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).

****

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

 

****

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

 

---

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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