There are moments in the Middle East when history suddenly shift gears and takes us all by surprise. Lenin knew the cadence: there are decades, he wrote, where nothing happens; and then, weeks in which decades happen. A year ago, Syria – trapped in the vortex of its civil war for almost fourteen years and virtually ignored by the rest of the world since October 7 2023 – suddenly leapt into one of those crazy weeks, leaving allies, enemies, and analysts alike blinking in the dust. Even now, a year after the astonishing fall of Damascus, the country sits like Kipling’s Tomlinson at the gates of judgement: not quite damned, not fully redeemed, suspended between heaven and hell.
Sleepers awake …
For years, as The Independent’s Bel Trew observed last December (see Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants) the world forgot about Syria – notwithstanding the courageous efforts of western and Syrian reporters and humanitarian workers who strove in perilous circumstances to bear witness. The civil war had become the background hum of the region, a grim drone many had learned to tune out as Ukraine and Gaza dominated the world stage. The regime of Hafez al Assad, brutal and immovable, bolstered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, looked set to endure indefinitely. The jihadi rebel enclave in Idlib, though supported by Türkiye, was dismissed as a besieged hold-out. Even those who professed expertise couldn’t reliably tell you whether the war was still ongoing, who was fighting whom, or what stage the conflict had reached. It was as if the wheels of war had stopped spinning.
Then, over the space of days – eleven, to be precise – the wheels spun again. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s fighters burst from their confined redoubt with a momentum no one expected (including, it seems, themselves), sweeping through Aleppo and racing down the highway to the capital. Analysts reached instinctively for historical parallels: Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. Analyst David Kilcullen pointed instead to Timur Kuran’s theory of the “preference cascade”: the sudden collapse of a regime that had mistaken silence for loyalty and compliance for consent. Assad’s security apparatus – omnipresent, omniscient, yet somehow oblivious – realised too late that its soldiers had no stomach left for the fight. The all-powerful giant had feet of clay.
It didn’t help that Iran, Assad’s indispensable patron, had stumbled into the most grievous strategic miscalculation of its post-1979 history. Flush with revolutionary zeal, Tehran had kicked the hornet’s nest in Lebanon, prompting Israel to pivot from Gaza to Hezbollah with stunning force. Suddenly Iran’s expeditionary assets were exhausted, its proxies over-extended, and its clerical leadership exposed as both ageing and isolated. Even the Ayatollah’s conspiratorial refrain – that the fall of Damascus was all a plot by the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the Sultan in Ankara – couldn’t mask the fact that this was less Zionist cunning than simple imperial overreach. When the rebels came, neither Iran nor Hezbollah, nor Russia, entangled in its Ukrainian quagmire, could ride to the rescue.
But the rebels, too, were surprised. Their mandate from Ankara was modest – expand the borders of their statelet a little, test the regime’s nerve. Instead, they found themselves virtually unopposed on the road to Damascus. In an Informative article in E-zine Unherd republished below, British writer and investigative journalist Tam Hussein writes how many of the fighters interpreted the victory as divine intervention – not jihadi zealotry, but a sincere theological attempt to explain the inexplicable. The suddenness of Damascus’s collapse felt, to them, like an echo of Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca. And in a land where the eschatological imagination has always saturated politics, it didn’t take long before social media brimmed with end-times speculation. Ahmed al Shara’a – formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, with a $10 million American bounty on his head – was seen by some as “the one”, and the precursor of the Mahdi and the foretold end of days.
Yet as Hussein rightly notes, miracles make poor policy. The survival of the new Syrian administration will depend not on prophecy but on governance, and on whether Shara’a, interim president and ex-jihadi turned statesman, can transform a miraculous seizure into a sustainable state.
To his credit, he has avoided the catastrophic purges that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He has kept the civil service intact, flirted audaciously with Western diplomacy, and allowed at least the theatrical semblance of elections. He has restored the embassy in London, opened channels to Washington, even visiting the White House and played the charm-game with Gulf capitals that only recently readmitted Assad into their fold. As Hussein writes, he has shown political finesse: keeping the constitution, appointing seventy parliamentarians himself, and balancing piety with pragmatism.
But the tightrope is frayed. Sectarian wounds – Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian – remain raw and unstitched, with the Latakia massacres now entering their fraught judicial phase, and Israel stirring the Druze pot. Kurdish anxieties simmer: the old “Arab-first” chauvinism must be abandoned if Syria’s patchwork is ever to become a tapestry again. Foreign fighters, once lionised, now loiter between hero and hazard, implicated in sectarian atrocities. Kurds clash with Syrian forces; Turkish troops press deeper into Rojava; Israel remains the unpredictable neighbour bestride the Golan; and Iran, though weakened, is never entirely out of the game. It is not inconceivable that the forces that helped topple Assad could yet turn their sights toward Jerusalem in the belief that prophecy demands it.
And there are darker portents too – those flickering shadows that hint the wind of freedom may be blowing from the wrong quarter. The new government’s early gestures toward Islamisation – the hair-covering admonition, the curriculum purge, the dismissal of women from key posts, the torching of a Christmas tree in Hama – suggest that pro-Russia and anti-western platforms like RT and Mint may have a point when they warn that the leopard has not fully changed its theological spots. Shara’a’s declaration that elections may be four years away, the dissolution of the old constitution, and the folding of all rebel factions into state structures recall less a liberal transition than a consolidation of revolutionary power.
Meanwhile, the country remains a mosaic of mini-wars. In the north, Turkish proxies grind against Kurdish forces in Rojava. In the south, local militias continue to resist HTS’s claim to national authority. In the west, Alawite formations cling to their shrinking redoubts. To the east, Islamic State survivors eye the chaos, waiting for the prison gates to break. And overhead, as ever, the Americans and Israelis fly their competing deterrents, ensuring the war never quite ends.
So: Syria stands at the crossroads. Will Syria’s future be heaven, hell, or merely another circle of the inferno?
Optimism is possible – cautiously so. If the West can avoid its habitual fatalism, if, when sanctions are lifted, investment flows, if Turkey and Israel can be coaxed into tolerable coexistence, if Kurdish autonomy is honoured, if sectarian grievances are handled with equity and not vengeance — then Syria could, in time, become a conservatively stable hub. Shara’a’s Idlib experiment shows he can build an economy under duress.
But the inverse is equally imaginable: a Lebanon-style implosion, a Yugoslav-style partition, or a Gaza-style fortress of permanent mobilisation. As Isreali commentator and contributor to Haaretz Zvi Bar’el wrote a year ago, writes, the warm international “envelope” around Damascus is generous but tentative. Nobody quite knows where Shara’a is heading. They simply assume anyone is better than Assad – the same mistake Syrians once made about the old Ba’athi patriarch Hafez al-Assad himself.
Right now, the future’s not ours to see. Something’s happening, but we don’t know what it is, and anyone with a deep knowledge of the Middle East knows that one must expected the unexpected. The old regional wars – Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Iran’s Axis of Resistance – though seemingly on hold, have not paused to let Syria breathe. The war in Ukraine grinds into winter, the bizarre Gaza peace plan shuffles on, and there are constant political shifts in Washington. Each of these could rewrite the geopolitical chess board yet again.
Still, as Robert Fisk wrote in the final line of the final book he never lived to promote: all wars come to an end, and that’s where history restarts. Syria is restarting now – painfully, precariously, imprecisely – but restarting nonetheless.
Whether Syria walks toward heaven or hell remains to be seen. The choice – as ever in the Levant – will not be its alone.
Syria Today: Walking Through the Wreckage
A year after the Assads fell, Syria still moves through its own ruins – startled by its freedom, and half-afraid of it. The dynasty’s collapse ended the nightmare but did not usher in a dream; it simply exposed, in unforgiving daylight, the damage done over half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of war. The smashed cities are visible to any passer-by; the deeper wreckage – the traumas, resentments, and debts of blood – is harder to map and harder still to mend.
Sednaya prison’s opened gates remain the sharpest indictment. The men who stumbled out were not just survivors but witnesses, their bodies forcing the nation to acknowledge what many had whispered and few had dared investigate. Yet even this reckoning has not united the country. Sectarian reprisals and atrocities on the coast, more atrocity and calls for Druze autonomy demands in Sweida, tribal restlessness in the south and northwest, Kurdish self-rule in the north, and Alawite fear of collective punishment keep the national psyche taut and divided. Bitterness circulates like a second economy.
The economy, meanwhile, balances on a fraying tightrope. Western aid and investment have brought cranes, reopened highways, and a flicker of commerce, but also inflation that is hollowing out households. Reconstruction glimmers like a desert mirage: real enough to chase, never close enough to touch. Corruption accompanying nepotism and patronage has survived the revolution, and many returnees discover that rebuilding a home now costs more than earning one.
Politically, the country sits in an improvised equilibrium. Al Shara’a rules as both liberator and question mark – trusted by some, tolerated by others, watched by all. His pivot toward Washington, his quiet coordination with US forces, and his break with former comrades offer a new direction, but also a gamble. Around him, sovereignty is nibbled at the edges: Israel digs deeper into Quneitra province; Türkiye tightens its grip in the Kurdish north. Liberation has shifted the map without fully restoring control over it.
So Syria stands on the threshold, like Tomlinson, neither damned nor redeemed, simply called to account. The war is over, but its aftershocks and tremors linger in regional loyalties, local vendettas and regional manoeuvres. The people are free, yet unsure of that freedom’s limits and what it asks of them. And the vast machinery of the state still creaks with old habits and temptation.
And yet – a small, highly qualified yet – Syrians are imagining a future again. Not the predetermined script of dictatorship, nor the fatalism of war, but something open, negotiable, theirs’. For a people long told that nothing changes, the mere possibility of change is its own quiet revolution. Hope is not guaranteed; neither is stability. But the impossible has already happened once, and that alone shifts the horizon.
Postscript: the strange, messianic weather of revolutions
Among the HTS fighters Tam Hussein describes, the astonishingly swift and almost bloodless collapse of Damascus could never be reduced to battlefield arithmetic. After over a decade of stalemate and slaughter, the conquest of Damascus and the fall of Assad felt too abrupt, too neat, too historically implausible to be merely human. And so they reached, perhaps instinctively, for the vocabulary of prophecy that has long circulated in the Levant: the old stories of tyrants toppled in the final days, of a just ruler rising at history’s eleventh hour, of a brief season of peace before a climactic confrontation with “the Romans,” a term that in popular imagination now stretches elastically to include Israel, America, or the West at large.
In this folk-level cosmology – not the carefully parsed doctrine of scholars, but the lived, emotional scripture of men who have lived too long fear, death and loss loss – the victory in Damascus reads like a prophetic epic ballad. When a fighter told Hussein that Syria would enjoy “ten years of peace before the war with Israel,” he was drawing from a hazy amalgam of hadith traditions and battlefield folklore to make sense if the improbable: the idea of a lull before the storm, a breathing space before the world tilts into its final reckoning. It is vernacular eschatology, shaped as much by trauma and longing as by text.
Within that register, the murmurs that Shara’a/Jolani might be “the one” carry an unmistakable Mahdist echo. No fatwas or proclamations like when Da’ish leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi famously declared the caliphate from the minbar of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque in 2014; but the emotional charge behind the phrase is unmistakabl: an intuitive reach for a Mahdi-shaped idea of the righteous restorer, the unifier, the man who appears when everything has fallen apart. It’s not that anyone literally thinks Jolani is the Mahdi; it’s that the mood of the moment makes such thoughts feel briefly within arm’s length. A silhouette on the horizon, nothing more.
And here, Syria is not unique. Revolutionary periods everywhere – the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Arab Spring even, have their magical phase — those jittery days when people begin to speak as if the world has cracked open, meaning is pouring through the seams, and events blur into myth. When a regime that seemed immovable collapses in a fortnight, people fall back on stories larger than themselves. Sudden upheaval, long suffering, and the ascent of a charismatic figure combine to crack open the ordinary world. Prophecy offers a narrative frame when history seems to be behaving like fable.
So the eschatological edge in these fighters’ conversations tells us less about doctrine and more about psychology. It’s a very human response: a form of magical thinking that arises when reality becomes too strange to process, a way of giving shape to chaos, of telling themselves that their suffering fits into a larger story. A coping mechanism, if you like – a mythic vocabulary for a moment when Damascus fell, and the ordinary rules stopped making sense and the earth seemed briefly to tilt on its axis.
A few months ago in Damascus, I discovered a medieval hospital. The door had been left slightly ajar, and I wandered in with my companion Hassan Idlibi — a rebel fighter and old friend. He hadn’t been in the Old City since the fall of Syria’s capital, exactly a year ago today. “When Damascus fell,” he told me, “we were at our lowest ebb. Even the attack on Aleppo was our last gasp. We wanted to break the stalemate. And then we just pushed and pushed, and we ended up sleeping inside the Umayyad Mosque. It was a miracle.”Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who travelled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.
After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.
The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.
Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.
Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticised — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.
Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbours, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.
Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favourite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.
Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.
Granting these fighters legal status, regularising their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilising them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralising one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.
Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to manoeuvre — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.
For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.
Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.
If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.
Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment programme to stabilise Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unravelled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.
Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment programme, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularise or demobilise foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.
What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.
Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. His work has been recognised by the Royal Television Society Awards.
US President Donald Trump’s twenty-point comprehensive peace plan for Gaza, published in full below, is a fascinating document – part fever dream of a “deal of the century,” part boardroom restructuring plan, part realpolitik ceasefire blueprint. And for Trump, yes – the dangling Nobel, the glittering carrot at the end of the labyrinth.
On paper it sounds almost seductively tidy: IDF withdrawal, Hamas stand-down, aid flowing, hostages returned in return for prisoners released, multinational security force, guns decommissioned, technocrats taking over, reformed PA, while a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump (and perhaps Tony Blair in a cameo) ushers in a gleaming new Gaza.
In That Howling Infinite reserves its opinion in these early days. It’s the only show in town right now and it is generating interest and potential commitment by all those parties who would have to make it happen. There’ll be dissenting voices on all sides, but at the end of the day, they have little to offer except more war and vitriol. You don’t use gasoline to put out a fire. To borrow from J Lennon, all we are saying is give peace a chance”.
But, nevertheless, the gap between the paper and the ground is immense.
Here are some early observations:
Ambition vs. feasibility. The plan imagines simultaneous hostage exchanges, mass prisoner releases, Hamas disarmament, and international deployment – all within days or weeks. Each step is individually fraught; stacked together, the sequencing is almost fantastical.
Actors and trust. It assumes that Hamas will voluntarily surrender weapons and that Israel will trust an international stabilization force enough to withdraw, all while regional guarantors enforce compliance. None of these actors currently exhibit the trust or cohesion needed.
Power dynamics. The “Board of Peace” with Trump as chair feels less like neutral governance and more like a branding exercise. Palestinians, already wary of external control, would likely see it as another foreign trusteeship.
Statehood dangling. The plan holds out a “credible pathway” to Palestinian self-determination but keeps it conditional on reforms and compliance – carrot and stick politics that might prolong, rather than resolve, the status question.
Optics of ownership. The redevelopment language (special economic zones, “miracle cities”) reads like a Gulf mega-project transplanted onto a traumatised strip of land, risking the perception of Gaza as a real-estate venture rather than a society with its own political agency.
So, on paper, it is clever and comprehensive, giving something to everybody, and promising an imminent end to the destruction and carnage of the past two years. But in reality, it is almost impossible to realise without a fundamental shift in regional politics and in the balance of trust. It reads less as a near-term peace plan than as a campaign manifesto – designed to signal vision and dominance, to offer every constituency a glimmer of what they want, and to position Trump as indispensable even if none of it materialises.
What will the warring parties and outsiders take the plan?
This will depend less on the fine print than on who authored it, and on the political imaginaries each camp carries into the debate. A few likely responses:
1. Israel & Netanyahu
Netanyahu, ever the tactician, would welcome the optics: Trump is both his old ally and a political shield. “Deradicalised Gaza,” hostages back, no forced concessions on West Bank settlements—what’s not to like?
The Israeli right could live with it, because it leaves the question of Palestinian statehood indefinitely conditional.
Centrists and security hawks might applaud the ISF mechanism and U.S. guarantees, though the idea of foreign troops patrolling Gaza would make many nervous.
2. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank
Gaza:
Immediate Relief vs. Distrust. Ordinary Gazans, exhausted by war and blockade, might welcome the promise of aid, reconstruction, and an end to bombardment. Rubble removed, water flowing, bakeries open—that is tangible.
But many will see it as conditional relief: they must surrender political agency, accept foreign trusteeship (“Trump’s Board of Peace”), and live under an imposed technocracy. To them, this may feel like a wardship, not a liberation.
Trauma & Pragmatism. After such devastation, some Gazans might pragmatically say, “we’ll take the deal, anything is better than this,” but the resentment toward outside control will simmer.
West Bank:
Deep Cynicism. Palestinians in the West Bank already regard the PA as corrupt and ineffectual, and many see U.S.-brokered plans as cover for Israeli expansion. The plan doesn’t address settlements, land seizures, checkpoints, or settler violence—all daily realities.
Result: West Bank Palestinians are likely to dismiss it as another charade – aid and optics in Gaza while the core occupation issue festers on their side of the Green Line.
3. Hamas and Its Supporters/Enablers
Hamas in Gaza:
Existential Threat. The plan effectively demands Hamas disarm, disband, or exile itself. For Hamas leadership, this is unconditional defeat in all but name.
Pragmatists vs. Hardliners. Some Hamas figures might toy with amnesty or safe passage, but for the movement’s core (military wing, ideological diehards), surrendering weapons = suicide.
Hamas Supporters in the West Bank:
They will frame the plan as capitulation and collaboration with occupiers. It hands Hamas a propaganda card: “see, the Americans and Israelis want to erase us.”
This could deepen West Bank radicalisation and further delegitimize the PA if it tries to administer such a deal.
Iran & Hezbollah: Will reject outright – it neuters their “Axis of Resistance”. They will continue funding and arming whatever underground or splinter groups emerge.
Qatar & Turkey: May hedge. They might support parts of the plan if it relieves humanitarian disaster, but not if it sidelines Hamas entirely.
Diaspora Palestinians & Pro-Hamas Sympathisers:
Many in exile view Hamas (however critically) as a symbol of armed resistance. For them, a Trump-blessed disarmament deal is betrayal dressed as peace.
Expect mass rejection from diaspora activists, especially in Europe and the Americas, where “Free Palestine” remains the rallying cry.
Net Effect
For Gazans: temporary relief but long-term discontent.
For West Bank Palestinians: scorn and dismissal.
For Hamas: existential rejection.
For Hamas’s backers: rejection, with potential escalation elsewhere (Lebanon, Syria, Red Sea) to keep the “resistance flame” alive.
In short, the plan may stop the bombs, but it does not resolve the politics. Gazans might sigh with relief; West Bankers will sneer; Hamas will fight on; its allies will sabotage; and the diaspora will rage.
3. Arab League & Regional States
Publicly, Arab governments (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE) would almost certainly bless the plan, because it ends the bloodletting, brings in money, and doesn’t force them to grapple with Hamas. Privately, they’d be wary: nobody relishes underwriting Gaza’s reconstruction while taking the blame for failed implementation. But in a rules-based, donor-heavy framework, they could sell it as Arab pragmatism.
4. Western Powers
Washington under Trump (and perhaps a Republican-leaning Congress) would present this as a masterstroke—“the deal no one else could deliver.” Europe would likely sigh in relief: anything that halts the war is better than nothing, and the technocratic language about governance and reform plays to EU ears. But the suspicion will linger: is this peace-building, or is it Trump building another gilded tower on scorched earth?
5. UN & International Institutions
UN agencies would leap at guaranteed humanitarian access, even under Trump’s “Board of Peace.” The problem: the UN is accustomed to being scapegoated, and here it would once again be implementing someone else’s design, while absorbing the failures if and when they come.
6. Progressives & Global Pro-Palestinian Activists
For many, this is a non-starter. It doesn’t dismantle the occupation, doesn’t guarantee sovereignty, doesn’t address the Nakba legacy – it freezes the conflict in a Trump-branded frame. They will dismiss it as paternalism dressed as pragmatism: Gazans are told to behave, hand over weapons, accept foreign trusteeship, and maybe, one day, statehood might be considered. For many progressives, and their Arab collaborators, the plan will probably not be enough. Though they’ve clamoured all along for a ceasefire, it’s not the one they wanted – a Free Palestine, and for some a Juden Frei Palestine “from the river to the sea”. Add the Trump factor: for progressives, he is the antithesis of credibility, and they abhor all he stands for. Even if the plan included a sovereign Palestinian state tomorrow, they’d likely distrust it as a Trojan horse.
7. The Subtext
The stark divide is this:
For state actors (Israel, Arab governments, Western powers), this looks like a workable ceasefire mechanism dressed up as reconstruction.
For non-state voices (Palestinian street, global solidarity movements), it looks like an elaborate cage, perhaps cleaner and better lit, but still a cage.
Netanyahu and the Arab League could sell it; the UN and EU could implement it; the U.S. could campaign on it; but progressives and much of Palestinian civil society will continue to shout: it’s not liberation, it’s management. And “management,” in the political imagination of the dispossessed, is simply another word for betrayal.
How will Donald Trump “sell” his “deal of the century “?
Trump’s political “genius” (and danger) is that he doesn’t need buy-in from the ground; he needs headlines at home and optics abroad. Here’s how the calculus lines up:
1. In the U.S. Domestic Arena
“The Deal Nobody Else Could Do.” Trump frames himself as the only leader who could stop the war, get hostages released, and bring aid trucks rolling in. The fact that Gazans or the diaspora are furious is immaterial – he’s selling to voters in Michigan, not in Khan Younis.
Optics of Strength. He casts the plan as disciplining Hamas (“they lay down arms or leave”) while also delivering humanitarian relief. That duality – tough but generous – is powerful on the campaign trail.
Nobel Peace Prize Theater. He doesn’t need to win it; he just needs to say he deserves it. The claim itself becomes part of his narrative of grievance and triumph.
2. Internationally
Israel: Netanyahu nods, Israeli centrists sigh in relief – Trump can present himself as Israel’s indispensable friend who also delivers quiet.
Arab League: Even tepid Arab League approval lets Trump boast: “I got the Arabs and Israelis on the same page.” That plays huge in diplomatic theater.
Europe: Brussels won’t love him, but the EU will be glad the bombs stopped. That’s enough for Trump to say, “they all lined up behind me.”
3. Against His Rivals
Against Biden/Democrats: He can taunt: “Biden let it burn, I brought peace.” Never mind the plan’s contradictions; soundbites are what matter.
Against Progressives: Their rejection of his plan – because it’s not liberation, because it has his name on it – becomes his foil. He’ll say: “They wanted chaos, I delivered peace, and they’re still angry.” That reframes them as radical spoilers.
4. The Spin Strategy
Even if Gazans accept aid but curse Trump, West Bank Palestinians reject it outright, Hamas refuses and Iran sneers, Trump still wins in the court of perception. He’ll point to convoys of aid, hostages walking free, and international press conferences flanked by Arab and Israeli leaders
For Trump, that’s success: not solving the conflict, but owning the narrative. He thrives on appearances of deal-making mastery, regardless of whether the underlying conflict is frozen, festering, or flaring again.
In other words: he doesn’t need the plan to work on the ground; he needs it to look like it worked just long enough. If later it unravels—well, that just proves others failed to sustain his deal.
A New Gaza governed by a New Palestinian Authority?
Trump’s plan waves vaguely toward a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) as the eventual sovereign custodian of Gaza, but the devil lives in the details. The PA’s own house is famously messy.
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are deeply unpopular among Palestinians because they are seen as stale, corrupt, and complicit. Abbas has overstayed his democratic mandate – his presidential term expired in 2009, yet he still rules by decree. Elections have been repeatedly postponed, hollowing out legitimacy. The PA is plagued by corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency, with patronage networks benefiting a small elite while everyday life in the West Bank deteriorates under occupation.
Worse, many Palestinians view the PA’s security coordination with Israel as collaboration – protecting Israel from attacks but delivering little political gain in return. Add to that the lack of progress toward statehood, the failure to heal the Fatah–Hamas split, and an aging leadership out of touch with a restless younger generation. The result: a widespread sense that the PA is more interested in preserving its own survival than advancing Palestinian freedom.
So what are the prospects for cleaning out these Augean Stables?
Every credible roadmap to Palestinian self-rule (whether in US “peace plans”, Arab League proposals, or European policy papers) circles back to roughly the same cluster of reforms:
Governance & Legitimacy
Elections: The PA has not held national elections since 2006. Regular, transparent presidential and legislative elections – monitored by international observers – are the baseline for legitimacy.
Leadership Renewal: President Mahmoud Abbas is in his late eighties and is highly unpopular. A clear succession process and generational turnover are essential to avoid a post-Abbas vacuum.
Rule of Law: Independent judiciary, due process in security courts, and an end to arbitrary detentions.
Security Sector Reform
Professionalisation of Forces: Unifying and depoliticising security services, with recruitment based on merit rather than factional loyalty.
Accountability Mechanisms: Civilian oversight, parliamentary scrutiny, and credible disciplinary systems to curb corruption and abuses.
Monopoly of Force: Ending the proliferation of armed factions and militias under semi-official umbrellas.
Anti-Corruption & Financial Transparency
Audit & Oversight: Strengthening the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Commission and ensuring regular public audits of ministries and security budgets.
Revenue Management: Transparent tax collection and spending, including reforms to the “clearance revenue” system Israel currently controls.
Private-Sector Safeguards: Modern procurement laws and independent regulators to reduce crony capitalism.
Institutional Consolidation
West Bank–Gaza Integration: Building unified administrative structures so that a future Gaza administration is not a parallel mini-state.
Service Delivery: Reliable health, education, and municipal services that reduce dependence on patronage networks.
Civil Society Engagement: Empowering NGOs and trade unions to act as watchdogs.
How Could This Be Realised?
External Leverage
Conditional Aid: The EU, U.S., and Gulf donors can tie financial support to measurable governance benchmarks (audits, election timelines, security milestones).
Arab Sponsorship: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE can provide both funding and political cover, helping broker intra-Palestinian reconciliation and mediating with Israel.
Internal Dynamics
Generational Change: A younger cohort of Fatah leaders and technocrats—already impatient with the old guard—must be empowered through credible elections.
Reconciliation with Hamas: Without some power-sharing or security arrangement, reform in the West Bank alone will not translate into legitimate rule in Gaza.
Israeli Role
Movement & Access: Reforms are impossible if Israel continues to restrict travel, tax revenue, and trade. Donors will demand at least tacit Israeli cooperation.
Security Coordination: A reformed PA security force must convince Israel that it can prevent attacks without being perceived domestically as a subcontractor for occupation.
Sustainability
Economic Viability: Reforms will collapse without a functioning economy—investment, trade corridors, and reliable tax revenue are oxygen.
Public Buy-In: Palestinians must see tangible improvements (jobs, mobility, basic freedoms) or reforms will be dismissed as foreign diktats.
Political Horizon: Even the best technocracy cannot survive perpetual occupation. A credible path to sovereignty—however distant—must accompany reforms to give them meaning.
In short, the PA must become a transparent, accountable proto-state while operating under occupation and facing a rival government in Gaza. It is a Sisyphean task, but not impossible if external actors (Israel included) provide real incentives, if donors enforce conditionality with patience, and if a younger Palestinian leadership can seize the moment. Without those three legs – international pressure, internal renewal, and a political horizon – the reform talk remains another Nobel-baiting paragraph in a White House press release.
[The above commentary and hypothetical is a the outcome of a conversation and collaboration between In That Howling Infinite and ChatGPT. The following list is the real deal]
Screenshot
Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza:
Deradicalisation & Security – Gaza will be a deradicalised, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.
Redevelopment for Gazans – Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.
Immediate Ceasefire & Withdrawal – If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed-upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.
Hostage Return – Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.
Prisoner Exchange – Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life-sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7th, 2023 (including all women and children detained in that context). For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.
Hamas Amnesty & Exit – Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommissioning their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.
Immediate Humanitarian Aid – Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip, at minimum matching the quantities specified in the January 19, 2025 agreement, including infrastructure rehabilitation (water, electricity, sewage), hospital and bakery repairs, and equipment to remove rubble and open roads.
Uninterrupted Aid Channels – Entry and distribution of aid in Gaza will proceed without interference from either party through the United Nations, the Red Crescent, and other neutral international institutions. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will follow the same mechanism as in the January 19, 2025 agreement.
Transitional Governance – Gaza will be governed by a temporary technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for daily public services, supervised by a new international transitional body, the Board of Peace, chaired by President Donald J. Trump with other members and heads of state (including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) to be announced. This body will manage funding and redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority completes its reform program and can securely take control.
Trump Economic Development Plan – A Trump-led economic development plan will convene experts who have helped build thriving Middle Eastern cities, synthesizing security and governance frameworks to attract investment and create jobs, opportunity, and hope in Gaza.
Special Economic Zone – A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
Freedom of Movement – No one will be forced to leave Gaza. Those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. People will be encouraged to stay and build a better Gaza.
Demilitarization & Monitoring – Hamas and other factions will have no role in Gaza’s governance. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure—including tunnels and weapons production—will be destroyed and not rebuilt. An independent, internationally funded buy-back and reintegration program will oversee the permanent decommissioning of weapons, verified by independent monitors.
Regional Security Guarantee – Regional partners will provide guarantees to ensure that Hamas and other factions comply with their obligations and that “New Gaza” poses no threat to its neighbors or its own people.
International Stabilization Force (ISF) – The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary ISF to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and support vetted Palestinian police, consult with Jordan and Egypt, help secure border areas, prevent munitions smuggling, and facilitate the rapid and secure flow of goods to rebuild Gaza. A deconfliction mechanism will be agreed upon.
Israeli Withdrawal – Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. As the ISF establishes control and stability, the Israeli military will withdraw based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization, progressively handing over Gaza to the ISF and transitional authority until complete withdrawal (except for a temporary security perimeter).
Partial Implementation if Hamas Refuses – If Hamas delays or rejects the proposal, the plan—including scaled-up aid—will proceed in the terror-free areas handed over from the Israeli military to the ISF.
Interfaith Dialogue – An interfaith dialogue process will be established to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence, aiming to change mindsets and narratives among Palestinians and Israelis by highlighting the benefits of peace.
Path to Palestinian Statehood – While Gaza’s redevelopment advances and Palestinian Authority reforms are implemented, conditions may emerge for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, recognized as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
U.S.-Brokered Political Horizon – The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence.
The Gaza quagmire is a forever war without winners but with the ceasefire yet to go into effect, if indeed it actually happens, Hamas and its supporters are already declaring victory. As the ceasefire was announced, senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya responded by praising the October 7 massacre as a major achievement that would be taught with pride to future generations of Palestinians. He went on to say that the next step is to rid Jerusalem of all Jews. In Gaza, fighters are openly displaying weapons and firing off “Happy shots” into the air accompanied by the takbirs of cheering onlookers. There are celebrations in the West Bank and in Teheran and Kabul whilst social media resounds with triumphalism by Muslims and western progressives alike. Critics argue that as the deal doesn’t require Hamas to be dismantled. this “victory” sets Gaza and Hamas up for the next war.
Commentator Armin Rosen wrote in Unherd on 18 January:
“Hamas’s reaction to the ceasefire agreement, with its leaders celebrating amid devastation, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of victory. Are wars still won by the usual measures of blood and territory, or is victory now more notional and slippery, a condition existing in the mind above all? Given the sheer scale of destruction over the past year, it seems crass for either side to claim victory. And as one Israeli official told me in early 2024: “You have won when no one has to ask whether you have won or not.”
An end to the war is a long way off and a long-term peace agreement of any kind between Israel and the Palestinians remains a hope and a dream, and in this long and bitter conflict hopes and dreams have so often ended in nightmares. The prospective ceasefire will bring relief and also, grief, to both Israelis and Palestinians, but a large majority of each, in their post-October 7 world, see the conflict as a zero-sum game with no end to it except victory for their side.
If this is a victory, we’d hate to see what defeat looked like.
We republish below an appraisal of the circumstances that have produced the prospective ceasefire at this particular stage in the present conflict and including the realities of multiple battlefields and the wider regional and global events that have compelled it.
For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire.
Politicians in Washington are indulging in a certain amount of unseemly grandstanding about who deserves credit for the Gaza ceasefire, provisionally agreed in Qatar this week and announced on Thursday. Outgoing US President Joe Biden boasts of his patient diplomacy through 15 months of war. President-elect Donald Trump touts his threat of “all hell to pay” if Hamas does not free its hostages before his inauguration on Monday (Tuesday AEDT), and the role his newly appointed envoy, Steve Witkoff, played in clinching the agreement.
Netanyahu meets US President-elect Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkof
These claims are, of course, exaggerated and wildly premature. This is a complex three-stage ceasefire agreement, only the first stage of which has been approved, and whose implementation will be extraordinarily contentious and difficult. The political pointscoring also obscures the military facts on the ground that drove the deal, which resulted less from deft diplomacy than from brutal battlefield reality.
That reality is obvious if we consider that only two of the principals who were in office when the war began will be alive still and in power when any ceasefire takes effect: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yemen’s Ansarallah (Houthi) leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar has been killed, wounded by an airstrike then finished off, live on social media, by an Israeli first-person-view drone in October. His counterpart, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, also is dead, assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July.
Slain Hamas military commander Yayha Sinwar. AFP
Many other senior Hamas commanders are dead, as is Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, killed in an airstrike that collapsed his headquarters last September.
Nasrallah’s successor, Hashem Safieddine, died days later in another Israeli strike, along with Hezbollah’s intelligence chief, Hussein Hazimah. Dozens of other Hezbollah leaders were killed, thousands wounded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, blinded in an earlier Israeli covert operation that concealed explosives in pagers and radio transceivers.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Hezbollah partner and Iranian ally, was overthrown last month and is exiled in Moscow. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, a crucial Hamas and Hezbollah sponsor and Assad’s principal backer, died in a helicopter crash last May. Several Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps generals – advisers to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Syrian regime – also have been killed. These include the IRGC’s commander in Syria, Razi Mousavi, killed in an airstrike in Damascus shortly after the war began. Iran’s senior adviser to Hezbollah, Abbas Nilforoushan, died in the same strike that killed Nasrallah.
This decapitation of Iranian, Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas leadership reflects the broader beating that Israel – with extensive non-combat assistance from the US – has dealt its regional adversaries.
Syria’s army evaporated when Assad fled; its navy was sunk at its moorings by Israeli jets and its air force destroyed on its runways in the days after the regime fell. Hezbollah lost thousands, killed and wounded in its two-month war with Israel in 2024, while expending a significant portion of its missile arsenal, to lesser effect than many analysts (including me) expected before the war.
Hamas started the war with its own extensive rocket arsenal and perhaps 40,000 fighters at its disposal between its own military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, and allies such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At least half these fighters have been killed and others scattered or forced underground.
The Gaza Strip is de-urbanised, depopulated and extensively damaged, whole settlements bombed and bulldozed, and millions of civilians displaced to makeshift camps in horrific conditions. It is claimed up to 50,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict and many times more wounded.
Large areas of Lebanon – especially in the southern region, in Beirut and in Hezbollah strongholds of the Bekaa Valley – have been extensively damaged in Israeli airstrikes. Syria’s cities were battered by more than a decade of war but the final campaign inflicted even further damage.
The exception to this picture is Yemen’s Houthi movement. The Houthis entered the war in late 2023 with a campaign against commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint that carried, before the conflict, 13 per cent of total ship traffic. Their stated intent was to pressure Israel and Israel-friendly nations by holding ships and trade routes at risk until a ceasefire was agreed and Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza. Using aerial drones, missiles, uncrewed surface vessels, armed speedboats and helicopters, the Houthis succeeded in reducing shipping through the strait, costing billions of dollars, disrupting supply chains and damaging more than 87 ships while sinking two and capturing one.
Houthi supporters rally in Sanaa, Yemen, in November. AP
Despite two naval taskforces – one US-led and one assembled by the EU – deploying to protect commercial shipping in the strait, along with extensive airstrikes and a blockade against Yemen’s port of Hudaydah, the Houthis continue their campaign. Their reaction to the news of this week’s tentative ceasefire, so far, has been to threaten that they will resume their efforts if the deal collapses while in fact persisting in their attacks. Iran’s proxies in Yemen remain defiant even as Iran and the others in its self-styled Axis of Resistance are on the back foot.
For its part, Israel is victorious on the battlefield – and recognition of that, rather than fancy footwork by Western diplomats, probably accounts for the willingness on both sides to negotiate a ceasefire. Indeed, it’s possible Israel’s main motivation for a ceasefire arose from the combination of clear battlefield victory close to home along with equally clear inability to suppress the Houthis, who continue launching long-range missiles against Tel Aviv. Benjamin Netanyahu is personally triumphant, albeit facing political and legal challenges.
None of this assuages the pain of Israeli families whose loved ones were massacred in the initial attacks or have been held by Hamas since October 2023. As few as 20 of the roughly 250 hostages taken at the outset of the war may remain alive, though it is almost impossible to say. In Israel, about 980 civilians and an equal number of military personnel have been killed, more than 13,000 wounded and up to a 500,000 displaced from their homes because of ground attacks at the start of the conflict and rocket and missile attacks since then.
Israel also faces difficult decisions, even if the ceasefire is confirmed and broadly holds. Hamas can survive with largely uncontested control over Gazans; there were no significant incidents of anti-Hamas unrest in Gaza at any time during the war. In the displaced persons camps and ruined cities of the Gaza Strip, Hamas maintains political authority. It also has sufficient military potential – at least 10,000 fighters still at large – to maintain the fight in the form of a guerrilla campaign or terrorist activity. Permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza would face an insurgency, while full Israeli withdrawal risks resurgence of conventional capability on the part of Hamas. And Israeli forces are still heavily committed in Lebanon, the Golan and the West Bank, with no immediate end to these deployments in sight.
All of which is to say that, even if this week’s ceasefire does indeed stick, what comes next will be the hardest thing. We can only hope the region’s innocent civilian populations – in Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and Yemeni territory – receive some measure of relief, however temporary. Who, if anyone, gets the credit for a ceasefire matters far less than the possibility that one may finally be at hand.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007. He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, followed by special adviser for counter-insurgency to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of six books including most recently The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.
“We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale”.
Thus wrote Unherd columnist and former war correspondent Aris Roussinos in December. 2023, but he would draw the same conclusion in 2024 and in 2025. He notes that ethnic cleansing is taking place on a vast scale in many parts of the world. Yet, apart from the current outrage at Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, turbocharged as it is by unprecedented and arguably one-sided mainstream and social media coverage, international reaction has been muted to the point of indifference. Roussinos’ article is republished below, and the following overview is inspired by and draws on his observations.
The term ethnic cleansing is elusive and politically charged. In an age of endemic conflict, identity politics and competing narratives, it has become a contested and often diluted concept invoked with increasing frequency. Yet, it remains undefined in law. Unlike genocide or war crimes, it has never been codified as a distinct offence under international law, and so its use is contested.
A United Nations Commission of Experts investigating violations during the wars in the former Yugoslavia offered the most widely cited descriptions. In its interim report it defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report the following year, the Commission elaborated: it is “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” What is clear in these descriptions is that ethnic cleansing is deliberate, systematic, and political in nature.
The Commission also catalogued the methods through which such policies are carried out. They include murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual violence, severe injury to civilians, confinement of populations in ghettos, forcible deportation and displacement, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilian areas, the use of human shields, the destruction and looting of property, and assaults on hospitals, medical staff and humanitarian organisations such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent. The Commission concluded that these acts could amount to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and in some instances, fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.
Many people today use the term ethnic cleansing interchangeably with genocide, since both involve the violent removal and destruction of communities and often lead to similar outcomes of death, displacement, and cultural erasure. Ethnic cleansing, which refers to the forced expulsion of a group from a territory through intimidation, violence, or coercion, frequently overlaps with acts that fall under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, such as mass killings and the destruction of cultural or religious life. This blurring of concepts reflects not only the moral outrage provoked by such crimes but also frustration at the narrowness of legal categories, which can leave survivors feeling their suffering has been minimized by technical distinctions. Historical cases illustrate how the line between the two has often been perilously thin: the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915, which many scholars and states regard as genocide and even describe as a holocaust – though Türkiye denies it and Israel avoids official recognition for fear of diluting the unique status of the Shoah – the expulsions and massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and the flight of the Rohingya from Myanmar all show how ethnic cleansing has so often carried genocidal dimensions – as is particularly the case today with the war in Gaza which has polarized and politicized ordinary people and activists alike worldwide who have through lack of knowledge or opportunism conflated the two.
Yet it is important to recognize that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not strictly interchangeable. Genocide requires proof of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, whereas ethnic cleansing focuses primarily on expulsion, which may or may not involve that deeper intent to annihilate. Ethnic cleansing can amount to genocide when the purpose is to eradicate a group, but not all instances meet this threshold. In public discourse, however, people motivated more by empathy and emotion than by detailed knowledge of history or law are often inclined to conflate the two, since the lived experience of the victims—violence, displacement, and cultural obliteration – appears indistinguishable from destruction itself. More informed observers, by contrast, emphasize legal precision and historical context, recognizing that while the outcomes often overlap, preserving the distinction remains vital for accurate analysis and accountability.
The moral revulsion ethnic cleansing excites is the natural and humane reaction, but historically and also presently, it is not an uncommon phenomenon. For the American sociologist and academic Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”: a recurring temptation of the modern nation-state. The following sections provided examples from the last thirty years, followed by a survey of instances of ethnic cleansing during the early to mid Twentieth Century. They describe how ethnic cleansing is not only a crime of forced removal and murder but also an assault on identity, memory, and the very visibility of a people.
[The featured picture at the head of this blog post is one of Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout’s striking illustrations of Al Nakba, the dispossession of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s war of independence, from In That Howling Infinite’s Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]. More of his art is included below]
Expulsion, eradication and exile
The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s – encompassing Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo – offer a clear illustration of ethnic cleansing in a modern European context. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, political and military leaders pursued campaigns aimed at creating ethnically homogeneous territories, often through the systematic targeting of civilians. In Bosnia, Serb forces carried out mass killings, forced deportations, rape, and the deliberate destruction of homes, schools, and cultural heritage sites, culminating in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. In Croatia and Kosovo, similar tactics were deployed: ethnic minorities were expelled, villages razed, and communities terrorised into flight. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) documented and prosecuted these actions as crimes against humanity and war crimes, establishing that the campaigns were not chaotic consequences of war, but deliberate, coordinated policies of ethnic removal. The tribunal’s rulings provide a legal benchmark for understanding ethnic cleansing as the purposeful removal of populations through violence, intimidation, and coercion, a pattern that recurs across history and geography—from the forced expulsions of Armenians in 1915, to the population exchanges of Greece and Turkey in 1923, to the contemporary displacement of Rohingya, Palestinians, Ukrainians, and Afghans. These cases demonstrate that ethnic cleansing combines physical violence, forced migration, and cultural erasure, often leaving long-term social, political, and demographic scars that endure generations after the immediate conflict.
Sudan has witnessed repeated waves of ethnic cleansing over recent decades, most infamously in Darfur in the early 2000s, when government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab communities with systematic violence. Villages were burned, civilians massacred, women subjected to mass rape, and more than 2.5 million people displaced, in what the International Criminal Court later described as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The displacement and destruction in Darfur followed earlier campaigns of forced removal during Sudan’s long north–south civil war, where entire communities in the south and Nuba Mountains were uprooted by aerial bombardment, scorched earth tactics, and starvation sieges. Today, ethnic cleansing has returned with devastating intensity: since April 2023, renewed fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (successors to the Janjaweed) has triggered mass atrocities, including the killing of thousands and the flight of more than 7 million civilians, many across borders into Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt. Reports of targeted massacres against non-Arab groups in West Darfur suggest continuity with earlier campaigns, underscoring how ethnic cleansing in Sudan is not an isolated event but a recurring feature of its violent political landscape.
The Rohingya expulsions in Myanmar provide a stark contemporary example of ethnic cleansing. Since 2017, Myanmar’s military has carried out systematic campaigns of violence, including mass killings, sexual violence, arson, and the destruction of villages, aimed at driving the Rohingya Muslim population from Rakhine State. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s largest refugee crises. The violence has been accompanied by measures of cultural and social exclusion: denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement, and the erasure of Rohingya identity from official records. The United Nations and international observers have described these actions as ethnic cleansing, noting the deliberate intent to remove an entire ethnic group from a geographic area, while some investigators have determined that elements of the campaign meet the criteria for genocide.
Armenia and its surrounding regions have been scarred by cycles of ethnic cleansing for more than a century. The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, carried out by the Ottoman Empire, combined forced deportations, massacres, and cultural destruction with the intent of removing Armenians from their ancestral lands in Anatolia. More than a million were killed or died on death marches, and countless others were scattered into diaspora communities across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Later, in the Soviet period, Armenians and Azerbaijanis experienced repeated forced movements, with pogroms and expulsions erupting during times of political instability. Most recently, the 2023 offensive by Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the flight of almost the entire Armenian population of the enclave—around 120,000 people—into Armenia proper, effectively erasing a centuries-old community. These waves of displacement illustrate how ethnic cleansing in Armenia is not confined to the past but has recurred across generations, leaving lasting demographic, cultural, and political consequences for the region.
During the past two years, mass expulsions from neighbouring countries returned large numbers of Afghans to Taliban-run Afghanistan. Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghans; Iran has driven out hundreds of thousands more. What is packaged as “repatriation” is, in many cases, forced displacement: exiles who had tenuous livelihoods, access to education, or limited civil freedoms in exile are now returned to a polity where the rights — especially the rights of women and girls — are ruthlessly curtailed. The Taliban’s record on gender is well known: it controls a society where women are barred from education and work, forced into early marriages, and denied even minimal public freedoms. Public-life prohibitions and systematic punishments disproportionately harm women and girls. Returning families are therefore being pushed into what many observers describe as among the worst possible places in the world for women — a profoundly gendered and life-threatening form of displacement.
The erasure of culture and historical memory
Like genocide, ethnic cleansing may not be limited the physical expulsion or eradication of people. It can be political, cultural and geographical, and often works through more insidious forms of erasure.
China’s policies in Xinjiang are an example. It has renamed at least 630 villages in Xinjiang, erasing references to Uyghur culture in what human rights advocates say is a systematic propaganda rebrand designed to stamp out the Muslim minority group’s identity. Human Rights Watch has documented a campaign of renaming thousands of villages across the region, stripping out references to Uyghur religion, history and culture. At least 3,600 names have been altered since 2009, replaced by bland slogans such as “Happiness,” “Unity” and “Harmony.” Such bureaucratic changes appear mundane, but they are part of a systematic project to erase Uyghur identity from the landscape itself.
Ukraine illustrates another, more violent dimension of contemporary ethnic cleansing. Russia is coercively integrating five annexed Ukrainian regions — an area the size of South Korea — into its state and culture. Ukrainian identity is being wiped out through the imposition of Russian schooling and media, while more than a million Russian citizens have been settled illegally into the occupied zones. At the same time, some three million Ukrainians have fled or been forced out. Torture centres have been established, with one UN expert describing their use as “state war policy.” Russian forces have employed sexual violence, disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and carried out massacres. Civilian deaths officially stand at around 10,000, but independent estimates suggest a figure closer to 100,000. Homes and businesses have been seized and redistributed to the cronies of Russian officials and officers. On top of these abuses, thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their families and deported into Russia for adoption and assimilation, with the threat that when they reach 18 they will be conscripted into the Russian military. This programme of child transfers has been declared a war crime by international courts, and represents perhaps the most chilling element of the campaign to erase Ukrainian identity across generations. Russian propagandists, including ideologues such as Alexander Dugin, routinely describe Ukrainians as “vermin” to be eliminated — language that many experts say is consistent with genocidal intent.
The long arm of history
Historical precedent is sobering, underscoring how entrenched practices definable as ethnic cleansing are. Some examples follow.
The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 is a historical example where the term “ethnic cleansing” can be applied alongside, though not identical to, the legal concept of genocide. Ottoman authorities systematically deported, massacred, and starved Armenians from their ancestral homelands in Anatolia, often under the guise of military necessity. Entire villages were emptied, survivors forced on death marches into the Syrian desert, and cultural and religious heritage deliberately destroyed. These actions aimed to remove the Armenian population from the territory of the Ottoman Empire, making the region ethnically and religiously homogeneous, which aligns closely with contemporary definitions of ethnic cleansing. The genocide combined mass killing with forced displacement and cultural erasure, illustrating how ethnic cleansing and genocide can overlap in both intent and method. (See The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye)
The Armenian case also illustrates how recognition of genocide is often bound up not only with history but with contemporary politics. Türkiye continues to deny that the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide, framing them instead as wartime relocations within the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Israel, despite wide acknowledgment among its own scholars of the genocidal character of the events, has avoided official recognition, partly out of diplomatic considerations toward Türkiye, once a key regional ally, but also out of concern that equating the Armenian tragedy with the Shoah might dilute the unique historical and moral status attached to the Holocaust in Jewish memory and international discourse. This reluctance is not unique to Israel: several states have long hesitated to employ the term “genocide” for fear of straining relations with Ankara or complicating their own foreign policy priorities. Such debates demonstrate how the line between ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only a matter of legal precision but also of political narrative, with governments and institutions sometimes reluctant to apply the most condemnatory labels even where evidence overwhelmingly supports them.
As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty, finalizing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”, and in effect, One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, the heartland of the new republic of Türkiye, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later – perhaps ironically – evolve into today’s UNHCR.
During the Second World War, Soviet Union alone deported half a million Crimean Tatars and tens of thousands of Volga Germans to Siberia. In 1945, the victorious Allied powers oversaw the removal of some 30 million people across Central and Eastern Europe to create ethnically homogeneous states. At Yalta and Potsdam, Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union endorsed the expulsion of 12 million Germans, over 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Finns.
The partition of British India in 1947 produced one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in modern history. As the new states of India and Pakistan were created, an estimated 12 to 15 million people crossed borders in both directions – Muslims moving into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs into India – in a desperate effort to reach what they hoped would be safer ground. The upheaval was marked by extreme communal violence, massacres, abductions, and sexual assaults. Between 500,000 and 1 million people are thought to have been killed, and millions more were uprooted from ancestral homes they would never see again. The trauma of Partition continues to shape Indian and Pakistani national identities, as well as the politics of South Asia to this day. (See Freedom at Midnight (2): the legacy of partition) and Freedom at Midnight (1): the birth of India and Pakistan
The dismemberment of Mandate Palestine by the new state of Israel, Jordan and Egypt in 1948 brought two simultaneous mass displacements that remain unresolved. During the first Arab–Israeli war more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel. Known as the Nakba or “catastrophe,” this created a vast refugee population now numbering in the millions, many still stateless. Jews living in what is now the Old City and East Jerusalem, and the West Bank seized by Jordan were expelled. Jews living across the Arab world in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere – faced growing hostility, persecution, and expulsion. Between 1948 and the 1970s, an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews left or were forced out, many stripped of property and citizenship. Most resettled in Israel, where their presence profoundly altered the country’s politics and culture. Palestinians and Jews alike endured dispossession, trauma and exile, and both experiences fuel competing narratives of grievance that continue to define the conflict.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But unlike the Mizrahim, and displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, the Palestinians have no Israel to go to. There is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences cannot at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Conclusion: The Age of Dispossession
In many historical cases, expulsions, however brutal, were stabilized by the existence of ethnic homelands ready to absorb the displaced. Refugees were incorporated into nationalist projects in Greece and Türkiye, or into newly homogenized states such as Poland and Ukraine, where they became central to the shaping of modern politics. The Karabakh Armenians driven into Armenia may follow this precedent, potentially reshaping the political order of a small and embattled state.
Ethnic cleansing in the twenty-first century, however, combines these older methods with new techniques. Violence, rape, deportation, and massacre continue, but are now accompanied by cultural erasure, bureaucratic renaming, engineered resettlement, propaganda, and the deliberate targeting of children for assimilation. Unlike many twentieth-century precedents, today’s displaced populations often have nowhere safe to go, forced into territories with no protective homeland or into environments of repression, creating open-ended cycles of dispossession. The erasure of identities in Xinjiang, the coercive integration of Ukrainian territories, the expulsion of Rohingyas and Afghans, the depopulation of Karabakh, and the looming threat of Gaza – where Palestinians face the looming threat of another mass displacement, echoing the 1948 Nakba – collectively demonstrate that ethnic cleansing is not a relic of the past.
It remains a recurring feature of our age – modern history is indeed built upon exodus and displacement – and its human cost is profound and incalculable.
Postscript … Al Nakba, a case study in dispossesion
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European Jews came to a land that was already inhabited by another, different people. Over two decades, they forced the guarantor power out by terrorism and took the land by conquest, expelling most of its original inhabitants by force. They have sowed their share of wind, too. Both sides want all the land for themselves.
Al Nakba, is the Arabic name for the “catastrophe” that befell the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine during the war that was fought between Arabs and Jews in 1947-1948, resulting in the expulsion of upwards of 700,000 Arab Palestinians. That it happened is incontrovertible. But the facts, even those that are attested to by all reputable politicians and academic authorities, including Israelis, have long been subject to doubt and distortion by all sides of what has since been called “The Middle East Conflict” – notwithstanding that there have been conflicts in the Middle East more devastating and bloodier in terms of destruction and mortality including in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Sudan.
I do not to intend here to retell the history of Al Nakba. There many accounts available in print including those by Arab and Israeli authors, and in film, particularly an excellent documentary broadcast by Al Jazeera in May 2013 and repeated often?
June 17th, 2018, I wrote about it in a Facebook post:
Al Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….
So begins this award-winning series from Al Jazeera, a detailed and comprehensive account of al Nakba, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians who lived within its borders.
It is a well-balanced narrative, with remarkable footage, that will not please the ardent partisans of both sides who prefer their story of 1948 to be black and white.
Revisionist Israeli historians Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Teddy Katz describe the ruthless and relentless military operations to clear and cleanse “Ha’aretz”, the land, of its Arab inhabitants and their history, whilst Palestinian historians tell the story from the Palestinian perspective, describing the critical failings of Palestinian’s political leaders and neighbouring Arab governments. Elderly Palestinians who were forced into exile and to camps in Jordan and Lebanon tell their sad stories of starvation and poverty, violence and death, and of terrible sadness, homesickness and longing that the passing years and old age have never diminished.
“When I left my homeland, I was a child. Now, I’m an old man. So are my children. But did we move forward? Where is our patriotism? Patriotism is about the pockets of our current leaders. They build high buildings and go to fancy banquets. They pay thousands for their children’s weddings”. Refugee Hosni Samadaa.
“We’re repeating the same mistakes. Before 1948 the Palestinian National Movement was split on the basis of rival families. Today, it is split into different parties over ideology, jurisdiction and self-interests. We didn’t learn our lesson. We were led by large, feudal landowners. Today, we are led by the bourgeoisie. Before 1948, we were incapable of facing reality. Today, we are just as inept. Before 1948, people chose the wrong leadership. And today, we are following the wrong leaders”. Researcher Yusuf Hijazi.
The truth about the ethnic cleansing in Gaza – modern Europe was built on exodus and displacement
Aris Roussinos, Unherd, December 18 2023
We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. In just the past few months, Pakistan has deported nearly half a million Afghan migrants, while Azerbaijan has forced 120,000 Armenians — the statelet’s entire population — from newly-conquered Karabakh, both to broad international indifference. As the UNHCR has warned, the forced expulsion — that is, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza’s Palestinian population is now the most likely outcome of the current war.
With no prospect of Palestinians and Israelis living together peaceably, anything short of absolute military victory unacceptable to both the Israeli government and its voters, but no meaningful plan for who will rule the uninhabitable ruins of post-war Gaza, the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is the total removal of the Palestinians. As Israel’s former Interior Minister has declared: “We need to take advantage of the destruction to tell the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000. We need all two million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”
Israeli officials have not been shy in promoting this outcome to a war, according to the President Isaac Herzog, for which “an entire nation… is responsible”. Israel’s agriculture minister Avi Dichter has asserted that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding for emphasis that the result of the war will be “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”Israel’s Intelligence Ministry has published a “concept paper” proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai desert, and Israeli diplomats have been trying to win international support for this idea. According to the Israeli press, Israeli officials have sought American backing for a different plan to distribute Gaza’s population between Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen, tying American aid to these countries’ willingness to accept the refugees. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, two Israeli lawmakers have instead urged Western countries — particularly Europe — to host Gaza’s population, asserting that: “The international community has a moral imperative—and an opportunity—to demonstrate compassion [and] help the people of Gaza move toward a more prosperous future.” The outcome for Gaza’s Palestinians does not appear to be in doubt: what remains to be haggled over is their final location.
The only actor that can prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the United States, and for domestic political reasons it is disinclined to do so. While the Biden administration declaresit does not support “any forced relocation of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip”, it is not taking any action to prevent it. If the expulsion of Gaza’s 2.3 million population comes to pass, the result will be the most significant instance of ethnic cleansing in a generation, which will define Biden’s presidency for future historians. Yet outrage over such events is selective. It is not entirely true, as some Middle Eastern commentators claim, that Western complicity in the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza highlights a lesser interest in Arab or Muslim lives: the Armenian case highlights that eastern Christians also barely flicker on the world’s moral radar.
This week’s awarding of the right to host next year’s COP29 climate conference to Azerbaijan, just a few months after its ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, reminds us that the supposed international taboo on the practice does not, in reality, exist. When ethnic cleansing is permissible, and when it is a war crime, depends, it seems, on who is doing it, and to whom. Azerbaijan is oil-rich, useful to Europe, and able to buy favourable Western coverage; Armenia is poor, weak and friendless in the world. Similarly, the extinction of much of the Christian population of the Middle East as a result of the chaos following the Iraq War won very little international attention or sympathy: communities which survived in their ancient homelands from Late Antiquity, riding out the passage of Arab, Mamluk, Ottoman and European imperial rule, did not survive the American empire.
Yet while the moral revulsion such events excite is the natural and humane reaction, ethnic cleansing is less rare an event than the crusading military response to its Nineties occurrence in the Balkans may make us think. For the sociologist Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”. As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty “which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”. One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later — perhaps ironically — evolve into today’s UNHCR.
It was a cruel process, wrenching peoples from ancestral homelands in which they had lived for centuries, even millennia— and by the end of it half a million people were unaccounted for, presumably dead. Yet it was viewed as a great diplomatic triumph of the age, perhaps with good reason: without meaningful minorities on each side of each others’ borders to stoke tensions, Greece and Turkey have not fought a war in a century. Indeed, as late as 1993, the Realist IR scholar John Mearsheimer could propose a “Balkan Population Exchange commission” for the former Yugoslavia explicitly modelled on the 1923 precedent, asserting that “populations would have to be moved in order to create homogeneous states” and “the international community should oversee and subsidize this population exchange”. For the younger Mearsheimer, ethnic cleansing was the only viable solution to Yugoslavia’s bloody and overlapping ethnic map: “Transfer is a fact. The only question is whether it will be organized, as envisioned by partition, or left to the murderous methods of the ethnic cleansers.” Thirty years later, however, Mearsheimercondemns Israel’s planned expulsions from Gaza outright.
There is a dark irony here: the forced expulsion of peoples is an affront to liberal European values, yet it is rarely acknowledged that our modern, hitherto peaceful and prosperous Europe is built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the ramifications of such a truth are too stark to bear, yet it is nevertheless the case that the peaceable post-1945 order depended on mass expulsions for its stability. Using the 1923 exchange as their explicit model, the victorious allies oversaw the forced removal of 30 million people from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe towards newly homogeneous ethnic homelands they had never seen. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union settled upon the expulsion of 12 million Germans, more than 2 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians and Finns from their ancestral homes.
As Churchill declared in Parliament in 1944, “expulsion is the method that, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been in the case of Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made.” Only two years later, once the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and its vassal Poland become a rival, did Churchill fulminate against the “enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of” by “the Russian-dominated Polish Government”. In ethnic cleansing, as in so many other things, political context is the final arbiter of morality.
But as a result, Germany has never since unsettled Europe with revanchist dreams; both Poland and Western Ukraine became, for the first time in their histories, ethnically homogenous entities. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has observed, the forced separation of Poles and Ukrainians, once locked in bitter ethnic conflict against each other, has led to today’s amicable relationship: “It seems that the segregation of the two peoples was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently the old adage that ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ has been proven true once more.” That we have forgotten the vast scale of the forced expulsions which established Europe’s peaceful post-war order is, in a strange way, a testament to their success.
Yet what made the mass expulsions following the First and Second World Wars broadly successful was that those expelled at least had ethnic homelands to receive them. In Greece and Turkey, the refugees fully adopted the ethnic nationalism of their new countries, in Greece providing the bedrock of later republican sympathies, and in Turkey the core support for both secular Kemalist nationalism and occasional bouts of military rule. In the newly-homogenous Poland and Ukraine, refugees shorn of their previous local roots and at times ambiguous ethnic identities fully adopted in recompense a self-identification with their new nation-states which has helped define these countries’ modern politics. The 120,000 Karabakh refugees will likely become a political bloc in tiny Armenia, affecting the country’s future political order in ways yet hard to discern.
Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But the Palestinians, like the ethnic French narrator of Houellebecq’s Submission, have no Israel to go to. Unlike the 20th century displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, there is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences can not at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found.
Egypt’s disinclination to host two million Gazan refugees is not merely a matter of solidarity, but also self-preservation: flows of embittered Palestinian refugees helped destabilise both Lebanon, where their presence set off the country’s bloody ethnic civil war, and Jordan, where they make up the demographic majority. It is doubtful too, given the recent tenor of its politics, that Europe will be eager to receive them, no matter how humanitarian the language with which Israeli officials couch their planned expulsion. Rendered stateless, driven from their homes and brutalised by war, Gaza’s refugees remain unwanted by the world, perhaps destined to become, as the Jews once were, a diaspora people forever at the mercy of suspicious hosts.
A terrible injustice for the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing may yet provide Israel with a measure of security, even as it erodes the American sympathy on which the country’s existence depends. The broader question, perhaps, is whether or not the looming extinction of Palestinian life in Gaza, like the expulsion of Karabakh’s Armenians, heralds the beginning of a new era of ethnic cleansing, or merely the settling of the West’s unfinished accounts. Like the movements which bloodily reshaped Central Europe, Israel’s very existence is after all a product of the same nationalist intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1923, while acknowledging its necessity, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon called the Greco-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious [idea] for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come”. Exactly a century later, Gaza’s Palestinians look destined to become the final victims of Europe’s long and painful 20th century
Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began
‘Nakba Day’ was commemorated this week with even more vehemence than usual. The greatest tragedy is that the Palestinian people who fled remain frozen in time.
Protestors at a Sydney rally to mark the anniversary of the ‘Nakba’. David Gray/AFP
On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.
That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.
When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
Arabs flee in 1948 ahead of the ‘war of extermination’ against Israel.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.
That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.
But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past
In 1929, there is violence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem – then a narrow alley named for Buraq, the steed with a human face that bore the Prophet Mohammed on his midnight journey to Jerusalem, and not the Kotel Plaza of today. The event, which was actually called the Buraq rising was incited by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. A massacre of Jews in Hebron in the south followed. These were a bleak precursor of the wars to come.
Fast forward to mid-April 1936. Following two incidents of killing carried out in by both Arabs and Jews, an Arab National Committee declared a strike in the city of Jaffa. National Committees were formed in other Palestinian cities and representatives of Arab parties formed the “Arab Higher Committee” led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. A general strike spread throughout Palestine, accompanied by the formation of Palestinian armed groups that started attacking British forces and Jewish settlements. Thus began the “Great Palestinian Revolt. It lasted for three years.
British troops run through Jerusalem’s’ Old City during the Great Revolt
Roots and fruits
The ongoing struggle with regard to the existence Israel and Palestine is justifiably regarded the most intractable conflict of modern times. Whilst most agree that its origins lie in the political and historical claims of two people, the Jewish Israelis and the predominantly Muslim Palestinians for control over a tiny wedge of one-time Ottoman territory between Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt to the south, hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea. There is less consensus as to when the Middle East Conflict as it has become known because of its longevity and its impact on its neighbours and the world in general, actually began.
Was it the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a national home for Jews in an Ottoman governate already populated by Arabs, or the secretive Sykes Picot Agreement that preceded it in 1916, staking imperial Britain’ and France’s claim to political and economic influence (and oil pipelines) in the Levant? Was it the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine after the Treaty of Sèvres of 1922 which determined the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Or was it the end of that British mandate and the unilateral declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 and the war that immediately followed?
In his book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Israeli journalist and author Oren Kesslerargues powerfully that the events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. The book identifies what was known at the time as The Great Revolt as the first Intifada, a popular uprising which actually sowed the seeds of the Arab military defeat of 1947-48 and the dispossession and displacement of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century.
It is a tragic history shared with knowledge in hindsight of the decades of violence and bloodshed in the region that followed. It begins in the time before Palestine became political entity, when mainly Eastern European Jews began settling in progressively larger numbers to the consternation of the Arab populace.
The 1936 conflict stemmed from questions of how to divide the land and how to deal with the influx of Jewish people – questions that remain relevant today. In an extensive interview coinciding with the book’s publication (republished below) Kessler notes that, for the Arab residents, the problem was one of immigration and economics; for the Zionists, it was about finding a home. These two positions soon became irreconcilable issues, leading to sporadic violence and then to continual confrontation.
He believes that the Revolt is the point when both sides really came to see the conflict as zero sum. insofar that whichever community had the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews threatened to become a majority, and this was the immediate precursor to the rising. There was no way that the objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
It is Kessler’s view that it was during revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extended beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – united in the same cause against Zionism and against its perceived enabler, the British Empire. The Arab public in Palestine was becoming increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
The British government made early efforts at keeping the peace, but these proved fruitless. And when the revolt erupted in 1936, it sent a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt. It proposed in effect the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepted this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signaled that they were amenable – not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies held the mayorships of many important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition.
Kessler believes that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line became the default position amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with dire consequences for the Palestinians themselves, and when Yishuv leader David Ben Gurion saw an opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – neither British or Arabs. When the Arabs called a general strike and boycott, cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies and closed the port of Jaffa in Spring 1936, he lobbied successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv, ultimately causing a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and helping the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
This is a mosaic history, capturing the chaotic events on the ground through snippets of action. And also, the people involved.
There are heroes and villains aplenty in this relatively untold story. The urbane and erudite nationalists Muhammed Amal and George Antonius who strive for middle ground against increasingly insurmountable odds, and who died alone and exiled having failed to head off the final showdown that is today known as Al Nakba. The farseeing, resolute, and humourless Ben Gurion and the affable, optimistic Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first prime minister and president respectively. The New York born Golda Meyerson, more of a realist than either leader, who would also one day become prime minister. The irascible revisionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, the forebear of today’s virulent rightwing nationalists
The hardliner Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, whose uncompromising stance, malign political influence, and conspiratorial association with the Nazis set the stage for a long general strike, the Great Revolt, and ultimately, the débâcle of 1948. The flamboyant rebel leaders, Syrian Izz al Din al Qassam, who is memorialized in the name of the Hamas military wing and a Gaza-made rocket, and Fawzi al Qawuqji. Qassam was gunned down by British soldiers during the revolt whilst Qawuqji lived on to become one of the most effective militia leaders in the war of 1948, and to perish therein. Both are remembered today as Palestinian martyrs whilst the Mufti is an arguably embarrassing footnote of history. There’s an article about his relatively unremarked death at the end of this post.
Amin al-Husseini in 1929
And in the British corner, the well-intentioned high commissioners who vainly endeavoured to reconcile the claims of two aspirant nations in one tiny land, and quixotic figures like the unorthodox soldier Ord Wingate who believed he was fulfilling prophecy by establishing the nucleus of what would become the IDF (like many charismatic British military heroes, and particularly General Gordon and Baden-Powell, both admirers and detractors regarded him a potential nut-case); and the Australian-born ex-soldier Lelland Andrews, assistant district commissioner for Galilee, who also conceived of his mission as divinely ordained. Lewis was murdered by Arab gunmen and Wingate went down in an aeroplane over Burma during WW2.
There are appearances from among many others, Lloyd George, Winton Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franklin D Eisenhower and Joseph Kennedy.
The book highlights the work of powerful British functionaries in handling early confrontations: they are memorialized for starting commissions to study the matter and to generate ideas, though many of their ideas weren’t followed or were followed to ill effect. None solved the problem, making this account of the earliest days of the conflict all the more heartbreaking.
All under the shadow of the impending Shoah, and the inevitable showdown that would culminate in al Nakba.
The road to Al Nakba
Kessler argues that the Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
The final paragraphs of Kessler’s enthralling book are worth quoting because they draw a clear line between the events of the Great Revolt and the catastrophe, al Nakba, of 1948:
“For the Jews, perhaps the greatest shift was psychological. they had withstood of powerful sustained assault and lived to tell about it. One book on Zionist leaders” thinking in this era is titled Abandonment of Illusions. The belief of material gains would bring Arab consent now naïve and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined and maintained by force.
“By 1939, the Yishuv had achieved the demographic weight, control of strategic areas of land, and much of the weaponry and military organization that would be needed as a springboard for taking over the country within less than a decade”, writes the Palestinian American historian Rasheed Khalidi.
Khalid argues that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947 -1949 was predicated on a series of previous failures: “a deeply divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces or centralized administrative organs, and no reliable allies. They faced a Jewish society in Palestine which although small relative to theirs, was political unified, had centralized para-state institutions, and was increasingly well-led and extremely highly motivated”.
For Palestinians, he maintains, the Nakba – the catastrophe of their military drubbing, dispossession and dispersal – was but a forgone conclusion. For them, the terrible events that bookended the year 1948 “were no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936- 39”.
The Great Revolt, Kessler says, has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. It is still remembered by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my he regards the. BDS movement as direct descendant of the general strike that preceded the revolt. The two-state solution that is still the international community’s favoured solution to the conflict is but a variation of that original partition plan of 1937.
In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
The picture at the head of this post shows British troops marching through Ibn Khatib Square in 1936 past King David’s Citadel and towards the Jaffa Gate
British policemen disperse an Arab mob during the Jaffa riots in April 1936 (The Illustrated London News)
Jews evacuate the Old City of Jerusalem after Arab riots in 1936.
Oren Kessler’s new book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues powerfully that events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 have shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. Called ‘the definitive study’ by Michael Oren, Kessler’s book identifies the revolt as the true first intifada, an uprising which laid the ground for the Arab defeat in 1947-48 and which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century. He sat down with Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman to discuss the book, recently released in the UK.
Jack Omer-Jackaman: The general reader, in English at least, has lacked a history of the Great Revolt and its repercussions. What have they been missing and with what consequences for our understanding of the conflict?
Oren Kessler: I argue that although this is an Arab revolt, it is as much a Jewish story as an Arab story. From the Arab perspective it’s an extremely formative event – it’s the crucible in which Palestinian Arab identity coalesced as virtually all strands of Arab society came together in a common purpose against a common foe. But on the Jewish side this is an equally seminal and decisive event. It’s often forgotten but this is the period in which the words ‘Jewish State’ first appear on the international agenda – not just the ‘national home’ promised in the Balfour Declaration, but a Jewish state to all intents and purposes, as part of a ‘two-state solution.’ It’s also the period in which the British Empire sows the seeds for a Jewish army. So, in all of these ways this is a hugely formative chapter in the history in the Land of Israel/Palestine, for the conflict itself, and for attempts to resolve it. The degree to which this chapter hasn’t gotten its due is actually quite startling. It’s not entirely clear to me why such a pivotal event right before the Second World War hasn’t gotten its due in English outside of a handful of academic works.
JOJ: And why has the 1936-1939 Revolt been relatively ignored?
OK: It’s a very good question. In the book I quote Professor Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel, who argues that in the Palestinian narrative and consciousness, the revolt has been side-lined, marginalised by the overwhelming primacy of the Nakba. The Nakba is much ‘easier’ to fit into the narrative because, from the Palestinian perspective, it’s the moment at which they are betrayed and unjustly treated by Zionism, by British Imperialism, even by their fellow Arabs who fail to rescue them from the Zionist menace. Whereas dealing with 1936-39 requires a lot more soul-searching. There is a huge convulsion of Arab infighting in this period – there is much Arab bloodshed at the hands of fellow Arabs. That is a lot more difficult for a national narrative to rationalise.
Every national movement has its narrative and its storyline, and the Jewish national narrative tends to be quite forward moving: from the first wave of immigration in the late 19th Century, on to the Balfour Declaration, the start of the British Mandate and the Jewish state-building of the 1920s and 30s, then the agony of the Holocaust and finally the redemption of statehood. That’s essentially the Zionist story, and I think a large-scale, concerted nationalist uprising against that story is a somewhat unwelcome blip in the narrative arc.
JOJ: Let’s set the geopolitical scene at that time: talk to us about the connections between European and local events.
OK: Throughout the book, I bounce back and forth between the situations in Palestine and Europe, because they’re inseparable – certainly from a British perspective, and equally from a Jewish one. The revolt begins only three years after Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. There are also other antisemitic movements ascendent across Europe, in places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, and very many Jews are desperate to leave. But almost all potential sanctuaries in the world have been closed; the US has been almost closed to immigration since the Immigration Act of 1924. In many ways, Palestine is the only significant possible refuge left for the Jews of Europe. So Jewish immigration into Palestine is skyrocketing in these years – the Jewish population there doubles in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935, 60,000 Jews come into Palestine, which is nearly double that of the year before, so the Jews are approaching 30 per cent of the population by the time the revolt erupts. The revolt is thus a direct result of the European situation, since it’s very clear to the Arabs of Palestine that if things continue this way, Palestine will have a Jewish majority before long.
From a British perspective, the war clouds looming over Europe make it very difficult for the British army to quash the revolt. They simply don’t have the manpower for it, at least until the Munich Agreement of 1938, granting Hitler the Sudetenland. With the appeasement of Hitler, Britain and all of Europe breathe a sigh of relief and buy some time (at least that’s how it felt at the time). After Munich the British are able to send two divisions to Palestine, which constitutes the largest British army deployment in the interwar period. This is another reason it’s startling that this era has been so overlooked.
JOJ: That leads us neatly onto the next topic, which looks at the balance of power post and ante the revolt. How does each side – and let’s include the British – go into the period and how do they emerge?
OK: Until Munich, the British are severely undermanned in Palestine, and this directly benefits the Jews because this is the period in which the British finally accede to a long-standing demand by the Haganah – the Jewish self-defence group that is technically illegal but tolerated by the British – to arm and train Jews in large numbers. And that’s what happens: 15,000-20,000 Jews join the Palestine Police as Jewish Supernumerary Police. And though they receive their weapons, training and part of their salary from the British government, it’s clear to everyone that they’re ultimately answerable to the Haganah. So the Jews, led by David Ben-Gurion – already in this era the clear leader of Palestine’s Jews – are able to turn adversity to advantage and make tremendous gains, militarily and otherwise, throughout the Arab revolt.
it’s the mirror image for the Arab side. The revolt to crush Zionism crushes the Arabs instead. The initial unity of the revolt’s first phase under the leadership of Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini – which includes a six-month general strike – gives way in the second phase (from Autumn 1937) to a convulsion of infighting and score settling. Several thousand Arabs are killed by their fellow Arabs, and the Arab leadership – namely the mufti and his associates – is driven into exile. And of course the British begin taking very heavy-handed measures – including a number of incidents that qualify as atrocities – to quash the revolt. Huge numbers of Arab men are put in prison or killed by the British, and thousands of homes demolished. The Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt. I argue in the book, and this is an argument that has also been made by the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.
JOJ: The popular narrative is that Palestinian nationalism – as distinct from wider Arab or Syrian nationalism – was a product of the 1930s. What did your study of the period tell you about this?
OK: I think Palestine is sui generis in many ways, including the development of nationalism there. In my view it is during the Arab revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extends beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – unite in the same mission against Zionism and against its perceived handmaiden: the British Empire.
The Arab public in Palestine is growing increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.
JOJ: So was the 1936-1939 Revolt the crucial event in the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was this the point at which it became zero sum for both sides? Or was it just the first time there was a wider realisation of this?
OK: I’ve lost track of how many people who, when I start telling them about my book, assume I’m referring to the Hebron massacre of 1929. In my view the Hebron riots were just that: they were riots, they were an outburst of terrorism, but not a sustained nationalist uprising in the way that the Great Revolt of 1936 is – not an intifada in the parlance of today. I think in many ways, the Revolt is when both sides really come to see this conflict as zero sum. But it was always in a way zero sum in that whichever community has the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. This is an age in which the world is moving, however haltingly, from imperialism towards self-determination, and it is clear to both Jews and Arabs alike that having a majority would be absolutely key. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews are threatening to become a majority, and that’s the immediate precursor to this revolt erupting.
JOJ: Is it fair to say that the tone was set at this time, on the Palestinian side, for this being a conflict that demands hardliners? That the tone was set of leadership by extremists like Qassam and Hajj Amin[1] and not more moderate figures like Faisal or the Nashashibis?
OK: Yes, I do think that this is the period in which the intransigent line taken by Hajj Amin becomes not just mainstream but one from which it is very dangerous to deviate. Hajj Amin, even after fleeing the country in Autumn of 1937, manages to exert his will over the revolt from afar, and anyone who dares step out of line or contemplate reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the Zionist movement tends to find himself dead or in some other serious trouble. A prime example of that is the reaction among prominent Arabs to the partition plan. In late 1936, the British government sends a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt, and famously it proposes the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepts this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signal that they are amenable; not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies hold the mayorships of quite a few important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition. So yes, I do think that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line becomes the default one amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with really devastating results for the Palestinians themselves.
JOJ: Let’s look to the Jewish side. Is it the first, or at least a formative, time when differing approaches to state-building and self-defence within the Zionist movement are clearly exposed?
OK: Absolutely. During the Arab Revolt the Haganah adheres to a policy called havlagah, meaning self-restraint, despite the revolt’s very high toll in Jewish blood. Some 500 Jews are killed in this revolt; these are huge numbers, comparable to those in the Second Intifada in much more recent times. The logic is to convince the British that they can be trusted with weapons and, as mentioned earlier, that’s exactly what happens. The Irgun – the Revisionist, right-wing dissident Zionist group, whose ideological leader is Vladimir Jabotinsky – has a very different view, much more in line with ‘an eye for an eye’. They believe that it has to be made very clear to the Arabs that Jewish blood could not be shed unanswered, and that taking the fight to the Arabs, including civilians, would have a deterrent effect. We see dozens of Irgun attacks targeting Arab civilians during the revolt. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than terrorism – this isn’t ‘collateral damage’ in an attempt to target militants, but a mentality in which ‘If the Arabs target our civilians, we’ll target theirs’. So, there’s a real schism between these two Zionist movements, but the Haganah are able to convince the British that they are in control and are the mainstream, and that the Irgun is merely a fringe group. And that’s how this crucial British-Jewish military cooperation begins.
JOJ: Could the Yishuv leadership have acted any differently in the years prior to the revolt and forestalled it? Or not without sacrificing immigration?
OK: A very good question, and one which gets back to this question of whether it’s a zero sum conflict. I don’t agree with the rose-tinted analyses of history that I sometimes hear, which claim that in the Ottoman and early Mandate eras the two communities were able to get along in peace and it is somehow British mismanagement that prompted the conflict. Rather it seems to me that when the Jews were a minority, they didn’t present too much of a disruption to the status quo, but as soon as they began to threaten to reach a majority, there is almost no alternative to this conflict breaking out. That’s how Ben-Gurion looks at this situation throughout, and he never agrees to even slowimmigration. By contrast, Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organisation, is willing to slow immigration to try to cultivate Arab goodwill and cooperation. I don’t see how that objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.
JOJ: To what extent was the Arab general strike self-defeating in allowing Ben-Gurion unprecedented opportunities for a key Zionist priority: the conquest of labour?[2]
The general strike starts almost at the very beginning of the revolt and lasts six months – still one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history. It is a source of great Arab pride. As I mentioned, Ben-Gurion really is an expert in turning adversity into advantage. He sees a tremendous opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – not the British or the Arabs. In the strike, the Arabs cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies, and when Jaffa port closed in Spring of 1936, Ben-Gurion pleads successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv. The British agree and Ben Gurion is euphoric, hailing the fact that the Jews now have an outlet to the world as a second Balfour Declaration. That’s just one example of how the Arab strike and boycott ultimately cause a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and help the Jews in their state-building enterprise.
JOJ: You benefited tremendously from the declassification of the Peel Commission’s secret testimonies, which threw up some fascinating revelations. What did we learn about the origins of the Balfour Declaration, for example?
This was one of the most interesting troves of archival documents that I found in my research. The British Government kept the Peel Commission documents classified for 80 years, and they were very quietly declassified only in 2017. I wrote an article in Fathom in 2020 about the 1937 secret testimony of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, on why the government had issued that historic and controversial document. Explaining his decision of two decades earlier, he says the Jews ‘are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.’ He says that he and his ministry were very concerned, in the midst of the First World War, that the Jews of America and Russia might not support the allies but go over to the German side. There were even murmurings that the Germans were thinking of a ‘Balfour Declaration’ of their own. Lloyd George makes very clear in this testimony that that was a primary reason that the Declaration was given at that time. And he says that, in his opinion, the declaration more than paid for itself by the help that the Jews of America and Russia gave in various ways during the war.
JOJ: Herbert Samuel’s testimony was interesting, too.
OK: Samuel was the first High Commissioner for Palestine, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. In his testimony he is asked why he appointed Hajj Amin as Grand Mufti in the first place in the early 1920s – this is the only occasion I’ve ever seen him asked about this decision, which is one of the most fateful taken in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘look, I had no choice. We had to appoint someone from the Husseini family because we had already given the other great Arab families various other perks, and so the Husseinis needed to get the muftiship. And Amin was the only Husseini with the requisite religious education having studied at al Azhar in Egypt.’ Samuel doesn’t admit it was a mistake but defends the decision and says that Hajj Amin had more or less behaved well until that point. (That is not quite true: the British had sentenced him in absentia for rabble rousing in 1920.) These are fascinating documents that were originally slated for destruction; the witnesses who give testimony do so on that understanding. But one very forward-looking British official has the foresight to stow them away,scribbling in the marginsthat they chronicle ‘an important chapter in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people, and will, no doubt, be of considerable value to the historians of the remote future.’
JOJ: Let’s look at Peel’s partition proposals a little deeper. We tend, optimistically, to think that decisions taken by high level politicians and civil servants are subject to forensic detail and informed by expert knowledge. How does the British process for proposing the first two-state solution correct us on this?
OK: That is one of the most fascinating discoveries contained in the secret testimonies: just how this two-state solution is arrived at. One of the commission members is an Oxford don by the name of Professor Reginald Coupland, an Africa-focused historian not particularly well-versed in the Middle East. He arrives at the idea that just as the Greeks and Turks were separated after World War One, in what he referred to as a ‘clean cut’, so Jews and Arabs need to be separated in that same way. It is really Coupland, with the help of a few British colonial servants in Palestine, who pushes through this idea of a two-state solution. And they do so quite hastily – when you look at the minutes of these secret testimonies, it’s just a few pages in which they discuss the practicability and the details of such a solution. It’s Coupland, an irrigation advisor by the name of Douglas Harris, and the assistant district commissioner for Galilee, Lewis Andrews (who shortly thereafter is assassinated) who draft the first two-state solution, which becomes the ideological template for every subsequent attempted solution to the conflict, from the UN’s exactly a decade later onto the various subsequent iterations until our time.
JOJ: Let’s talk about another piece of Mandate administration,the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which barred Jews entry to Palestine just months before the outbreak of World War Two. Does your book have anything to say on this that is new?
OK: There’s a general familiarity, at least among Jews, with the White Paper and that it is a bad an unjust thing. But the genesis of the White Paper has not been researched to the degree it deserves, and in the book I devote a whole chapter to it. The Colonial Secretary at the time is Malcolm MacDonald, who is only 37 years old (he is the son of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald). This is the Chamberlain government, which is dedicated to appeasement, not just in Europe but in the Middle East. Even though MacDonald is a member of the National Labour Party, he is a loyal member of the ministry and determines, with the advice of senior officials in the army and the government, that some drastic changes need to be made to Britain’s Palestine policy in such a crucial period. There is a feeling that world war would break out at any point and that Muslim opinion, particularly in India, has to be appeased, lest Muslim subjects of the empire side with Hitler.
When you look at the discussion, you see that the British policy makers plan to go far in the direction of Arab demands when they call the St James’s Conference in 1939. And yet, throughout these negotiations, they go quite a bit farther even than they originally intend. So, where 60,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1935, the 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 over five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state. The White Paper doesn’t say an independent Arab state, but of course if Jewish immigration is limited to keep the Jews under 35 or 40 per cent of the population, it’s clear to everyone that this would be a de facto Arab state. This is mid-1939, when the Jews of Europe are most desperate to find sanctuary outside of Europe, and the White Paper is seen by the Jews and their supporters as a tremendous betrayal, and a reneging not just on the Peel Commission plan of two years previous, but on the Balfour Declaration itself.
This is one of the tremendous ‘what ifs’ of history: what would have happened had the White Paper not been passed, or had the Peel partition plan of 1937 gone through? Ben-Gurion, after the Holocaust, said that had the Jews had the small state promised to them in 1937, six million could have been saved. I think that’s perhaps an overstatement: I’m not sure that the very small state offered to them was developed enough to absorb six million people. It was Golda Meir who said that had the Jewish state been established (and the White Paper not implemented), hundreds of thousands could have been saved: I think that’s a plausible reading of history. The White Paper is what finally turns Ben-Gurion against the British. It’s when he decides that the British-Zionist partnership is essentially over and when he starts to look across the ocean to America as the great potential supporter of Zionism.
JOJ: Finally, it’s fascinating to see how the 1936-1939 Revolt and this period lives in the iconography of both Israelis and Palestinians. You don’t have to look too hard to see it referenced or deployed in the present day. It occupies a place of glory for Palestinians, which is rather ironic given its role in the catastrophe of 1948. And on the Israeli side, it was referenced not too long ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
OK: I argue that the revolt has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. Just recently, for example, in the Gaza conflict of May 2021, you may remember that the war extended to the battlefield of social media. When the Arabs of Israel and the West Bank joined together in a one-day strike, Twitter was abuzz with comparisons to 1936. And, as you mention, Bezalel Smotrich tweeted: ‘the riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the great Arab revolt. Back then a hostile British government protected rioters. Today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a contaminated judiciary and a law enforcement system emasculated by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions…’ Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my view the BDS movement is a direct descendant of the general strike. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the two-state solution that is still the international community’s the favoured solution to the conflict is simply a variation of the original partition plan of 1937. In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.
[1] Editor’s note: Hajj Amin al Husseini, appointed by the British Mandate as Grand Mufti in 1921, would become a determined supporter of Nazi Germany. At his 1941 meeting with Hitler, Hajj Amin declared himself ‘fully reassured and satisfied’ with Hitler’s reassurance that once having achieved the ‘total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe… Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere’. In 1943, the SS enlisted Hajj Amin to lead a recruitment drive among Bosnian Muslims, SS Main Office Chief Berger noting the ‘extraordinarily successful impact’ of the Mufti’s activities.
[2] Editor’s note: The concept of Kibbush Haavoda, the conquest of labour, was a key plank in Labour Zionism. Its priorities were the encouraging of manual and agricultural labour amongst Jewish immigrants to Palestine and a reliance on Jewish labour for the Jewish economy
In 1936, widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance erupted into open rebellion. Several key dynamics and events can be seen as setting the stage for this uprising. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the 1930s had been a time of intense economic disruption. Rural Palestinians were hit hard by debt and dispossession, and such pressures were only exacerbated by British policies and Zionist imperatives of land purchases and “Hebrew labor.” Rural to urban migration swelled Haifa and Jaffa with poor Palestinians in search of work, and new attendant forms of political organizing emerged that emphasized youth, religion, class, and ideology over older elite-based structures. Meanwhile, rising anti-Semitism—especially its state-supported variant—in Europe led to an increase of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, in Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, the combination of these various trends produced periodic upheavals, from the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising to multicity demonstrations in 1933 against the British Mandate. In October 1935, the discovery of a shipment of arms in the Jaffa port destined for the Haganah fueled Palestinian concerns that the Zionist movement was introducing the human and military resources necessary for its state-building project under the nose of the British. Meanwhile, the popular and populist Syrian Shaykh Izzeddin al-Qassam , who preached to the slum-dwelling rural transplants near Haifa’s rail yards and who had spent the early 1930s building a cell-based paramilitary network, was killed in a firefight with British forces in November 1935. Qassam’s funeral in Haifa elicited a mass outpouring of public outrage. These events are often seen as direct predecessors of the mass Palestinian uprising that took place in 1936.
The Great Palestinian Rebellion , or the Great Arab Revolt, as this uprising came to be known, lasted for three years and can be generally divided into three phases. Thefirst phase lasted from the spring of 1936 to July 1937. With tensions throughout Palestine running high since the fall of 1935, the revolt was ignited in mid-April 1936 when followers of Qassam attacked a convoy of trucks between Nablus and Tulkarm , killing two Jewish drivers. The next day, the Irgun killed two Palestinian workers near Petah Tikva , and in the following days, deadly disturbances ensued in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In Nablus, an Arab National Committee was formed and a strike was called on 19 April. National Committees in other cities echoed the call to strike, and on 25 April the Arab Higher Committee (Lajna) (AHC) was formed, chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini , to coordinate and support a nationwide general strike, which was launched on 8 May.
The strike was widely observed and brought commercial and economic activity in the Palestinian sector to a standstill. Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the countryside came together in armed groups to attack—at first sporadically, but with increasing organization— British and Zionist targets. Some Arab volunteers joined the rebels from outside Palestine, though their numbers remained small in this period. The British employed various tactics in an attempt to break the strike and to quell the rural insurrection. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. Large areas of Jaffa’s Old City were demolished, and the British called in military reinforcements.
Concurrent with military operations and repressive measures, the British government dispatched a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to investigate the root causes of the revolt. In October 1936, under the combined pressure of British policies, other Arab heads of state, and the effects of a six-month general strike on the Palestinian population, the AHC called off the strike and agreed to appear before the Peel Commission . A period of lower intensity conflict prevailed as the Peel Commission toured the country, but tensions continued to build in anticipation of the commission’s report. In July 1937, the Peel Commission published its report, recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. Dismayed by this negation of their desires and demands, the Palestinian population relaunched their armed insurgency with renewed intensity, initiating the second phase of the revolt.
This second phase, lasting from July 1937 until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem , fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle. The British, meanwhile, imposed even harsher measures to try to quash the revolt. The AHC and all Palestinian political parties were outlawed, political and community leaders were arrested, and a number of high-profile public figures exiled. The military aspects of counterinsurgency intensified, and British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. The British also meted out collective punishment: thousands of Palestinians were relegated to “detention camps”; residential quarters were destroyed; schools were closed; villages were collectively fined and forced to billet British troops and police. Zionist military institutions took advantage of the situation to build up their capacities with British support. By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the British government as a thinly veiled front for the Haganah, and so-called Special Night Squads comprising Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages.
Thethird phaseof the rebellion lasted roughly from the fall of 1938 to the summer of 1939. The British dispatched another commission of inquiry, this one headed by Sir John Woodhead , to examine the technical aspects of implementing partition. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission report concluded that partition was not practicable, marking a certain British retreat from the Peel recommendation. At the same time, however, the British launched an all-out offensive: in 1939 more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Such brutality placed immense pressure on the rebels, exacerbating rifts between the political leadership of the AHC exiled in Damascus and local leadership on the ground, between rebel bands and village populations that were expected to support and supply them, and ultimately between Palestinians who remained committed to the revolt and those willing to reach a compromise with the British. British-supported Palestinian “Peace Bands” were dispatched to battle their compatriots.
In May 1939, the British government published a new White Paperthat proposed the following: Britain’s obligations to the Jewish national home had been substantially fulfilled; indefinite mass Jewish immigration to and land acquisition in Palestine would contradict Britain’s obligations to the Palestinians; within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to “Arab acquiescence”; land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.
The combined impact of Britain’s military and diplomatic efforts brought the rebellion to an end in the late summer of 1939. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another. At the same time, the White Paper—despite its limitations—offered certain concessions to the rebels’ demands. Whatever gains Palestinians might have made through the revolt, however, were quickly overtaken by the larger geopolitical processes of World War II , and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact.
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.
The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.
When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.
“ARAB DEMONSTRATIONS ON OCT. 13 AND 27, 1933. IN JERUSALEM AND JAFFA. RETURN OF GRAND MUFTI FROM INDIA. MET BY HUNDREDS OF CARS AT GETHSEMANE, NOV. 17, 1933.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4218.
In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]
Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.
The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.
THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, SAYID AMIN AL HUSSEINI, MEETS WITH HITLER, NOVEMBER 1941.
Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.
Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.
And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.
Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,
it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.
British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:
We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.
So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.
A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”
But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.
The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]
Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.
Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.
Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.
1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:
Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.
The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.
2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)
3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël[Investig’Action, 2019] Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]
4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August 1941
Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.
The day the Mufti died
Yes, Hajj Amin al-Husayni collaborated with the Nazis, but that’s not why he was dropped from the Palestinian narrative
Martin Kramer, Times of Israel Blogs, July 5, 202
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“To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.
Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.
When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.
The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.
In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.
After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.
After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.
Man without a country
The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:
King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream.
Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:
The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule.
So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.
The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?
Nakba stigma
What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:
As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves.
This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.
Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.
The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)
If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.
It has been said before and often, that Qatari owned Al Jazeera presents the non-Arabic speaking world with a markedly different narrative of the Gaza war to what it relays to its Arabic readers – it is the most popular news source in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinians.
Viewing or reading Al Jazeera English, you would think that Israel’s onslaught is directed entirely against the defenceless and helpless civilians of the unfortunate enclave. There are very rarely images of the militants who are engaged on a daily basis in fierce battles and deadly firefights with the IDF. Al Jazeera Arabic on the other hand, posts pictures and videos of the fighters, illustrating their courage, their resilience in the face of overwhelming odds, and their successes in the face of overwhelming military odds.
The title refers to the pogrom of October 7 in which Islamic militants slaughtered some 1,200 Israeli men, woman and children and kidnapped over 200. It was given the name Amaliyyat Tufān al Aqsa –Al Aqsa Flood, insofar as its purpose was to preempt a Jewish takeover of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest Islamic shrine – notwithstanding the fact that nothing of the kind was happening. Israel’s angry response has been biblical in its brutality, with nine months of air and ground assault that has devastated the enclave of Gaza and, according to health officials killed more than 40,000 people (uncorroborated figures provided by the Hamas-run health authorities that include thousands of militants killed in the fighting, and persons who would have died under normal circumstances had war not broken out).
An earlier piece in In That Howling Infinite, Lebensraum Redux – Hamas’ promise of the hereafterrevealed the Hamas master plan for the destruction of the state of Israel and the dispersion and disposal of its Jewish inhabitants. Statements like this and the longstanding foundational Hamas Covenant, which also calls for the eradication of Israel do not generally attract mainstream and social media interest, even after October 7.
Few have actually read the 1988 Hamas Covenant or the revised charter that was issued in 2017. The neglect is nonetheless surprising considering the clear exposition of the Islamist, genocidal intent of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This accords with a view held by many knowledgeable and well-informed observers and commentators that the original intent of Operation Al Aqsa Flood was to race en-masse across the Negev to the Occupied Territories and spark a general Palestinian rising which would precipitate an invasion of Israel by its Arab neighbours – a repeat of the war of 1948 without its outcome, but rather, al Nakba in reverse.
We’ll probably never really know why this scenario was not followed through, and what may have been the outcome. Some may argue a 100km sprint across the open desert to the nearest Palestinian city, Hebron, was an impossible task. Others might surmise that the militants who descended on the borderland kibbutzim and the Nova Trance Festival to molest, maim and murder were distracted by the easy prey and the release of pent-up rage and brutal vengeance.
Al Aqsa Flood may have failed, with only the Black Shabbat and the destruction of Gaza to show for it, but without doubt, it ignited a wildfire that has reinvigorated the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world and severely damaged Israel’s standing on the world stage. The Hamas maintains that the ongoing carnage is justified, with many senior officials, declare in the safety of their sanctuaries in Qatar and Beirut that they’d do it all over again … and again.
The Al Jazeera series is enlightening in several respects, particularly insofar as it does not recognise the events of October 7 for what they were; and whilst acknowledging that there is a battle raging in the enclave but eschewing any reference to the carnage it is causing among the Gazan population, it presents the moral and humanitarian disaster of the Gaza war as the beginning of an Islamic enlightenment:
“Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs”.
By happenstance, I read this series not long after In That Howling Infinite published A Messiah is needed – so that he will not come, which discussed the phenomenon of messianism with particular reference to the connections between the conflict and catastrophe of the Gaza war on the one hand and an emerging messianism on the other among both religious and non-religious Jew. It noted:
The irony is that increasingly in the Jewish state, the existential crisis emanating from the catastrophe of October 7 and the encirclement of the tiny country by enemies determined to wipe it off the map, has arguably fostered a messianic fervour in Israel too.
We republish the foreword to the Al Jazeera series below in both English and Arabic.
Al-Aqsa Flood and Religiosity … A New Islamic Awakening?
“Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs”.
What is the religious symbolism of the red cows that the Zionist settlers brought before the flood? Why did the spokesman for the Qassam Brigades denounce them in a speech? And what is the meaning of the concept of the nation in the speeches of the resistance leaders? Why did the Zionist Prime Minister invoke the story of the “Amalekites” from the Old Testament to justify the Israeli brutality in the Gaza Strip? And why do we only receive clips of resistance fighters accompanied by glorification and praise and mention of the virtue of martyrdom?
Many questions about religion and religiosity and their relationship to the flood have imposed themselves since the outbreak of the flood on October 7, 2023. From the first moments of the flood, and with the resistance members crossing the security fence of the Gaza Strip, the sounds of glorification and praise of the resistance fighters preceded the sounds of the Kalashnikovs. During the battle, the leaders of each team did not limit themselves to the military and strategic mention of the battle, but they loaded the battle itself with many religious symbols, which are no less present and important than the importance of the security, intelligence and military machine. Outside the military battlefield, there was another battle raging alongside the flood, which is the battle of conflicting identities that the world witnessed with the flood, and the accompanying signs of a noticeable religious awakening among young people around the world, and the restoration of the centrality of the role of religion in Arab public affairs.
All of this prompted us to ask the question: What is the position of religion and religiosity in the battle of the flood? This was the file titled “The Flood of Al-Aqsa and Religiosity… A New Islamic Awakening?!” which consisted of 7 articles.
The first article was an extensive article titled “From the Tortured of the Earth to the Beloved of God… How did Arab Youth Return to the Questions of Faith and Religiosity after the Events of October 7?” The work on the article took 8 months, during which we met with dozens of young people around the world between the ages of 20 and 40 to monitor the transformations of Arab youth after the flood, and the transformation of many of them from “indifference” to a state of sweeping religiosity, and sometimes even readiness to engage in the broad Islamic state, and support the Islamic resistance. All of this was monitored by the article, and their testimonies recorded the impact of the flood on them and its effect on the transformations they went through.
As for the second article, it was a conceptual article entitled “Cultural Wars and the War on Gaza… How did October 7 formulate the concept of the nation?” The article followed the conflict of identities that accompanied the flood, and how the speeches of the resistance spokesman restored the concept of “nation” and made it the heart of the battle of the flood, and how the Zionists and their allies tried to redraw the concept of the term “nation” in the past decades!
Then we delved into the third article into a forward-looking article entitled “The Flood, Prophecy, and the Hour… Welcome to the Exceptional Times!” to tell us how prophecy can have its effect on military reality? And how faith becomes a refuge for salvation for the resistance fighters when all roads are narrow, moments of foresight are absent, and work becomes based on the sites of destiny.
As for the fourth article, it was about the presence of the Zionist religious narrative on social media platforms, especially TikTok. The article “Religious Zionism on TikTok… This is how genocide was legitimized in Gaza” attempted to monitor the religious presence of Zionist figures and those influenced by them on TikTok, and how this presence helped justify the genocide with a clear conscience! The article placed this Zionist religious narrative in a comparative case with the role of Arab influencers and the religious narrative they carried during the war.
From TikTok to psychology, in the fifth article we went to reconsider Western psychology and the problem of Western standards on religion and religiosity in the article “What is faith? About Gaza and the Istisqa prayer in the summer”, which monitored the academic deficiency in Western standards of religiosity when trying to apply them to Muslim peoples. The article revealed that the case of “Gaza” remains a unique case that is difficult to frame within the material framework of the psychology of religiosity in its Western perspective.
Then we reinforced it with the sixth article, in which we returned to the impact of religion on the battlefield, which is the article “Psychology of Religiosity… The Infrastructure of Resistance in Gaza”, which attempted to draw the line between religious motivation and mental health in crises, and monitored the religious beliefs of the people of Gaza that created meaning from the womb of suffering, and concluded the article by talking about the uniqueness of Islam in drawing the path of salvation for its followers in the two cases of life or martyrdom.
Finally, we concluded with the seventh article, which tells the expansion of the circle of influence to the ends of the world by reviewing the story of an evangelical Christian Islam, and how the Gazan model of religiosity was transformed into a beacon of global guidance.
طوفان الأقصى والتدين … يقظة إسلامية جديدة؟!
مقدمة الملف ما الرمزية الدينية للبقرات الحُمر التي استجلبها المستوطنون الصهاينة قبيل الطوفان؟ ولمَ ندد بها المتحدث باسم كتائب القسام في خطاب له؟ وبأي مدلولٍ حضر مفهوم الأمة في خطابات قادة المقاومة؟ ولماذا استدعى رئيس الوزراء الصهيوني قصة “العماليق” من العهد القديم تبريرًا للوحشية الإسرائيلية على قطاع غزة؟ ولماذا لا تصلنا مقاطع مقاتلي المقاومة إلا مصحوبة بالتكبير والتهليل وذكر فضل الشهادة؟
أسئلة كثيرة حول الدين والتدين وعلاقتهما بالطوفان فرضت نفسها منذ اندلاع الطوفان في السابع من أكتوبر ٢٠٢٣. فمنذ اللحظات الأولى للطوفان، ومع عبور أفراد المقاومة السياج الأمني لغُلاف غزة كان أصوات التكبير والتهليل للمقاومين تسبق أصوات الكلاشنكوف. وفي أثناء المعركة لم يكتف قادة كل فريق بالذكر العسكري والإستراتيجي للمعركة، وإنما شحنوا المعركة ذاتها بكثير من الرمزيات الدينية، التي لا تقل في حضورها وأهميتها عن أهمية الآلة الأمنية والإستخباراتية والعسكرية. أما خارج ميدان المعركة العسكري، فكان ثمة معركة أخرى تدور رحاها إلى جوار الطوفان، وهي معركة الهويات المتصارعة التي شهدها العالم مع الطوفان، وما صاحب ذلك من بوادر استفاقة دينية ملحوظة في أوساط الشباب حول العالم، واستعادة محورية دور الدين في الشأن العام العربي.
كل ذلك دفعنا إلى طرح سؤال: ما هو موقع الدين والتدين في معركة الطوفان؟ فكان هذا الملف الذي حمل عنوان “طوفان الأقصى والتدين … يقظة إسلامية جديدة؟!” والذي تكون من 7 مواد.
كانت المادة الأولى مادة مستفيضة بعنوان “من معذبي الأرض إلى أحباب الله … كيف عاد الشباب العربي إلى سؤالي الإيمان والتديّن بعد أحداث السابع من أكتوبر” وقد استغرق العمل على المادة 8 أشهر، التقينا فيها بعشرات الشباب حول العالم من الفئة العمرية ما بين 20 إلى 40 لرصد تحولات الشباب العربي بعد الطوفان، وتحول كثير منهم من “اللامبالاة” إلى حالة التدين الجارف، بل وأحيانا التأهب للانخراط في الحالة الإسلامية الواسعة، ومناصرة المقاومة الإسلامية. كل ذلك رصدته المادة، وسجلت بشهاداتهم وقع الطوفان عليهم وأثره في التحولات التي خاضوها.
أما المادة الثانية كانت مادة مفاهيمية بعنوان “الحروب الثقافية والحرب على غزة.. كيف صاغ 7 أكتوبر مفهوم الأمة؟” تتبعت المادة صراع الهويات التي صاحب الطوفان، وكيف استعادات خطابات المتحدث باسم المقاومة مفهوم “الأمة” وجعلته في القلب من معركة الطوفان، وكيف حاول الصهاينة وحلفائهم إعادة رسم مفهوم مفردة “الأمة” في العقود الماضية!
ثم دلفنا في المادة الثالثة إلى مادة استشرافية بعنوان “الطوفان والنبوءة والساعة … مرحبًا بك في الأزمنة الاستثنائية!” لتخبرنا كيف يمكن للنبوءة أن يكون لها أثرها في الواقع العسكري؟ وكيف يصبح الإيمان ملاذ الخلاص للمقاومين عندما تضيق جميع الطرق، وتنعدم لحظات الاستشراف، ويصبح العمل على مواقع القدر.
أما المادة الرابعة فكانت عن حضور السردية الدينية الصهيونية على منصات التواصل الاجتماعي، وخاصة التيك توك. فكانت مادة “الصهيونية الدينية على “تيك توك”.. هكذا شُرّعت الإبادة في غزّة” حاولت هذه المادة رصد الحضور الديني للخامات الصهاينة والمتأثريين بهم على التيك توك، وكيف ساعد هذا الحضور على تبرير الإبادة بضمير مرتاح! ووضعت المادة هذه السردية الدينية الصهيونية ضمن حالة مقارنة مع دور المؤثريين العرب والسردية الدينية التي حملوها أثناء الحرب.
ومن التيك توك إلى علم النفس، فقد ذهبنا في المادة الخامسة إلى إعادة النظر في علم النفس الغربي وإشكالية المقايس الغربية حول الدين والتدين في مادة “ما الإيمان؟ عن غزة وصلاة الاستسقاء في الصيف” والتي رصدت النقص الأكاديمي في مقاييس التدين الغربية عند محاولة تطبيقها على الشعوب المسلمة. وكشفت المادة أن حالة “غزة” تظل حالة فريدة ومستعصية على التأطير ضمن الإطار المادي لعلم نفس التدين في منظوره الغربي.
وثم عززنا بالمادة السادسة التي عُدنا فيها إلى أثر الدين في أرض المعركة، وهي مادة “سيكولوجية التديّن.. البنية التحتيّة للمقاومة في غزة” والتي حاولت رسم الخط بين الدافع الديني والصحة النفسية في الأزمات، ورصدت المسلمات الدينية لأهل غزة والتي خَلّقَت المعنى من رحم المعاناة، وختمت المادة بالحديث عن فرادة الإسلام في رسم مسار الخلاص لأتباعه في حالتي الحياة أو الشهادة.
وأخيرًا ختمنا بالمادة السابعة، التي تحكي اتساع دائرة التأثير إلى أطراف المعمورة باستعراضنا لقصة إسلام مسيحيّ إنجيليّ، وكيف تحول نموذج التديّن الغزيّ إلى منار هداية عالميّة.
In our more secular, rational times, we condemn those who maim and murder in the name of their god. But do not for a moment dismiss the power of religious fervour … The promise of a full remission of all sins and a place in paradise was a powerful motivator (and among some faithful, it still is). Al Tariq al Salabiyin – the Crusaders’ Trail, In That Howling Infinite
… it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews
Amit Vershinsky, Israeli historian and author
Messianism, the belief in the advent of a “promised one”, a Messiah or Mahdi, who emerges as the saviour of a people and who will bring about a better world, has never gone out of fashion, particularly in the Middle East, its theological birthplace. It originated as a Zoroastrian religious belief and flowed into the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but other faiths also harbour messianistic proclivities. And yet, messianism can be temporal as much as spiritual, as illustrated by the ideological movements which determined the course of twentieth century history.
The yearning for an ideal leader has long been ingrained in our collective psyche: a hero, mortal or divine, who would appear at the darkest hour and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph. Even though we may not personally subscribe to a spiritual belief in the end of days, it is there in our historical memory and in the myths that are often shaped by it, as the following lines, referencing Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and King Arthur, these “once and future” kings, illustrate:
We sing such songs as we might hear In dreams before day breaking, As ancient echoes hide between The slumber and the waking. We remember, Yes, we remember
Iskander marched this way and back Across these battlefields of old. Persepolis he burned and in Babylon he died, And now, embalmed in gold, He lies waiting.
The killer khan in death reclines Amidst his guards and concubines, Who died so none would ever see The final resting place where he Lies waiting.
And in our own imagining The fabled, once and future king Upon an island in a lake, He slumbers still but will awake One day.
World-renowned Critical Theorist, activist, psychoanalyst, and public Marxist intellectual, Erich Fromm(1900-1980) distinguished two kinds of messianism. One he saw as radical and progressive, the other as regressive and potentially reactionary: “prophetic messianism” and “catastrophic or apocalyptic” messianism.
Prophetic messianism, Fromm argued, conceives the messianic event as occurring within history and time and not arriving through a rupture from history and time. Regressive catastrophic messianism on the other hand sees the messianic event entering history from outside, a force majeure, and not as an outcome of human activity. He saw “prophetic messianism” as a “horizontal” longing, a longing for human-made change, and “catastrophic messianism” as a vertical” longing, a longing for an external, transcendent “saviour” (perhaps a human leader or a deterministic law governing history) that will enter history from a realm outside of human affairs.
Because prophetic messianism views the messianic event as the outcome of human progress, it encourages productive and revolutionary action, and it makes planning or “anticipatory change” possible. By contrast, because catastrophic messianism views the messianic event as the outcome of the transcendent entering history to rescue a fallen humanity, catastrophic messianism encourages passive waiting or even destructive or unnecessarily violent action aimed at speeding the coming of the apocalypse. Like the types of false hope that Fromm warns against, catastrophic messianism risks becoming quietism on the one hand or actively destructive nihilism on the other.
[These two previous paragraphs are an edited extract of a review by Dutch publishing house Brill of Erich Fromm’s Revolutionary Hope by Joan Braune, 1st January 2014}
Today, catastrophic messianism is active and influential in our world’s most enduring conflicts – the clear and present danger facing the non-Muslim world by Islamic extremism, and the current war between the predominantly Jewish State of Israel and the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and its allies
In islamic eschatology, the end of times will portend Malhama Al-Kubra, the “last battle between the forces of light and of darkness, an apocalyptic struggle so intense that according to some Hadith narrations, were a bird to pass their flanks, it would fall down dead before reaching the end of them. Many texts say that this will take place at Dabiq in northern Syria. As testament to its relevance in contemporary Islamist thinking, the brutally fundamentalist Islamic State adopted the name for its magazine.
The irony is that increasingly in the Jewish state, the existential crisis emanating from the catastrophe of October 7 and the encirclement of the tiny country by enemies determined to wipe it off the map, has arguably fostered a messianic fervour in Israel too.
In an informative article in Haaretz, writer and historian Amit Varshizky contemplates the connections between conflict and catastrophe on the one hand and an emerging messianism on the other among both religious and non-religious Jews.
This article reminded me of British historian Norman Cohn‘s influential book The Pursuit of the Millenium which I first read in ‘seventies. Indeed, Varshinsky refers to him. Cohn’s work as a historian focused on the problem of the roots of a persecutorial fanaticism which became resurgent in modern Europe at a time when industrial progress and the spread of democracy had convinced many that modern civilization had stepped out forever from the savageries of earlier historical societies. In ThePursuit, he traced back to the distant past the pattern ofchiliasticupheaval that marred the revolutionary movements of the 20th century. He had described all his workas studies on the phenomena that sought “to purify the world through the annihilation.
Vershinsky writes:
“The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of “pangs of the Messiah,” characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments. This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythic light, as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality … the power of this redemptive mysticism derives from the fact that it does not talk about far-reaching cosmic transformations in the order of creation, as predicted by the Prophets. It refers, rather, to messianic fulfillment within the realm of historical, concrete time, and as such it is tightly linked to human deeds … History demonstrates how apocalyptic interpretations can be created from the experience of an existential crisis, which brings to a head the everlasting tension between deficiency and the striving for fulfillment – a tension that characterizes the human condition in general. Since the start of recorded history, periods that were marked by political crises, plagues, social anxieties and collective despair have been accompanied by the rise of apocalyptic interpretations that have vested history with a new and sanctified significance and have charged the events of the hour with redemptive meaning. As Norman Cohn showed, marking a low point as a formative moment of spiritual renascence that leads to redemption is part of a recurring pattern that appears in all apocalyptic interpretations of events throughout Western history. Cosmic disorder is a precursory and necessary stage for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God … But it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews”.
Disasters are a fertile ground for purveyors of apocalyptic prophecies
Oil-storage facility in Hםuthi-held Hodeida, Yemen after the port was hit by Israeli planes July 20. “War advances “the purification, refining and galvanizing of the Jewish people” Rav Kook.”: AFP
Social media is flooded with clips of rabbis calculating the end times and intoxicated with salvation as they declare that we are poised at the onset of the flowering of our redemption. Rabbi Naftali Nissim, a YouTube star in-the-making, waxed poetic: “There has never been a beautiful period like this… What happened on Simhat Torah [October 7] is a prelude to redemption.” Rabbi Yaakov Maor explained that “Rafah [in Gaza] refers to ‘288 sparks’ [the numerological value of the word ‘RFH,” and a concept in kabbalistic literature]. The redemption is near!” And Rabbi Eliezer Berland, head of the Shuvu Banim group in the Breslav Hasidic sect, promised: “This is the last war before the Messiah. After this war, Messiah Son of David will come.”
But such talk is not confined to the yeshivas and the kollels (yeshivas for married men), it’s even voiced on commercial television. Dana Varon, a presenter and commentator on the right-wing Channel 14, stated, “It’s written in the Mishna: The Galilee will be destroyed and the Golan shall be emptied, and the people of the border wander from city to city, that’s the Mishna coming to realization within us literally, I’m happy about this.”
Her colleague Yinon Magal went even farther in a radio broadcast. “The feeling is that we are approaching great days. We are in a redemptive process, and prophecies are happening.” And on another occasion: “Only the Messiah [can] supplant Bibi.” Magal is a demagogue and the embodiment of narcissism, but his remarks reflect a prevailing sentiment among broad circles of the settler and Hardali(nationalist ultra-Orthodox) right, and one that has also been adopted by broad segments of the ruling party.
The sentiment itself is not new. Since the advent of religious Zionism, it has greased the movement’s ideological wheels and been the driving force of the settlement project and the vision of Greater Israel. What is new is the popularity these ideas enjoy in the present-day political and public discourse, and how they have traveled from the margins of right-wing politics into the Likud center. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is captive by choice of power-hungry Kahanists and other extremists, is dragging Israel into the grip of an apocalyptic ecstasy that is deepening the existing crisis and creating new conditions for realizing the messianic fantasy of conquering all the territories of the Land of Israel, replacing Israeli democracy with the kingdom of the House of David and building the Third Temple.
This accounts for the enthusiastic spirit that has gripped the messianic camp since October 7, as well as the repeated provocations on the part of individuals and groups in an attempt to ignite a conflagration in the West Bank and pull the Arabs in Israel into the blaze.
War of Gog and Magog
The origins of this craving for destruction and strife reside in the belief that the coming of the Messiah will be preceded by a period of “pangs of the Messiah,” characterized by suffering and ordeals; in short, there is no redemption that is not acquired without torments. This is a basic element of political messianism, which interprets historical events in a mythic light, as the embodiment of sanctity in concrete reality. According to this approach, the birth of Israel and the Zionist enterprise, particularly since the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, are manifestations of emerging redemptive reality. This reading of events is based in part on tractate Berakhot in the Talmud, according to which between this world and the time of the Messiah there is only “servitude to the [foreign] kingdoms.”
Indeed, the power of this redemptive mysticism derives from the fact that it does not talk about far-reaching cosmic transformations in the order of creation, as predicted by the Prophets. It refers, rather, to messianic fulfillment within the realm of historical, concrete time, and as such it is tightly linked to human deeds. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the dean of Ateret Yerushalayim Yeshiva and the former rabbi of the settlement of Beit El, put it succinctly: “We assert the absolute certainty of the appearance of our redemption now. There is no barrier here of secret and hidden.”
The same applies to the present war; it needs to be seen in its biblical dimension and perceived through a messianic prism. In this sense, the history of our generation is not much different from the chronicles of the Exodus from Egypt and the conquests of Joshua. At that time, too, the events occurred by natural means and the military victories opened the age of redemption.
The Gaza war, from this perspective, is bringing closer the Jewish people’s collective redemption. Light and dark are intertwined here, destruction and revival are interlocked like revealed and concealed, and as material and spiritual reality. Accordingly, the greater the dimensions of the destruction and the devastation, so too will the spiritual transformation brought by the campaign in its wake be augmented. The war is the purgatory that will steel the spirit of the Jewish people, which is already at the stage of incipient redemption. Anyone seeking a foundation for this idea will find it in the thought of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (the son of Abraham Isaac Kook): “What is the reason for the War of Gog and Magog? Following the establishment of Israel’s sovereignty, war can possess only one purpose: the purification, refining and galvanizing of Knesset Israel [the Jewish people].”
What is the conclusion? The more that suffering increases, the more good there will be; and “the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out” (Exodus 2:12). They will multiply and burst forth, for like the measure of justice, so too is the measure of mercy. And as Dana Varon noted in replying to her critics, “It’s a good sign. Because if all the bad and the wicked materialize, that is a sign that the good is also guaranteed and is arriving.”
Sanctified victims
The designation of catastrophe as a condition for salvation is not new in human history. History demonstrates how apocalyptic interpretations can be created from the experience of an existential crisis, which brings to a head the everlasting tension between deficiency and the striving for fulfillment – a tension that characterizes the human condition in general. Since the start of recorded history, periods that were marked by political crises, plagues, social anxieties and collective despair have been accompanied by the rise of apocalyptic interpretations that have vested history with a new and sanctified significance and have charged the events of the hour with redemptive meaning.
As the British historian Norman Cohn showed, marking a low point as a formative moment of spiritual renascence that leads to redemption is part of a recurring pattern that appears in all apocalyptic interpretations of events throughout Western history. Cosmic disorder is a precursory and necessary stage for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the pattern of apocalyptic thought exists only within the framework of religious belief. Its fingerprint can also be found in secular revolutionary movements and in modern ideological worldviews. Marxism, for example, is based on the assumption that history is progressing toward a final end, after which there will be no more oppression, injustice or wars. The realization of the Marxist utopia sees extreme aggravation in the living conditions of the working class as a necessary condition for world revolution, and for the formation of a classless society that will bring about the end of history.
Fascism, and German fascism in particular, preserves a central place for apocalyptic patterns of thought. In Hitler’s Third Reich, whose followers adopted the Christian eschatological concept of the “Thousand Year Reich,” extensive use was made of the narrative of fall and redemption as a means to consolidate the Nazi movement’s ideological hold on the German public. The Nazi ideologues and propagandists were successful in evoking the deepest fears of their contemporaries, and in depicting Germany’s military defeat in World War I and the national nadir as a formative moment of illumination, resurrection and renewal.
As the Nazis conceived it, the catastrophe of the war marked the watershed – it was a rupture that exposed the subversive activity of the Jews, awakened the German people to recognize its inner strength and accelerated a process of national renewal. It was precisely the destruction and the mass killing of the Great War that made it possible to formulate a new worldview and philosophy of life that was based on recognition of the vital powers of the race and the organic essence of the people (the Volk). As such, the sacrifice of the war’s fallen was vested with sanctified validity.
The totalitarian movements thus secularized the apocalyptic pattern of thought and implanted it in their worldview. They offered their believers a utopian vision that was based not on divine redemption but on scientific progress, naturalism and the sovereignty of humanity. Their followers were driven by a sense of moral eclipse and existential dread, accompanied by a call to eradicate the old world and to build on its ruins a new, orderly world. The total war, in the Nazi case, or the total revolution, in the communist case, were perceived as a necessary stage to realize the secular utopia, and made it possible to normalize the most horrific crimes and sanctify every form of violence. The historical lesson is thus clear: Every attempt to establish the Kingdom of God on earth is destined to ignite the first of in the abode of man.
Here lies the danger in striving for a politics of “total solutions,” whether on the right or on the left. That form of politics entrenches a false picture of reality and paves the way for demagogues and populist false messiahs who are adept at exploiting social distress and anxiety by appealing to the urge for redemption and the human need for absoluteness.
Not only does political messianism cast on its leaders a sanctity of religious mission that is insusceptible to doubt; it also requires the marking of enemies (or political rivals) as foes that are delaying redemption, in the spirit of the Latin phrase, “Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor” (No devil, no redeemer). In this sense, the more powerful the messianic idea is, the greater the violence and the destruction it sows when the demand for absoluteness shatters on the rocks of reality; the height of the sublimity toward which it thrusts is matched only by the depth of the abyss into which it is liable to slide. For the more that reality declines to acquiesce to the absolutist demands of the advocates of political messianism, the greater the strength they wield to shape it in the image of their utopian visions; and the more untenable this becomes, the more they attribute their failure to an internal enemy and to the power of abstract conspiracies.
David Ben Gurion: “The Messiah has not yet come, and I do not long for the Messiah to come. The moment the Messiah will come, he will cease to be the Messiah”. Fritz Cohen / GPO
Between the absurd and the meaningful
It’s only natural for people to seek to inform their lives with meaning that transcends their temporary, ephemeral existence. It’s also natural that in periods of mourning and distress they should wish to console themselves and imbue their sacrifice and loss with cosmic meaning. Crisis and catastrophe can indeed serve as an opportunity for renewal, and there is also nothing intrinsically wrong with the longing for redemption or for the absolute that is innate in the human psyche. The danger lies in the attempt to transform redemption into a political program, and the ambition to bring the heavenly kingdom into being in this world. The demand for absolute justice always ends in injustice. Moreover, a cause that relies on unjust means can never be a just cause.
In a meeting with intellectuals and writers in October 1949, David Ben-Gurion said, “The Messiah has not yet come, and I do not long for the Messiah to come. The moment the Messiah will come, he will cease to be the Messiah. When you find the Messiah’s address in the phone book, he is no longer the Messiah. The greatness of the Messiah is that his address is unknown and it is impossible to get to him and we don’t know what kind of car he drives and whether he drives a car at all, or rides a donkey or flies on eagles’ wings. But the Messiah is needed – so that he will not come. Because the days of the Messiah are more important than the Messiah, and the Jewish people is living in the days of the Messiah, expects the days of the Messiah, believes in the days of the Messiah, and that is one of the cardinal reasons for the existence of the Jewish people.”
Those remarks can be taken at face value, but it’s desirable to understand them as a message that encapsulates universal human requirements: People need belief, vision and a guiding ideal, but as is the way with ideals, it’s certain that this too will never materialize but will remain on the utopian horizon toward which one must strive but to which one will never arrive. Humanity, thus, is fated to exist in the constant tension between want and fullness, between the absurdity and futility of life and our need for meaning, purpose and significance. That tension can be a millstone around our necks and enhance the attraction of political messianism in its diverse forms.
Accordingly, it’s a mistake to assume that the allure of messianism can be fought only with rational tools. Myth cannot be suppressed by reason, and the yearning for the absolute cannot be moderated by means of learned, logical arguments. It was Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, the philosopher who perhaps more than any other is associated with modern atheism and the “death of God,” who maintained that the death of God does not necessarily herald the death of faith, and that the rejection of religion and a consciousness of God’s absence do not mean that the craving for the absolute has ceased to exist.
On the contrary, it is precisely the death of God, precisely his nonexistence, that keeps alive more forcefully the longing for him, and spurs man to find substitutes. Hence Nietzsche’s famous cry: “Two thousand years have come and gone – and not a single new god!” The secular individual who has been orphaned of God is fated to give birth from within to new gods that will provide a response to one’s unfulfilled religious longing. God is dead, but his shadow continues to pursue humanity and to drive people to act in numberless forms and ways.
The denial of God’s shadow and of the unrequited longing of the human psyche for the absolute are the root of the blindness of secular culture in our time, and the source of its weakness in the light of the messianic sentiment. Under the guise of post-ideological pragmatism and economical rationalism, secular liberalism has completely forsaken the psycho-religious needs of the current generation in favor of material utilitarianism, narcissistic individualism and consumerist escapism, and has abandoned the possibility of bringing into being a life of a spiritual and cultural character capable of providing a response to the basic need for meaning and self-transcendence. Secular culture may perhaps allow freedom of choice (and that’s not a little), but in itself it does not offer another positive meta-narrative, guiding idea or existential meaning in an era of consumer and technological alienation. Into this vacuum political messianism has penetrated, as it offers an answer for spiritual longings and existential anxieties.
The formulators of state-oriented Zionism, head by Ben-Gurion, understood this well. They sought to harness the religious impulse to nation building and to the formation of a new Hebrew (Jewish) identity that draws on the messianic sources but does not attach itself to their religious content and instead secularizes it. In this way the messianic tension served Ben-Gurion to forge an ideal vision of a Jewish state that would be a moral paragon and a light unto the nations.
Is a return to the fold of Ben-Gurion-style Zionism the answer? Probably not. One thing, however, is certain: besides the urgent need to separate religion and state, and to anchor Israel’s secular-liberal character in a constitution, a deep transformation is also necessary in secular culture, in education, in artistic creation and in the intellectual-spiritual life. Because in order to do battle against the messianic myth, a counter-myth is needed, one that does not lie within the realms of religion and meta-earthly redemption, but in the imperfect world of humankind. It alone is capable of providing a substitute for the temptations of the diverse types of political messianism and of providing human beings with a horizon free of all supernatural, theistic, utopian or redemptive qualities.
How do you see my country? Dusky maidens in desert tents offering dates on golden plates? Algerian secret agent Mohammed Ibn Khaldun to Tom Quinn, Spooks, 2,Ep 2
How often have we heard the exclamation “it’s like something out of the Arabian Nights”? We’ve said it ourselves as we walked down the Suq al Hamadiyya in Old Damascus and al Wad and Daoud Street in Old Jerusalem, in an ersatz Bedouin tent-restaurant just down the road from Palmyra and a similar night out near Petra. It’s as if the local tourist industry folk expect us westerners to enjoy, nay, expect this kind of entertainment.
But whereas since the translation of The Arabian Nights, we have loved the tales, we have also taken from them a distorted impression of the Middle East, a pastiche of palm trees, minarets and camels like the illustrations of the old boxes of figs and of Fry’s Turkish Delight.
So, how did we get here?
From a historical European perspective, the East or Orient has long been perceived as an unknown, alien, and, therefore, alluring world, that has existed for centuries, even millennia. It’s spell persists to this day, enchanting, seducing, and seducing soldiers, adventurers, travelers, troublemakers, writers, artists, and musicians.
This enduring fascination with the East gave rise to the descriptor Orientalism. In art history, literature, and cultural studies it described the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world largely by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. Since the publication Palestinian America academic Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) much of academic discourse has begun to use the term to refer to the generally nurturing though patronizing Western attitude toward societies in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa.
But more on Orientalism and Edward Said later. First, we’ll take look at one of the most popular manifestations of western culture’s relationship with the East.
One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) is a collection of folk tales compiled in Arabic during medieval times in what is recognized as the Islamic Golden Age, a period of scientific, economic and cultural flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century. It known in English as The Arabian Nights – from the first English-language edition in the early eighteenth century entitled The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. Many European translations followed, but none more racy and picaresque that of English explorer, polymath and enfant terrible Richard Burton in 1885; it was an abridged version of this, purchased from a budget book store in King Street, Sydney, that I read the first time i got to meet Mademoiselle Scheherazade. The featured image is from that book’s dust cover.
It has been acknowledged that Burton’s gaudy and bawdy English bears little relation to the Arabic of the Nights, which tends to be plain, conversational, and even a little threadbare – in other words, the idiom of folk literature. Some would dismiss it as Orientalist camp. Others would say it was just what would be expected from the infamous translator of The Kama Sutra. His translation included virtually every tale he could find a manuscript for – as well as some that he made up, such as my personal favourite How Abu Hasan Broke Wind.
The stories were gathered over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across the Middle East and South Asia, and North Africa. They originated in ancient and medieval Arabic, Egyptian, Indian, Persian, and even Mesopotamian folklore and literature. Many were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the central story of Scheherazade are most likely drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, A Thousand Tales), which in turn contained Indian elements.
Charting the timeline, English scholar, author and Sufi adept Robert Irwin has written: “In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or ‘The Thousand Nights’. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the 9th or 10th century, this original core had Arab stories added to it—among them some tales about the CaliphHarun al-Rashid. Also, perhaps from the 10th century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation … Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period, yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book’s title”.
Sheherazade (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
The Thousand And One Arabian Nights has been so appropriated by our culture that it is a de facto member of our so-called Western Canon. It is the source of so many of our fairy tales and boy’s own adventures with its magic lamps and genies, giant birds and winged horses, flying carpets and gorgeous girls in rich silks and ethereal damask. In our pubescent days, did we not “dream of Jeannie”?
Harem pants and turbans, belly dancers and serpentine melodies, and a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” of vicarious naughtiness (itself a word of Indian origin) – an exotic, “orientalist” retro-zeitgeist that drew artists, poets, writers and composers to this inexhaustible source of narrative, inspiration and titillation. Recall, back in those thankfully long gone more repressed days, the risqué, soft porn imaginings of European artists, including the Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalists who also elided into similar fever dreams of Babylonian and Roman erotica.
Musicians too got in on the act. In 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered Entführung aus dem Serail, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Gioachino Rossini presented his L’italiana in Algerior An Italian Girl in Algiers in 1813. These lightweight comic operas featured many of the tropes that entered the cinematic lexicon in the twentieth century, and whilst musically endearing and entertaining, their Orient was a mix of slapstick and exotic, and by today’s standards, condescending in their portrayal of lascivious sultans and their flunkies so easily outwitted by occidental heroes and heroines. Much grander and imposing is Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s splendid Scheherazade suite, otherwise known as “the Sultan is coming”. There’s an orchestral rendering of this masterpiece below.
The stories rattle through English pantomimes, Hollywood fantasias, Walt Disney, and even the avant-garde Pier Paulo Pasolini: Alāʼu d-Dīn and Sindibādu l-Bahriyy (these were indeed their original names), Ali Baba and those bandits in huge pots – the inspiration and the storylines for all those boy gets girl cosplay, rom-com, adventure and fantasy films like The Thief of Baghdad and Prince of Persia, and musicals like Kismet – and many more besides, most of them ordinary and many, bad (go Google!). Baubles, bangles and beads indeed (see, below, the Clio from the film). It was a pleasant, picturesque oriental world, the Middle East as Hollywood imagined it before it hit the headlines with its oil, its tyrants, and it internecine wars, a world sans Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Da’ish and the Al Quds Brigade.
To illustrate the potential for satire, smut and downright silliness – a veritable “Carry on In The Casbah”. The nearest the famous British comedy series came to anything like this was the one film that didn’t have “Carry on” in its title: Follow That Camel in 1967. Though based on the French Foreign Legion adventures of Beau Geste, it doesn’t waste time getting to the suq and, predictably, the generic harem and the usual, well, carry on. Apropos this, there’s a clip below from the BBC production of British playwright Denis Potter’s excellent faux-musical Lipstick on Your Collar, set during the Suez Crisis of 1956, replete with orientalist imaginings and straight-out smut.
The Blue Sultana by Léon Bakst
The spell of the orient also lured adventurers and chancers to the canyons and the castles, the deserts and the oases of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan and India. And, I have to declare, yours truly – not without incident but no match for derring-do of Brits who went before. Like Irwin himself, I was of a generation with no more deserts to conquer, no fabled cities to administer. See Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller.
It’s a part of the world that has captivated much of my intellectual life for I too like many others before me was lured by the spell of the Orient.
I wrote before, in East, “I was drawn to the Middle East in another age, when it was the land of myth and magic, of dreamers and adventurers, of quixotic tilters at windmills, of pioneers who would make the deserts bloom, of dissemblers and deceivers bearing false promises. The ancient lands of the bible, the fabled realm of A Thousand and One Nights, and the restless quests of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, and TE Lawrence. The pulp fiction fantasies of Frank Herbert, James Michener and Leon Uris, and the celluloid myths of Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Paul Newman”.
Middle East folk have taken to the stories too, and as in the West, it has inspired books, poems, plays and movies. Lebanese diva Fairuz played Scheherazade in a Beiruti musical back in the seventies, and Umm Kulthum, dead nearly five decades and still indisputably the Arab world’s most renowned and beloved singer, sang about the lass for forty minutes, which was not unusual for her, without saying too much about the story. There is a statue of Scheherazade and the sultan on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad.
And yet, the whole glittering, fairytale artifice was built upon dubious foundations of misogyny and murder.
Scrumptious Scheherazade’s “cunning plan” was nothing more or less than that of distracting Shahriya, a randy psychopath of a sultan, from dispatching her (and her sister) – as he had done with his many short-lived exes. The premise is that his former missus cheated on him with a cavalcade of lovers, including slaves and persons of colour. To use the words of an old song by latter day philosopher Hal David and his sidekick Burt Bacharach,, he resolved that he was “never gonna love again”. And no doubt, in true oriental fashion, he was fearful of rival claimants and suspicious of all, including his paramours conspiring against him. Yet, he nonetheless constantly needs to get his end in. So whomsoever he selects to join him in his boudoir – and no one says no to the sultan – gets the chop the morning after. When Schezza gets the royal nod, she is determined not to go the way of her predecessors, and to preserve the lives of future bedmates. Accordingly, she keeps his lascivious lordship so distracted with her storytelling that he will refrain from slayage because he wants to hear how her tale ends. And yes, indeed, he forswears his murderous ways and settles into connubial bliss.
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat
Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West
The term Orientalism gained its modern definition through the writing of the Palestinian academic and cultural critic Edward Said, especially his famous book Orientalism, published in 1978, which sparked controversy among scholars of Oriental studies, philosophy, and literature. It was a critique of cultural perceptions of how the Western world – primarily the white and Judeo-Christian world – perceives the East – or specifically lands and cultures that lie outside the borders of southern and southwestern Europe.
From a historical European perspective, the East has long been perceived as an unknown, alien, and, therefore, alluring world, that has existed for centuries, even millennia. The Greeks and Romans longed for the silk and spices of the East. To satisfy our human craving for the good things of life, busy trade routes stretched from China and Java to present-day Russia, Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles.
The term orient is derived from Latin, oriens meaning “east” (literally “sunrise”, from aurior, rising, and its geographical use of the word “rising” to refer to the east, where the sun rises). The term Levant is in turn derived from Old French, and Italian in origin, to refer to the lands of the rising sun – specifically the historical lands of Syria (in Roman times, specifically’ that included the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey. In its broad historical sense, it came to include Greece, the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, modern Egypt and North Africa. And with the emergence of European empires in the east, Persia, Afghanistan, India, China, and the East Indies.
Along with east, west, or west, derived, again, from Old French, via Latin, Occidentem, west, or “sky where the sun goes down”, as in occido, to go down or set, was originally synonymous with Christianity which in the Middle Ages were the states that followed the Roman Catholic faith and which for various centuries considered themselves superior to the Eastern Orthodox faith of the Byzantine Empire and the lands of Russia.
The Levant was widely used after the fifteenth century. During the two hundred years of the Crusades, during which the French knights and their retinue took control, the lands that became the crusader kingdoms were referred to as Outremer, meaning the lands beyond the sea. And through the Crusades, the love affair of Christian Europe with the East began. And it was to continue to this day, enchanting, seducing, and seducing soldiers, adventurers, travelers, troublemakers, writers, artists, and musicians.
Edward Said and Orientalism
Original cover art of Orientalism, Jean Leon Gerome’s Le charmeur de serpents, 1870
Edward Wadih Said Edward Wadih Said (November 1935 – September 24, 2003) was a Professor of Literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of Postcolonial Studies. A Palestinian-American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States through his father, a US Army veteran.
Educated in British and American schools, Said applied his pedagogical and cultural perspective to highlight the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East.
As a public intellectual Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Islamic regimes that work against the national interests of their people. He called for the establishment of a Palestinian state to guarantee equal political and human rights for Palestinians in Israel, including the right to return to the homeland.
Orientalism in art history, literature, and cultural studies is the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world. These drawings are usually made by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. In particular, Orientalist painting, more specifically depicting the ‘Middle East’, was one of the many disciplines of academic art in the nineteenth century, and the literature of Western countries showed a similar interest in Eastern themes.
Since the publication of Orientalism, much of academic discourse has begun to use the term “Orientalism” to refer to the generally nurturing Western attitude toward societies in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. In Said’s analysis, the West classifies these societies as static and undeveloped, thus creating a vision of Eastern culture that can be studied, photographed, and reproduced in the service of imperial power. Implicit in this is the idea that Western society is sophisticated, rational, flexible, and superior, Said writes.
His book redefines the term Orientalism to describe the Western tradition – academic and artistic – of biased interpretations of the Eastern world shaped by the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Said said that Orientalism as “the idea of representation is a theoretical idea: the Orient is a stage in which the whole of the Orient is confined” to make the Eastern world “less intimidating to the West.” And that the developed world, and the West in the first place, is the cause of colonialism, and that Western countries and their empires arose by exploiting backward countries and extracting wealth and labor from one country to another. Academically, the book has become a foundational text for postcolonial cultural studies.
While Said’s analysis relates to Orientalism in European literature, especially French literature, the historical view identified and described can also be applied to representations of the Orient in other art forms, including visual art – most notably in Orientalist painting, which was popular among artists And with galleries during the nineteenth century, which modern scholars see as depicting myth and fantasy that has little connection with reality, and also in other art forms that come like music and film.
Such representations drew criticism as much as before and after World War II, they perpetuated the imagined trend, giving generations of Westerners a distorted impression of the Middle East adorned with palm trees, minarets, and camels like illustrations of old chests of figs and boxes of Turkish delight and serpentine melodies. Such images directly connected in Western minds with the trappings of orientalists.
Fun, romantic and fascinating, this Middle East as imagined by artists and Hollywood – to quote from above, “harem pants and turbans, belly dancers and serpentine melodies, and a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” of vicarious naughtiness (itself a word of Indian origin) an exotic, “orientalist” retro- zeitgeist that drew artists, poets, writers and composers to this inexhaustible source of narrative, inspiration and titillation”.
Inevitably, a backlash arose in the developing world, both in the Islamic world, and in Asian and African countries in general, and the term Western is now often used to refer to the negative views of the Western world found in Eastern societies, and is based on the nationalism that spread as a response to colonialism. Furthermore, Edward Said himself has been accused of Westernizing the West in his critique of Orientalism. He is guilty of falsely describing the West in the same way that Western scholars are accused of falsely describing the East. Said is said to have encouraged a homogenous picture of the West, which no longer consisted not only of Europe, but also of the United States, Canada and Australia which became more culturally influential over the years.
[This profile of Edward Said and Orientalistism is drawn largely from Wikipedia. For an interesting account of Robert Irwin’s take down of Said’s opus, see The man who defeated Orientalism The man who defended Orientalism]
Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favourite poets. In 1969, a Christian friend gave me a Penguin Modern Poets edition of his poems. Here are three sublime spiritual pieces from this treasured book, beautifully translated by JB Leishman. No other translations are as lovely as his.
I would always recall these poems when visiting the Holy Land, and since my very first visit in 1971, I have associated them particularly with the Old City of Jerusalem. I took the photographs accompanying this piece in that exquisite place.
The Olive Garden
And still he climbed, and through the grey leaves thrust,
quite grey and lost in the grey olive lands,
and laid his burning forehead full of dust
deep in the dustiness of burning hands.
After all, this.
And this, this, then was the end
Now I’m to go, while I am going blind,
and, oh, why wilt Thou now have me still contend
Thou art, whom I myself no longer find.
No more I find thee. In myself no tone
of Thee; nor in the rest; nor in this stone.
I can find Thee no more. I am alone.
I am alone with all that human fate
I undertook through Thee to mitigate,
Thou who art not. Oh, shame too consummate…
An angel came, those afterwards relate.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night,
and turned the leaves trees indifferently,
and the disciples stirred uneasily.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night.
The night that came requires no specifying;
just so a hundred nights and nights go by,
while dogs are sleeping and while stones are lying –
just any melancholy night that, sighing,
lingers till morning mount the sky.
For Angels never never come to such men’s prayers
nor nights for them mix glory with their gloom,
Forsakenness is the self-loser’s doom
and such are absent from their fathers cares
and disincluded from their mothers womb.
The Spectator
I watched the storms in the tree above:
after days of mild decaying
my windows shrink from there assaying,
and the things I hear the distant saying,
without a friend I find dismaying,
without a sister I cannot love.
There goes the storm to urge and alter,
through forest trees and through time’s tree;
and nothing seems to age or falter:
the landscape like an open psalter,
speaks gravely of eternity.
How small the strife that’s occupied us,
how great is all that strives within us!
We might, if, like the things inside us,
we let the great storm over-ride us grow
spacious and anonymous.
We conquer littleness, obtaining
success that only makes a small,
while unconstrained and unconstraining,
The permanent alludes us all:
that angel who, through loath, yet lingers
to wrestle with mortality,
and, when opponents’ sinews settle
in strife and stretch themselves to metal,
can feel it move beneath his fingers
like strings in some deep melody.
The challenger who failed to stand
that trial so constantly rejected
goes forth upright and resurrected
and great from that hard, forming hand
that clasped about him and completed.
Conquests no longer fascinate.
His growth consists in being defeated
by something ever-grandlier great.
The Annunciation
(Words of the Angel)
You are not nearer God then we;
he’s far from everyone .
And yet, your hands most wonderfully
Reveal his benison.
From woman’s sleeve none ever grew
so ripe, so shimmeringly:
I am the day, I am the dew,
you, Lady, are the tree.
Pardon, now my long journey’s done,
I had forgot to say
what he who sat as in the sun,
grand in his gold array ,
told me to tell you, pensive one
(space has bewildered me)
I am the start of what’s begun,
you, Lady, are the tree.
I spread my wings and wide and rose,
the space around grew less;
your little house quite overflows
with my abundant dress.
But still you keep your solitude
And hardly notice me:
I’m but a breeze within the wood,
you, Lady, are the tree.
The angels tremble in their choir,
grow pale, and separate:
never were longing and desire
so vague and yet, so great.
Something perhaps is going to be
that you perceived in dream.
Hail to you! for my soul can see
that you are ripe and teem.
You lofty gate, that any day
may open for our good:
Your ear my longing songs assay
My word – I know now – lost its way
in you as in a wood.
And thus your last dream was designed
to be fulfilled by me.
God looked at me: he made me blind…
You, Lady, are the tree.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief.
الشاعر الألماني راينر ماريا ريلكه هو أحد المفضلين لدي .. هذان اثنان من أعماله الروحية السامية ، تمت ترجمتها بشكل جميل من قبل ج ب ليشمان في أول إصدار لي من سلسلة بنجوين الشعراء المعاصري. لا توجد ترجمات أخرى جميلة مثل ترجماته.
حديقة الزيتون
وما زال يتسلق ، ومن خلال الأوراق الرمادية ،
رمادية تمامًا وفقدت في أراضي الزيتون الرمادية ،
ووضع جبهته المشتعلة مملوءة بالتراب
في أعماق غبار الأيدي المحترقة.
بعد كل هذا.
وهذه كانت النهاية
الآن سأذهب ، بينما أنا أعمى ،
و ، أوه ، لماذا تريد الآن أن أجادلني
أنت الذي لم أعد أجده بنفسي.
لا أجدك بعد الآن. في نفسي لا لهجة
منك. ولا في البقية. ولا في هذا الحجر.
لا يمكنني العثور عليك أكثر. انا وحيد.
أنا وحدي مع كل هذا المصير البشري
لقد تعهدت من خلالك بالتخفيف ،
أنت الذي ليس كذلك. أوه ، العار بارع جدا …
جاء ملاك ، فيما بعد.
لماذا ملاك؟ أوه ، جاء الليل ،
وقلبت أوراق الأشجار بلا مبالاة ،
وكان التلاميذ يتقلبون بقلق.
لماذا ملاك؟ أوه ، جاء الليل.
الليلة التي جاءت لا تحتاج إلى تحديد ؛
فقط حتى تمر مائة ليلة وليلة ،
بينما الكلاب نائمة وحجارة الكذب –
فقط أي ليلة حزينة ، تنهد ،
باقية حتى الصباح جبل السماء.
لأن الملائكة لا يأتون أبدًا إلى صلاة مثل هؤلاء الرجال
ولا تخلط الليالي لهم المجد بكآبتهم ،
التهور هو عذاب الخاسر
ومثل هؤلاء غائبون عن اهتمامات آبائهم
واستثنوا من رحم أمهاتهم.
المشاهد
شاهدت العواصف في الشجرة أعلاه:
بعد أيام من التحلل الخفيف
تتقلص نوافذي من هناك ،
والأشياء التي أسمعها تقول من بعيد ،
بدون صديق أجده مخيفًا ،
بدون أخت لا أستطيع أن أحب.
هناك تذهب العاصفة للحث والتغيير ،
من خلال أشجار الغابات وعبر شجرة الزمن ؛
ولا شيء يبدو أنه يتقدم في العمر أو يتعثر:
المناظر الطبيعية مثل سفر المزامير المفتوح ،
يتحدث بجدية عن الخلود.
كم هو صغير الفتن الذي شغلنا ،
ما أعظم كل ما يجتهد فينا!
قد نحب الأشياء التي بداخلنا ،
تركنا العاصفة العظيمة تطوف بنا تنمو
فسيحة ومجهولة.
نحن نتغلب على الصغر ، ونكتسب
النجاح الذي يصنع فقط القليل ،
بينما غير مقيد وغير مقيد ،
الدائم يلمح لنا جميعًا:
ذلك الملاك الذي ، من خلال الكراهية ، باقٍ
تتصارع مع الموت ،
وعندما تستقر أعصاب الخصوم
في الفتنة وتمتد إلى المعدن ،
يمكن أن يشعر أنه يتحرك تحت أصابعه
مثل الأوتار في بعض اللحن العميق.
المتحدي الذي فشل في الوقوف
تلك المحاكمة حتى رفضت باستمرار
يذهب منتصبا ويقوم
وعظيم من تلك اليد الصلبة المشكّلة
التي تشبثت عنه وانتهت.
الفتوحات لم تعد ساحرة.
نموه يتمثل في الهزيمة
بشيء أعظم من أي وقت مضى.
البشارة
(كلمات الملاك)
لستم قريبين من الله منا نحن.
إنه بعيد عن الجميع.
ومع ذلك ، يديك بشكل رائع
تكشف له بنيسون.
من كم المرأة لم ينمو أي شيء
ناضجة جدًا ، ومتألقة جدًا:
انا اليوم انا الندى
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
عفوا ، الآن انتهت رحلتي الطويلة ،
لقد نسيت أن أقول
ما هو الذي جلس في الشمس ،
كبير في مجموعته الذهبية ،
أخبرني أن أخبرك ، متأملًا
(الفضاء حيرني)
أنا بداية ما بدأ ،
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
بددت أجنحتي واسعة وردية ،
نمت المساحة المحيطة أقل ؛
بيتك الصغير يفيض تمامًا
مع ثوبي الوفير.
لكن ما زلت تحافظ على وحدتك
وبالكاد تلاحظني:
أنا مجرد نسيم داخل الغابة ،
أنتِ يا سيدتي الشجرة.
ترتجف الملائكة في كورالهم ،
تصبح شاحبة ومنفصلة:
لم يكن هناك شوق ورغبة
غامضة جدًا لكنها رائعة جدًا.
ربما شيء ما سيكون
التي تراها في الحلم.
تحية لك! لروحي تستطيع أن ترى
أنك ناضج ومزدحم.
أنت بوابة عالية ، في أي يوم
قد تفتح لمصلحتنا:
أذنك مقايسة أغاني الحنين
كلمتي – أعرف الآن – ضلت طريقها
فيك كما في الخشب.
وهكذا تم تصميم حلمك الأخير
ليحققها لي.
نظر إليّ الله: جعلني أعمى …
أنتِ يا سيدة الشجرة.
Thursday July 15, 1948, began as another ordinary day for the Ali family in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya in the Lower Galilee. It was during Ramadan and Umm Taha was busy preparing mulukhiyah for the iftar meal to break the daily fast at sundown. The eldest son, Taha – who was also the family breadwinner – returned after a busy day at the shop. After finishing his meal, he washed his hands and went out to the field to graze two goats he had recently bought. Taha found them to be restless, but couldn’t understand their strange behavior. Suddenly, he heard a strange whirring sound. This sound intensified and then he saw two planes approaching his village. I heard a terrifying boom. I fell to the ground, my knees shaking. Then another boom, and another boom,” he would later recall. Then he heard wailing and saw smoke in the distance, and parents and children scattering in terror. He left the goats and ran toward home to find his family, but found no one there.
Sheren Falah Saab, Haaretz
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya in the Galilee, then in the British Mandate of Palestine, and now, northern Israel. He fled to Lebanon with his family after their village came under heavy bombardment during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military campaign that captured the Lower Galilee),
They were among more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine‘s Arab population – who from their homes or were expelled by Jewish militias and, later, the Israeli army.
We did not weep when we were leaving – for we had neither time nor tears and there was no farewell. We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting so where would our weeping have come from?”
Unlike most who fled, he returned the following year – to Nazareth, where he lived until his death in 2011. During the 1950s and 1960s, he sold religious souvenirs to pilgrims and tourists during the day to Christian pilgrims, and studied poetry at night. Self-taught, through his readings of classical Arabic literature, including Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar and adored classical Arabic poetry. He read American fiction, and English poetry in translation. He began his poetry career in his forties. His shop in Nazareth, near the Church of the Annunciation, became a meeting place for local and visiting writers. his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop.
In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era. “My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told his biographer. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish, the most celebrated of Palestinian poets, and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.
The Saffuriya of his youth and the political and social upheavals he endured served as inspiration poetry and fiction that is grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller’s vivid imagination.
“Taha Muhammad Ali writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humor and an unflinching, at times painfully honest approach; his poetry’s apparent simplicity and homespun truths conceal the subtle grafting of classical Arabic onto colloquial forms of expression. In Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Europe and in America, audiences have been powerfully moved his poems of political complexity and humanity. He has published several collections of poetry and is also a short story writer.
In a direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, He combines the personal and political as he details both village life and the upheaval of conflict. Comparing Muhammad Ali to his contemporaries, John Palattella commented in a review in The Nation: “Whereas Darwish and al-Qasim, like most Palestinian poets, have favoured the elevated and ornate rhetoric of fus’ha, or classical Arabic, Muhammad Ali writes non-metrical, unrhymed poems that blend classical fus’ha with colloquial Arabic’.”
Amongst contemporary Palestinian poets, Taha was an atypical. His aversion to performing poems that referred to intifada and resistance raised numerous questions in the hothouse atmosphere Israeli and Palestinian politics and conflict. When asked his opinion on what he called “placard like-poetry”, he declared: “The poetry of the stones is fleeting, and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”
His collections in English include Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (2000) and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006), both translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. He traveled to read his work in Europe and the United States, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In 2009, the writer Adina Hoffman published a biography, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which won the 2010 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Meeting at an airport
I made my first acquaintance with the poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali with a poem about a chance meeting at an airport. Aware of his background, and the tumultuous times he lived through, it spoke to me on many levels.
In common with much contemporary Palestinian poetry, it portrays thepain of separation and of leaving home – and of exile. It recounts a chance meeting four decades after an event which we are to assume is al Nakba.
Two friends are taking their customary walk to a village spring. The language suggests that they are more than friends – he recalls how is his companion surprises with him questions that send his blood rushing. He answers and she laughs – her laughter startles the starlings into flight,
They part or are parted – we do not know which – and do not see each other again until forty years later when they just chance to bump into each other at a foreign airport in what we assume from the Arabic title of the poem, liqa’ fi matar mahayid , is a “neutral” or “friendly” airport. Are they just travelers or is his old friend an exile? Again we are not told – although Taha did not leave what became Israel, living in Nazareth all his life, so we assume it was the latter.
He is absolutely shocked to encounter his old friend. “Ya lalmuhal min al muhali!” he exclaims, using the a high Arabic idiom equivalent to “Oh my god!
“ or “wow!” He doesn’t think she recognizes him – but it is not so. She asks the very same questions she asked all those years ago. Again his blood rushes. He gives the very same answer. But this time, she does not laugh – instead, she weeps, and there no birds to sing, but invisible, heartbroken doves.
And so, two people meet at last and harbour the same feelings for each other as the first time they met long, long ago. But in life as in art, reconnecting with a loved one does not just bring joy – it can also bring sorrow and regret. It is a timeless theme – think Rick and Lisa reunited unexpectedly and ultimately temporarily in the “gin joint” in Casablanca.
I could go out on a limb and suggest that the lost love encountered at the airport could also be construed as a metaphor for the lost Palestine.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz provides some further insight into the poem:
“He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.
On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as, his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.
We were not awake, and we did not fall asleep
on the night we left, that night was not a night for us
No fire was lit, no moon rose
He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”
Meeting at an Airport follows, in English and in Arabic, together with a selection of Taha Muhammed Ali’s poems – all translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin
Arab poets and exile
A million spaces in the earth to fill, here’s a generation waiting still – we’ve got year after year to kill, but there’s no going home. Steve Knightley, Exile
Historical and social memory, and indeed, remembrance and commemoration, and their opposites, forgetfulness and letting go, are intrinsic to our human story … For the exile, the refugee, the involuntary migrant, theirs’ is a yearning, a longing, an absence of belonging – an existential homelessness and rootlessness, that is almost like a phantom limb. It is a bereavement, a loss, a spiritual and cultural death that could qualifies for descriptors drawn from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief: (Shock and disbelief), denial, anger, bargaining, depression, (testing) and acceptance.
One way the refugee can assuage his or her anguish is through writing. Chicago librarian and writer Leslie Williams notes: “The literature of exile encompasses bitter, impassioned indictments of unjust, inhumane regimes, but also includes wrenching melancholy for lost homes, lost families, and a lost sense of belonging. The pervasive feeling of rootlessness, of never being quite at home echoes across centuries of exile writing” (read here her The Literature of Exile).
See also, No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2)
You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”
And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.
. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .
And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”
And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.
From So What New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005
لقاء في مطار محايد
طه محمد علي
سألتني
وكنا من ضُحى النبعِ
مرة
عائديْْنْ
‘ماذا تكره
ومن تُحِب؟
سؤآلٌ
عُمرُه الآن عقودٌ أربعةْ
يا للْجواب من السؤالْ
وجوابٌ
عُمرُه عُمرُ رحيلك
يا لَلْسؤآلِ من الجوابْ
واليومَ
يا للْمُحالْ
ها نحن في مطارٍ مُحايِِدْ
على شفا صُدفةٍ
نَلتَقي
وّيحيْ…؟
نلتقي…؟
وها أنتِ
تُعيدين السؤالْ؟
يا لَلْمُحالِ من المُحالِْ
عَرَفْتُكِ
ولم تعرفيني
‘أهذا أنتَ؟
ولم تُصَدِّقي
وفجأة
انفجرتِ تسألين
‘إن كنتَ أنتَ أنتَ
فماذا تكره
ومن تُحبْ؟
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
Poetry hides
somewhere
behind the night of words
behind the clouds of hearing,
across the dark of sight,
and beyond the dusk of music
that’s hidden and revealed.
But where is it concealed?
And how could I
possibly know
when I am
barely able,
by the light of day,
to find my pencil?
from SO WHAT New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, Copper Canyon Press, 2006,
Empty Words
Ah, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
I’ve protected you
from dampness and rodents
and entrusted you with
my sadness and fear,
and my dreams—
though in exchange I’ve gotten from you
only disobedience and betrayal…
For otherwise where are the words
that would have me saying:
If only I were a rock on a hill…
unable to see or hear,
be sad or suffer!
And where is the passage
whose tenor is this:
I wish I could be
a rock on a hill
which the young men
from Hebron explode
and offer as a gift to Jerusalem’s children,
ammunition for their palms and slings!
And where is the passage
in which I wanted
to be a rock on a hill
gazing. out from on high
hundreds of years from now
over hordes ,.
of masked liberators!
And where is what belongs
to my dream of being
a rock on a hill
along the Carmel—
where I call on the source of my sadness,
gazing out over the waves
and thinking of her
to whom I bade
farewell at the harbor pier
in Haifa forty years ago
and still…
I await her return
one evening
with the doves of the sea.
Is it fair, little notebook,
yellow as a spike of wheat
and still as a face,
that you conceal
what you cancel and erase,
simply because it consists of empty words—
which frighten no enemy
and offer no hope to a friend?
From Never Mind – Twenty Poems and a Story,
Twigs
Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
Abd al Hadi Fights a Superpower
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn’t cut down a single tree,
didn’t slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn’t raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”
Nevertheless—
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His God-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
The Palestinian poet who never lamented the occupied land
The play ‘Taha’ offers a glimpse into the life of a poet who eschewed politics, preferring to write about personal pain and lost masculinity
The late poet Taha Muhammad Ali. Nina Subin
Thursday July 15, 1948, began as another ordinary day for the Ali family in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya in the Lower Galilee. It was during Ramadan and Umm Taha was busy preparing mulukhiyah for the iftar meal to break the daily fast at sundown.
The eldest son, Taha – who was also the family breadwinner – returned after a busy day at the shop. After finishing his meal, he washed his hands and went out to the field to graze two goats he had recently bought. Taha found them to be restless, but couldn’t understand their strange behavior. Suddenly, he heard a strange whirring sound. This sound intensified and then he saw two planes approaching his village.
“I heard a terrifying boom. I fell to the ground, my knees shaking. Then another boom, and another boom,” he would later recall. Then he heard wailing and saw smoke in the distance, and parents and children scattering in terror. He left the goats and ran toward home to find his family, but found no one there.
The story of Taha, from an eponymous play that was recently published in Hebrew (as part of the Maktoob project that translates Arabic literature into Hebrew), is based on the life of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who died in 2011 at age 80.
The village of Saffuriyya in the lower Galilee in 1948. נדב מן, ביתמונה. מ?
Amer Hlehel, the actor and playwright who wrote the play, takes the reader on a reflective journey through the poet’s personal life: from his escape from Saffuriyya as a teenager in 1948 following the occupation of the village, through his adaptation to life in a Lebanese refugee camp, to his return to Israel, which was fraught with dangers.
The play was first produced in 2014 and performed in Arabic at the Al-Midan Theater in Haifa. It was subsequently staged in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah, and was well-received by Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. In the play, Hlehel incorporates quotes from things Ali said in interviews and in his meetings with him, as well as excerpts from his poetry.
Writing about leaving their Galilee village, Ali writes: “We did not weep / when we were leaving – for we had neither / time nor tears / and there was no farewell. / We did not know / at the moment of parting / that it was a parting / so where would our weeping / have come from?”
In the play, just as in real life, Ali does not manage to overcome the personal pain, but confronts it by writing poetry. He does not weep for the stones of the house that were destroyed, nor for the land that was occupied, but for the love that he lost and the life that ceased to exist.
Taha Muhammad Ali. ‘He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain. Alex Levac
Taha Muhammad Ali was born in Saffuriyya in 1931. At age 10, he stopped his formal education in order to help his father support the family. Later, he opened a grocery store in the village, as described by Hlehel in the play: “I opened the diwan [central room] in our house, which overlooked the main road. I filled the shelves with cigarettes and chocolate and halvah and chewing gum and pens, and the crown jewel was a block of ice inside a bowl with bottles of orange-, apple- and lemon-flavored soda.”
Despite ending his formal studies, Ali continued to be interested in reading and writing. He was self-taught and learned the Quran and Arabic grammar thanks to his neighbor, il-Hajj Taher. “He had a shelf of books and called it a library: the people of the village would read and return them,” he recounted in an interview with Adina Hoffman, who wrote the biography of Ali’s life, “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.”
It was through Taher’s books that Ali learned about the poets of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties (between the seventh and eighth centuries, and eighth and 13th centuries, respectively), and fell in love with classical Arabic poetry.
The sacrifices Ali made on behalf of his family reveal a generous and reserved personality. He was in love with his cousin Amira, who would later become a central figure in his poems. He wanted to ask for her hand in marriage, but decided to wait until he was financially stable and had the dowry to offer her family.
Dr. Daniel Behar. ‘Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry.’runo Charbit/The Hebrew Universe
On that fateful night when Saffuriyya was bombed as part of Operation Dekel (the 10-day Israeli military operation that captured the Lower Galilee), his hopes of marrying Amira were shattered. He continued to carry her in his heart after his family fled to Lebanon, and he got to meet her again in the refugee camp. However, after a year, Ali’s father decided to try his luck and returned to Israel with his children. Thus, Ali’s love for Amira was buried on the day the family left the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.
In an interview with Hoffman, Ali described that moment as really tough. He immortalized this moment in a poem that is quoted in the play: “We were not awake, and we did not fall asleep / on the night we left, that night was not a night for us / No fire was lit, no moon rose.”
“Taha Muhammad Ali dedicates space to personal sadness in his poetry,”says Daniel Behar, a lecturer in modern Arabic literature at the Hebrew University who translated Ali’s poems for the play. He stresses that Ali’s poems distance themselves from performative-collective lamentation. “He is not crying over the ruins. Rather, he writes about parting from his beloved Amira. There’s room for sorrow over lives that were cut short, but he always roots it in the personal, without assimilating it into the collective pain.”
According to Behar, Ali decided to write in such a personal style as he was not writing with a specific audience in mind.
Ali confirmed these observations while speaking with Hoffman, when he said he would throw his writing “in the drawer and forget about it.” He said he had never thought of becoming a poet or publishing his poems, even though he was interested in culture and literature. After his return from Lebanon in the fall of 1949, his family settled in Nazareth and he opened a souvenir shop. In fact, his door was always open to intellectuals and cultural figures of that era.
‘As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,’ says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play ‘Taha.Noa Elhannan
“My shop turned into a literary salon,” he told Hoffman. Prominent intellectuals and authors like Rashid Hussein, Emile Habiby and Hanna Abu Hanna visited him regularly. He mentioned that even Mahmoud Darwish and Samih Al-Qasim, who were high school students at the time, visited him and conversed with him about current events.
But, adds Behar, Ali’s poetry was different from the works of well-known Palestinian poets like Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Al-Qasim, who often focused on Palestinian heroism. “Taha Muhammad Ali had a talent to separate himself from the bitterness and political performance that surrounded Palestinian poetry,” he notes. According to Behar, “his writing was intended to fill the silence of the archive for marginalized forms of life and nameless experiences, and whose voices were absent from written history.”
In 1983, Ali published his first collection of poems, “The Fourth Qasida [ode] and Ten More Poems.” This happened only after his friends urged him to publish his work. He later published a collection of stories, “Fooling the Killers” (1989), and three more collections of poetry: “Fire in the Convent Garden” (1992), “God, Caliph and the Boy with Colorful Butterflies” (2002) and “No More” (2005). A collection of his poems was published in Hebrew in 2006, translated by the author and poet Anton Shammas (published by Andalus).
The cover of Hebrew translation of the play ‘Taha.Maktub / Fares Shehada
“As I read his poems, I felt it was important for the Hebrew audience to get to know him,” says Guy Elhanan, a theater director, actor and translator of the play “Taha.”
One of the key motifs in Ali’s poetry was his native village. “Saffuriyya was dear to his heart and his love for it stood out in all his poems,” says Behar. Taha’s brother, Amin Muhammad Ali, said in an interview with the Al-Raed channel in 2016 that “the village never left him.” He added that his brother documented the small and large details in Saffuriyya throughout his life – in conversations with people, in his poetry, both day and night. The Palestinian poet Naji Daher from Nazareth added in an interview with the same Arab channel that “Ali carried Saffuriyya in his heart everywhere, and he also succeeded in conveying it to the world at large.”
The poem “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” written by Ali in 1973 and published in Hebrew in 2006, embodies his approach as a poet. He does not write about Palestinian heroes seeking revenge against the Jews, nor does he try to conceal the sense of defeat and lost masculinity. In the poem, he portrays the character of the village fool Abd el-Hadi as an illiterate person who does not even know what The New York Times is. Between the lines, Ali reveals parts of himself, drawing the reader closer to him. “You can see aspects of Taha Muhammad Ali in the character of Abd el-Hadi – he has a joy and love of life that punctures the sadness and gives value to human love,” says Behar.
Ali concludes the poem with a description of Abd el-Hadi’s forgiving behavior: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury / about his enemies my client knows not a thing / And I can assure you / were he to encounter the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Enterprise / he’d serve them eggs sunny-side up / and labneh fresh from the bag.”
According to Behar, in this poem (and others), Ali plays with words and sounds that were not customary in Palestinian poetry, offering sharp transitions between dialect and a high literary language.
In 2007, in an interview with the U.S. television program “PBS NewsHour,” Ali talked about his attempts to write poetry in the years after he left school. “This went together, reading and trying to write,” he said. “You have to take the pen and to take a paper, and to be ready to wait for it – otherwise it will come and you are not there. As a writer, you have to train yourself to write. Write anything, but everyday.”
Eight months after the outbreak of the second intifada at the start of the 2000s, Ali was published in London. He and Al-Qasim gave poetry readings to audiences in the British capital. Al-Qasim read his “Poem of the Intifada,” an indictment of those he called “Occupiers Who Do Not Read.” Ali, on the other hand, read distinctly different poems. “None of the poems he read contained a single direct reference to the uprising, to the ‘struggle,’ to children or to stones,” Hoffman wrote in her book.
His aversion to performing poems that referred to the intifada raised numerous questions. Hoffman noted in her book that he was indeed asked his opinion on what she called “placard like poetry.”
“The poetry of the stones is fleeting,” he declared, “and the true poetry that lasts is that which depicts what’s behind the stones and what’s behind the intifada, which shows life brimming with feeling and sensation and pain.”
“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.
In That Howling Infinite 