CounterVortex

THE DISPOSSESSION OF THE PALESTINIANS

An Historical Outline

by Bill Weinberg

“Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”

—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

“Admitting honestly to the moral and political responsibility for the crime which the Zionist scheme has perpetrated against us is what will pave the way for a historical reconciliation between the two peoples—the Palestinian and the Israeli people.”

—Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian national poet, 1941-2008, spoken in Radio Palestine address on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, May 15, 1998

Zionism was conceived as the Jewish national liberation movement, and attained control over Palestine just as the national liberation struggles of the colonial world were gaining ground in the aftermath of World War II. But to the Palestinians, Zionism was a new form of colonialism which ironically came to power in the era of decolonization. The more the state of Israel came to behave like a colonial power over the Palestinians, the more it came to serve as a proxy and regional extension of the neo-colonial powers of the West, serving to beat back and humble the rising tide of revolutionary Arab nationalism and, later, Islamist militancy.

Many indigenous peoples around the world have been dispossessed of their homelands by colonialist projects. But both the centrality of Palestine to the three great Abrahamic religions, as well as its proximity to the world’s most strategic oil reserves, gives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a unique criticality to the question of world peace. If the international community, either at the level of nation-states or citizen initiatives, truly wants to promote peace, an understanding of the dispossession of the Palestinians must inform any action we take.

The Historical Background

While Zionism is a movement of modernity, both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeal to claims arising from past centuries and even millennia of contest over the territory, and any understanding of the contemporary crisis must begin with an overview of this history.

Palestine is the southern stretch of the western arm of the Fertile Crescent, whose eastern arm is the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, known in ancient times as Mesopotamia and today the heartland of Iraq. Between the two arms is the northernmost stretch of the Arabian deserts. Palestine is divided between a low and fertile coastal plain along the Mediterranean Sea, and rugged uplands to the east—principally, the area now called the West Bank in reference to the Jordan River that forms its eastern border. The Jordan River flows south, through a comparatively fertile valley, into the inland Dead Sea; beyond the Jordan Valley is more hill country, and then the desert of the interior. South of the Dead Sea, the fertile lands end; a stretch of desert today known as the Negev reaches down to the Gulf of Aqaba, entrance to the Red Sea. (Nathan, p. 117-23)

From earliest times, the land that is now Palestine was inhabited by Semitic peoples who arrived out of these deserts to the south and east. The most significant and settled of these early inhabitants were the Canaanites (forebears of the Phoenicians, who would later maintain a powerful maritime trading empire just up the Mediterranean coast in what is now Lebanon). It is they who gave the land its earliest known name—Canaan. The Hebrews—led to the land by Abraham, according to biblical accounts—were one of several nomadic Semitic peoples who arrived sometime after the Canaanites. By biblical accounts the Hebrews originated in Ur in Mesopotamia, but they clearly had much in common with the Arabian nomadic peoples and almost certainly shared a common origin with them. Indeed, the words Hebrew and Arab are believed to both derive from the Semitic root-word abhar, meaning nomadic. Both peoples are traditionally held to be descendants of the biblical Shem, son of Noah (hence “Semite”). Both are also held to descend from Shem’s descendant Abraham—the Hebrews through the line of his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, the Arabs through the line of his son Ishmael. (Dimont, p. 30; Hitti, p. 24; Lewis, 1950, p. 10; Ludwig, p. 10-3; Roth, p. 3)

By the time the Hebrews arrived, other presumably Semitic peoples had established small kingdoms on the less fertile lands east of the Jordan River—Gilead, Ammon, Moab and others. Settled life slowly spread from Canaan’s seat in the hill country west of the river. But the region was far behind the two great centers of civilization—Mesopotamia across the desert to the east and Egypt’s Nile Valley across the Sinai Peninsula to the west. The Hittites, in Anatolia at the northern peak of the Fertile Crescent, were also building an empire that would make its influence felt. (Cohn-Sherbok, p. 2)

At approximately 1600 BCE, the Hebrews were among various Semitic nomads apparently driven by drought and famine in the Fertile Crescent into the rich Nile Valley. The rulers of Egypt at that time were a “foreign” dynasty, the Hyksos, themselves likely Semites who had arrived from the Crescent some years earlier. The Hyksos welcomed the Hebrews, who evidently held a privileged position in Egypt under their rule. (Dimont, p. 36-40; Roth, 5-8)

This began to change with the overthrow of the Hyksos and the restoration of a “native” dynasty to Egypt, cerca 1550 BCE, opening the most powerful period of its rule. The Hyksos and Hebrews alike were seemingly reduced to slavery by the Pharaoh Ramses II, “the Great” (1279-1213 BCE, Ozymandias to the Greeks). The name “Israelites” first comes into use with the biblical account of the Exodus from Egypt back towards Canaan, led by Moses and thought to have happened cerca 1225 BCE. After centuries in Egypt, presumably inter-marrying with Egyptians, it is uncertain that the Israelites who emerged were precisely the same people as the Hebrews who had entered. Israelite monotheism may have been influenced by the reign of Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1353-1337 BCE), the Egyptian pharaoh who proclaimed the sun god Aten to be the sole deity. (Dimont, p. 36-40; Ludwig, p. 13; Roth, 5-8)

While the Hebrews/Israelites dwelt in Egypt, Canaan was contested by the pharaohs and the Hittite empire of Anatolia to the north. Pharaoh Thutmose III finally took Canaan cerca 1470 BCE, but Egyptian rule there was in decline by the time of the Exodus, having merely nominal loyalty of the Canaanite kingdom. (Ben-Sasson, p. 13-4, 27; Roth, p. 6-7)

The Old Testament tells of the Israelite leader Joshua’s conquest of Canaan upon arriving in the land inhabited by the Hebrews centuries earlier. By popular histories, the Israelites simply displaced the Canaanites, but in reality there was probably an amalgamation of the two populations, with the Israelites becoming dominant, especially in the south. After a period of rule by “judges” in a sort of legislative body known as the Sanhedrin (during which time Egyptian rule in the land collapsed completely), a monarchy was established by Saul cerca 1000 BCE. Saul’s successor David greatly expanded the kingdom’s borders—most significantly, taking the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites. This he made his capital, and established a temple on the slopes of a hill called Mount Zion within the city. At its height, the kingdom stretched from the Euphrates in the east to the Mediterranean in the west; from Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. The heartland, however, remained the hill country around Jerusalem. The Philistines, a probably Greek-related people who inhabited the southern part of the coastal plain (and give Palestine its name), were subdued although not conquered. David was succeeded by his son Solomon cerca 965 CE, who greatly expanded the Temple, completing its construction cerca 953. (Dimont, p. 52; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 9; Ludwig, p. 20-2; Roth, p. 23-7)

But around 930 BCE, shortly after Solomon’s death, the kingdom split into the two entities of which it had really been a federation: Israel in the north, with its capital at Shechem (contemporary Nablus) and a temple at Bethel; and Judah in the south, with both capital and temple at Jerusalem. The outlying territories were mostly lost. It was at this time that composition of what would become the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) began in both kingdoms. Biblical scholars have for generations been parsing the text to determine which chapters were written in which kingdom—the scribes of Judah generally referring to God as Yahweh (“Jehova,” rendered as Lord in English translation) and those of Israel using the plural term Elohim (rendered in English as God). Scholarship is increasingly of the opinion that the inhabitants of the two kingdoms were separate peoples. The northern kingdom is generally considered to have been closer to the Baal-worshiping Canaanites, long ago pushed north by the Israelites. Starting in approximately 790, there was war between the two kingdoms. (Cohn-Sherbok, p. 13-4; Dimont, p. 54-7; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 15; Ludwig, p. 52-3; Roth, p. 32)

As the Hebrew kingdoms declined, new powers were arising in Mesopotamia, and making incursions into the western arm of the Crescent. Israel fell to Assyria in 722 BCE, and (by the biblical version) the population was deported to Mesopotamia. Judah, in an alliance with Egypt, maintained a precarious independence. Then Babylon superseded Assyria as the dominant Mesopotamian power and began a new thrust of expansion. Judah’s King Josiah at first supported Babylon as an ally against Assyria. When Egypt switched sides and sent an army to back Assyria against Babylon, Josiah attempted to block its passage through Judah—and was defeated at the Battle of Meggido (Armageddon), 609 BCE. Babylon nonetheless prevailed over Assyria, and then perceived that Judah had been precariously weakened. The Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II took Judah in 597 BCE, sacking Jerusalem, destroying the temple, and again (by the biblical version) deporting the population. (In reality, it was likely only the political and priestly leadership class that was deported.) (Dimont, p. 58-61; Roth, p. 35, 43)

By the time of the Assyrian conquest, Israel had moved its capital to Samaria, and those Israelites from this region who were not deported became known as the Samaritans. There is still a small community of Samaritans living today in the vicinity of Nablus on the West Bank, keeping alive elements of the ancient Hebrew religion. (Jewish Encyclopedia; Roth, p. 35)

The deportations mark the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, as well as the point at which the name “Jews” (Yehudim, in Hebrew) first emerged—the exiled people of Judah, traditionally identified as the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. (By the biblical version, the exiles from the north kingdom of Israel—the ten “lost tribes”—were dispersed and disappeared from history.) The seeds of contemporary Judaism were also established in the Babylonian exile; with no temple, “houses of assembly” (beth ha-knesset, later rendered by the Greeks “synagogue”) were established as places of worship, with teachers (later to go by the title rabbi, or master) instead of priests. (Dimont, p. 68; Ludwig, p. 72; Roth, p. 62, 83)

In 539 BCE, Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia, who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (although some remained in Babylon). Under the protection of Persia, Judah (called Yahud by the Persians) again prospered, although no longer as a wholly independent state. A council of elders known as the Gerousia ruled over local affairs. Synagogue and temple, rabbi and priest, now existed side by side—the common people more linked to synagogue and rabbis; the elite to the priests and temple. (Ben-Sasson, p. 191; Dimont, p. 68-73; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 19-20)

The fall of Persia to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE meant great change for the whole region, with a Greek ruling class imposed. Alexander’s empire stretched from Egypt to what is now Afghanistan, but fractured following his death in 323 BCE, divided among his leading generals. The land of Judah was for over a century contested between the Ptolemies, ruling from Egypt, and the Seleucids, ruling from Syria. In 198 BCE the Seleucids gained the final victory, taking Jerusalem from the Ptolemies. (Dimont, p. 87; Ludwig, p. 94)

The Greeks called the land Ioudaia (Judea). At first, the Gerousia system continued under Greek rule. But around 175 BCE, the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes began a campaign of “Hellenization”—imposing Greek culture and taking measures against Jewish self-government. This led to the rebellion of the Maccabees, a Jewish revivalist movement, which in 141 BCE succeeded in establishing an independent kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmonean kings succeeded in winning back much of the territories ruled centuries earlier by David and Solomon. However, the kingdom was still precariously situated between the hostile Greek-dominated empires, and at times under official Seleucid sovereignty. Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus waged war against the Seleucids from 134-2 to maintain the kingdom’s independence. The Hasmonean dynasty was a theocracy, with no distinction between kings and priests. It was in this period that codification of the Old Testament was completed. (Ben-Sasson, p. 202-4, 218; Dimont, p. 87-90, 120; Ludwig, p. 107-8; Roth, p. 71)

A civil war in the Hasmonean kingdom between the Pharisees (populists who rejected Hellenization, and favored the rabbis and synagogues) and Sadducees (party of the elite who favored greater integration with the Hellenized world, and stood for the temple and priesthood) was finally exploited by the ascendant power in the region—Rome. (Dimont, p. 92-5)

Rival claimants to the throne appealed to outside powers. When the pro-Pharisee Hyrcanus II sought aid from the neighboring Nabateans, his brother, the pro-Sadducee Aristobulus II, sought aid from the Romans, who had recently completed their conquest of Syria. This was to spell the end of an independent kingdom. The Roman general Pompey skillfully played the brothers off against each other, finally switching sides. It was Hyrcanus who turned Jerusalem over to Pompey in 63 CE, and the followers of Aristobulus were massacred. (Dimont, p. 92-5; Ludwig, 114-5; Roth, p. 86-7)

Hyrcanus was installed as priest-king, but he ruled as a Roman vassal. Judah was officially renamed Judea by the Roman occupation. A Hasmonean restorationist revolt in 40 BCE was aided by the Parthian dynasty of Persia, and put down three years later by the Romans with the aid of the Idumeans (Edomites), a neighboring people who had been brought under Judean rule. Herod, a Judean leader of Idumean lineage, led the forces that retook Jerusalem when the revolt was put down, and was subsequently named “king” by Rome. But Romanization of Judea by this Rome-appointed Herod “the Great” (37-4 BCE) lead to continued unrest. After Herod’s death, Roman procurators (governors) ruled from the new capital the Romans established at Caesarea on the coast; Judea was made a Roman province in 6 CE and formally incorporated into the empire. A reduced Jewish kingdom was allowed to rule under Roman occupation in Galilee—the fertile area around the small inland “sea” of the same name in the north, from which flows the Jordan River. (Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and ruler of Galilee, is the one encountered by the adult Jesus in the New Testament.) (Dimont, p. 100-5; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 29-34; Roth, p. 94-5; Schürer, p. 118-9)

The vestiges of local autonomy rapidly eroded, and Judea was even for a while annexed to the neighboring and much larger Roman province of Syria. In 66 CE, a Jewish revolt spread throughout Judea and Galilee. The revolution was crushed in 70 CE, with Roman forces under the general (later emperor) Titus sacking Jerusalem and destroying the temple. A band of Jewish partisans known as the Zealots held out at Masada on the Dead Sea for another three years before they too were crushed. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 36-7; Roth, p. 103-10)

In a subsequent rebellion under the leader Bar Kochba from 132-5, Jews succeeded in retaking ruined Jerusalem and the temple site. When the Roman Emperor Hadrian put down the rebellion, he changed the name of the province from Judea to Palestine (to de-emphasize the legacy of Judah), and deported the Jews en masse north to Galilee. There, they retained a degree of autonomy—no longer under a king, but a body of scholars known as the Patriarchate based in the town of Tiberias. Reconstitution of the culture there, and in the wider diaspora, lead to the basis of contemporary Judaism. (Dimont, p. 112; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 38; Roth, p. 111-9)

Contrary to the popular impression of a mass expulsion of the Jews from Palestine at this time, many remained in Galilee. There were now far more Jews outside Palestine than within, but this had been the case for at least a century before the deportation, due to Jews following trade routes. The most significant centers of Jewish culture were by then Alexandria in Roman-ruled Egypt and Babylon, where the descendants of Jews from the exile period remained under the protection of the Persian Sassanid dynasty. (Dimont, p. 125; Nathan, p. 35; Roth, p. 120-1)

Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem after the deportation and renamed it Aelia Capitolina. Jews were barred from living in the city, and were for many years forbidden to even enter it. After Emperor Constantine made Christianity the empire’s state religion in 324, the name Jerusalem was restored, and the city became an important Christian center—although secondary to Alexandria. When the Roman empire split into two following Constantine’s rule, Palestine came within the eastern sphere—the Greek-ruled Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (formerly Byzantium and today Istanbul). (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 40-4; Nathan, p. 37)

Over the following centuries, Greek culture and Christianity became increasingly dominant under Byzantine rule. Those who clung to Jewish identity, chiefly around Galilee, dwindled. The Patriarchate was abolished in the fifth century. Jews were allowed again to reside in Jerusalem, but the city’s leading families were now Greek and Roman. A Samaritan revolt was put down in 529. (Ben-Sasson, p. 355; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 44-5)

The 614 invasion of the Sassanid Persians was for obvious reasons supported by the Jews. Under Sassanid rule, Jerusalem was restored to the Jews, who were armed to defend it. It wasn’t until 629 that the Byzantines succeeded in driving the Sassanids back and retaking Palestine. Jews were again barred from Jerusalem. (Ben-Sasson, p. 362; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 47)

But the Byzantine restoration was brief. The Arabs, a chiefly nomadic people of the deserts far to the south of Palestine, were on the cusp of an unprecedented expansion, inspired by Islam, the new religion brought by the Prophet Mohammad. There were already Arab peoples in the Fertile Crescent—the ancient kingdoms of Nabatea (in contemporary Jordan) and Palmyra (in contemporary Syria) were Arab. But from the distant desert towns of Mecca (the religious center) and Medina (the political capital), Arabs were now forging a centralized empire, uniting tribes for campaigns of conquest. (Lewis, 1950, p. 26-7)

The Byzantines virtually invited an Arab invasion of Palestine. They had long subsidized nomadic Arab tribes beyond the Dead Sea as a buffer military force. But after the routing of the Sassanids, they overconfidently ceased these payments. The tribes appealed to their kindred further south, who were just then forging a formidable fighting capacity. (Nathan, p. 42)

The Arabs invaded Palestine in 634 and took Jerusalem four years later. Although there had been a lengthy siege, the surrender of the city to the Arab armies was in the end peaceful and negotiated. Caliph Omar, the second successor to Mohammad, personally toured the city, now holy to three monotheistic faiths. The Arabs called Jerusalem al-Quds, the holy. Islam became the state religion, but Christians and the remaining Jews were tolerated as long as they paid a special tax, the jizya. As “people of the book,” they were considered dhimmis—followers of tolerated religions recognized as having a kinship with Islam. Jews were allowed once again to reside in Jerusalem. Jews, and other subject peoples who had been persecuted by the Byzantines, generally welcomed Arab rule. (Asali, p. 116; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 48-9; Lewis, 1950, p. 58)

Arabs became the new dominant class, soldiers becoming settlers with generous land grants. However, the Arabs took over only lands which had officially belonged to the Byzantine state, or to those who resisted them. Landowners who recognized the new government were allowed to keep their properties. There was again probably a general continuity with the pre-existing population in Palestine, with many Christians and perhaps some Jews converting to Islam, inter-marrying with Arabs, and adopting Arab culture. Arabic superseded Aramaic (the vernacular counterpart to the liturgical Hebrew) as the language of the land’s common people, and Greek as the language of administration. (Hebrew would survive as the liturgical language of the Jews; Aramaic still survives today as the common tongue of scattered Jewish communities in the Arab lands.) (Lewis, 1950, p. 57; Nathan, p. 43; Polk, et al., p. 241; Lewis, 1984, p. 76; Roth, p. 121)

The Fertile Crescent naturally became the new center of Arab power, although Mecca and Medina were still revered as holy cities. In 661, Palestine came under the Umayyad Caliphate, which ruled the Arab empire from Damascus, in Syria. It was in the early years of Umayyad rule that al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat as-Sakhrah) were built on the Temple Mount, the site of the old Jewish temple—which had been turned into a garbage dump by the Byzantines. The Dome of the Rock protects the purported site of the biblical Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. Al-Aqsa Mosque commemorates the Prophet Mohammad’s mystical “Night Journey,” in which he is believed to have visited Jerusalem. The complex on the Temple Mount—known as the Noble Sanctuary or Haram al-Sharif—became the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. Immediately below is the Western Wall, the last standing fragment of the Second Temple, and the holiest site for Jews. This remains the geography of the Temple Mount to this day. (Armstrong, p. 46; Hitti, p. 33; Encyclopaedia Judaica, 51-2)

In 750, the Umayyad dynasty was superseded by the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad, in contemporary Iraq. The following century was the height of the Arab empire’s glory. The empire’s local seat of administration was Ramleh, and Jerusalem’s significance was as a religious center. There was something of a recovery of Jewish culture in the city under the Abbasids, and the Talmudic Academy—Palestine’s most important center of Jewish learning—was moved there from Tiberias in the Galilee. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, 54-5; Lewis, 1950, p. 96)

Egypt gained increasing preeminence in Islamic world as the Abbasids began to decline, and in 878 Jerusalem was taken by the Egyptian ruler Ahmad ibn Tulun. From 941, another Egyptian dynasty, the Ikhshidids, ruled Palestine—again, with merely official loyalty to the Caliphate of Baghdad. In this period of decay, religious conflict emerged in Jerusalem. Episodes of Muslim violence against Christians (including the sacking of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, purported site of the resurrection of Jesus) occurred repeatedly in the 10th century. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, 54-5; Lewis, 1950, p. 96; Najeebabadi, vol. 2, p. 618)

In 969, the Fatimid Caliphate was established in Cairo by followers of the Ismaili Shi’ite “heresy,” and Palestine finally fell outside the orbit of the Abbisid Caliphate altogether. This brought a century of relief to the Christian and Jewish minorities. But the Fatimids lost Palestine to the Seljuk Turks in 1071. The Seljuks had begun their career as a mercenary force for the declining Abbisids, but were by now the real power in Baghdad—while still recognizing the caliph in name. A Palestinian revolt against the Seljuks was put down with great brutality. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 58-9; Najeebabadi, vol. 2, p. 622-3)

The Seljuks’ barring of Christian pilgrims from Jerusalem prompted the Pope of Rome, Urban II, to call the First Crusade, with knights recruited from across Catholic Europe to take the Holy Land. In 1098, with Crusader armies advancing, the Fatimids retook Jerusalem. But they lost it again in 1099, when Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders after a five-week siege. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 59; Riley-Smith, p. 2-10, 34)

This change of power was different: there was a general slaughter of the city’s populace, with Muslims and Jews massacred and burned alive in mosques and synagogues. In the aftermath, the city was closed to Muslim and Jewish worshipers. The Knights Templar, the most fanatical of the Crusader military orders, established their headquarters in al-Aqsa Mosque. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 60-1)

This period also saw the first major outbreaks of violence against Jews in Europe, who had by then long since arrived via the Mediterranean in France and England. Both these countries saw widespread attacks on Jews in the same paroxysm of zeal that mobilized the Crusades. The Crusaders gratuitously destroyed Jewish villages en route to Jerusalem as well. (Riley-Smith, p. 16-7)

In 1144, a Second Crusade was called to defend Christian Jerusalem as the fractured Islamic world began to gather forces for the counter-attack. The first serious threat to the Crusader state came from Zengi, ruler of Syria to the north. (Riley-Smith, p. 93)

But the real turn-around came in 1171, when the Kurdish warrior Salah al-Din (Saladin) ousted the Fatimids from Egypt, establishing the Ayyubid dynasty and restoring Sunni Islam (the majority tendency, that of the Abbasid Caliphate). The Ayyubids were officially loyal to the Abbasid Caliphate, but Cairo had now supplanted Baghdad as the center of Islamic power. Following the 1187 Battle of Hattin, Saladin drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem. Revenge killings were barred, and the city’s Christian inhabitants (by then overwhelmingly Frankish settlers) were granted safe passage to the rump Crusader state on the coast. A Third Crusade was promptly launched to re-take the city. (Hourani, p. 84; Riley-Smith, p. 84-5)

In 1191, Saladin made a peace deal with the rump Crusader state of England’s Richard the Lion-Hearted, allowing Christians and Muslims alike access to Jerusalem. This peace was broken following Saladin’s death in 1193, when new crusades were launched. (Riley-Smith, p. 118)

In 1229, a Sixth Crusade was organized at the Vatican’s urging by Frederick II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, the great confederation of German and northern Italian states. But this time the crusade was cut short by a peace deal between Frederick and Saladin’s successor, the Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil. This pact established joint Christian-Muslim control of Jerusalem under Frederick’s official if distant rule—for which the Holy Roman Emperor was promptly excommunicated by the Pope. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 67; Hitti, p. 225-6; Riley-Smith, p. 149-51)

This peace persisted until the 1244 invasion of the Khwarazmian Turks, fleeing the Mongol irruption from Central Asia. The Khwarazmians overran Jerusalem, causing much destruction, but were turned back by the Ayyubids before they reached Egypt. However, the struggle against the Khwarazmians lead to the ascendance of the (mostly Turkish) Mamluk military slave caste within Egypt’s political elite. Palestine was meanwhile left in ruin and chaos, although Nablus and other hill towns provided some shelter for refugees from devastated Jerusalem. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 67)

In 1249, when a Seventh Crusade under Louis IX of France (St. Louis) invaded Egypt, the Mamluk “slave dynasty” finally took power, successfully repelling the Crusaders. Palestine was for some years contested by Mamluk Egypt and a rump Ayyubid state in Syria. But in 1258, the Mongols themselves arrived in the Fertile Crescent. The Mongol armies under Hulagu Khan destroyed Baghdad, overran Syria, and penetrated Palestine from the north. It was the Mamluks who turned them back at the battle of Ayn Jalut (En-Harod in Hebrew) before they could reach Jerusalem. Afterwards, Palestine finally came under firm Mamluk rule. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 69; Riley-Smith, p. 160)

The Mamluk Sultan Babyars next seized Syria, expelling both the Mongols and last of the Crusaders in a confused three-way war. The Abbasid Caliphate was formally transfered from destroyed Baghdad to Cairo. Peace was restored, but centralized rule weakened, and feudalism spread. Agriculture in Palestine had virtually collapsed, and settled peoples returned to nomadism. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 69; Najeebabadi, vol. 2, p. 589; Nathan, p. 46-7; Riley-Smith, p. 203-4)

Palestine slowly began to recover under the Mamluks, and Jerusalem was rebuilt. Heavy taxes were imposed on Jews and there were periodic episodes of persecution—the closing of synagogues and so forth. Still, a yeshiva (Jewish seminary) was maintained in Jerusalem, and Jews fleeing persecution in Europe even found refuge in Palestine, arriving on Italian merchant ships. Safed, in the Galilee, was also a significant seat of Jewish culture and learning. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 69-76)

In the closing years of the Crusades, European Jews again became a target—and this time in a far more systematic campaign. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, overseen by Pope Innocent III, mandated that Jews wear identifying yellow badges. The situation worsened as the “Black Death” (bubonic plague) devastated Europe, and Jews were superstitiously blamed. In 1290 England became the first country to expel its Jews by decree. France and various German states would follow—generally amid much violence. While a small number came to Mamluk Palestine, far greater numbers moved east within Europe—to those German states that would have them, and then to Poland and Lithuania. Many would later come under Russian rule as borders shifted. By 1500, the center of Jewish culture had shifted from Western to Eastern Europe. Even where they were tolerated, Jews faced restrictions on where they could live—confined to walled ghettos in Poland and Lithuania. Their villages in Russia would later be confined to a limited “Pale of Settlement.” In the ghettos, they were allowed a degree of self-government. Effectively segregated from the Christian population, they would maintain their own language, Yiddish, a distinct tongue that evolved from German. Hebrew was of course maintained as the liturgical and scholarly tongue. (Ben-Sasson, p. 486-7; Dimont, p. 230-1, 248; Roth, p. 198, 334)

In 1400, a new Mongol irruption from Central Asia, this time under Timur Leng (Tamerlane), ravaged Syria. The Mamluks again successfully fended off the invader, so Palestine and Egypt were spared. But the Mamluk dynasty was greatly weakened by the struggle. (Lewis, 1950, p. 157)

In 1451, the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople, putting a final end to the greatly diminished Byzantine Empire. In 1517, the Ottomans under Sultan Selim I (“the Grim”) established Mamluk Egypt as a vassal state, and officially transfered the caliphate to Constantinople. Palestine, and most of the Arab world, now came under Ottoman rule. Mamluk sway over Palestine waned as the dynasty declined, and the Ottoman Turks became ascendant. (Kinross, 107-10, 170)

Ottoman rule brought another period of relative tolerance and reflorescence of Jewish culture. Sultan Bayezid II (“the Just”) welcomed Jewish exiles from Spain after the expulsion of 1492 to settle in Palestine or elsewhere in his empire. Safed reached its peak as a world center of Jewish learning. (Ben-Sasson, p. 632, 661)

The rebuilding of Jerusalem picked up pace, and Sultan Suleiman “the Magnificent” (1520-66) built a new wall around the city—largely to check the periodic raids of the nomadic Bedouin Arabs. A waqf (trust or endowment) was established to oversee the Haram al-Sharif and other Islamic holy sites, with land grants in the countryside to make it economically self-sufficient. The Temple Mount complex was renovated and the Dome of the Rock restored. After the centuries of turmoil, there was now a long period of peace. The Ottomans would be embroiled in many wars in Europe—chiefly with Austria and Russia—but these did not affect Palestine. (Asali, p. 200-1; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 77, 92-100)

Trade with Europe grew, and by the 18th century Palestine’s coastal plain was a major producer of cotton and citrus for export. But real Ottoman control did not extend far beyond the urban centers. There was little permanently settled Turkish class. The land remained largely in Arab hands, and Arabic remained the dominant language. (Asali, p. 214; Encyclopaedia Judaica, p. 91; Hourani, 252, 286)

As Palestine’s economic importance grew, the Ottomans began to take tentative measures to increase their control. But in 1703, after a Turkish governor had been installed in Jerusalem who imposed heavy taxes on the peasants and townspeople alike, an insurrection broke out, led by the prominent Husseini family. It was put down, but thenceforth the governors of Jerusalem were drawn from the local Arab elite, and the heavy taxes rescinded. The nearest center of direct Turkish administration, Damascus, interfered little in Palestine’s affairs. (Asali, p. 215-6)

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte established an occupation of Egypt, precipitating a confused four-way war over the country among the French, British, Turks and Mamluks. Eager to extend his control to Syria, Napoleon invaded Palestine, sacking the Mediterranean port of Jaffa and besieging Acre, another port up the coast. In a precursor of later European imperial strategies in the territory, Napoleon appealed for Jewish support against the Arabs and Turks. On April 20, 1799, amid the siege of Acre, he had an order penned, declaring that when he conquered the territory, Jews—who he called the “rightful heirs of Palestine”—would inherit the land. The Jewish notables of Acre spurned the offer, and Napoleon was forced to retreat from Palestine. In 1801, his precarious hold on Egypt collapsed, and Ottoman-Mamluk rule was restored. Palestine remained under more direct Ottoman rule, although with broad autonomy for Arabs (Muslim and Christian alike) and Jews. (Fisher, p. 263; Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2011)

Zionist Colonization Under Ottoman Rule

By the mid-19th century, Palestine, like most of the Middle East, had been a part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 500 years. People who lived there called the country Filastin, or by the Arabic phrase al-Ard al-Muqadassa—the Holy Land. (Gerner, p. 9)

For centuries, a high degree of local autonomy had been allowed. There was both cultural autonomy for the various religious and ethnic groups, and territorial autonomy for villages and districts. Under the millet system, Muslims, Christians and Jews each had their own leadership responsible for internal affairs within their own community and subject to their own laws. (Lewis, 1984, p. 125)

Village mukhtars (traditional elders) were treated as local administrators, given authority over local affairs in exchange for providing taxes and conscripts for the Turkish army. Informal village militias were also often maintained to protect against Bedouin raids, and tolerated by Turkish authorities. (Sayigh, p. 15)

Villages were generally self-sufficient, with families working subsistence plots of perhaps 100 dunums (25 acres) under a system of land tenure in which some fields were formally the domain of lords or mukhtars in a survival of feudalism, and others were explicitly for the use of common villagers. Wheat, barely, millet, sesame, lentils, olives, figs, citrus and melons were common crops, and most families had goats and other livestock. (Nathan, p. 184, 196)

1834 saw a new Arab uprising in Palestine, after the territory was seized by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali—a commander of Albanian origin who had been dispatched by Constantinople to finally oust the Mamluks, and then made his own bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Mohammed Ali’s excessive demands for conscripts and other encroachments on village autonomy were resented by the Palestinian Arabs. After he was forced to cede Palestine (and accept Ottoman sovereignty over Egypt), the traditional rights of the villages were restored. (Ayyad, p. 15)

This began to change in the 1840s, however, when the Ottoman Empire’s tanzimat reforms brought centralized administration and taxation, extending the control of the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. This saw the formal abolition of serfdom, with peasants freed from the authoritarian control of local mukhtars. Peasants were no longer bound to the land, or forced to work it as fiefs. But, as old patterns of land use were disrupted, this also resulted in an impoverishment of the villages, and the beginning of a slow movement of the population to the coastal towns. (Morris, 2001, p. 7; Nathan, p. 50)

An 1858 Land Law to regularize property deeds had the actual effect of centralizing control of communal agricultural lands—which had traditionally been worked by peasants without formal title—in the hands of a few wealthy, often absentee, private owners. Lands designated miri—arable lands controlled by the state after being removed from feudal authority—had been de facto communal village lands, and their titling as mulk (private) lands often meant the exclusion of peasant families that had worked them for generations. Musha lands were more formally for the common use of villagers, subject to repartition among families. These were also increasingly transfered to the mulk sector, as families were given the option of privatizing the parcels they had been working. Outlying uncultivated lands—known as mewat—were also claimed by the state and then privatized, even though they had been used informally for pasturing. Many of the new owners were Turks rather than Arabs, and often they were European—with the Ottoman state then under pressure from European powers to allow land ownership by foreigners. Arab peasants were increasingly reduced to the status of tenant farmers—an ironic outcome of their “liberation” from serfdom. (Dowty, p. 59-60; Nathan, p. 50, 184)

Nonetheless, a thriving citrus industry on the coastal plain remained in the hands of local Arabs—usually the effendis, or Arab gentry. And even under greater economic burden, the villages of the fellahin, or peasantry, remained largely self-sufficient. The system of communal apportionment of lands and water, known as masha’, actually survived the new land law—in part because many Arab peasants evaded land registration. While this helped preserve communal traditions, it would also make the villages more vulnerable, as many now lacked legal title to their lands under the new system. (Hadawi, 1963, p. 119; Polk, et al, p. 241; Sayigh, p. 27, 32)

At this time the population of Palestine was 462,500, of which 404,000 were Muslim, 44,000 Christian and 15,000 Jews—or 20,000 by some estimates, as some Jews were not considered Ottoman citizens and may have not been counted. The population was overwhelmingly rural, although the Jews were disproportionately urban, concentrated in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. (Dowty, p. 13)

Events far from Palestine meanwhile gave birth to a movement which would change the land’s fate. European Jews had largely achieved “emancipation”—full citizenship rights, and an end to the ghettos—by the mid-19th century. Jewish emancipation was formally embraced by Europe’s Great Powers at the 1878 Berlin Conference. But this sparked a backlash, and the modern ideology of anti-Semitism emerged—viewing the Jews as an alien, un-assimilable and ultimately corrupting Semitic presence in Europe. As revolutionary upsurges threatened the continent’s old monarchies, Jews served as scapegoats, and an assimilationist solution to Europe’s “Jewish Question” seemed less tenable. In 1881, Russian pogroms (from word for “havoc” or “outrage”) began following the March 13 assassination of Czar Alexander II, with hundreds of Jewish villages attacked by right-wing mobs and paramilitaries. Following Alexander II’s reforms, which had allowed Jews access to higher education and posts in the bureaucracy, there was a period of backlash in which some 4 million Jews fled Russia. The reforms were overturned, and the pogroms actively encouraged by the authorities. (Ben-Sasson, p. 823-4; Gross, p. 651-7; Morris, 2001, p. 15-8; Dowty, p. 31, 33)

In the mass emigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe that began at this time, most went to the United States. Some went to Britain, Canada and South Africa. But an organized movement to direct the exodus with the aim of establishing a Jewish national state emerged in response to surgence of anti-Semitism: Zionism. (Nathan, p. 52-3)

The Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) was founded in Poland, with a vision of establishing Palestine as a Jewish homeland. It organized chapters throughout Russia, Poland and Romania to raise funds for emigration. The allied Bilu—an acronym for “House of Jacob, Let Us Go”—was established in Palestine to organize settlements. The First Aliyah, or mass migration of Jewish settlers to Palestine, began in 1882—a year which also saw the publication in German of the first Zionist manifesto, Leon Pinsker’s Self-Emancipation. Aided by wealthy Jewish philanthropists in western Europe, the movement purchased some 100,000 dunams of land for the olim (settlers, “those who ascend”) by 1890, and 200,000 by 1900. Most of the olim lived in the coastal cities, particularly the new city of Tel Aviv that was established near Jaffa. But the program called for the establishment of agricultural settlements as quickly as possible. The Bilu evolved into the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. (Ben-Sasson, p. 896; Cohn-Sherbok, p. 106-7; Morris, 2001, p. 15-8; Dowty, p. 31, 33)

In 1888, the Ottoman administrators took note of the Jewish immigration and Zionist designs, changing the region’s administrative districts to enhance Constantinople’s control. The entire region had until then been part of a province or vilayet ruled from Damascus, and was generally considered part of Syria. With the reorganization, Palestine was separated from Syria and divided into three districts, centered around Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre. The northern two districts were sanjaqs (internal districts) attached to the Vilayet of Beirut, while Jerusalem, encompassing the southern half of historic Palestine, became a mutasarriflik (independent district) administrated directly from Constantinople. The sparsely inhabited Negev Desert remained under Syrian administration. Officially, Zionist aims at this time were limited to establishing “a state within a larger state”—an autonomous Jewish territory within the Ottoman empire. (Dowty, p. 18, 33)

In 1896, following the Dreyfus Affair in France—in which a Jewish army officer was notoriously framed on treason charges—Theodore Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in Germany. The book, the first explicit aspiration of Jewish statehood in Palestine, actually made no reference to the Arab inhabitants of the territory. Elsewhere, Herzl wrote that he saw Zionism as bringing economic development to the Arabs of Palestine, and in 1903 publicly called for restraints on the purchase of Palestinian lands from absentee landlords in Beirut, arguing that “poor Arab [tenant] farmers should not be driven off their land.” (Morris, 2001, p. 20-1, 678)

But in 1895 he wrote in his diary: “We must expropriate gently… We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it in any employment in our country… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Morris, 2001, p. 21-2)

“A land without people for a people without land” became the Zionist slogan (actually originating in the memoirs of British politician Lord Shaftesbury). But Russian Jewish writer Asher Ginsberg (pen name Ahad Ha-Am) warned in a Hebrew newspaper in Russia after an 1891 visit to Palestine: “We abroad are used to believing that Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed… But in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed. Only sand dunes and stony mountains…are not cultivated… If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily.” (Morris, 2001, p. 42, 49; Davis, p. 7)

Ginsberg/Ha-Am favored a “Cultural Zionism” that emphasized the Hebrew language and Jewish cultural renewal in Palestine, and was skeptical of a rush to statehood. But the “Political Zionism” of Herzl, heedless of his warnings, became the mainstream position. (Davis, p. 7; Roth, p. 373)

Zionism was still a minority current within Jewish thought at this time, and Palestine but one option under consideration within Zionism. Jewish agricultural colonies were established in Manitoba, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. There was even a scheme to establish a Jewish state on Grand Island in the Niagara River, off Buffalo, New York. (AFSC, p. 15; Gross, p. 620)

This began to change as the movement was formalized. The World Zionist Organization was founded at the Basel Congress, held in Switzerland in September 1897. “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State,” Herzl boasted. When Ottoman authorities completely rejected establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the movement opened talks with Britain, which offered territory in East Africa. The Russian wing of the movement especially, led by the young Chiam Weizmann, was most vocal in rejecting the “Uganda Offer,” calling themselves “Zionists of Zion.” Those who were open to a homeland elsewhere than Palestine broke from the WZO to form the “Territorialist” tendency under the leadership of Israel Zangwill. The “Zionists of Zion” held sway over Herzl and the WZO. (Ben-Sasson, p. 901-2; Morris, 2001, p. 23; Dowty, p. 37)

Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi, patriarch of one of Jerusalem’s leading families, wrote to the chief rabbi of France, appealing to him to pressure for a halt to Jewish colonization, predicting it would lead to violent conflict. He wrote that there were “still uninhabited countries where one could settle millions of poor Jews… But in the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace.” (Dowty, p. 63)

Arabs had reason to fear European encroachment. European colonialism was at this time a growing force in the Arab world. In 1882, a British occupation of Egypt was established, with the Ottomans maintaining only nominal sovereignty there. Although the British had ostensibly intervened to put down an Arab revolt against the Ottoman administrators, they became the real power in Egypt. The Suez Canal—linking the Mediterranean and Red Sea through Egypt, completed in 1869 by a French-dominated company (using Egyptian forced labor)—made the region critically strategic. (Fisher, p. 286-91)

Jews were again scapegoated as revolutionary currents swelled in Russia, and a new wave of pogroms was unleashed in 1903. In the notorious Passover Pogrom, 50 were killed and scores injured and raped at Kishinev. The violence, paradoxically, succeeded in radicalizing Russian Jews, many of whom did embrace anarchism and other revolutionary ideologies. But many fled Russia, and embraced Zionism. The violence prompted the Second Aliyah movement—this one much larger and better organized. The new exodus from Russia brought some 34,000 Jewish settlers to Ottoman Palestine. (Avrich, p. 17; Morris, 2001, p. 25; Dowty, p. 36-7; Yivo Institute for Jewish Research)

The most anti-Semitic elements of the Russian government were pleased by the notion of a Jewish exodus from their country. In 1903, just before he died, Herzl actually received a letter from Interior Minister Viacheslav Plehve, notorious as the mastermind of the pogroms, in which he pledged the Czarist state’s “moral and material assistance with respect to the measures taken by the Zionist movement which would lead to the diminution of the Jewish population in Russia.” (Bober, p. 172-3)

The first kibbutzim (collective settlements) were established in Palestine, building on the moshavot of the First Aliyah, which had been based on private property and exploitation of cheap Arab labor. The kibbutzim were owned in common and sought to be self-sufficient. Menachem Ussishkin in 1904 delineated three methods by which land could be procured: “By force—that is, by conquest in war, or in other words, by robbing land from its owner… by expropriation via government authority; or by purchase.” (Morris, 2001, p. 38-9)

Although Constantinople curtailed Jewish land purchases, baksheesh (bribery) allowed de facto purchases to continue. The new Jewish owners offended local traditions of land use in various ways. Arab shepherds were denied the right of access to what had long been common pasturelands regardless of official ownership. Jews purchased land from effendis—members of the Arab land-owning elite—and then pushed out the poor tenant farmers who had been on the lands for generations. (Morris, 2001, p. 41, 46, 57)

The very first violent conflict between Arab Palestinians and Zionist settlers took place in this era—largely because of this refusal on the part of the settlers to recognize the peasants’ customary rights in the land. For instance, when settlers barred the peasants from grazing their herds on newly bought lands, this naturally provoked incursions, which then escalated to attacks. (Sayigh, p. 44)

The Second Aliyah olim were often socialists, anarchists, atheists and free-thinkers, but even the socialist Poalei Zion organization, led by Polish-born David Ben-Gurion, advocated exclusion of Arabs from the emerging Jewish economy, and a ban on hiring Arab labor. This policy was known as kibush ha’avoda or “conquest of labor.” (Morris, 2001, p. 46, 50-1)

Arab raids on settlements predictably became a constant problem, with houses vandalized and livestock seized. In 1908, the HaShomer (“guard,” or “watchman”) militia was founded to defend the settlements. (Morris, 2001, p. 53-4; Gee, p. 40)

In 1891, a group of Jerusalem Arab notables petitioned Constantinople to halt Jewish immigration: “The Jews are taking all the lands out of the hands of the Muslims, taking all the commerce into their hands and bringing arms into the country.” (Morris, 2001, p. 56)

Arab national aspirations were also emerging at this time. In 1905, Najib Azuri, a Lebanese Christian who had served in the Ottoman bureaucracy in Jerusalem, published in French The Awakening of the Arab Nation, calling for an independent Arab state stretching from Mesopotamia to the Suez. (Dowty, p. 65)

In 1907, the World Zionist Organization founded a Palestine Office in Jaffa to oversee land acquisition and distribution, headed by Arthur Ruppin, who wrote: “Land is the most necessary thing for establishing roots in Palestine. Since there are hardly any more arable unsettled lands…we are bound in each case…to remove the peasants who cultivated the land.” He advocated a “limited population transfer” of Palestinian peasants to Syria. (Morris, 2001, p. 59, 61, 140)

Yet the most ambitious Zionist statement actually foresaw the annexation of Syria itself. Max Nordau wrote that Zionism sought “to expand Europe’s moral borders to the Euphrates.” (Morris, 2001, p. 63)

In 1911, the Turkish governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, in a bid to appease Arab protests, wrote: “We are not xenophobes; we welcome all strangers. We are not anti-Semites… But no nation, no government could open its arms to groups…aiming to take Palestine from us.” (Morris, 2001, p. 62)

A Palestinian-born Jew, Yitzhak Epstein, delivered a lecture on the “Arab question” in Basel in 1905: “We have forgotten one small matter: There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it… We are making a great psychological error with regard to a great, assertive and jealous people. While we feel a deep love for the land of our forefathers, we forget that the nation who lives in it today has a sensitive heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like every man, is tied to his native land with strong bonds.” (Morris, 2001, p. 57; Palestine Remembered)

In direct response, Mose Smilansky wrote: “Either the land of Israel belongs in a national sense to those Arabs who settled there in recent times, and then we have no place there and we must say explicitly: The land of our fathers is lost to us. [Or] if the Land of Israel belongs to us, to the Jewish people, then our national interests come before all else… It is not possible for one country to serve as the homeland of two peoples.” (Morris, 2001, p. 58)

Smilansky was clear in advocating separation from the Arabs: “Let us not be too familiar with the Arab fellahin lest our children adopt their ways and learn from their ugly deeds. Let all those who are loyal to the Torah avoid ugliness and that which resembles it and keep their distance from the fellahin and their base attributes.” (Masalha, p. 7)

Ber Borochov, a prominent Marxist Zionist and founder of Poalei Zion, called for a “Semitic nationalism,” for the olim to learn Arabic, and recognize Arabs as “close to us in blood and spirit.” But such sentiments remained marginal. (Hertzberg, 352; Morris, 2001, p. 58)

As Zionism gained ground, so did Arab calls for independence—initially among the Lebanese Christian elite of Beirut, who launched the watan or “fatherland” movement. In 1877, a new Ottoman constitution had instated a parliament in Constantinople, with representatives from throughout the empire. When the new constitution was suspended following a conservative coup the following year, the hand of Arab independence advocates was strengthened. Many rallied to Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, who had been exiled to Syria following a revolt against the French in Algeria. The movement was crushed, and the constitution revived when the reformist Young Turk tendency took power in Constantinople in 1908. But Arabs remained a minority in the parliament even though they believed they constituted a majority in the empire’s populace. The 1908 Ottoman parliament included 147 Turks, 60 Arabs and four Jews (as well as token numbers of Armenians, Greeks, Albanians and Slavs). (Lewis, p. 179; Morris, 2001, p. 26-9)

In Palestine, demographics were changing. By 1914, there were some 60,000 Jews in Palestine, compared to 657,000 Muslims (including Druze, a minority sect), and 81,000 Christians. Some 45 Jewish agricultural settlements had been established. (Morris, 2001, p. 83; Nathan, p. 52)

World War I and the Balfour Declaration

The outbreak of World War I—with Constantinople on the side of the Central Powers—brought disruption of the Ottoman Empire’s trade routes, and harsh privation to Palestine. Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish but non-Zionist US ambassador to the Ottomans, organized a dispatch of aid raised by American Jews to the Yishuv, or community of the olim. The aid was delivered by the US battleship North Carolina in October 1914. Morgenthau also applied diplomatic pressure when the Ottoman authorities began having Jewish settlers deported as enemy nationals later that year; the deportations were halted after several hundred had been shipped to British-held territory in Egypt. (Morris, 2001, p. 85)

Many Jews in Palestine believed that an Allied victory would improve their prospects for a state, and some actively collaborated with the British. In 1915, Jewish settlers established the NILI spy ring which reported to Britain on Ottoman forces in Palestine; two of its leaders would be hanged by Ottoman authorities. (Morris, 2001, p. 87)

One 1915 British parliamentary report read:

The Zionist leaders gave us [Britain] a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. [Thomas, p. 9]

The British Gen. Edmund Allenby invaded from Egypt in the spring of 1917—with the participation of a Jewish Legion made up of Zionist volunteers from Palestine, Britain and the US. The Turks, clearly no longer trusting the loyalty of the Jews, had Tel Aviv forcibly evacuated—under the guise of protecting the populace. The city’s mostly Jewish inhabitants took refuge in the Galilee and other inland rural areas. But Allenby took Jerusalem and expelled the Turks from the territory in December; the Jewish refugees returned to Tel Aviv. (Morris, 2001, p. 77; Segev, p. 19-20)

In April 1918, Allenby established the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA)—which, in a bid to win peace with the Arabs, made no overt moves towards implementing the Zionist policy, and actually curbed Jewish immigration. (Morris, 2001, p. 88-9)

As Allenby’s invasion was prepared, Britain’s rulers began debating the post-war fate of Palestin

Continue ReadingTHE DISPOSSESSION OF THE PALESTINIANS 

IMMIGRATION DETENTION: THE CASE FOR ABOLITION

by Jane Guskin, The Huffington Post

On August 6, 34-year-old immigration detainee Hiu Lui Ng died in Rhode Island, in severe pain from a fractured spine and terminal cancer which went undiagnosed and untreated over the year he spent in federal lockups. Valery Joseph, another immigration detainee, died of an apparent seizure at the Glades County Detention Center in Florida on June 20, just two weeks shy of his 24th birthday. Ng had been living in the US for half his life, since he was 17; Joseph had spent two thirds of his life here, having arrived at age 8. The two men joined a list of at least 80 people who have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since January 1, 2004.

Since May of this year, investigative stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS News have exposed a pattern of serious medical neglect in the immigration detention system which appears to have been a factor in many of these deaths. (ICE denies the charges, unsurprisingly.)

By focusing on these compelling stories of human suffering, the mainstream media coverage has brought needed attention to the issue of mass incarceration in our immigration system.

Many concerned citizens are now demanding reform, saying that even people facing deportation have a right to basic medical care and humane treatment while detained. Others are less sympathetic, arguing that we shouldn’t spend taxpayer dollars on health care for immigrants.

The obvious question isn’t being asked: why are people detained at all? Why should we spend more than $1.2 billion a year to keep immigrants in prison? What purpose does immigration detention serve?

Officially, immigration detention is not supposed to be used as punishment; the immigration agency can only detain immigrants in order to more easily deport them, so that they don’t “abscond” and evade removal. In reality, the federal government uses immigration detention to punish people for fighting their deportation cases, to pressure them to give up and return to their country of nationality, and to discourage other people from coming to the US to seek asylum.

But these aren’t legally or morally acceptable justifications for detention.

Does it even matter whether people “abscond”? Is it really a problem if immigrants who are supposed to be deported end up staying here with their families—living, working, shopping and paying taxes? When we add up the cost in dollars, and in human lives, is it worth it to ensure that immigrants really leave the US?

On the other side of the globe, Australia has confronted the same question and has decided that the answer is no. On July 29, the Australian government announced it will stop routinely detaining asylum seekers while their immigration cases are pending; under the new policy, only adults who are considered a security risk may be detained—and even then, only as a last resort, and for the briefest possible time.

Back in the US, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. In 1994, there were an average of 6,785 people in immigration detention on any given day; in 2008, that number is around 32,000 and growing. That’s an increase of more than 470% in less than 15 years.

Do you feel safer, knowing that 32,000 people are behind bars today for the sole reason that they were not born in this country and have been deemed “removable”? Are you satisfied to spend over $1.2 billion a year of your tax dollars keeping immigrants locked up while the prison industry’s profits soar?

Why can’t we just abolish immigration detention, the way debtor’s prison was abolished in the 1800s?

The solution is not “alternatives to detention” like the electronic monitoring devices some immigrants are forced to wear on their ankles. As the Catholic Legal Immigration Network points out, such devices are “overly restrictive in nature and constitute other forms of detention, rather than meaningful alternatives to detention.”

The alternative to detention is simple: no detention.

The government could end detention today by releasing the people who are fighting their cases, and letting everyone else—those who aren’t trying to stay here—choose voluntary departure with a six-month period to make arrangements and leave on their own. (The incentive? Voluntary departure means they could later apply to return here legally.)

How much tragedy would be avoided this way? How much money would be saved?

Debtor’s prison was considered normal once. So was slavery. But normal doesn’t mean right. When slavery was normal (and legal), some reformers advocated for slaves to be treated decently, and not beaten, whipped or otherwise abused. And other people, denounced as radicals at the time, believed slavery was an abomination and organized to stop it.

In the end slavery was abolished, and so was debtor’s prison. Immigration detention can also be stopped, if the voices of opposition become loud enough that Congress is forced to act.

Too many people have suffered for too long under our immigration detention system. How many deaths will it take before we end this abuse?

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Jane Guskin is co-author of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, published by Monthly Review Press in July 2007. Guskin also edits Immigration News Briefs, a weekly newsletter covering immigration issues. She lives in New York City.

This story first appeared Aug. 27 on The Huffington Post.

From our Daily Report:

Rhode Island: detainee dies in ICE custody
WW4 Report, Aug. 18, 2008
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23-year-old dies in ICE detention
WW4 Report, July 14, 2008
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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Sept. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIMMIGRATION DETENTION: THE CASE FOR ABOLITION 

BIG OIL AND THE BIG EASY

Catastrophe and Counterinsurgency in New Orleans

by Frank Morales, The Shadow

“For years, cities across the nation have been declaring old-style public housing complexes a social experiment gone awry, emptying the buildings and, with a good riddance press of the plunger, blowing them up.”

—Clifford J. Levy, “Storm Forces a Hard Look at Troubled Public Housing‚” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2005

“Vickie Johnston, a 37-year-old New Orleans hairdresser, sneaked into the city a week after the catastrophe only to learn she had lost everything—her clothes, furniture, and irrreplaceables such as correspondence and photos. She voted for Bush twice but feels betrayed by all government. “They knew New Orleans was a fishbowl. They knew,” she said. “Now it’s a toilet bowl. How can they do this to us? Why did they let the water get so high?”

—Washington Post, Sept. 16, 2005

“Louisiana has been joined at the hip throughout its history with US military interests, and the message I want you to take away from today is that we fully support that role.”

—Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, Gulf Coast Military Expo, New Orleans, May 6, 2004

The preventable August 29-30 2005 catastrophic drowning of New Orleans and the deaths of some 1,300 people was, to say the least, a case of negligent homicide. Drowned in a sea of indifference, without food and water, 25,000 people waited five days at the Superdome to be rescued after Katrina hit. At this moment, thousands of families are still living the disorienting nightmare of displaced refugees, many trapped in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers, spewing formaldehyde poison. Unable to pay the cost of their temporary “shelter,” facing the day-to-day fear of eviction, fear of becoming homeless again. Meanwhile, the poor who’ve fought to remain in New Orleans have been forced to endure the demolition of their homes, and the basic right to their private property flagrantly violated. Even the homes of those living in public housing in the poorer sections, many unscathed by the hurricane, are currently the targets of evictions. In short, the displacement continues, a war against the poor grinds on. And yet, we might ask, to what end?

The story of New Orleans, Katrina and its aftermath is a big story. I shall attempt only to sketch an outline of some of its features, raise a few questions. For example, could it be that the “colossal failure” that has typified federal response to Katrina was, in fact, an efficient rendering of and cover for a new military model to catastrophe, a military operation designed to secure and defend oil installations throughout the area? Or, is the unprecedented militarization of New Orleans, under the banner of counter-terrorism, linked inextricably to a domestic counter-insurgency, with American citizens, particularly those who are non-white and poor, as its target? I contend that it is all of these things.

I contend that the “federal response” to Katrina represents an escalation of the tactics of domestic counter-insurgency.

In fact, the unnecessary deaths followed by an unprecedented forcible displacement and scattering of thousands of New Orleans residents, may be seen as an attempt to seize large swaths of the land known as New Orleans in the interests of US elite elements—particularly those wed to the dominant and hyper-militaristic oil barons. In other words, as in Iraq, the human catastrophe of Katrina has all to do with the security of Big Oil. It’s about Big Oil versus the Big Easy.

New Orleans and the Northern Command
Weeks before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a premonition about the hurricane season. According to a Sept. 26, 2005 US News and World Report item, it “turns out that some two weeks before Katrina hit the Gulf, [Rumsfeld] signed a ‘severe weather execution order‚’ that let the Northern Command dispatch officials to hurricane sites on its own, without Washington’s OK. Officials report that the order helped speed military response.”

According to “Hurricane Katrina: DOD Disaster Response,” issued on Sept. 19, 2005 by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “the details of this order, including the extent of the authority it conveyed, have not been made public.” Interestingly, the “execution order‚” emanates from the Pentagon’s Northern Command, located at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. It states (in caps): “THIS IS A CDRUSNORTHCOM EXECUTION ORDER (EXORD) DIRECTING MOVEMENT OF TITLE TEN FORCES WITHIN THE JTF-KATRINA JOA.” CDRUSNORTHCOM stands for Commander, United States Northern Command. Funny thing is, though, it is dated “DTG 140900Z SEP 05″—which would seem to be at odds with the report of the earlier “severe weather” order cited above. In any case, other Pentagon directives regarding domestic operations which impact on DoD response to Katrina are more easily pinned down.

For example, on June 27, 2005, when Katrina was just a gleam in Mother Nature’s eye (or the dark soul of some Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency official in the “weather modification” branch), the Pentagon issued, “for official use only,” Department of Defense Directive (DoDD) 3025.dd-M, a 190-page is entitled “Manual for Defense Support of Civil Authorities” (DSCA). It states that United States military “emergency authority” applies “when the use of Military Forces is necessary to prevent loss of life or wanton destruction of property, or to restore governmental functioning and public order…when sudden and unexpected civil disturbances occur,” particularly those “civil disturbances incident to earthquake, fire, flood, or other such calamity…” And further, “if duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation and circumstances preclude obtaining prior authorization by the President,” the military is, from their point of view, legally grounded to intervene, in order to restore “public order.”

The maintenance of “public order” and the obsession to suppress “civil disturbance” is also central to the Pentagon’s “Domestic Operations Manual,” issued by their Center for Law and Military Operations. Chapter Four, entitled, “Military Assistance for Civil Disturbances,” sets forth the legal parameters for conducting missions whose goal is the suppression of so-called “civil disorder.” Page 75 states that “the GARDEN PLOT plan provides the basis for all preparations, deployment, employment, and redeployment of Department of Defense component forces, including National Guard forces called to active federal service, for use in domestic civil disturbance operations, in support of civil authorities as directed by the President.” The manual, originally issued back in August 2001, was updated in 2005 to incorporate current US military Northern Command and “homeland defense” alignments.

That New Orleans was to become identified as a “civil disorder” operation—via a kind of mass media morphing into Los Angeles 1992—was codified by none other than Sen. John Warner (R-VA), head of the Armed Services Committee. His Sept. 14, 2005 communiqué to Donald Rumsfeld affirmed, in its opening sentence, that “the extraordinary damage caused to the Gulf States by Hurricane Katrina…was followed by incidents of public disorder.” As we shall see, Pentagon “emergency authority” was to be applied to the “disordered” City of New Orleans—a counter-insurgency operation with hints of martial law. More recently, the Bush junta has taken further steps toward martial law in its rewrite of the Insurrection Act to now allow for the stationing of troops anywhere in the US without the consent of local authorities, at the whim of the so-called Commander in Chief.

In a September 2, 2005 front-page article entitled, “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans,” the Army Times expressed this very sentiment. The piece opens with the announcement that “combat operations are underway on the streets ‘to take this city back’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” According to the article, Brig. General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force stated that, “this place is going to look like Little Somalia.” Jones went on to say that hundreds of armed troops were prepared to “fight the insurgency in the city” by launching a “massive citywide security mission” from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back.” Leaving no doubt, he said that “this will be a combat operation to get this city under control,” as there were, presumably, “several large areas of the city “in a full state of anarchy.”

Consequently, no sooner had Lake Pontchartrain emptied itself into the lowlands of New Orleans, with a little help labeled “massive incompetence,” that Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and police helicopters filled the sky—”most,” according to Army Times, “with armed soldiers manning the doors.” Armed? Against the flood of suffering humanity below? No, armed ostensibly, as a consequence of the military’s own disseminated reports of having “been shot at by armed civilians,” while “several military helicopters reported being shot at from the ground,” followed by well-disseminated lurid stories of roaming armed gangs, rapes and murders—all, at this point, shown to have been convenient fictions designed to justify the massive police-military build up.

A front-page New York Times report of Sept. 29, 2005, “Fear Exceeded Crime’s Reality in New Orleans,” said that “most [of the] alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.” It stated that New Orleans police superintendent Edwin Compass admitted that he had, in fact, “no official reports to document any murder,” nor “one official report of rape or sexual assault.” In essence, according to the paper of record, “most [of the] shocking statements turned out to be false.”

Nonetheless, scores of military trucks and “up-armored Humvees” would eventually roll in, along with 50,000 plus Army and Air Force National Guard troops from dozens of states, along with a thousand military troops from the 82nd Airborne Division and 1st and 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, not to mention scads of private rent-a-cop, rent-a-soldier outfits, like Blackwater. Alos mobilized were the Naval Reserve Force, the national reserve command for the Navy; the Marine Forces Reserve; the Eighth Coast Guard District, which is the largest Coast Guard district command, covering 26 states; and the 377th Theater Support Command, which is the largest Army Reserve logistical command. In short, by September 7, a week after President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana and NORTHCOM began to deploy the “forward elements” of what was to become Joint Task Force Katrina, the Pentagon had fielded “assets in the affected area [which] included 42,990 National Guard personnel, 17,417 active duty personnel, 20 US ships, 360 helicopters, and 93 fixed wing aircraft.” (CRS report, cited above)

The chief of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, was put in charge of “securing” the New Orleans convention center and moving 25,000 people out of the Superdome, where, unable to escape the floodwaters, they’d been directed (forced) to seek shelter. The only thing these people encountered in the ill-prepared stadium was a suped-up soldiery who viewed them as the enemy. According to Blum, “the most contentious issues were lawlessness in the streets, and particularly a potentially very dangerous volatile situation in the convention center where tens of thousands of people literally occupied that on their own. We had people that were evacuated from hotels, and tourists that were lumped together with some street thugs and some gang members that—it was a potentially very dangerous situation.”

Blum, quoted in a Sept. 3, 2005 DoD news transcript and later in an American Forces Press Service report, stated that in “re-taking” the Superdome, “the Guardsmen encountered absolutely no opposition. Not a shot was fired during the effort, and no Guard soldiers were injured.” Their plan was executed “with great military precision.”

“We waited until we had enough force in place to do an overwhelming force,” Blum blurted, saying he “went in with police powers, 1,000 National Guard military policemen,” and “stormed the convention center, for lack of a better term… Had the Guardsmen gone in with less force, they may have been caught in a fight between the Guard military police and those who didn’t want to be processed or apprehended.”

It should be noted that “apprehending people” is a police function, not a military one. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prohibits active-duty forces from conducting law enforcement operations within the US. According to Gen. Blum, that’s not a problem. After all, he said, “National Guard troops reporting for duty in the Gulf region to help maintain security are trained professionals, many who serve as civilian law enforcement officers when not on military duty,” and consequently “bring solid expertise to the mission.” In fact, “military police” are “trained badge-carrying law enforcement officers that discharge their duties when called to active duty.” (AFPS, Sept. 1, 2005)

The very first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, Paul McHale, agreed with Blum, stating in the same AFPS report, that Posse Comitatus “does not cover National Guard members operating under their state governors control.” After all, notes McHale, this “enables Guard forces, who often come from the communities they are serving, to work side-by-side with law enforcement officials in ways active duty forces simply can’t.”

An eight-page policy statement on the subject of “Defense Support of Civil Authorities” (DSCA), issued on the same day as the aforementioned DoDD 3025.dd-M, notes that “all requests by civil authorities for DSCA shall be evaluated by DoD authorities and approved by the Secretary of Defense.” These “requests by civil authorities,” evaluated as to issues of “legality, lethality, risk, cost, appropriateness, and readiness,” result in the launching of military operations, “in accordance with this Directive (3025.dd-M), the DoD Civil Disturbance Plan (‘GARDEN PLOT’) or any other plans or orders published by the DoD Domestic Crisis Manager.”

In other words, it’s likely that the decades-old “GARDEN PLOT” operation, mil-speak code for the Pentagon’s long-standing “civil disturbance suppression” apparatus initiated in 1968, was in effect “operational,” on the ground in New Orleans. The June 27, 2005, “Defense Support for Civil Authorities‰ directive (cited above) was authored by Paul McHale, the Pentagon’s first Assistant Secretary for Homeland Defense.

Terrorism Paranoia on the Bayou
McHale is a busy man. It happens that the Assistant Secretary was at the Hilton Hotel in New Orleans on May 10-11, 2005, three months prior to Katrina, attending the second annual “Gulf Coast Military Expo.” The stated theme of the military expo was “how do we make homeland defense and homeland security seamless?” McHale participated in a panel, along with Dr. Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, author of America the Vulnerable: How Our Government is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism, entitled, “What are the maritime gaps and how do we address them?” Presumably, they sat in on the next panel, entitled, “What are the land gaps and how do we address them?”

One wonders what “land” and “maritime gaps” they were referring to. Surely any discussion related to “gaps” in the “defense” and “security” of the people New Orleans might have stumbled upon the fact that according to Scientific American (Oct. 1, 2o01), National Geographic (October 2004), and various Congressional and federal (including Department of Homeland Security) studies, the drowning of the city was a disaster waiting to happen. So, whose “security” and “defense” were they talking about?

A sampling of other “military expo” conference participants included Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, Louisiana National Guard, who addressed the “role of the Reserves and the Guard in homeland security and homeland defense.” Susan Maraghy, Lockheed Martin VP for Homeland Security, and James Bernazzani, Special Agent in Charge, FBI/New Orleans, were also present. So was Col. Terry J. Ebert, Executive Assistant to the Mayor for Homeland Security and Public Safety, New Orleans. Last but not least, Michael D. Brown, the recently demoted former Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response (better known as FEMA), addressed those assembled as to whether or not “the National Response Plan” was “Up to the Task?” Corporate “expo” sponsors included Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing.

A year earlier, at the inaugural New Orleans “military expo,” in May 2004, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco noted that “in Louisiana we play a critical role in the development and execution of a homeland defense strategy,” given that, “in the Greater New Orleans economy alone, there are 42,000 jobs that are directly connected to the American military, with a $4.5 billion annual impact,” while “the civilian federal government component accounts for 22,000 full-time jobs and an additional $3.2 billion annual impact.” According to the governor, “the oil and gas that comes through our ports and refineries accounts for a huge proportion of the nation’s energy needs,” while “the intersection of road, rail, shipping and airfields represents perhaps the most significant of its kind in our nation today.”

In fact, the governor went on to note that “the Gulf Coast provides the best training areas for the future of homeland defense.” At the end of the day, she stated, “South Louisiana is the gateway to a corridor of 50 million Americans who live in states that are served by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. By any measure, the river system and the Gulf of Mexico are vital to all of us and our futures.” Therefore, she said, “we are hopeful that New Orleans will be named one of our nation’s regional homeland security sites when the decision is made.”

Concluding her statement with a bang, Blanco warned that “international terrorists recently raided oil platforms in the Arabian Gulf.” She added: “Off the shores of the Gulf South, less than 100 miles from where we are sitting today, there are literally hundreds of similar platforms that are exposed. These platforms require constant vigilance to directly protect our nation’s fuel supply… On the subject of national defense I make the argument that Louisiana is strategically positioned to be the major player in the future of homeland security. The natural resources, infrastructure and personnel are already in place… We must resolve to defeat terrorism at home and abroad. And that effort should begin at home.”

The governor may have had a point. A December 2004 Congressional Research Service Report, “Port and Maritime Security,” which delineates the “potential for terrorist attack,” states under the heading of “potential targets” that “terrorists could be expected to target a port that handled a large volume of oil and other goods and that had a densely populated area that tankers passed on their way through a harbor to an unloading terminal,” and that “if terrorists sought major economic damage while minimizing loss of life, they might try the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, or LOOP, the only US deepwater oil port that can handle fully loaded supertankers, 18 miles off the Louisiana coast.”

What’s more, the Gulf Coast region also houses the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, 700 million barrels of oil stored under 500 salt domes. It’s also the location of many refineries and distribution points for tankers, barges, and pipelines. According to a New York Times report, “the question of ensuring a secure energy supply has taken on added significance in the last year, as terrorist groups have taken aim at petroleum installations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and political turmoil has struck two other large oil exporters, Nigeria and Venezuela. China’s growing appetite for oil has only added to the jitters about the global oil supply.” (Dec. 7, 2004, “Topping Off the Biggest Gas Tank.”)

One attendee at the aforementioned “military expo” might have been especially jittery. Col. Terry Ebbert, USMC (Ret), who during the onslaught of Katrina was the director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, is also the former security director of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port is, according to their website, a limited liability company “whose primary business is offloading foreign crude oil from tankers, storing crude oil, and transporting crude oil via connecting pipelines to refineries throughout the Gulf Coast and Midwest.” Some of those oil pipelines cross into New Orleans proper. Is it paranoid to suggest that “terrorists” might consider taking out some of LOOP’s oil terminals and pipelines? Apparently, those expert in “counter-terrorism” don’t think so.

Katrina and 9-11
Accordingly, on Sept. 20, 2005, less than three weeks following Katrina, President Bush appointed Frances Fragos Townsend, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, to lead his administration’s “investigation” into the federal response to the hurricane. Bush’s choice to head such an investigation into “what went wrong” indicates the “counter-terrorist” lens through which the elite view the “consequence management” that is post-Katrina New Orleans. Could it be that the federal response, far from being a “failure,” fits precisely within the context of a finely drawn and deftly executed counter-terror, counter-insurgent operation, executed behind a “natural” catastrophe, a catastrophe which was bound (if not expected) to happen?

The notion gains weight when one examines the curriculum vitae of Frances Fragos Townsend. According to a Dec. 6, 2004 US News & World Report article entitled “A Skilled Survivor,” “it is Townsend who has led the government’s response to numerous terrorism-related threats and crises, first as a national security advisor for counterterrorism, then as President Bush’s new advisor for homeland security.” One area in which he responded was in the area of domestic spying. This past June 2005, President Bush “embracing nearly all of the recommendations of a blue-ribbon intelligence commission,” announced the creation of “a national security service within the FBI to specialize in intelligence as part of a shake up of the nation‚s disparate spy agencies.” (AP, June 29, 2005) The measure, designed to allow for CIA domestic operations via the FBI, is, as the BBC (June 30, 2005) put it, “a domestic spy service.” The AP report notes that the decision to set up such a homeland spy apparatus was made after a three-month review of the commission’s recommendations, “by the National Security Council’s homeland security advisor, Frances Fragos Townsend.”

Townsend, a native New Yorker from Long Island, began her career as a prosecutor, eventually working out of the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan, where she prosecuted corporate and mob cases for Rudy Giuliani. Later, she spent 13 years at the Justice Department in Washington DC, becoming a close confidant and trusted advisor to Janet Reno during the Clinton years. In 1998, at the behest of Reno and former FBI Director Louis Freeh, she took a job at Justice as head of the powerful Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. The OIPR enforces a controversial statute known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), under which the FBI or other agencies can obtain special wiretaps and other search and surveillance warrants to presumably track spies and terrorists.

As we’ve come to learn post-9-11, the Bureau was not always good at sharing what it knew, especially with those who might wish to prevent a crime. The USNews.com report cited above noted that “both the Government Accountability Office and the 9-11 Commission have blamed the OIPR in part for the government’s intelligence failures before the [9-11] terrorist attacks.”

The US News report notes that “Townsend developed a unique perspective on al-Qaeda because of her close personal friendship with a legendary FBI agent and al-Qaeda expert named John O’Neill, who, having retired from the bureau, lost his life on Sept.11, 2001, just days after starting his job as security chief at the World Trade Center.” In fact, O’Neill was forced out of the Bureau by those who resented his zeal in tracking al-Qaeda operatives. He reportedly told Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, authors of the book Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden (2002), that “the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.” It is unclear whether or not Townsend’s “unique perspective” facilitated the obstruction of O’Neill’s investigation, eventual departure and subsequent silencing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

What is known however is that on Sept. 11, 2005, a week or so before she was given her new post-Katrina assignment, Townsend was a featured speaker at the Monmouth County 9-11 Memorial Dedication program in New Jersey along with Lewis M. Eisenberg, past chairman (1995-2002) of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. One can rest assured that her remarks were both informed and timely; after all, as former FBI chief Robert Mueller noted, “Fran is a true professional, with extensive experience in addressing terrorism. As such, she brings experienced leadership to the war on terror.” (USNews.com, Dec. 6, 2004)

The question is though, what is the relationship between a “counter-terror expert” investigating these matters and the rehabilitation, nurture and care for a million displaced people? What is a counter-terrorism czar doing in New Orleans anyway? What does an NSC insider bring to the table, which the poor are not even allowed to sit at? Is the lens through which Ms. Townsend views her current assignment vis a vis the Gulf Coast the most constructive one? Or more ominously, is her placement meant to secure a post Katrina geo-political strategy for the region that places counter-terror/counter-insurgent requirements ahead of the needs of the former residents’ requirements for land, housing, employment and funds for the reconstruction of their communities? Given the racist “spin” being cast regarding the fitness of the displaced to be guaranteed a right of return‚ is it possible that Katrina facilitated an elite counter-insurgency/displacement operation targeting the people of New Orleans, particularly poor people of color.

Concurrent with focusing her attention on New Orleans, Townsend lead a National Security Council “policy review” dealing with “the road ahead” for “the war on terror.” Citing “a drift in overall terrorism policy,” the Bush administration, according to the Washington Post (May 29, 2005), “launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al-Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader ‘strategy against violent extremism.'” According to the Post, she said “that the review is needed to take into account the ‘ripple effect’ from years of operations targeting al-Qaeda leaders… ‘Naturally, the enemy has adapted,’ she said. ‘As you capture a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an Abu Faraj al-Libbi raises up. Nature abhors a vacuum.”

In other words, forget about the Osama, let’s criminalize dissenting thought—so-called extremism—instead. To this end, Townsend envisions a “US [that] is expected to look beyond Al Qaeda” to develop a “strategic approach to defeat violent extremism,” in order to “prevent the spread of Islamic jihad.”

Especially we might surmise, at home—in, say, cities like New Orleans, whose people might prove susceptible to “extreme” notions that question the priority of protecting oil infrastructure through a hyper-militarization of the region over the human rights of the citizenry.

Finally, we ought to take note of a Sept. 15, 2004 document, “for official use only,” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), entitled, “How Terrorists Might Exploit a Hurricane.” A speculative “thought experiment” authored by something called the “analytic red cell program” of the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection sector of the DHS, the document analyzes “threats, impact and vulnerabilities” during the “entire hurricane lifecycle.” Noting that “a splinter terrorist cell” of “persons pursuing a political agenda” might “be more likely to exploit a hurricane on site,” it recommends increased security procedures (e.g. identification checks) at evacuation centers and shelters—while advising the “first responder community” to ‘increase identification procedures to prevent imposters from gaining unauthorized access to targets.” Among those who took part in the Red Cell’s “alternative assessment” which was “intended to provoke thought and stimulate discussion,” was the Central Intelligence Agency.

FEMA and Martial Law
The media spin of “massive incompetence” in the face of catastrophe aside, Michael Brown’s FEMA, the disgraced disaster agency recently swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security, was quite busy orchestrating its role in the counter-insurgent war against the people of New Orleans. This should come as no surprise. FEMA was set up to do just this sort of thing. An unconstitutional construct with secret budgets, FEMA was created by Executive Order 12148 in 1979 and given the authority to organize and lead the government’s response to national emergencies, both natural disasters and “man-made” ones.

In 1982, FEMA issued a joint paper with the Department of Defense entitled “The Civil/Military Alliance in Emergency Management” which specified then-President Reagan’s policies on “emergency mobilization preparedness,” mil-speak for mass round-ups. This was about the time that Oliver North, then assigned to the National Security Council, started serving as NSC liaison to FEMA. According to the Miami Herald, (July 5, 1987, “Reagan Aides and the Secret Government” by Alfonso Chardy) “from 1982 to 1984, North assisted FEMA, the US government’s chief national crisis-management unit, in revising contingency plans for dealing with nuclear war, insurrection or massive military mobilization.”

In this era, FEMA and the DoD staged a number of so-called “readiness exercises” geared to effectuate the “evacuation” and detention of large numbers of people in case of massive civil unrest or national emergencies. According to scholar Diana Reynolds in “The Rise of the National Security State: FEMA and the NSC” (Covert Action Quarterly, 1990), it was during this period that “FEMA and DoD began a continuing tradition of biannual joint exercises to test civilian mobilization, civil security emergency and counter-terrorism plans using such names as ‘Proud Saber/Rex 82’ and ‘Rex-84/Night Train.'” These exercises, according to Reynolds, “anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial law.”

One exercise, code-named “Rex84-Alpha,” included a joint operation that rehearsed a round-up of tens of thousands of Central American refugees in the US, in the event of a US invasion of the region. The “exercise” bears a striking similarity to the current Department of Homeland Security’s Endgame program, a “removal and detention” operation which has resulted in the detaining of many thousands so-called illegal immigrants.

Another chilling scenario, set forth in a June 30, 1982 memo obtained by the Miami Herald (cited above), called for the rounding up and detention of 21 million “American Negroes” and the imposition of “martial law in case of a national uprising by black militants.” The head of FEMA during this period, Louis Giuffrida, fresh out of Army Combat Command, was an old crony of Reagan’s from their days together in California, where they kick-started SWAT (militarized police) and Œcivil disorder suppression‚ training at the California Specialized Training Institute. Giuffrida, obsessed with domestic counter-insurgency methodologies and ideologies, once stated that, “martial rule comes into existence upon a determination (not a declaration) by the senior military commander that the civil government must be replaced because it is no longer functioning anyway,” adding that, “martial rule is limited only by the principle of necessary force.” (Guardian, NY Jan. 16, 1991)

Accordingly, long before the federal government and most aid organizations had arrived on the scene in New Orleans, FEMA had already contracted with Blackwater USA, a Christian fundamentalist-linked, for-hire mercenary outfit active in Iraq, to provide the “necessary force”—more specifically, to “provide 164 armed guards for FEMA reconstruction projects in Louisiana,” according to journalist Jeremy Scahill, writing in The Nation (Oct. 10, 2005). According to Scahill, the “contract was announced just days after Homeland Security Department spokesperson Russ Knock told the Washington Post he knew of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security firms,” stating that they already had enough personnel “to meet the demands of public safety” in New Orleans. Obviously he lied.

So, while FEMA was unwilling to move expeditiously to the tasks of meeting the critical needs of the people, it found time to put 164 armed thugs on the ground “dressed in full battle gear,” who “patrolled the streets in SUVs with tinted windows and the Blackwater logo splashed on the back,” while “others sped around the French Quarter in an unmarked car with no license plates.” At some point, “they congregated on the corner of St. James and Bourbon in front of a bar called 711, where Blackwater was establishing a makeshift headquarters. From the balcony above the bar, several Blackwater guys cleared out what had apparently been someone’s apartment,” throwing “household items from the balcony to the street below.” They also “draped an American flag from the balcony’s railing”—an irony given the fact that Americans fought a revolution in part to put a halt to troops taking over their homes. Incidentally, according to the Nation report, “more than a dozen troops from the 82nd Airborne Division stood in formation on the street watching the action.”

Along with cutting deals with private mercenary outfits like Blackwater, FEMA officials also found time to do a number of other things consonant with their true mission. According to published reports, FEMA turned away experienced fire fighters, turned back Wal-Mart supply trucks, prevented the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel, blocked a 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid. According to Bob Herbert, (NY Times, Sept. 15, 2005), “when the out-of-state corporate owners” of a hard-hit Methodist Hospital “responded to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere.” In another instance, FEMA wouldn’t even let the Red Cross deliver food! Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross, stated to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Sept. 3, 2005) that “the Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans… We have been at the table every single day asking for access. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders… We have 51 emergency canteens on the ground in the other affected areas, but where the need is greatest, in downtown New Orleans, there just is no access. That is the problem every relief group is facing.”

In fact, the only FEMA person “pre-positioned” in New Orleans when Katrina hit was one Marty J. Bahamonde. In a highly instructive New York Times piece (Oct. 21, 2005), which made use of a series of Bahamonde’ increasingly desperate e-mails to FEMA/DHS officials in DC, we learn that during the early afternoon of Aug. 29, the “north side of the city” was under “11 feet of water in a heavy residential area.” Well, that’s interesting. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, said that he did not know about the flooding until Aug. 30, explaining in part why he went to a meeting that day in Atlanta to jump-start the avian flu panic. According to the Times report, on Aug. 31, Bahamonde decided to send an e-mail message directly to FEMA Secretary Brown in which he said, “I know you know… The situation is past critical… Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water.” An aide to Brown responded hours later that the director would be at a restaurant in Baton Rouge that night and that “it is very important that time is allowed for Mr.Brown to eat dinner.”

Even more startling, “FEMA News,” out of headquarters in Washington DC, dated Aug. 29, the day Katrina hit, put out the following incredible alert: “First Responders Urged Not to Respond to Hurricane Impact Areas Unless Dispatched By State, Local Authorities.” This despite the fact that FEMA’s 426-page National Response Plan states that “Federal support must be provided in a timely manner to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate severe damage,” which “may require mobilizing and deploying assets before they are requested via normal NRP protocols.” In other words, as journalist Chris Strohm pointed out in a Sept. 8 report on the Government Executive website, „Homeland Security had [the] power to bypass states in hurricane response.”

And it‚s not like they didn’t have some time to figure this all out. After all, Bush had issued an “emergency declaration” on Katrina dated Aug. 27. So, first responders were told by FEMA not to respond, while on the ground the agency was deploying mercenaries and blocking access to aid at the gates. But why? In order to facilitate, along with the military, the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people from the region, abetting the dispersal and resettlement of a whole population through force, herded into detention disguised as “shelter,” only later to be ghettoized in 100,000 trailers scattered across numerous states‚ disenfranchised, situated in remote, undesirable areas, far from home. And after 18 months they throw you out.

The Homeless as Targets of Counter-Insurgency
These “FEMA-villes,” controlled by private rent-a-cops, check points and surveillance, are a form of ghetto-warehousing of vulnerable, traumatized men, women and children. Some historical background: Following the 1967 urban uprisings (“riots”) in over a hundred cities, President Lyndon Johnson created, by way of executive order, a federal commission on “civil disorder.” Meant to uncover both the origins of and antidotes to “riots,” the so-called Kerner Commission, named after it’s chair, former Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, issued its final report in June 1968, in which it recommended a solution to the urban “riot problem.” It advocated dispersing the poor from the cities. Chapters 16 & 17 of the report stated that: “By 1985, the Negro population in central cities is expected to increase by 68% to approximately 20.3 million… This growth will produce majority Negro populations in many of the nation’s largest cities. The future of these cities is grim.” The study found that “the underlying forces” of “disorder” “continue to gain momentum.”

“Unless there are sharp changes in those cities in the factors influencing Negro settlement patterns within major metropolitan areas,” the report warned, “there is little doubt that the trend towards Negro majorities will continue”—a dangerous trend from the government’s point of view, given that this urban “majority” “plays the most significant role in civil disorders.” The solution, as set forth by the 1968 commission, lies in “creating strong incentives for Negro movement out of central city ghettos.” The aim was clear. By 1985, the population of the urban poor had decreased drastically—they’d been forced out by banks and cops, priced out, drugged, bought and burnt out of the cities in massive numbers.

“As all of us saw on television, there is some deep, persistent poverty in this region [that] has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” Bush said that a few weeks after Katrina hit. “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” (Washington Post, Sept. 16, 2005) Is displacement of the poor one means of boldly “confronting this poverty”?

On Sept. 23, 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and with the looming devastation of Hurricane Rita, President Bush paid a visit to FEMA’s Washington DC offices, in order, presumably, to oversee the managing, monitoring and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans refugees—a portion of roughly a million people displaced from 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast, who according to Michael Ignatieff (NY Times, Sept. 25, 2005) represent “the largest population of internally displaced people since the Civil War.”

We may infer some of what was discussed from documents issued in the following days. In an Oct. 18, 2005 FEMA communique headlined “Katrina Victims Need to Stay in Touch with FEMA,” Senior Deputy Federal Coordinating Officer Mike Bolch stated that although “we understand that people move around a lot as they adapt to new situations,” the displaced “always need to know current addresses and contact phone numbers.” FEMA was obsessed with its ability to track the displaced—strewn throughout forty states, transported there against their will, with no destination announced.

On his way out FEMA‚s door, Bush made it known that he was heading to the Pentagon’s Northern Command, located in Colorado Springs—the mother of all “domestic war rooms.”

Posse Comitatus and the New Military State
NORTHCOM, the Pentagon’s Northern Command, is responsible for military operations within the United States of America. Set in motion prior to 9-11, the domestic military command oversees all “assistance to law enforcement” and is the executive in any operations dealing with so-called “civil disorder.”

Ostensibly, Bush was stopping in at NORTHCOM, blowing off a pre-planned photo-op in Houston, in order to “better understand the relationship that the federal government’s role is to support state and local governments.” (AP, Sept. 23) “I want to watch that happen,” he said. “It’s an important relationship, and I need to understand how it works better.”

The “relationship” between the military and the police is lawfully governed by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which mandates a clear separation between the two “entities of force.” What Bush wanted to watch, and have the American people acquiesce to, is the process whereby the military becomes the police in America, wherein the complete symbiosis between the military and the police is effectuated—a defining characteristic of military dictatorships.

By coincidence, the day before Bush’s FEMA visit, National Public Radio had aired a Morning Edition “politics & society” piece entitled “Military Ban on Law Enforcement Questioned,” which reminded us that “federal troops assisting local governments with disaster relief,” in New Orleans “are not allowed to engage in law enforcement, according to the 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act.” But “the Bush administration, the Pentagon and members of Congress are considering loosening that longstanding restriction.” Bush stated that “the US military should play a bigger role in major disasters.” The administration, has had Posse Comitatus “under review” for a few years now.

Recent Executive Orders
Finally, just a few months back, on April 23, 2008, President Bush issued Executive Order 13463. The little-noted EO amends two earlier Executive Orders, 13389 and 13390, which, respectively, created the 2005 “Gulf Coast Recovery and Rebuilding Council” and established the position of “Coordinator of Federal Support for the Recovery and Rebuilding of the Gulf Coast Region.” Most prominently, the new EO replaces the “Chairman of the [Rebuilding] Council”—formerly the President’s “Assistant for Economic Policy”—with his “Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.”

In a Jan. 31, 2006 statement to a bi-partisan select committee investigating the “Preparation and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” Col. Terry Ebbert had some revealing things to say regarding his response to Katrina. After dutifully offering “public thanks to Gen. Russell Honore, Vice Admiral Thad Allen, Admiral Robert Duncan, Captain Tom Atkin, General William Caldwell and his magnificent warriors from the 82nd Airborne Division as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the other federal law enforcement officials,” for their performance in Katrina, he stated that he and his people had “dedicated great time and effort in planning for hurricanes.” Tellingly, he pointed out that “the basis of our efforts has been to develop effective evacuation plans.”

Continuing his statement, Ebbert noted that “this phase was designed to begin once Contaflow [?] was discontinued and a dusk curfew was to be implemented. The plan utilized RTA buses, moving throughout the city, picking up citizens at preestablished checkpoints and transporting them to the Superdome. All citizens were thoroughly searched by National Guard troops upon entering the dome. Security was provided by both the National Guard and the New Orleans Police Department.” But “further evacuation with federal assets would be required.” According to Ebbert, the plan “was a success.” Building on that success, Ebbert promoted “the Urban Area Security Initiative” “as a mechanism to provide federal funding to specific metropolitan areas having a disproportionate share of the nation’s critical infrastructure and, therefore, at greater risk to attack.” The intent of the program, according to the Colonel, “was and is to enhance the capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks employing weapons of mass destruction.”

Ebbert noted: “The four parishes of Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard have been formed into Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Region One for joint planning, training, and exercising of the Department of Homeland Security defined events. This includes WMD, all acts of terrorism and natural disasters.” This program, according to Ebbert, “also provides a desperately needed and long overdue source of critical funding whereby economically challenged metropolitan areas can substantially increase the level of protection.” Protection from whom? And who is the former director of oil security really interested in defending?

Col. Ebbert concludes by stating that we must “find a way to immediately utilize the only organization with the leadership, command and control capability, equipment and training to accomplish large scale response—the Department of Defense.”

In conclusion, the federal response to Katrina has been a racist military operation in defense of oil infrastructure. As in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the people and their suffering mean nothing. Simply put, it’s been about Big Oil versus the Big Easy, a war against the people of New Orleans, a domestic counter-insurgency masked behind the facade of “counter-terrorism.” The right of return, with all the reparations due, to all those forced to leave their homes, is not only the most morally precise remedy, but is also the strategic means through which to reclaim the land called New Orleans, in the name of the people of New Orleans, in the name of peace.

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This story first appeared in the summer 2008 edition of The Shadow, NYC.

See also:

BUSH MOVES TOWARD MARTIAL LAW
2007 Defense Authorization Act Guts Posse Comitatus
by Frank Morales
World War 4 Report, November 2006
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From our Daily Report:

NSPD-51: Bush prepares martial law
WW4 Report, May 24, 2007
/node/3940

Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans: it’s official
WW4 Report, Oct. 11, 2005
/node/1166

Iraq mercenaries deployed to New Orleans
WW4 Report, Sept. 11, 2005
/node/1064

Urban “combat” in New Orleans —and ethnic cleansing?
WW4 Report, Sept. 6, 2006
/node/1048

From our Archive:

Homeland Security Act Passes
WW4 Report, Nov. 26, 2002
/static/61.html#shadows1

Pentagon Command Structure Re-Organized
WW4 Report, July 28, 2002
/static/44.html#shadows1

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Sept. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

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