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The Palestinian Charter
| Palestine ***In the map below, the West Bank is the land known as Palestine |
| HISTORY
Territory of the Ottoman
Empire in 1890 After
the Ottoman
conquest, the name "Palestine" disappeared as the official name of an
administrative unit, as the Turks often called their (sub)provinces
after the
capital. Since its 1516 incorporation in the Ottoman Empire, it was
part of the vilayet
(province)
of
Damascus-Syria until 1660, next of the vilayet of Saida
(Sidon), briefly interrupted by the 7 March 1799 - July 1799 French
occupation
of Jaffa, Haifa, and Caesarea. During the siege of Acre
in 1799, Napoleon
prepared a proclamation declaring a Jewish state in Palestine. On 10
May 1832
it was one of the Turkish provinces annexed by Muhammad Ali's
shortly imperialistic Egypt
(nominally still Ottoman), but in November 1840 direct Ottoman rule was
restored. Still
the old name remained in popular
and semi-official use. Many examples of its usage in the 16th and 17th
centuries have survived.[95]
During the 19th century, the "Ottoman Government employed the term Arz-i
Filistin (the 'Land of Palestine') in official correspondence,
meaning for
all intents and purposes the area to the west of the River Jordan which
became
'Palestine' under the British in 1922".[96]
Amongst the educated Arab public, Filastin was a common
concept,
referring either to the whole of Palestine or to the Jerusalem sanjaq
alone[97]
or just to the area around Ramle.[98] Ottoman
rule over the region lasted
until the Great War
(World War I)
when the Ottomans sided
with Germany
and the Central Powers.
During World War I,
the Ottomans were driven from much of the area by the United
Kingdom during the dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire. In
European usage up to World War I,
"Palestine" was used informally for a region that extended in the
north-south direction typically from Raphia
(south-east of Gaza)
to the Litani River
(now in Lebanon). The western
boundary was the sea, and the eastern boundary was the poorly-defined
place
where the Syrian desert began. In various European sources, the eastern
boundary was placed anywhere from the Jordan River to slightly east of Amman.
The Negev Desert
was not included.[99] Under
the Sykes-Picot Agreement
of 1916, it was
envisioned that most of Palestine, when freed from Ottoman control,
would
become an international zone not under direct French or British
colonial
control. Shortly thereafter, British foreign minister Arthur
Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration
of 1917, which laid
plans for a Jewish homeland to be established in Palestine eventually. The
British-led Egyptian
Expeditionary Force, commanded by Edmund Allenby,
captured
Jerusalem on 9 December,
1917 and occupied the whole of the
Levant following the defeat of Turkish forces in Palestine at the Battle of Megiddo
in September 1918 and
the capitulation of Turkey on 31 October.[100] The British Mandate
enacted English, Hebrew
and Arabic
as its three official languages. The land designated by the mandate was
called
Palestine in English, Falastin (فلسطين) in Arabic,
and in Hebrew Palestina or Eretz Yisrael
((פלשתינה
(א"י). In
April 1920 the Allied Supreme
Council (the USA, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan) met at Sanremo
and formal decisions were taken on the
allocation of mandate territories. The United Kingdom accepted a
mandate for
Palestine, but the boundaries of the mandate and the conditions under
which it
was to be held were not decided. The Zionist Organization's
representative at
Sanremo, Chaim Weizmann,
subsequently reported to his
colleagues in London: "There
are still important details outstanding, such as
the actual terms of the mandate and the question of the boundaries in
Palestine. There is the delimitation of the boundary between French
Syria and
Palestine, which will constitute the northern frontier and the eastern
line of
demarcation, adjoining Arab Syria. The latter is not likely to be fixed
until
the Emir Feisal attends the Peace Conference, probably in Paris."[101]
In
July 1920, the French drove Faisal bin Husayn
from Damascus
ending his already negligible control over the region of Transjordan,
where
local chiefs traditionally resisted any central authority. The sheikhs,
who had
earlier pledged their loyalty to the Sharif of Mecca,
asked the British to undertake
the region's administration. Herbert
Samuel asked for the extension of the Palestine government's
authority to Transjordan, but at meetings in Cairo and Jerusalem
between Winston Churchill
and Emir Abdullah
in March 1921 it was agreed
that Abdullah would administer the territory (initially for six months
only) on
behalf of the Palestine administration. In the summer of 1921
Transjordan was
included within the Mandate, but excluded from the provisions for a Jewish National Home.[102]
On 24 July,
1922 the League of Nations approved the terms of the British Mandate
over
Palestine and Transjordan. On 16 September
the League formally approved a memorandum from Lord Balfour
confirming the exemption of Transjordan from the clauses of the mandate
concerning the creation of a Jewish national home and from the
mandate's
responsibility to facilitate Jewish immigration and land
settlement.[103]
With Transjordan coming under the administration of the British
Mandate, the
mandate's collective territory became constituted of 23% Palestine and
77%
Transjordan. Transjordan was a very sparsely populated region
(specially in
comparison with Palestine proper) due to its relatively limited
resources and
largely desert environment. The
award of the mandates was
delayed as a result of the United States' suspicions regarding
Britain's
colonial ambitions and similar reservations held by Italy about
France's
intentions. France in turn refused to reach a settlement over Palestine
until
its own mandate in Syria became final. According to Louis, Together
with the American protests against the issuance of
mandates these triangular quarrels between the Italians, French, and
British
explain why the A mandates did not come into force until nearly four
years
after the signing of the Peace Treaty....
The British documents
clearly reveal that Balfour's patient and skillful diplomacy
contributed
greatly to the final issuance of the A mandates for Syria and Palestine
on September 29,
1923.[104]
Even
before the Mandate came into
legal effect in 1923 (text),
British terminology
sometimes used '"Palestine" for the part west of the Jordan River and
"Trans-Jordan" (or Transjordania) for the part east of the
Jordan River.[105][106] In
the years following World War II,
Britain's control over Palestine became increasingly tenuous. This was
caused
by a combination of factors, including:
Finally
in early 1947 the British
Government announced their desire to terminate the Mandate, and passed
the
responsibility over Palestine to the United
Nations.
Refugees There
are 4,255,120 Palestinians registered as refugees with the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This number includes the
descendants of regugees from the 1948 war, but excludes those who have
emigrated to areas outside of UNRWA's remit. Based on these
figures, almost half of all Palestinians are registered refugees.
The 993,818 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and 705,207
Palestinian refugees in the West Bank who hail from towns and villages
that are now located in Israel are included in these UNRWA
figures. UNRWA figures do not include some 274,000 people, or 1
in 4 of all Arab citizens of Israel, who are internally displaced
Palestinian refugees. |
 |
|
CURRENT
STATUS Following
the 1948 Arab-Israeli War,
the 1949 Armistice
Agreements between Israel
and neighboring Arab states eliminated Palestine as a distinct
territory. With
the establishment of Israel, the remaining lands were divided amongst
Egypt,
Syria and Jordan.
For
a description of the massive
population movements, Arab and Jewish, at the time of the 1948 war and
over the
following decades, see Palestinian exodus
and Jewish exodus from
Arab lands. From
the 1960s onward, the term "Palestine" was regularly used in
political contexts. Various declarations, such as the 15 November 1988
proclamation of a State of Palestine
by the PLO
referred to a country
called Palestine, defining its borders based on the U.N. Resolution 242
and 383
and the principle of land for peace. The Green Line
was the 1967 border established by
many UN resolutions including those mentioned above. In
the course of the Six Day War
in June 1967, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from
Egypt. According
to the CIA World Factbook,[108]
of the ten million people living between Jordan and the Mediterranean
Sea,
about five million (49%) identify as Palestinian,
Arab, Bedouin
and/or Druze.
One million of those are citizens of Israel.
The other four million
are residents of the West Bank and Gaza, which are under the
jurisdiction of
the Palestinian National
Authority. In
the West Bank, 360,000 Israeli
settlers live in a hundred scattered settlements with
connecting
corridors. The 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live in four blocs
centered
in Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho. In 2005, all the Israeli
settlers
were evacuated from the Gaza Strip
in keeping with Ariel Sharon's plan
for unilateral disengagement, and control over the area was transferred
to the
Palestinian Authority. THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE The
Greek
toponym Palaistinê (Παλαιστίνη), with which the Arabic Filastin
(فلسطين) is cognate, first occurs in the
work of the Ionian
historian Herodotus,
active in the middle of the 5th century BCE, where it denotes generally[6]
all of the coastal land, including Phoenicia,
down to Egypt.
In expressions where he employs it as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of
the
'Syrians of Palestine'[7]
it refers to a population distinct from the Phoenicians, and thus
probably
Philistines, though it may also cover several other tribes and ethnic
groups
present in the area, including the Jews.[8].
The word bears comparison to a congeries of ethnonyms in Semitic
languages,
Egyptian Prst, Assyrian Palastu, and the Hebraic Plishtim,
the latter term used in the Bible to signify the Philistines. The
Arabic word Filastin has
been used to refer to the region since the earliest medieval
Arab geographers
adopted the Greek
name. Filastini (فلسطيني), also
derived from the Latinized
Greek
term Palaestina (Παλαιστίνη), appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun
in the region since as early as
the 7th century CE.[9] During
the British Mandate of
Palestine, the term
"Palestinian" was used to refer to all people residing there,
regardless of religion or ethnicity, and those granted citizenship by
the
Mandatory authorities were granted "Palestinian citizenship".[10] Following
the 1948 establishment
of the State of Israel
as the national homeland of the Jewish people,
the use and application of the terms "Palestine" and
"Palestinian" by and to Palestinian
Jews largely dropped from use. The English-language
newspaper The Palestine Post
for example — which,
since 1932, primarily served the Jewish community
in the British Mandate of
Palestine — changed its
name in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post.
Jews in Israel
and the West Bank
today generally identify as Israelis.
Arab citizens of
Israel identify
themselves as Israeli and/or Palestinian and/or Arab.[11] The
Palestinian National
Charter, as amended
by the PLO's Palestine National
Council in July 1968,
defined "Palestinians" as: "those Arab nationals who, until
1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were
evicted
from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian
father
— whether in Palestine or outside it — is also a Palestinian."[12]
This definition also extends to, "The Jews who had normally resided in
Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist
invasion." The Charter also states that "Palestine with the boundaries
it
had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."[13][12] Palestinian perceptions of identity In
his 1997 book, Palestinian
Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness,
historian Rashid
Khalidi notes that the archaeological strata that denote the
history
of Palestine—encompassing
the Biblical,
Roman, Byzantine,
Umayyad,
Fatimid,
Crusader,
Ayyubid,
Mamluk
and Ottoman
periods—form part of the identity of the modern-day Palestinian people,
as they
have come to understand it over the last century.[14]
Khalidi stresses that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive
one,
with "Arabism, religion, and local loyalties" continuing to play an
important role.[15] Echoing
this view, Walid Khalidi
writes that Palestinians in Ottoman
times were "[a]cutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian
history
..." and that "[a]lthough proud of their Arab heritage and ancestry,
the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from
Arab
conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples
who had lived in the country
since time immemorial, including the ancient Hebrews
and the Canaanites
before them."[16]. Ali
Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist,
explains how identity is "a discursive narrative that validates the
present by selecting events, characters, and moments in time as
formative
beginnings."[17]
Qleibo critiques Muslim historiography for assigning the beginning of
Palestinian cultural identity to the advent of Islam in
the seventh
century.[17]
In describing the effect of such a historiography, he writes: "Pagan
origins are
disavowed. As such the peoples that populated Palestine throughout
history have
discursively rescinded their own history and religion as they adopted
the
religion, language, and culture of Islam."[17] According
to Salim Tamari, the
'nativist' ethnographies
produced by Tawfiq Canaan
and other Palestinian writers and published in The Journal of the
Palestine
Oriental Society (1920-1948), were driven by the concern that the
"native culture of Palestine", and in particular peasant society, was
being undermined by the forces of modernity.[18]
Tamari continues: "Implicit in their scholarship (and made explicit by
Canaan himself) was another theme, namely that the peasants of
Palestine
represent—through their folk norms ... the living heritage of all the
accumulated ancient cultures that had appeared in Palestine
(principally the
Canaanite, Philistine, Hebraic,
Nabatean,
Syrio-Aramaic and Arab)."[18] The
folklorist revival among
Palestinian intellectuals such as Nimr Sirhan, Musa Allush, Salim
Mubayyid, and
the Palestinian Folklore
Society of the 1970s, highlighted pre-Islamic
(and pre-Hebraic) cultural roots, re-constructing Palestinian identity
with a
focus on Canaanite and Jebusite
cultures.[18]
These efforts seems to have borne fruit as evidenced in the
organization of
celebrations like the Qabatiya
Canaanite festival and the annual Music Festival of Yabus by
the Palestinian
Ministry of Culture.[18]
Nonetheless, some Palestinians, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have
criticized the
"Canaanite ideology" as an "intellectual fad, divorced from the
concerns of ordinary people."[18] Emergent nationalism(s) The
timing and causes behind the
emergence of a distinctively Palestinian national consciousness among
the Arabs of
Palestine are
matters of scholarly disagreement. Rashid
Khalidi argues that the modern national identity of
Palestinians has
its roots in nationalist
discourses that emerged among the
peoples of the Ottoman empire
in the late 19th century, and
which sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation-state
boundaries in
the Middle East
after World War I.[15]
Khalidi also states that although the challenge posed by Zionism
played a role in shaping this identity, that "it is a serious mistake
to
suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to
Zionism."[15] In
contrast, historian James L.
Gelvin argues that Palestinian
nationalism was a direct
reaction to Zionism. In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One
Hundred
Years of War he states that “Palestinian nationalism emerged during
the
interwar period in response to Zionist
immigration and settlement.”[19]
Gelvin argues that this fact does not make the Palestinian identity any
less
legitimate: Whatever
the causal mechanism, by
the early 20th century strong opposition to Zionism and evidence of a
burgeoning nationalistic Palestinian identity is found in the content
of
Arabic-language newspapers in Palestine, such as Al-Karmil
(est. 1908)
and Filasteen (est. 1911).[20]
Filasteen, published in Jaffa by
Issa and Yusef al-Issa,
addressed its readers as "Palestinians",[21]
first focusing its critique of Zionism around the failure of the
Ottoman
administration to control Jewish immigration and the large influx of
foreigners, later exploring the impact of Zionist land-purchases on
Palestinian
peasants ((Arabic: فلحين,
fellahin),
expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications
for the
society at large.[20] The
historical record also reveals
an interplay between "Arab" and "Palestinian" identities
and nationalisms. The idea of a unique Palestinian state separated out
from its
Arab neighbors was at first rejected by some Palestinian
representatives. The
First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations (in Jerusalem,
February 1919), which met for the purpose of selecting a Palestinian
Arab
representative for the Paris Peace
Conference, adopted the
following resolution: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as
it
has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it
by
national, religious, linguistic,
natural, economic and geographical bonds."[22]
After the fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the French conquest of Syria,
however, the notion
took on greater appeal. In 1920, for instance, the formerly
pan-Syrianist mayor of Jerusalem,
Musa Qasim Pasha
al-Husayni, said
"Now, after the recent events in Damascus,
we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria
no longer
exists. We must defend Palestine".[citation needed] In
1922, the British authorities
over Mandate Palestine
proposed a draft constitution
which would have granted the Palestinian Arabs representation in a
Legislative
Council. The Palestine Arab delegation rejected the proposal as "wholly
unsatisfactory," noting that "the People of Palestine" could not
accept the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration
in the constitution's
preamble, as the basis for discussions, and further taking issue with
the
designation of Palestine as a British "colony of the lowest order."[23]
The Arabs tried to get the British to offer an Arab
legal establishment again roughly ten years later, but to no avail.[24] Conflict
between Palestinian
nationalists and various types of pan-Arabists
continued during the British Mandate, but the latter became
increasingly
marginalized. Two prominent leaders of the Palestinian nationalists
were Mohammad Amin
al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem,appointed by the British, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.[25]
Followers of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who was
killed by the British in 1935, initiated the 1936–1939 Arab
revolt in Palestine
which began with a general strike and attacks on Jewish and British
installations in Nablus.[25]
The call for a general strike, non-payment of
taxes, and the closure of municipal governments was met and by the end
of 1936,
the movement had become a national revolt, often credited as marking
the birth
of the "Arab Palestinian identity".[25] The
"lost years" (1948 - 1967) After
the 1948 Arab-Israeli war
and the accompanying Palestinian exodus,
known to Palestinians
as Al Nakba
(the "catastrophe"), there was a hiatus in Palestinian political
activity which Khalidi partially attributes to "the fact that
Palestinian
society had been devastated between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 as a
result
of a series of overwhelming military defeats of the disorganized
Palestinians
by the armed forces of the Zionist movement."[26]
Those parts of British Mandate Palestine which did not become part of
the newly
declared Israeli state were occupied by Egypt and
Jordan.
During
what Khalidi terms the "lost years" that followed, Palestinians
lacked a center of gravity, divided as they were between these
countries and
others such as Syria,
Lebanon,
and elsewhere.[27] In
the 1950s, a new generation of
Palestinian nationalist groups and movements began to organize
clandestinely,
stepping out onto the public stage in the 1960s.[28]
The traditional Palestinian elite who had dominated negotiations with
the
British and the Zionists in the Mandate, and who were largely held
responsible
for the loss of Palestine, were replaced by these new movements whose
recruits
generally came from poor to middle class backgrounds and were often
students or
recent graduates of universities in Cairo, Beirut
and Damascus.[28]
The potency of the pan-Arabist
ideology put forward by Gamel Abdel Nasser—popular
among Palestinian
for whom Arabism was already an important component of their identity[29]—tended
to obscure Recent
developments in Palestinian identity (1967 - present) Since
1967, pan-Arabism has
diminished as an aspect of Palestinian identity. The Israeli capture of
the Gaza Strip
and West Bank
in the 1967 Six-Day War
prompted fractured Palestinian
political and militant groups to give up any remaining hope they had
placed in
pan-Arabism. Instead, they rallied around the Palestine Liberation
Organization
(PLO) and its nationalistic orientation.[31]
Mainstream secular
Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the
PLO
whose constituent organizations include Fateh and
the Popular Front for
the Liberation of
Palestine, among others. [32]
These groups have also given voice to a tradition that emerged in 1960s
that
argues Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots, with extreme
advocates reading a Palestinian nationalist consciousness and identity
back
into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even
millennia,
when such a consciousness is in fact relatively modern.[33] The
Battle
of
Karameh and the events of Black September in
Jordan contributed to
growing Palestinian support for these groups. In 1974, the PLO was
recognized
as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the
Arab
states and was granted observer status as a national liberation
movement by the United
Nations that same year.[5][34]
Israel rejected the resolution, calling it "shameful".[35]
In a speech to the Knesset,
Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Allon outlined
the government's view that: 'No one can expect us to recognize the
terrorist
organization called the PLO as representing the Palestinians—because it
does
not. No one can expect us to negotiate with the heads of terror-gangs,
who
through their ideology and actions, endeavour to liquidate the State of
Israel.'[35] The
identity of Palestinians has
been a point of contestation with Israel. Golda Meir expounded the
early
position in her famous remark that: 'It
was not as though there was a
Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian
people and
we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They
did
not exist.'[36] .
The British historian Eric Hobsbawn
allows that an element of justness can be discerned in sceptical
outsider views
that dismiss the propriety of using the term 'nation' to peoples like
the
Palestinians: such language arises often as the rhetoric of an evolved
minority
out of touch with the larger community that lacks this modern sense of
national
belonging. But at the same time, he argues, this outsider perspective
has
tended to 'overlook
the rise of mass national
identification when it did occur, as Zionist and Israeli Jews notably
did in
the case of the Palestinian Arabs.'[37] .
From 1948 through until the
1980’s, according to Eli Podeh, professor at Hebrew
University, the textbooks used in Israeli schools tried to
disavow a
unique Palestinian identity, referring to 'the Arabs of the land of
Israel'
instead of 'Palestinians.' Israeli
textbooks now widely use the term 'Palestinians.' Podeh
believes
that Palestinian textbooks
of today resemble
those from the early years of the Israeli state.[38] Various
declarations, such as the
PLO's 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine,
have further served to
reinforce the Palestinian national identity.[citation needed]
Today,
most Palestinian organizations conceive of their struggle as either
Palestinian-nationalist or Islamic in nature, and these themes
predominate even
more today. Within Israel itself, there are political movements, such
as Abnaa
el-Balad that assert their Palestinian identity, to the
exclusion of
their Israeli one. |
