hands.

And the Hebrew labour rule, the one that gave the jobs to Jewish workers only? Britain had no problem with it.

The plan was still there. Every word of it. It just did not do anything any more.

Jews called it the MacDonald Letter, after the Prime Minister who wrote it. Palestinians called it the Black Letter.

And it taught Palestinians something they never forgot. Britain would investigate honestly. Britain would publish honestly. And then Britain would give way the moment honesty cost it anything.

The gate opens wider

In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

What happened to the Jews of Europe after that was the worst crime of the last century. It is not the subject of this book, but it is the reason for almost everything in this chapter. Jews were robbed, beaten, driven out of their homes, and in the end murdered in their millions in camps built for killing. Six million people.

They tried to escape. One country after another quietly closed its doors to them. Ships full of families were turned away from ports and sent back to die.

So they went where a door was still open. That door was Palestine.

Look what happens to the numbers. After the big year of 1925, arrivals had dropped right down again. In 1931, about 4,000 Jewish settlers arrived. In 1932, about 9,500. In 1933, around 30,000. In 1934, about 42,000. In 1935, 62,000.

When Allenby walked into Jerusalem, one person in ten in Palestine was Jewish. By 1936 it was nearly one in three.

Meanwhile, in British offices and at Zionist meetings, a new question was being asked openly. What if the Palestinians were simply moved somewhere else?

David Ben-Gurion said plainly that families who lost their land to new settlements could be sent across the river, to live in what is now Jordan. Jewish organisations even gave people the job of working out how it could be done.

Nobody kept this a secret, and nobody made it up afterwards. It was something they sat down together and talked about.

There was also a deal that helped Jews get out of Germany, and it is one of the strangest of the whole century.

In August 1933, Jewish organisations made an agreement with Hitler’s government. It was called the Haavara Agreement. Haavara is Hebrew for transfer.

Normally a Jew running from Germany left with nothing. House, shop, savings, all gone.

This deal let him keep some of it. Here is how it worked.

Before he left, he paid his money into a special bank account in Germany. Germany used that money to buy German goods. The goods were loaded onto a ship and sent to Palestine. In Palestine they were sold in the shops. And when he arrived, the money from those sales was handed to him.

Both sides got what they wanted. Germany was rid of its Jews and sold its goods too. Jewish families reached Palestine with some money instead of none. About 60,000 came this way.

Jews in other countries were furious. Nearly every country had stopped buying from Hitler’s Germany, to punish him, and this deal helped him sell. One of the men who arranged it was shot dead on a Tel Aviv beach.

People still argue about whether that deal was right or wrong. What it did in Palestine, though, is something nobody argues about. Frightened families had been arriving one at a time. Now they came in organised groups, with money in their pockets, and they came at the very worst moment for the Palestinians.

Now hold two true things in your head at once. This is the hardest part of the whole series.

The Jews arriving were running for their lives. They had nowhere else on earth to go. Sending them back meant sending them to die. That is true.

Now think about the Palestinian farmer standing at Jaffa, watching those ships come in.

He knew what those ships meant. He would lose his home. He would lose his farmland. He would lose his work. And in the end he would lose even his right to stay in his own country.

Of course he was frightened. Anyone would be. That is true too.

Two peoples, and both had a real case. Britain had promised each of them something different, and meant to keep neither promise.

That is the trap. Nobody in Palestine built it.

The barrels on the dock at Jaffa

On 16 October 1935, Arab workers were unloading a ship at Jaffa port. They were carrying heavy barrels marked as cement. One slipped and broke open on the stones.

Guns spilled out of it.

The British opened the rest. Most of the barrels were full of weapons. Eight hundred rifles. Machine guns. Four hundred thousand bullets. Nobody was arrested.

Guess why. The papers that came with the cargo named a Jewish merchant in Tel Aviv. The British said they could not prove who the guns were really for, and the case quietly died.

Remember what that same government did to Arabs. It searched their villages for weapons. It had hanged three young men at Acre. Now it looked at four hundred thousand bullets and arrested nobody at all.

Now no doubt was left in anyone’s mind. An army was being built against the Palestinians, and they had all stood there and watched its weapons roll across that dock.

Protests broke out across Palestine, and in the Arab cities beyond it. Later that month a strike began, and in Jaffa it turned violent.

The preacher who picked up a rifle

By the mid 1930s Palestinians had run out of patience. Their leaders were rich men who wrote polite letters to the British, and the letters had changed nothing.

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was a Syrian scholar, trained in Cairo, who had already fought two European empires. He raised men and money against the Italians in Libya, then took to the mountains against the French in Syria. The French sentenced him to death. He reached Haifa in the early 1920s a wanted man.

There he became the imam of a mosque called Istiqlal, which means Independence. He also took a job registering marriages, which carried him through every village in the north. He taught in the mosque, married poor couples for free, and ran evening classes teaching farmers and dock workers to read.

He went to the poorest people of Haifa, the ones who had come there after losing their land in Marj Ibn Amir. They were men with nothing left to lose.

He gathered them into small secret groups, found them weapons, and told them the country would only be saved by fighting for it.

In November 1935 British soldiers surrounded him and a few of his men. He was told to surrender. He refused, and told his men to die as martyrs.

They were killed there. Palestinians have called him a shaheed, a martyr, ever since.

His funeral was the biggest crowd Palestine had ever seen. Thousands of people filled the streets of Haifa to walk behind him.

And many of them went home that day having decided to follow in al-Qassam’s footsteps.

Palestine’s poets were angry too, and they wrote it down for everybody to read.

One of them stood in front of a visiting Arab prince in Jerusalem and asked him a question. Have you come to visit Al-Aqsa, or have you come to say goodbye to it before we lose it? People repeated that question all over the country.

Another poet criticised Palestine’s own leaders. You keep making speeches, he told them, while the country disappears piece by piece, and there is hardly any of it left. Step out of the way and let somebody else try.

Five months later

On 19 April 1936, in Jaffa, Palestinians stopped working.

The strike spread fast. Within days it had reached every city and nearly every village in Palestine. Shops stayed shut. Workers stayed home.

This time the Palestinians wrote down the reason for their strike, and they wrote it in English so that the rest of the world could read it. They said three things.

Our quarrel is with Britain, because Britain means to replace the Arabs of this country with the Jews.

Britain promised the Jews a national home in our country, and it never once asked us. Every Arab in the region hates that promise.

And that promise gave them a country. It gave us the right to pray, and nothing more. Not one word about ruling our own land.

That last point was exactly right.

Look at Balfour’s sixty-seven words again. Civil and religious rights, for the existing non-Jewish communities. Not the right to a country of their own.

Palestinians had spotted that missing line in 1917. Nineteen years later they were on strike, still pointing at it.

The three young men at Acre had been hanged after a riot. What was starting now was not a riot.