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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PLAYING WITH ACADEMIC FIRE  
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Hatim Kanaaneh
January 25, 2024
Jadaliyya [[link removed]]

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_ This study of three late 1940s kibbutzim, writes reviewer Kanaaneh,
“analyzes how these so-called leftist settlements” related to
their Palestinian neighbors in “the land and the farming villages
that were then wiped out of existence.” _

,

 

Colonizing Palestine
The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9781503642041

Palestinian scholar Areej Sabbagh-Khoury was traumatized in her
childhood by the loss of her loving father whom, she avers, could
perhaps have been saved by medical staff at a Galilee hospital were it
not for the breakout of the 1982 Israeli war on Lebanon and the
priority given at the hospital to injured Israeli soldiers. She has
made such Israeli contradictions the focus of her research, zeroing in
on the inner deliberations and actions of the Israeli Left during the
establishment of the state. MAPAM kibbutz members were declared
Marxists and called for all the proletariats of the world to unite in
their revolutionary struggle for liberty and equality regardless of
ethnicity or nationality. Their international slogans declared that
“the land belongs to those who work it.” Yet Palestinian scholars
like Sabbagh-Khoury are unsettled by the contradictions between such
slogans and what they and their parents experienced on their skin at
the hands of the very same “leftist revolutionaries” during and
after the Palestinian Nakba. In _Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist
Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba_, Sabbagh-Khoury takes a
close look at the archives of three kibbutzes—Mishmar Haemik,
Hazorea, and Ein Hashofet—in the southeast corner of Marj Ibin
A’amer (the Jezreel Valley). She analyzes how these so-called
leftist settlements dealt with their neighboring Palestinians who
worked the land and the farming villages that were then wiped out of
existence. She examines how the ideology and practice of these
socialists came to diverge.

The author goes to the core contradictions of these kibbutzes,
illuminating in detail the false pretensions of the Israeli left
before and during 1948, some for the first time. This treatise is an
ambitious intellectual exercise, even if limited geographically and
temporally. The author studies the opinion and actual behavior of
members of the three mentioned Jewish cooperative farm villages by
examining the official records of the debates that their members held
regarding the war and the neighboring Palestinian villages that were
then erased and replaced by the expansion of the very same kibbutz
farms. Though the writing is dense and academically specialized, it is
also incredibly moving in parts. I found myself crying profusely while
reading the story of a woman from kibbutz Ein Hashofet who relates,
years later, her parting with a necklace of Hebron glass beads that
her father had salvaged for her in 1948 from a home in the demolished
neighboring Palestinian village of al-Kafrayn. Her kindergarten
teacher in 1948 asked the children in his class to vote on what to do
with similarly purloined items their parents had given them. Following
the children’s decision, he then took the loot and buried it in a
neighboring forest in a spot he later claimed he could no longer
find.  Yes, I am sentimental when it comes to Palestine, but to be
driven to tears even on the second reading is a testament to the
author’s effective narrative style.

Marj Ibin A’amer was targeted by the Zionist settlers for its
fertility and strategic location as well as for the fact that many of
its lands were formally registered as owned by “foreign
landlords.”  Earlier in the 1920s, the British Mandate Authority
had changed the Ottoman land purchase and ownership rules to fit its
overall pro-Zionist settler colonial plans. Quickly, Zionist
organizations started to purchase land tracts and to expel native
Palestinian tenant farmers who, until then, had inherited the usufruct
of the land down through the generations. At the same time, Zionist
immigrants started to establish their armed militias, supported by
Britain and the West. Sabbagh-Khoury explains “the implementation of
private land ownership, which effectively made land liquid for
purchase by Zionist institutions who evacuated the land of its
tenants, brought about the formation of a tenant class stripped of any
cultivation rights” (57). As a result, the 1936-39 native
Palestinian peasant uprising against the British and the
Zionist-sponsored settler colonialists started in the Palestinian
countryside like a series of simultaneous wildfires.

What the settlers ignored was that these Arab land tenants “turned
over a share of the crop to the landowner as a condition of their
permanent presence. They did not anticipate that sale of the land
would change their usufruct” (88-90). Zionist settler colonial
agencies, such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association,
realized the nature of their purchasing land from absentee owners and
sought to obligate them to handle the expected tenant farmers’
rebellion against their intended exiling. The settlers thus
collaborated with the absentee landlords and the British officials, as
illustrated in a scouting visit to the Palestinian village of Joara
reported by Weitsz, a participating settler official. The visit,
declared as intended to plan a police station and not a settlement,
“needed to be planned so that no premature suspicions would arise
among the Arabs of the region” and “to mislead the inhabitants”
(109). Here we have the full details of the trickery used in collusion
between three external participants to cheat the tenant farmers.
Sabbagh-Khoury’s reconstruction of this from the kibbutz archives
begs for a corresponding exploration of Palestinian views of this
process—the voices, experiences, and actions of the villagers of
Joara are unsurprisingly missing from the kibbutz archives
Sabbagh-Khoury mines. 

Absentee landlords were committed to handing over the area “free of
land tenant rights,” though it was not free of the land tenants
themselves, some of whom were still living in the village. The author
states early on: “I center the role of 1948 throughout this book in
discussing the Zionist Left’s views about the legitimacy of settler
colonial violence. The 1948 mass displacement of Palestinians
fundamentally transformed the Zionist project from colonization of
land by purchase to colonization by warfare, ethnic cleansing, and
mass dispossession” (30). Put simply, the Israeli left’s
principles of international brotherhood of proletariats didn’t stop
it from attacking Palestinian farmer neighbors, evicting them from
their homes, pilfering and demolishing their homes, and replacing them
physically by adding their property to the lands of the settlement. 

Sabbagh-Khoury notes that most interactions between kibbutzes and the
neighboring inhabitants were “confined to a limited number of
figures charged with maintaining relations with the Arabs, some of
whom were recruited officially by the settlement institutions and the
Zionist military establishment. Eventually, for many of them,
relations with the Arabs became their primary work” and
“constituted an informal form of intelligence gathering in the
period before the establishment of official Zionist military
intelligence bodies” (125). The author digs into the limited and
cautious interactions of the newly arrived Jewish settler colonialists
in the three kibbutz communities with the neighboring native
Palestinian tenant farmers. The select few Jewish settlers who were
formally assigned the function of maintaining relations with the Arab
peasants learned Arabic and were tasked with the secret mission of
collecting sociocultural and security-related material for the Jewish
military forces. This process culminated in secret Village Files for
the use of the military, especially in the infamous Plan-D for the
ethnic cleansing of their assigned communities. For this handful of
specialized settlers, “relations with Arabs was an occupation, tied
inherently to the ultimate cleansing of the lands of their
neighbors” (132). 

The author gives a glimpse of the limited socializing on special
occasions such as weddings and holidays, even if this was weighted to
the advantage of the settlers, who come across in the text as cagy and
opportunistic (as settler colonialists classically are: witness the
white European immigrants as newly arrived in North America and their
invented Thanksgiving celebrations.) The alliance of Zionist settlers
with British Mandate authorities weighs heavily in their favor, even
when the British feign mediating between the two sides. This
British-Zionist alliance against the native population is best
illustrated by the collective punishment of house demolition that
Israel inherited from the British Mandate system and still uses
against Palestinian natives till the present day.

More conflicted members of these kibbutzes make for more interesting
characters. As someone who has dabbled in fiction writing, I noted
that _Colonizing Palestine_ offered a few complex personalities that
would make for excellent inspiration material. Take Hillel Meirhoff,
the locksmith of Hazorea who seriously addressed himself to
establishing friendly relations with the residents of the neighboring
Palestinian village of Abu Zureiq:

The only person in the small group of kibbutz settlers specializing in
relations with Arab neighbors whose actions, according to the archival
records, was unconnected with security, settlement, or politics is
Hillel Meirhoff of Hazorea, who helped his neighbors technically as a
locksmith and gathered ethnographic material on the villages in the
area as well. Meirhoff was also the one person who, in his kibbutz’s
tenth-anniversary book, argued explicitly that there were no real
contacts between most of the kibbutz settlers and the Arabs. (130-131)

In 1949, Meirhoff left the kibbutz: “he saw the villagers as
permanent neighbors. What occurred in 1948 was apparently hard on him.
In 1967 he traveled to Jenin in search of the uprooted villagers of
Abu Zureiq and met the widow of a good friend, who shed tears upon
their encounter” (131-132). Sabbagh-Khoury writes that “Meirhoff
exemplifies the tensions of an internationalist-cum-colonialist
movement” (132). 

But the author highlights Meirhoff’s rarity in grappling with the
ramifications of settlers’ actions. Many of his fellow settlers
instead wax poetic on the beauty of the newly emptied, now Jewish
land. As Shmuel Ben-Tzvi, a settler of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, wrote on
May 20, 1948:

At the lookout post—the sound of the yelping dogs in deserted
al-Kafrayn. Its houses are largely ruined and only the unending
yelping of dogs attests to their having had owners. In the Valley to
the east, at sunrise, the morning was dreamlike—a silver sea, with
islands overhead, their peaks reaching the sky—Moreh Hill, Mount
Tabor, and among the hills of Umm al-Fahm [a large Palestinian town],
the peaks of Mount Gilboa are revealed as morning clouds hover
above....Our country is beautiful, and we are fortunate to protect it.
(156)

Ben-Tzvi better exemplifies the Zionist left’s involvement in the
cleansing of the newly emerging Israel of its native Palestinian
farming population, residents of the same farming villages with whom
the nascent settlement residents had signed some hundred mutual peace
agreements before proceeding to advise them to stop resisting and to
abandon their homes. David Ben-Gurion saw these actions as being the
first acts of evicting Palestinians out of their homes, “in
effect…accusing MAPAM of hypocrisy for their own participation in
and benefiting from violence done to the Arabs,” an accusation that
Sabbagh-Khoury found no evidence of them attempting to refute (168)
When members of Kibbutz Hazorea decided on their own to interrogate
the “defeated” Palestinian men of neighboring Abu Zureiq, they
considered their action part of the ongoing relations with those
neighbors (171-172). Sabbagh-Khoury concludes: “The settlers of
Hashomer Hatzair tended to disavow their responsibility for military
operations and saw themselves as dovish leftists. Yet during the war,
as previously shown, the kibbutzim played a major role in expulsions,
through both local initiatives,” such as the above interrogation, as
well as “their members’ participation in the Haganah, the Palmach,
and later the Israel Defense Forces” (171). 

In the Kibbutz Hazorea archive, we meet Bracha, a school teacher who
worried about Arab children, but “in purely humanitarian, not
political terms.” She was conscientious enough to acknowledge the
right of the Palestinian villagers to fight for their home, but their
capacity to do so “came to justify their expulsion” (170-171).
Members of Kibbutz Hazorea met repeatedly and discussed the fate of
the defeated native village. They decided amongst
themselves—democratically, it should be noted—that any remaining
Arabs have to serve the new masters and that their property can be
looted, but collectively for the benefit of the Kibbutz and not
individually.

Sabbagh-Khoury focuses on how the three colonies belonging to Hashomer
Hatzair remembered the displaced Palestinian former neighbors, asking:
“How have memory and forgetting been organized and wielded among the
kibbutzim? How have settlers’ memories reproduced, legitimated,
erased, or questioned their settler colonial practices?” (192). The
author delves into a lengthy philosophical exploration of “the
binary of memory and forgetting” and the relevance of the Holocaust
to these workings of memory. She notes that “Kibbutz discussions
about the lands and properties of their former neighbors died down in
the early 1950s. Normalization of the disappearance of entire villages
and their inhabitants took hold relatively quickly, and a significant
gap opened between the formal political positions of their movement
and the actions of settlers on the ground” (199).

The archives Sabbagh-Khoury mines “include rare testimonies about
Palestinians”; she recognizes that the colonization processes and
interactions in question are presented in the archives “from the
point of view of the settler colonizers, not the natives.” For this
reason, she seeks to “execute a double move: reconstruct the settler
colonial practices and relationships and then reassess attributions of
political meaning through representations and memory” (27). Yet in
my reading, the reconstructions from the kibbutz archives still beg
for more corresponding exploration of Palestinian views of this
process. That the voices and actions of the villagers are
unsurprisingly absent from the colonial archive is hardly surprising,
but more creative approaches to address this archival absenting are
urgently needed.

Sabbagh-Khoury offers a close reading of kibbutz archival materials,
most of which she translates and analyzes for the first time: “These
materials contrast official memory production with the more fractured
terrain of local settler colonial memory” (215). The author expands
her findings “to trace patterns and identify both unified logics and
fissures across the labor Zionist settlement movement” more
generally. I hope that this courageous researcher will be awarded the
attention and recognition she well deserves. To zero in on these
contradictions and to use a settler colonial lens on Zionist archives
is a risky task within Israeli academia, and Sabbagh-Khoury is based
at what is often considered the major Zionist university, the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Other scholars who have dared to tread in
this direction have been subject to attacks and academic ostracism.
That she relies on archival written documents rather than Israeli oral
testimonies may spare the author from some of the susceptibility of
Israeli narratives to public pressure. Undoubtedly, this book is a
courageous step on her part.

Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh was born and raised in the Palestinian village
of Arrabeh in the Galilee. After earning his medical degree and
Master of Public Health at Harvard University, he returned home to
head the region's governmental health office and served as the only
area physician. He helped establish The Galilee Society, an NGO
addressing the health needs of the rural population which continues
to serve its target population to the present. Kanaaneh has
documented those efforts in his books _A Doctor in Galilee: The Life
and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel _(Pluto Press, 2008)
and _Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor's Tales of Life in
Galilee_ (Just World Books, 2015). The latter has been translated
into Arabic. Currently, he is working on a fiction trilogy.

* Palestinian Nakba
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* zionism
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* settler colonialism
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