A poisonous legacy

A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, by Norman Rose

Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948, by David Cesarani

The second epigraph in Norman Rose’s eloquent, comprehensive and even-handed book, A Senseless, Squalid War, says it all, from Palestine in the late 19th century to Gaza right now. In 1891, the Zionist philosopher and poet Asher Zvi Ginsberg, wrote:

From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys. But this is a big mistake. The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz-Israel. If the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz-Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not yield easily their place.

When Ginsberg wrote that, the Jewish population of Palestine was at most 34,000; there were upwards of 600,000 Arabs. On the eve of the first world war, writes Rose, a professor at the Hebrew University, Arabs were complaining that Zionists were aiming for a state within a state, including a flag and an anthem; they accused the Jews of dispossessing them from Arab lands, expanding Jewish settlements, and creating a bank and and a separate educational system. By 1922, two years after the establishment of the British mandate, there were 660,641 Arabs and 83,790 Jews in Palestine, and only six years later there were 151,656 Jews. The Yishuv, the Jewish community, despite the lack of interest amongst Jews worldwide, who preferred America as a destination, had created Jewish ministries, trades unions, what Rose terms ‘progessive educational and health systems,’ and the Philharmonic Orchestra. Britain saw nothing out of the way in these developments, which saved money for the British taxpayer.

At worst, in those pre-war years, the British thought of the Jews as ‘uppity and argumentative,’ while both the primarily agricultural Arabs and the European or Europeanised Jews regarded each other with suspicion and resentment, but reserved much of their animosity for the British.