Preface to the Portuguese Translation of "Empire and Arab Indology"

Wadi' al-Bustani (1888–1954). Frontispiece to Al-Mahabharata: al-Malhama al-Hinduwiyya (Beirut, 1952).

Thanks to the support of the Institute for Contemporary History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, my Modern Intellectual History article “Empire and Arab Indology” will be published soon in Portuguese translation as part of the “Trânsitos” series. The article deals principally with the past, with the life and work of Wadi’ al-Bustani (1888 -1954), the Lebanese-Palestinian poet, lawyer, and translator. I’ve reproduced the preface below in its original English as it deals (historically) with the present situation.

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Wadi’ al-Bustani faced the present head on. His poetry was almost exclusively political in orientation. If his form was conservative and his diction archaic, his politics were radical, attuned fundamentally to the challenges of the day: British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.

 

While his poems—published in Palestinian dailies and recited in the Palestinian streets—were by necessity occasional and timely, his philology was decidedly not. He sought, through decades of research, travel, and translation, to uncover deep truths about language through his own practice of Indology. But even timeless pursuits are punctuated by time. As my article recounts, Bustani prefaced his Arabic Mahabharata with reference to the new reality surrounding his home, namely, the establishment of the State of Israel, the severing of Haifa from the Levant (and Bustani from his children in Lebanon), and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

 

And as I write about Bustani writing about Israel’s beginnings, the world is perhaps witnessing Israel’s end. Like the settler-colonies that preceded it, Israel is desperate. Gripped by denial, Israeli leaders are seeking, with multi-ton bombs, to put an end to the recalcitrant problem of the native. But in this genocidal activity, Israel does not work alone. As ever, Israel’s murder and maiming of Palestinians is a project assiduously supported by the North Atlantic (and, at least in the theaters of the United Nations, some hardly sovereign islands in America’s Pacific empire). On this score, we may recall some words from Amílcar Cabral’s forward to Basil Davidson’s 1969 report on the PAIGC’s revolution:

 

No illusions, though. Everyone knows that Portugal does not make any aircraft, not even as toys for children. Our situation—this Portugues aggression against our people—also involves the allies of Portugal, including Great Britain and the United States. And there too our struggle brings another gain: it teaches us to know the friends and enemies of our people, of Africa.¹

 

Here, Cabral echoes C.L.R. James in 1960, reporting on Ghana’s revolution from Accra. “You see,” James said, “I don’t bother with the enemies of Africa. They are enemies, they are over there, that is no problem; we just have to fight them to the end, that is all.”²Palestine’s enemies are fairly easy to identify—they commonly dwell in parliaments and boardrooms, in imperial universities and colonial bureaucracies, in Merkava battle tanks and F-15 fighter jets, at the New York Times and CNN.  

 

What our present predicament has revealed more clearly than ever is the number and location of Palestine’s friends. Cabral was an old friend, his revolution was entangled with ours and with others. “We are with the refugees,” Cabral announced at Dar es Salam in 1965, “the martyrised refugees of Palestine, who have been tricked and driven from their own homeland by the maneuvers of imperialism. We are on the side of the Palestinian refugees and we support wholeheartedly all that the sons of Palestine are doing to liberate their country.”³When hundreds assembled alongside Cabral in Khartoum for the International Conference in Support of the Peoples of Portuguese Colonies and Southern Africa in January 1969, the PLO was there. And when many of the same delegates traveled up the Nile to Cairo a few days later for the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, the PAIGC was among them.  

 

Meetings and statements, mediated by translation and nourished by solidarity, were the infrastructure of internationalism. This international sustained the PAIGC through the transfer of arms and knowledge, in demonstrations and publications, even with flesh and blood. “Some Frenchmen have formed a committee to send us blood” Gil Fernendez, the PAIGC’s representative in Cairo told Ufahamu in 1970, “Every two weeks a plane comes from Paris which stops in Conakry from where we can get the blood. So this is the blood of Frenchmen while the French government helps Portugal. Funny war.”⁴The present war on Palestine has stretched the vast distance between official support for genocide and popular support for the Palestinians to its breaking point.

 

Between ideas and actions, are methods and tactics. “Empire and Arab Indology,” considers the content and conditions of Wadi’ al-Bustani’s political and philological approach. I ask, through his example: must the study of another people be one of mastery and domination? Edward Said—great critic of imperial power and imperial knowledge—once counterposed Ernest Renan, “the philologist as judge” and Louis Massignon, “the philologist as guest.” Renan, Said wrote, surveyed “lesser religions like Islam with disdain,” Massignon on the other hand was “the rarest-veined unraveler of Islamic civilization the West has produced.”⁵ Time was the fulcrum of Renan’s philological judgment. Massignon’s philology, in contrast, was spatial in orientation. Topography, rather than typography, was the engine of Massignon’s inquiry. Bustani, in his study of India, was a kind of guest, or friend. For him, India was at once a territory brimming with difference and a geography inextricable from his own home. Finally, anti-colonialism, in a way even the most sympathetic European orientalist could not fathom, drove Bustani’s intellectual labors forward.

 

My article on Bustani is a kind of pre-history of an era of public and prolific solidarity. The conditions of Bustani’s imperial career, between British India and British Palestine, was the ground upon which a powerful anti-colonialism was made in the twentieth century. It is an anti-colonialism that many millions still carry upon their shoulders today.

 

Esmat Elhalaby

Toronto

December 15, 2023

 

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¹. Amílcar Cabral, “Forward,” in Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guinea: Aspects of an African Revolution (London: Penguin, 1969), 14.

². C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1977), 167.

³. Amílcar Cabral, “The Nationalist Movements of the Portuguese Colonies,” Revolution in Guinea, ed. and trans., Richard Handyside (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 62.

⁴. “A Talk with a Guinean Revolutionary,” Ufahamu 1:1 (Spring 1970), 16.

⁵. Edward Said, “Islam, the Philological Vocation, and French Culture: Renan and Massignon,” in Malcolm H. Kerr, ed., Islamic Studies: a Tradition and its Problems (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1980), 71.

The University in Ruins

The Islamic University of Gaza at present.

We return to David P. Barrows to follow his career as he rises to the heights of academic prominence and power. For seven years he stumped the state of California, proclaiming the destiny of the Stars and Stripes to float from the North Pole to the South. The world was to be divided up, it was our business to get our share; we should win because we were better organized, more efficient; the world would not tolerate small nations; strong men must rule. And presently came a chance for strong men to rule in Mexico; but the strong men had at their head a weakling by the name of Woodrow Wilson, who refused to act. You might think there would be some impropriety, some violation of military precedence, in a university dean’s attacking a former university president, who had become President of the United States; but when Woodrow Wilson took Vera Cruz, and then refused to take the rest of Mexico, Dean Barrows rushed to the front, denouncing him before chambers of commerce, and being reported in the interlocking newspapers. 

We shall note in the course of this book many cases of college professors forbidden to take part in “outside activities,” and especially to get themselves into the newspapers. The professor’s place is the classroom, we are told; and to this there is only one exception—when the professor is advocating more loot for the exploiters who pay him his salary. Shortly after this Vera Cruz affair the San Francisco “Star” published some revelations concerning our imperialist dean, stating that at the very time he was campaigning for intervention, he was vice-president of the Vera Cruz Land & Cattle Company. A friend who knows Dean Barrows well, defended him to me by the statement that his holdings in this company were not valuable. When I asked how valuable they might have become if the United States had conquered Mexico, my friend changed the subject. 

Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923) 

It is, indeed, a safe generalization that in point of fact the average of university presidents fall short of the average of their academic staff in scholarly or scientific attainments, even when all persons employed as instructors are counted as members of the staff. It may also be remarked by the way that when, as may happen, a scholar or scientist takes office as directive head of a university, he is commonly lost to the republic of learning; he has in effect passed from the ranks of learning to those of business enterprise. 

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men (1918) 

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Al-Azhar University of Gaza at present.

One other thing, when I was on the board of regents, a General Dynamics [Corporation] president—General Dynamics was the big airplane manufacturer in the San Diego area—came to the board of regents and said, "We've got this great company. We need all these Ph.D.s, and we can't get them. They won't come to San Diego, because there's no university affiliate for them to be close to." And he said, "It's shocking. Here's a great guy that we need, and we're offering him all kinds of money. He's saying, no, he wants to be close to a university affiliate." So he petitioned the regents to change the oceanography thing down there in San Diego... to a campus of the University of California, and if we would do that, they—General Dynamics—would contribute a million dollars. Well, now a million dollars isn't... And we accepted it. We opened the University of California, San Diego, on his petition and his gift of a million dollars. 

Oral History Interview with Cyril C. Nigg, Regent, University of California, 1955-1957 (California State Archives State Government Oral History Program, 1993). 

Academic people approve of critical and dispassionate inquiry, yet at the same time they carry placards and write letters to editors. Scholars are content to work quietly when they believe sound judgment is operating and can operate, but they cannot remain silent when they believe that those in authority have ignored important information or forsaken sound judgment on matters of national importance. 

It was such a moment of frustration last June 11 that the New Haven Committee on the Middle East Crisis first met and began its efforts. We were alarmed that the American public and its political leaders seemed oblivious to the complexity of the Middle East situation and ready to sacrifice the destinies of other peoples as well as our own in a total and uncritical identification of America with the nation which took the offensive in the June War. 

Michael C. Hudson and Willard G. Oxtoby, America and the Middle East: Report of a Conference Held at Yale University November 3, 1967 (New Haven: New Haven Committee on the Middle East Crisis, March 1968).

Palestine Live: Benjamin Zephaniah (1958 – 2023) in Gaza

Peace to Benjamin Zephaniah, who died this morning, the 7th of December 2023. Two years ago, during Israel’s last campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza—one of many steps towards Israel’s current genocidal efforts—I wrote an essay about the people of Gaza and their friends. The title, “A Global People,” came from Zephaniah’s 1995 track, “Palestine.” I’ve excerpted the relevant section from that essay, published in the Arab Studies Journal, below. 

Benjamin Zephaniah, Rasta Time in Palestine (Liverpool: Shakti Publishing Ltd., 1990).

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[In 1988] the British-Jamaican dub poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, made a visit [to Palestine]. Rasta Time in Palestine, the account of his trip he published a year later in 1990, is a slim and evocative volume, illustrated by Jez Coulson’s black-and-white photographs of Palestinians. Zephaniah moves effortlessly across subjects. He examines Israeli meddling in African affairs and the politics of Rastafari, including a section on “Rastafari and Zionism.” He writes that everywhere he went in the “Arab world” he fielded questions about Rastafari symbols and tropes. “Zion in Rastafari terminology has always been Ethiopia,” Zephaniah makes clear.

 

In describing his visit to Gaza, Zephaniah reached for the same analogy many Palestinian writers had come to on their own in years prior, “it reminded me of pictures I have seen of Nazi concentration camps. Some may argue that there are many differences, but again, it was similarities that I notice: the large fences, people being marched off, etc.” The situation today, more than seventy years since Gaza’s initial enclosure, has only worsened. When the United Nations predicted in 2012 that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020, it was responding not simply to the deterioration of economic conditions that Sara Roy first described as “de-development” in the middle 1980s, but also to the continuous cruelty of a multi-year siege and blockade that has immiserated and isolated the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And yet, Gaza only captures headlines when it is bombed in spectacular fashion.   

 

Gaza’s past is little known and rarely studied, but it is a revolutionary past rich in ideas and movement, not simply death, destitution, and isolation. Recalling its political and intellectual history is an ever necessary task. The history of Gaza cannot be buried beneath the present’s rubble. There is no need to “humanize” the people of Gaza, but it would be prudent for the world to consider their aims and desires. “What the people wanted was a poetry reading,” Zephaniah wrote from Gaza, “and I was really excited by the idea. Word spread quickly that I was a poet and I had to prove it, but after making inquiries, I learned that poetry was not allowed because I could draw a crowd.”

 

“Palestine,” on Zephaniah’s 1995 album Back to Roots, is a moving poetic tribute: “Work your land work your plan / You are a live nation / You are a global people / Suffer much evil / And now you just want get along.” At the end of the track, “Palestine Live!” reverberates as a powerful refrain: “Dancing eyes collect your prize / Palestine Live! / Rise up like the star you are / Palestine Live!”

Esmat Elhalaby, “A Global People,” Arab Studies Journal 29:2 (Fall 2021), 156-162. PDF

When the Palestinian Historian Walid Khalidi Met Kissinger (1961)

Henry Kissinger dressed as terrorist (1974).

Since I mentioned my meeting with Scranton, I might as well mention my encounter with the Herr Doktor. This was in 1961, at a cocktail party in the idyllic surroundings of Harvard University in Cambridge. Dr. Henry Kissinger approached me, having been told I was Palestinian. 

“You are Palestinian?” 

“Yes.” 

“What is your solution to the Palestine Problem?” he asks. 

“There are many parties in the conflict, not just the Arabs,” I say. 

“What parties?” the Doctor asks. 

“The World Zionist Organization, for example,” I say. 

“The World Zionist Organization? What is that?” the Doctor asks. 

It is now my turn to ask, “You mean you have never heard of the World Zionist Organization?” 

“Never,” he says. At this we smartly perform a duet, turn our backs to each other, and march in opposite directions. Let us hope the Doctor has done his homework since then as a good professor should. 

Walid Khalidi, "Towards and Adjustment of Political Perception in Arab Society," in The Middle East: Five Perspectives (North Dartmouth, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., Information Papers no. 7 October, 1973), 15-16.

Isaac Deutscher on the Confused Left (1967)

Israeli soldiers in Gaza City (1967). Via palestineremembered.com

The confusion of the international Left has been undeniable and widespread. I shall not speak here of such ‘friends of Israel’ as M. Mollet and his company, who, like Lord Avon and Selwyn Lloyd, saw in this war a continuation of the Suez campaign and their revenge for their discomfiture in 1956. Nor shall I waste words on the right wing Zionist lobby in the Labour Party. But even on the ‘extreme Left’ of that party men like Sidney Silverman behaved in a way as if designed to illustrate someone’s saying: ‘Scratch a Jewish left-winger and you find only a Zionist.’

But the confusion showed itself even further on the Left and affected people with an otherwise unimpeachable record of struggle against imperialism. A French writer known for his courageous stand against the wars in Algeria and Vietnam this time called for solidarity with Israel, declaring that if Israel’s survival demanded American intervention, he would favour it and even raise the cry ‘Vive le President Johnson’. Didn’t it occur to him how incongruous it was to cry ‘A bas Johnson!’ in Vietnam and ‘Vive!’ in Israel? Jean-Paul Sartre also called, though with reservations, for solidarity with Israel, but then spoke frankly of the confusion in his own mind and its reasons. During the Second World War, he said, as a member of the Resistance he learned to look upon the Jew as upon a brother to be defended in all circumstances. During the Algerian war the Arabs were his brothers, and he stood by them. The present conflict was therefore for him a fratricidal struggle in which he was unable to exercise cool judgment and was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions.

Still, we must exercise our judgment and must not allow it to be clouded by emotions and memories, however deep or haunting. We should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause. I am speaking as a Marxist of Jewish origin, whose next-of-kin perished in Auschwitz and whose relatives live in Israel. To justify or condone Israel’s wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and to harm its own long term interest. Israel’s security, let me repeat, was not enhanced by the wars of 1956 and 1967; it was undermined and compromised. The ‘friends of Israel’ have in fact abetted Israel in a ruinous course.

They have also, willy-nilly, abetted the reactionary mood that took hold of Israel during the crisis. It was only with disgust that I could watch on television the scenes from Israel in those days; the displays of the conquerors’ pride and brutality; the outbursts of chauvinism; and the wild celebrations of the inglorious triumph, all contrasting sharply with the pictures of Arab suffering and desolation, the treks of Jordanian refugees and the bodies of Egyptian soldiers killed by thirst in the desert. I looked at the medieval figures of the rabbis and khassidim jumping with joy at the Wailing Wall; and I felt how the ghosts of Talmudic obscurantism—and I know these only too well—crowded in on the country, and how the reactionary atmosphere had grown dense and stifling. Then came the many interviews with General Dayan, the hero and saviour, with the political mind of a regimental sergeant-major, ranting about annexations and venting a raucous callousness about the fate of the Arabs in the conquered areas. (‘What do they matter to me?’ ‘As far as I am concerned, they may stay or they may go.’) Already wrapped in a phoney military legend—the legend is phoney for Dayan neither planned nor conducted the six days’ campaign—he cut a rather sinister figure, suggesting the candidate to the dictator’s post: the hint was conveyed that if the civilian parties get too ‘soft’ on the Arabs this new Joshua, this mini-de Gaulle, will teach them a lesson, himself take power, and raise Israel’s ‘glory’ even higher. And behind Dayan there was Beigin, Minister and leader of the extreme right-wing Zionists, who had long claimed even Trans-Jordania as part of ‘historic’ Israel. A reactionary war inevitably breeds the heroes, the moods, and the consequences in which its character and aims are faithfully mirrored.

On a deeper historical level the Jewish tragedy finds in Israel a dismal sequel. Israel’s leaders exploit in self-justification, and over-exploit Auschwitz and Treblinka; but their actions mock the real meaning of the Jewish tragedy.

European Jews paid a horrible price for the role they had played in past ages, and not of their own choosing, as representatives of a market economy, of ‘money’, among peoples living in a natural, money-less, agricultural economy. They were the conspicuous carriers of early capitalism, traders and money lenders, in pre-capitalist society. As modern capitalism developed, their role in it, though still conspicuous, became less than secondary. In Eastern Europe the bulk of the Jewish people consisted of poverty-stricken artisans, small traders, proletarians, semi-proletarians, and outright paupers. But the image of the rich Jewish merchant and usurer (the descendent also of Christ’s crucifiers) lived on in Gentile folklore and remained engraved on the popular mind, stirring distrust and fear. The Nazis seized this image, magnified it to colossal dimensions, and constantly held it before the eyes of the masses.

August Bebel once said that anti-semitism is the ‘socialism of the fools’. There was plenty of that kind of ‘socialism’ about, and all too little of the genuine socialism, in the era of the Great Slump, and of the mass unemployment and mass despair of the 1930’s. The European working classes were unable to overthrow the bourgeois order; but the hatred of capitalism was intense and widespread enough to force an outlet for itself and focus on a scapegoat. Among the lower middle classes, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lumpenproletariat a frustrated anti-capitalism merged with fear of communism and neurotic xenophobia. These moods fed on crumbs of a mouldering historic reality which Nazism used to the utmost. The impact of Nazi Jew-baiting was so powerful in part because the image of the Jew as the alien and vicious ‘blood-sucker’ was to all too many people still an actuality. This accounted also for the relative indifference and the passivity with which so many non-Germans viewed the slaughter of the Jews. The socialism of the fools gleefully watched Shylock led to the gas chamber.

Israel promised not merely to give the survivors of the EuropeanJewish communities a ‘National Home’ but also to free them from the fatal stigma. This was the message of the kibbutzim, the Histadruth, and even of Zionism at large. The Jews were to cease to be unproductive elements, shopkeepers, economic and cultural interlopers, carriers of capitalism. They were to settle in ‘their own land’ as ‘productive workers’.

Yet they now appear in the Middle East once again in the invidious role of agents not so much of their own, relatively feeble, capitalism, but of powerful western vested interests and as protégés of neo-colonialism. This is how the Arab world sees them, not without reason. Once again they arouse bitter emotions and hatreds in their neighbours, in all those who have ever been or still are victims of imperialism. What a fate it is for the Jewish people to be made to appear in this role! As agents of early capitalism they were still pioneers of progress in feudal society; as agents of the late, over-ripe, imperialist capitalism of our days, their role is altogether lamentable; and they are placed once again in the position of potential scapegoats. Is Jewish history to come full circle in such a way? This may well be the outcome of Israel’s ‘victories’; and of this Israel’s real friends must warn it.

The Arabs, on the other hand, need to be put on guard against the socialism or the anti-imperialism of the fools. We trust that they will not succumb to it; and that they will learn from their defeat and recover to lay the foundations of a truly progressive, a socialist Middle East.

Isaac Deutscher, “The Israeli-Arab War, June 1967,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, Tamara Deutscher, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). From an interview conducted with the New Left Review on the 23rd of June, 1967. First published New Left Review 44 (July–August, 1967). 

The Israeli Bombing of Al-Shifa Hospital in 1956 (and After)

 

1951 Survey of Israel map based on 1946 British Survey of Palestine Map. Via Palestine Open Maps.

In his 1979 study of the Gaza Strip, the Marxist political economist Hussein Abu al-Naml (1943 – 2020) wrote:

 

Individual crossing operations towards the occupied territory from the Gaza Strip have not ceased since the Nakba itself: “A few months after the Nakba, the individual infiltration of the occupied land began. A hungry rebel carrying a weapon enters his village to retrieve one of his cows or a sheep. Another kills an Israeli and seizes his weapons. And a third recovers his money buried under the dirt in the courtyard of his house. A group of rebels seizes a herd of cattle from the enemy and drives it to Arab lands to satisfy the hunger of refugees with fresh meat. Thus the myth of Israel became an illusion…”

 

Although the political horizon of these individual invasions was not clear, they were closely intertwined with the economic and social problems of the Gaza Strip. Especially since the political and economic situation was not difficult for ordinary people to understand. Their land was right there in sight. The refugees could simply look east and see the vast fields that were once Arab land.¹

 

Abu-Naml quotes here the work of Subhi Yasin (1920 – 1968), the Palestinian militant and historian. Born in the village of Shifa‘amr in the Galilee, Yassin went to school in Haifa. As a teenager, he participated actively in the Arab revolt of 1936-39. After the nakba—during which he fought and was wounded—he lived in Damascus’ Yarmouk refugee camp where he poured himself into political work. He later moved to Egypt and participated in the activities of Palestinian nationalists in the Gaza Strip. Alongside his organizational efforts, Yasin also wrote a series of historical and theoretical texts on Palestinian liberation. His first book, an important history of the same 36-39 revolt he participated in, was published in Damascus in 1959. The book remains a touchstone for all subsequent historians of the revolt thanks to Yasin’s deft narration and first-hand view of the events. Yasin founded the Vanguard of Arab Sacrifice for the Liberation of Palestine (Tala’i al-Fida’ ‘Arabi li Tahrir Filastin) and was always a militant before being a writer. He introduced his 1964 book, A Theory of Action for the Recovery of Palestine with a typically defiant admission: “I would have preferred this book to be printed while I was carrying my machine gun and fighting the enemies of the Arab nation in the streets of Tel Aviv.”²  

 

The last book Yasin wrote was a study of guerrilla war in Palestine, covering some of the same material as his other works. His is an especially useful account of the “infiltrations” of the fidayeen, those Palestinian and other Arab commandos who entered Israeli controlled territory in the years after 1948, especially in the period between 1952 and 1956. Palestinian political and militant activity during this period, before the emergence of the PLO, is relatively understudied. Journalistic accounts that see the actions of the fidayeen as just one prelude to the 1956 war and a small number of somewhat critical Israeli histories (critical of Israeli means but not critical of Israeli ends) are most of what we have on the period.³ Yassin’s account then, thoroughly and unabashedly nationalist and anti-colonial, is an essential counter. In the passage I’ve excerpted below, he recounts the largest guerrilla operation ever launched from Gaza until that point. The action was precipitated by the Israeli bombing of Gaza's largest hospital.

This all took place less than two weeks before Israel’s eighth anniversary of independence. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's stance on ethnic cleansing had been clear since the state's very beginnings (before, too). "Every additional Arab in the country increases the danger," Ben-Gurion put it in October 1949, "it is impossible to expel them by moralizing...rather they must be expelled at the point of a gun."⁴ And indeed, thousands of Palestinians were killed seeking to return to their land in the years after 1948. In his Independence Day address to his nation on April 15th, 1956 (5 Iyar in the Hebrew calendar)—after a ceasefire was brokered under the eye of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld—Ben-Gurion immediately turned to the “guerrilla war which Egypt, Jordan and Syria have been treacherously waging against us.” “We shall not fear,” he continued, “the murderous gangs dispatched by the Egyptian dictator, nor will the hosts of Amalek, from the South, the East and the North, who are now concentrating on the other side of our borders, be able to subdue us.” The IDF, he concluded, “will give back the aggressors two blows for one, as they have done before.”⁵

A portrait of "al-mujahid" Subhi Muhammad Yasin. Included in the Egyptian edition of his Al-Thawra al-'Arabiyya al-Kubra (Cairo: Dar al-Huna li al-Taba'a, 1959).

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Subhi Yasin wrote:

The Israeli gang decided to attack Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, hoping to gain a cheap victory by killing patients. At two in the afternoon on April 5, 1956, the Israelis began bombing the Gaza hospital with heavy artillery for five continuous hours. More than a hundred patients were killed.

 

The leaders of the aggression imagined that mass killing of the sick would terrorize the Arabs of Palestine into oblivion. But the opposite of what they expected happened. Their plan failed and their plot was turned inside out.

 

In the evening, Commander Mustafa Hafez gathered his men and put together a plan for a comprehensive attack on the enemy’s hideouts. The violent retaliatory attack began before midnight on April 5, from open and secret bases simultaneously. Thereafter, Israel witnessed its darkest nights.

 

On the night of April 6th, the largest guerrilla group entered Israel, numbering 300 commando members. They pierced dozens of miles into the usurped land. Each detachment carried out its role with the best possible courage and organization, hitting targets and taking revenge on those who knew no other language.

Headlines from Maariv (Tel Aviv) and Al-Ahram (Cairo), April 6, 1956.

The attack continued for five days, during which hundreds of Israelis were killed and wounded, in addition to material losses.

 

1 - The number of raids on the night of April 7, according to Israeli Radio, was nine. These included a commando detachment that attacked an enemy military convoy on the Bi'r al-Saba' - Falujah road, in which a number of its soldiers were killed. At the same time, a second detachment attacked a military convoy on the Falujah-Iraq-Suwaidan road, killing a number of its soldiers, and damaging a military vehicle. A third detachment placed mines on the Falujah - Shufan settlement road, blowing up a military vehicle and killing its passengers. Other detachments were able to blow up a railway bridge on al-Saba’ road and a large water distribution station for enemy camps, blowing up huge water pipes in several places, and blowing up al-Majdal [Ashkelon, today] water tank. Another detachment attacked a military convoy south of al-Majdal, and a number of the convoy's passengers were killed. A detachment entered the same occupied town of al-Majdal, attacked the enemy barracks with grenades and machine guns from close range, and killed large numbers of the enemy. Another detachment attacked an Israeli military patrol near a village al-Jura.

 

2 - The number of raids on the night of April 8th was 16. These included: blowing up an enemy military vehicle south of the village of Bayt Jibrin and killing its passengers; an attack on a military convoy on the Falujah - Bi'r al-Saba' road, and a third attack on a military patrol on the Bi'r al-Saba' road; an attack on military patrols inside the town of al-Majdal, killing a number of enemy soldiers; an attack on the Uza settlement near Bi'r al-Saba'; blowing up a railway bridge between Bi'r al-Saba' and Fallujah. A daring attack on the enemy inside the Shapira colony. An attack on a labor camp near the Givat Rachel settlement.

 

3 - The number of raids on the night of April 9th was 14. An attack on the Tekish settlement (Abu Ghalioun) left a number of Israelis dead; an attack on a military patrol near the Oren settlement and a number were killed From its members. An attack on a third patrol south of Bi'r al-Saba', killing a number of enemy soldiers. The commandos sabotaged bridges, telephone lines, tanks and water pipes, and railway lines on a large scale.

 

When the free fidayeen were able to impose their presence inside the lost homeland, control the enemy’s lines of transportation, and record the most amazing victories over the enemy forces with few weapons and small numbers, their morale rose, and they began attacking the enemy’s convoys and colonies at four in the afternoon because the enemy, with his armies, equipment, and capabilities inside his lands, began to evade confronting the fidayeen.

 

For a period of time, the actions of the fidayeen made the enemy think their demise was imminent.

 

The 9th and the 10th of April 1956 were among the immortal and glorious days in the history of the Arabs of Palestine after the nakba, as units of the heroic guerrillas attacked an Israel military convoy south of the Rehovot colony, south of Tel Aviv, at Rabaa al-Nahar, and killed a large number of its members among the citrus trees. A second detachment blew up the wireless communication station that linked Israel with the world. A third detachment attacked the Zikim colony during the day and killed a number of residents. On the morning of April 10, 1956, units of the fedayeen attacked Israeli military convoys on the roads of Fallujah - Bi'r al-Saba' - Al-Majdal. They threw grenades at enemy vehicles from close range. Other detachments attacked an Israeli patrol near Dayr Sunayd. Other detachments also attacked a colony, killing six of its members, and performed acts of sabotage.

 

After five full days of continuous struggle and immortal Arab heroism inside their lost homeland, the nakba generation that would liberate Palestine returned to the Gaza Strip after losing eleven martyrs and three prisoners.

 

The heroes of redemption returned after teaching the enemy bitter lessons. The heroes of the struggle returned after they left every city, colony, and house of the enemy in mourning.⁶

 

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The cover of the Beirut edition of Rashid Hussein's collection Sawarikh (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1982).

In his 1958 collection Sawarikh (Missiles), the Palestinian writer Rashid Hussein (1936 – 1977) wrote a poem entitled “The Closed Door” addressed to “the Jewish friend who asked me: why don’t you describe the Negev, the kibbutz, and the moshav in your poetry?”

 

You’re asking me to describe the charms of the “Kibbutz” and the “Moshav” and the “Negev”

…

Brother, do you want me to forget that you shut the door on me 

Do you think me a clown, a liar, or a fool?

 

You closed the door on me.

 

Hussein goes on:

 

How can I describe what lies behind the door?

When it is you who decides when I can enter

…

Or do you think that one of these days I jumped over your high walls?

 

You closed the door on me.

…

Unlock the door and take off the jailers uniform

                       open it! 

When you open it you will know who I am

An artist who loves beauty and sanctifies humanity

But how do I praise the wine locked behind the bar

When the lock is high above the door?

 

Does someone who cannot enter the garden praise its flowers?⁷

 

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¹. Hussien Abu al-Naml, Qita’ Ghazzah, 1948 – 1967: Tatwwurat Iqtisadīyah wa  Siyasiyah wa Ijtima‘iyah wa ‘Askariyah (Beirut: Markaz al-Abhath, Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyah, 1979), 111-112.

 

². Subhi Muhammad Yasin, Nazariyat al-‘amal li istirdad Filastin (Cairo: Dar al-Ma ‘rifah, 1964), 7.

 

³. Kennett Love, Suez: The Twice-Fought War (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969). Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and Ze'ev Drory, Israel's Reprisal Policy, 1953-1956: The Dynamics of Military Retaliation (New York: Routledge, 2005). Both studies conclude that it was Israeli violence that spurred Palestinian violence. For a short account more attuned to Palestinian sources, see Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1997), 58-70. The Arab and Israeli press covered the events widely and deserve thorough review, as do the relevant United Nations documents.

 

⁴. Drory, Israel's Reprisal Policy, 1953-1956, 78. 

⁵.“Eight Independence Day Celebrated in Israel, P.M. Stresses Determination on Road Ahead,” Israel Digest 7:15 (April 20, 1956), 1.

 

⁶. Subhi Muhammad Yassin, Harb al-‘asabat fi Filistin (Cairo: Dar al-Katib al-Arabi li al-Taba'a wa al-Nashir, 1967), 186 - 190.

 

⁷. Rashid Hussein, “al-Bab al-mughlak,” Sawarikh (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1982), 56-57. First published in 1958 by Nazareth's Al-Hakim Press.

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