Israel: from eviction to ethnic cleansing

How a movement to save Jews and modernise Judaism turned into a settler-colonial project

Zionist leaders long debated whether Palestinians might be induced to leave voluntarily or only by force. From the mid-1920s, as they bought up land and tensions grew, these ideas would harden.

Out with Palestinian farmers: Jewish agricultural settlement in the Jezreel Valley, Lower Galilee, 1930

In the mid-1920s the Zionist movement shifted from simply seeking to achieve a homeland where Jews would be safe – dependent on the mercy of greater imperial powers – to colonising Palestine in its own right, brazenly dispossessing the indigenous population. The movement began, moreover, to see this dispossession as necessary for obtaining that homeland.

By 1926 the Zionist movement had upturned many decades of convention in land ownership which had been in force since the Ottoman reforms of the mid-19th century. These reforms, which meant that land was no longer leased from the state, enabled the wealthy to become private landlords. In this way, large swathes of land came into the hands of a small class of landlords, many of whom were outside Palestine (so-called absentee landlords). A few were Palestinian notables.

When land was purchased, villages and villagers came along with it. Custom dictated that villagers had to fulfil certain obligations to the landlord, but there was never any question of them leaving – at least, not until the British administration changed the rules. First, in 1920, the British removed many existing restrictions on land purchases, even if, conscious of Palestinian resistance, they placed some limits on Zionist purchases of land. But in practice this meant that the Zionist movement could buy as much as it could afford. The British also reclassified Palestinian villagers, many of whom had been cultivating the same land for generations, as tenant farmers, and as a result their presence became dependent on the landowner’s goodwill.

Between 1921 and 1925, the American Zion Commonwealth bought 80,000 acres of land in what was then Marj ibn Amr (now known as the Jezreel Valley) from the Sursock family in Beirut. In 1929 the Jewish National Fund then purchased roughly 7,500 acres in what was Wadi Hawarith, between Haifa and Tel Aviv, when the original Lebanese owner’s heirs could not pay off his debts. In both cases, the new Zionist settlers evicted, sometimes forcibly, the villagers and farmers who had cultivated the land.

Zionists, driven by the ideal of Jews working on the land for themselves, sought, and were granted, eviction orders by the British authorities. And so began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which continues to this day.

What started as a movement to save Jews and modernise Judaism by transforming it into one national identity among others was now clearly a settler-colonial project, dependent on the subordination of another people. In settler colonialism, the coloniser aims to wholly replace the indigenous society with the coloniser’s own. For settlers, desperate to impose their own culture and social system, the local population, so obviously different to them, is an obstacle to be removed – and this can never be done without brutality. In Australia, for instance, there were at least 270 massacres of Aboriginal people over 140 years of British settlement.

The process is not simply a matter of brute force, however. Settlers erase the past so that history only begins with their own arrival. Old customs vanish, and food resources are appropriated as the settlers’ own. Put simply, the land is not empty, and so the settlers empty it.

Patrick Wolfe, the Australian scholar of settler colonialism, described the settler’s attitude as ‘the logic of elimination’. He argued that while elimination is not total, the settler-colonial project will endeavour to complete it. In other words, as long as Israel maintains a settler-colonial ethos, it will never peacefully coexist with the Palestinians.

These actions do not come out of nowhere. Before and during these acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, settlers build an ideological justification: they create a consensus. They write about their intentions, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. This is visible in seemingly innocuous mediums such as painting; early Zionist painters depicted the landscape of their future home without any Palestinian villages in it.

How did colonialists justify their attitude to the indigenous population? As in other colonialist enterprises, they dehumanised them, portraying them as ‘savages’ or ‘primitive’. A particularly potent trope was that Palestinians were ‘nomads’, people with no attachment to the land. This was in spite of many villages having existed for thousands of years. Simultaneously, settlers claim to be driven by nobler purposes, such as bringing the benefits of modernisation (and civilisation) to a backward place.

But settler colonialists differ from classical colonialists in a crucial respect. The latter regarded themselves as bringing modernity to the ‘savages’. Settler colonialists saw themselves as modernising the land, not the people. The people were inconveniences to be brushed aside. Even today, many Israelis repeat the myth that Palestine was essentially one vast desert until Zionists arrived and ‘made it bloom’.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen repeated this old cliché in her message of congratulations for Israel’s 75th anniversary. Yet Palestine was in no way a desert, nor were its people primitive nomads. While these illusions were propagated to make the Zionist project more palatable to Jews in Europe and beyond, Zionist thinkers were well aware that there was an indigenous population that needed to be dealt with.

Long before the 1920s we can find Zionist leaders deliberating about how the Palestinians could be moved. Some Zionist ideologues hoped they would voluntarily emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries if given adequate financial compensation. But if not, forced transfer remained on the table. Zionist leaders and activists developed these ideas from the mid-1920s until 1948, when the time came to put them into action. Previously vague ideas were now translated into a master plan that would result in the ethnic cleansing of half of Palestine’s Arab population.

Palestine was in no way a desert, nor were its people primitive nomads. While these illusions were propagated to make the Zionist project more palatable to Jews in Europe and beyond, Zionist thinkers were well aware that there was an indigenous population.

The massive land purchases in the 1920s, and the ethnic cleansing operations that came with them, helped put an end to the quiet years. As the decade drew to a close, a far more fraught relationship between Jewish settlers and Palestinians emerged, with violent confrontations becoming increasingly frequent in the 1930s. Both sides also clashed with the British authorities, whom they saw as failing to protect them.

The signs of a disaster brewing were already evident as newly landless Palestinians, evicted from the farms they had made fruitful, were forced to move to the towns. These Palestinians were victims of nominally ‘socialist’ Zionist groups, known as Hebrew Labour, who believed Jews could only modernise themselves through engagement in productive labour.

Consequently, they wanted agricultural work to become the preserve of Jews alone. Even Jewish employers of Palestinian rural labourers resisted this policy, as it meant letting experienced hands go in favour of settlers who may never have worked on a real farm. But landowners with this attitude were attacked and shamed publicly until they gave in. And so Palestinians, impoverished and dispossessed, sought work in towns.

In 1929 tensions erupted catastrophically in what is known to Palestinians as the Al-Buraq revolution (thawrat al-buraq). On 15 August the Haganah and Revisionist Zionists inspired by Ze’ev Jabotinsky staged demonstrations by the Wailing Wall, leading Muslims to mount counterprotests the next day. Violent incidents between Muslims and Jews occurred throughout the week, culminating in 17 Jews being killed after Muslims’ Friday prayers on 23 August. This set off a chain reaction, and within one week, 133 Jews and 116 Palestinians lost their lives.  Violence did not remain confined to Jerusalem; it spread to other cities, most notoriously the Hebron massacre of 24 August 1929. The Jews of Hebron were part of a small minority that had lived in Palestine many centuries before the arrival of Zionism. They coexisted peacefully with the Muslim community. The two communities believe in the sanctity of Hebron, as it is the resting place of the prophet Abraham, revered by both faiths.

However, young Zionist yeshiva (Talmudic school) students in modern European dress were unwelcome arrivals. As news of clashes spread from Jerusalem, Muslims from villages just outside Hebron descended on the town; 67 Jews were massacred, although some successfully found shelter in the homes of sympathetic Muslim families. Today the Hebron massacre, a horrific atrocity, is weaponised by the official Israeli narrative to ‘prove’ coexistence is impossible, and, ironically, to justify the subsequent massacres of Palestinians.

Although the immediate trigger for the events of 1929 was a religious one, the disturbances spread quickly and devastatingly as Palestinians witnessed the social order breaking down. It was an outburst of frustration after a decade when the Zionist movement had moved in leaps and bounds. In this decade, in the countryside, Palestinians could see what lay ahead for them all: ethnic cleansing and deliberate immiseration.

As ever more Palestinians were forced out of agricultural work, shantytowns developed. In those of Haifa, in the north of Palestine, a new form of Palestinian resistance took shape against Zionism and its British accomplices: guerrilla warfare. Here a charismatic preacher entered the stage, the imam Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1882-1935). The military wing of Hamas is named after him, as were its early rockets.

Many secular Palestinian resistance groups also honour his legacy for introducing guerrilla warfare into the Palestinian struggle in a doomed stand against the British. Al-Qassam, with his background in anticolonial contestation in his native Syria, was able to inspire young Muslims in Haifa’s shanty towns to start their own paramilitary groups to prepare for a protracted fight against British colonialism.

However, faced with a large influx of Jewish immigration and increasing surveillance by the British authorities, he was forced to show his hand prematurely. In the hills near Jenin, al-Qassam and 11 others held off a much larger British force for several hours on 20 November 1935, until he and four others were killed.

Haifa declared a general strike the next day. Al-Qassam’s death inspired increasing numbers of young Palestinians to take up arms and prepare to fight a war against Britain to force it to abandon its Zionist policies. Although al-Qassam’s military revolt was destined to fail, it paved the way for the more organised resistance that would follow in the latter half of the 1930s.

by Ilan Pappe a professor of history at the University of Exeter. This article is adapted from his Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Oneworld, 2024.

Source: Israel: from eviction to ethnic cleansing | Ilan Pappe

Feature image

Top First: Two women farmers harvesting wheat [1918–35] Second: Rural life in Jerusalem in the 1930s. Palestinian farmers peacefully work together to gather the season’s olives

Bottom First: A pre-Nakba scene in one of the villages Second: Bedouin girl Third: Agriculture in Palestine Wheat harvest…a village in Bethlehem in 1934 Fourth: Palestinian Arab men reading the Huna Al-Quds magazine, 1940 Fifth: Baking

The British Mandate and the crisis of Palestinian landlessness, 1929–1936