https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword
The Neck and The Sword
Interviewed by Tariq Ali

Let’s start with the present, not just in the sense of the horrors being inflicted on Palestine right now, but the present as part of Palestine’s still-active past. The brutal Anglo-Zionist repression of the great Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was followed by the Nakba of 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967, the 1982 siege of Beirut, led by Ariel Sharon, and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the two Intifadas, the continuous raining down of terror by Israel since then. Yet the post-October 7 genocide seems to have had a bigger global impact than any of these.

Yes, something has shifted globally. I’m not sure why those historic episodes did not have the effect of completely changing the narrative—the popular narrative, in particular. I don’t want to speculate about things like social media. But this has been the first genocide that a generation has witnessed in real time, on their devices. Was it the first in recent times in which the us, Britain and Western powers were direct participants, unlike others, in Sudan or Myanmar? Did the work of pro-Palestinian advocates over a generation or more prepare people for this? I don’t know. But you are right that as a result of the horrors that have been inflicted on Gaza over eight continuous months, and which are still being inflicted now, something new has happened. The displacement of three quarters of a million people in 1948 did not produce the same impact. The 1936–39 Arab Revolt is almost completely forgotten. None of those earlier events had anything like this effect.

The Arab Revolt has always fascinated me as one of the major episodes of anti-colonial struggle, which has had far less attention than it deserves. It began as a strike, became a series of strikes, then developed into a huge national uprising which had British forces tied down for over three years. Could you give us an explanation of its origins, development and consequences?

The Arab Revolt was essentially a popular uprising, on a massive scale. The traditional Palestinian leadership was taken by surprise, just as Arafat and the plo leadership were surprised by the First Intifada in 1987. Both uprisings were sparked by minor incidents; in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the death in battle of Shaikh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, killed by British forces. Born in 1882 in Jableh, on the Syrian coast, al-Qassam was a religious scholar, trained at Al-Azhar, and a militant anti-imperialist, who fought against all the Western powers in the region, beginning with the Italians in Libya in 1911, then the French-Mandate forces in Syria in 1919–20. He ended up in British-Mandate Palestine, where he lived and worked mainly among the peasantry and the urban poor. Al-Qassam’s killing had an enormous amplitude, such that within a few months it had helped to detonate the longest general strike in interwar colonial history. The best account is by Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian writer assassinated by the Israelis in 1972; it was to be the first chapter of his history of the Palestinian struggle, unfinished at his death.footnote1

Kanafani’s analysis stands to this day. Among other things, he underlined the economic impact on the popular classes of increased Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1930s, after Hitler came to power; the sacking of Arab workers from factories and construction sites, in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy of ‘Jewish Labour Only’; the eviction of 20,000 peasant families from their fields and orchards, sold to Zionist settlers by absentee landlords; rising poverty. These popular revolts erupt when people reach a point where they just cannot go on as before, and in this case social anger combined with powerful national and religious feelings. The Palestinians rose up against the full might of the British Empire—which, in a century and a half, had not been forced to grant independence to a single colonial dependency, with the sole exception of Ireland in 1921. The Arab Revolt was crushed by what was still the world’s most powerful empire, but the Palestinians fought for over three years, with perhaps a sixth of the adult male population killed, injured, in prison or in exile. In the annals of the interwar period, this was an unprecedented attempt to overthrow colonial rule. It was only suppressed by the deployment of 100,00 troops and the raf. This is a forgotten page in Palestinian history.

Did not this defeat also lead to a demoralization within the Palestinian masses, so that when the Nakba proper began in 1947, they still had not recovered from the terror of 1936–39?

The defeat of the Arab Revolt created a heavy legacy that affected the Palestinian people for decades. As Kanafani wrote, the Nakba, ‘the second chapter of the Palestinian defeat’—from the end of 1947 to the middle of 1948—was amazingly short, because it was only the conclusion of this long and bloody chapter which had lasted from April 1936 to September 1939.footnote2 What the British did was later copied in almost every detail by the Zionist leaders from Ben-Gurion onwards. For that reason alone, it’s worth recalling the cost to Palestinian society. At least 2,000 homes were blown up, crops destroyed, over a hundred rebels executed for possessing firearms. All this was accompanied by curfews, detention without trial, internal exile, torture, practices like tying villagers to the front of steam engines, as a shield against attacks by freedom fighters. In an Arab population of about a million, 5,000 were killed, 10,000-plus wounded and over 5,000 political prisoners were left rotting in colonial jails.

In the process of crushing the Arab Revolt, the British gave the Zionist forces that were working with them valuable training in counterinsurgency.

Yes. The Zionists were taught every underhanded colonial technique by counterinsurgency experts like Orde Wingate, and other specialists in torture and murder. The British imported veterans from India, like Charles Tegart, the notorious Chief of Police in Calcutta, the subject of six assassination attempts by Indian nationalists. The same forts and prison camps built by Tegart are still in use by Israel today. They brought in people from Ireland and other places in the Empire, like Sudan, where Wingate started, and where his father’s cousin, Reginald Wingate, had been Governor-General and an intelligence officer before that.

Orde Wingate, a long-forgotten name. I doubt many readers would even have heard of this demented figure, of whom Montgomery said the best thing he ever did was to be in the plane crash that killed him in Burma in 1944. Who was he and did he have any special links to the Zionist forces? I vaguely recall a bbc tv series on him in 1976 where he was portrayed as a hero.

He was a cold-blooded colonial killer, ending up a major general, who was loathed by many on his own side, as Montgomery’s remark suggests; Montgomery also described Wingate as ‘mentally unbalanced’. Churchill, no slouch when it came to inflicting suffering on subject populations, called Wingate ‘too mad for command’. He was born in British India in a pious Plymouth Brethren family. A Christian fundamentalist and a Bible literalist, he promoted the Old Testament version of Jewish redemption. He arrived in Palestine as a Captain in military intelligence, just as the 1936 uprising was beginning. He knew Arabic, learnt Hebrew and became a key figure in training Haganah fighters as ‘Special Night Squads’—in other words, death squads—to target and kill Palestinian villagers in the mountains, as the Israeli military and settlers do today. His notoriety was such that on the outbreak of the European war in 1939, the Arab notables demanded that Wingate be expelled from the region. He was. His passport was stamped, prohibiting his return. His job was done. He had trained many of the men who became commanders of the Palmach and later the Israeli military, like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. Several sites in Israel bear his name, and he is rightly considered the founder of Israeli military doctrine.

He taught them well.

Yes. What was once a British colonial speciality became an Israeli colonial speciality. Everything the Israelis have done they learned from the British—including the laws, the 1945 Defence Emergency Regulations, for example, that the British used against the Irgun. The same laws are still in force, now used against Palestinians. It all comes from the British colonial playbook.

A victory—or even a draw—for the Arab Revolt would have laid the foundations of a Palestinian national identity and strengthened their forces for the battles that lay ahead. Like Kanafani, you’ve argued that the vacillations of the traditional Palestinian leadership played a key role in the defeat, kowtowing as they did—at the St James Conference, for example—to the collaborationist Arab kings, who had been put on their thrones by the British?

Then as now, the Palestinian leadership was divided. They were stymied by their own inability to agree on an appropriate strategy—to mobilize the population and create a representative national forum, a popular assembly where these matters could be discussed. The British, unlike in India, Iraq and parts of Africa, denied Palestinians any political access to the colonial state. So the argument for a people’s assembly to break decisively with the structures of colonial control was very important.

The other background condition for the Revolt was the rise of fascism in Europe.

From the moment the Nazis came to power, the whole situation changed for Jews in their relationship to the world and to Zionism. That’s entirely understandable. It produced changes in Palestine too: between 1932 and 1939, the Jewish proportion of the population rose from 16 or 17 per cent to 31 per cent. The Zionists suddenly had a viable demographic base for taking over Palestine, which they didn’t have in 1932.

The Palestinians became indirect victims of the European Judeocide.

Absolutely. Palestinians are paying for the entire history of European Jew-hatred, going back to medieval times. Edward I expelling the Jews from England in 1290, the French expulsions in the following century, the Spanish and Portuguese edicts in the 1490s, the Russian pogroms from the 1880s and finally the Nazi genocide. Historically, a quintessentially European Christian phenomenon.

What if there had been no Judeocide in Europe and the German fascists had been ordinary fascists without the obsession to wipe out the Jews?

What a might-have-been. But look at the situation in 1939. There was already a Zionist project, with strong British imperial support, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews or Zionism. It had to do with strategic interests. The Balfour Declaration was made by the man responsible for shepherding through the most antisemitic bill in British parliamentary history, the Aliens Act of 1905. The British ruling class didn’t care for the Jews per se. They may have cared for their reading of the Bible, but what they cared about most was the strategic importance of Palestine and the Middle East as a gateway to India, long before 1917. That was what concerned them, from the beginning to the end. When they were forced to leave in 1948, they could do so because they’d already quit India in 1947 and didn’t need Palestine in the same way. Had Hitler been assassinated, there would still have been a Zionist project, with British imperial backing. Zionism would still have tried to take over the entirety of the country, which was always its objective, and would still have tried to create a Jewish majority through ethnic cleansing and immigration. I couldn’t speculate beyond that.

But weren’t there also anti-Zionist currents within the Jewish communities?

Certainly, there were Jewish communists, Jewish assimilationists. The vast majority of the persecuted Jewish population of Eastern Europe chose emigration to the white-settler colonies: South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, above all, the United States; some also went to Argentina and other Latin American countries. These were the majority and that’s where the bulk of the Jewish population of the world went, besides those who stayed in Europe. Anti-Zionism was a Jewish project, up until Hitler. Before then, Zionists were a minority and their programme was deeply contested in Jewish communities. But the Holocaust produced a kind of understandable uniformity in support of Zionism.

Defeats usually have the effect of stopping everything for a time; then the resistance rises again, in different forms. But in the case of 1936–39, the defeat was immediately followed by the eruption of the Second World War—which started in China, though many call it the European war. What was the attitude of the Palestinian leadership in that period? In Indonesia, Malaysia, India and parts of the Middle East, some sections of the nationalist movement said: the enemy of our enemy is our friend, if temporarily. Since our enemy is the British Empire, that means the Germans or the Japanese. In his book on Egypt, Anouar Abdel-Malek recounts how, as it appeared that Rommel might take Egypt, huge crowds gathered in Alexandria chanting, ‘Forward, Rommel, forward!’ They wanted anyone but Britain. What was the attitude in Palestine?

The attitude in Palestine was deeply divided. A minority faction of the leadership aligned themselves with the Germans, following the Grand Mufti. He had an extraordinary wartime career: the French kicked him out of Beirut, the British chased him out of Iraq, when they reoccupied it in 1941, then they chased him out of Iran. He tried to go to Turkey, but the Turks wouldn’t let him stay, so he ended up in Rome, and then Berlin. But most Palestinians did not adopt that line. Many joined the British Army and fought with the Allied forces. Of course, many leaders had been killed by the British, either on the battlefield or executed. Others were exiled. The British loved to exile their nationalist opponents to island possessions: Malta, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, the Andamans. My uncle was sent to the Seychelles for a couple of years, together with other Palestinian leaders, then exiled to Beirut for several more years. And so the leadership for the most part understood that Britain could never be their friend. You can read my uncle’s memoirs—he became virulently, venomously anti-British. He was always a nationalist and anti-British, but the degree to which the Revolt changed Palestinian views is remarkable. Previously, the leadership had always tried to conciliate the British, along the lines of many co-opted colonial elites. This changed with the crushing of the Revolt.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Revolt and then World War Two left the Palestinians ill-prepared for what came after, when the two new superpowers—the us and the Soviet Union—supported Zionism, while on the ground the British collaborated with the Zionists and Jordanians to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians were not sufficiently organized to face the assault of the Zionist military, which began in November 1947, months before the Mandate ended on 15 May 1948, when the un Partition was supposed to go into effect and the Arab armies joined the fray. By then, Zionist forces had taken Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Safad and dozens of villages, expelling around 350,000 Palestinians, and had already overrun much of what was to have been the Arab state under the un Partition Plan. So the Palestinians were already defeated before the State of Israel was proclaimed and the so-called Arab–Israeli War began.

We’ll come to the United States’ role in all this. But how do you explain the Soviet Union’s support for the Zionists, supplying them with Czech weapons in order to carry on fighting?

Stalin turned on a dime, as you know. From being a staunch anti-nationalist and anti-Zionist power, the Soviet Union suddenly became an advocate of a Jewish state. This came as a huge shock to the Communist parties of the Arab world. There were several motivations, I think. It was certainly an effort to outbid the United States, and there was a sense that this might be a socialist country that would align with the Soviet Union. Stalin also wanted to undermine the British in the Middle East. Remember, he had spent his youth fighting in the south of what became the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War, when the British were the primary supporters of the Whites—funding, arming and training them. They supported them with troops and fleets from the Baltic to the Caspian to the Black Sea. Early on, Stalin developed a great animosity towards Britain, and an obsession about the threat posed by British power to the south of the ussr. And he now saw this as a moment in which the Soviet Union could undermine Britain’s Arab puppet regimes in the region.

It was a disastrous political intervention. But it didn’t last too long.

A couple of years. But yes, absolutely. If you look at the vote in the un General Assembly, without the Soviet Union and their Belarusian and Ukrainian attachments, as well as the countries they influenced, the Americans would have had difficulty pushing through the Partition resolution. They might have done it, but it could have led to a different outcome. And the Czech arms deal was crucial to Israel’s victories against the Arab armies on the battlefield.

That brings us to the Arab elites—the monarchies and sheikhdoms installed by Britain after the collapse of the Ottomans—their collaboration with the British, and their failure to help defeat this entity that the British Empire had created.

The Egyptian, Jordanian and Iraqi monarchies played the most important role here. They were subject to competing pressures, from above and below. On the one hand, the British had absolutely no desire to see a Palestinian state. They still had enormous hostility to the Palestinians, even as they had also become hostile to the Zionists because of the bloody campaign waged against them by the Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah at the end of World War Two. Britain abstained on the un Partition resolution. A Jewish state would be established, there was nothing that could prevent that. But they hoped through their client regimes to balance its power and to maintain influence in a part of Palestine, thanks to Emir Abdullah of Transjordan, whose army was commanded by British officers.

On the other hand, there was the pressure of public opinion. The Arab world had long been concerned about Zionism. When I was researching this, I found hundreds of early newspaper articles about Palestine from Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo and Beirut. There were volunteers from Syria and Egypt fighting in Palestine during the Arab Revolt. So these neighbouring regimes came under popular pressure to do something about the catastrophe that was unfolding in Palestine in 1947–48, as the Zionists rapidly gained the upper hand and destitute refugees began arriving in Arab capitals. The British wanted the Jordanians to go in, of course—to annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem for themselves. Egypt and the other Arab countries were forced to intervene by their populations. But they did so in a half-hearted way, and only once the British had withdrawn.

This had a hugely radicalizing effect on the Arab junior officers involved, including Abdel Nasser. He wrote in his memoirs: we were not given the means to fight, and as we were fighting the Israelis, we were thinking of the corrupt British-controlled monarchy at home. Along with two close colleagues in the nationalist Free Officers group, Abdel Hakim Amer and Zakaria Mohyedin, Nasser was posted to Gaza and Rafah, and observed first-hand the anger of the rank-and-file soldiers against the High Command in Cairo. He quotes a soldier who kept repeating with each new pointless order: ‘Shame, shame on us’, in the drawn-out sarcastic intonation of the Egyptian countryside.footnote3 The war boosted the popularity of the Free Officers, and ultimately led to the toppling of the monarchy in 1952. This was true with the Iraqis and the Syrians, too. Almost as soon as the war ended there was a series of coups in Syria, followed by the 1952 revolution in Egypt, and then Iraq in 1958. The military officers involved had all fought in Palestine.

So Palestine was partitioned, but not according to the plan agreed by the United Nations.

Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership wanted to take it all, they just didn’t have the means at the time. So they settled for 78 per cent.

And there has been semi-continuous war since then. The first wave of refugees arrived in Gaza after the Nakba in 1948, including many of our friends. They had never lived in Gaza before.

Eighty per cent of the population of what is now the Gaza Strip are descended from refugees, most of whom arrived in 1948. There are populations from the Negev and other areas who were expelled even later. But 80 per cent of Gaza’s population originally came from elsewhere.

Like much of my generation, I first learnt of the scale of the Palestinian Nakba—the catastrophe—in 1967, after the Six-Day War. I was sent to visit the refugees by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, which wanted us to produce an investigative report—as we had done in Vietnam for the International War Crimes Tribunal that Russell and Sartre had convoked. On that trip I met your cousin, Walid Khalidi in his house in Beirut, which I will never forget. He sat me down and said: ‘Do you know what happened?’ He told me about the massacre of Deir Yassin in April 1948. My eyes were coming out of my head. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t known.

Do you recall when this was?

I think it must have been July, a month after the 1967 war. We met refugees in camps in Jordan, outside Damascus, in Egypt, as well as politicians and intellectuals. Ironically, our translator was a Muslim Englishman, Faris Glubb, whose father General Sir John Glubb had been commander-in-chief of the Transjordanian Army. Faris was a rock-solid supporter of the Palestinian cause. Walid was very tickled by this fact. He was the one who first gave me a real tutorial on Palestinian history.

He’s very good at that. He’s about to reach his 99th birthday, inshallah, in July.

I will never forget that afternoon in Beirut. And if people like me, growing up in a left-wing, pro-Arab, pro-Nasser family, didn’t know about the Nakba at that time, then large numbers of people couldn’t have had any idea.

Absolutely. I am constantly struck by how poor a job the Palestinians did in publicizing their cause, starting in 1917 and going well beyond 1967. It’s only really with the current generation that there has been any kind of a breakthrough. And this has not come from the political leadership, but from civil society—organizations like pacbi, the group calling for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or the Institute for Palestine Studies that Walid founded, which has been working for decades. Finally, we’re beginning to see the results. But this is in spite of the absence of any competent official effort. The plo made a start on informational and diplomatic work in the 1970s and early 80s, though it was still insufficient. Aside from that, the record has been dismal.

How do you explain the persistent weakness of the modern Palestinian leadership? I know that the best people were killed.

That’s the first important point. Assassinating Palestinian leaders became an Israeli speciality. An Israeli author, Ronen Bergman, has a chilling book about this, Rise and Kill First. The title says it all. They have been very careful in picking out the ones they want to eliminate. Together with a few Arab regimes, it must be said: the Israelis have been helped in their efforts by the assassins of Libya, Iraq and Syria. And the Israelis knew their targets. When they went to assassinate Abu Jihad in Tunis, they went straight past the home of Mahmoud Abbas. They didn’t consider him a danger—on the contrary—so they kept him alive and have been using him ever since. This was also a British speciality.

But the problems of the Palestinian leadership go deeper. In the 1930s, it was in part a product of the Palestinian class structure—an out-of-touch landed elite, with blinkered or naïve views on how to deal with the British. Since the 1960s, the lack of a global outlook on the part of successive generations of Palestinian leaders has been a major problem. If you look at other anti-colonial movements—the Irish, the Algerians, the Vietnamese or the Indians—they were led by people with a sophisticated understanding of the global balance of power, of the way imperial powers operate, and how to reach public opinion in the metropole. Nehru, Michael Collins, de Valera understood this. The Algerian leadership understood France. What they called the seventh wilaya or province of the fln was in France. The Irish won in 1921 because they understood British and American politics, and had extensive political and intelligence operations there. The Palestinian leadership has never had the same knowledge or skills. I hate to say this, it sounds self-denigrating, but it’s true.

How would you characterize the Palestinian elite in that early period? In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, you give a wonderful sense of these Palestinian clans, the Khalidis and the Husseinis. Yours was more intellectual, more scholarly, the Husseinis tended to occupy practical leadership roles. Was this kind of class structure particular to Palestine, or did it exist in some form in other parts of the Arab world?

The term used by my teacher, Albert Hourani, was notables—the politics of the notables.footnote4 He talked about families, rather than clans; these were not tribal populations. The same social structure prevailed throughout the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire; they were urban elites, involved in religion, law and government; also, in many cases, landlords and involved in trade. This stratum was quite divorced from the popular classes, disdaining manual labour and, in many cases, commerce itself. It was imbricated in Ottoman politics for centuries, and before that, in the Mamluk empire. Members of my family were involved in the Mamluk judiciary in the 14th and 15th centuries. This elite was well suited to the kind of administration you had under the Moguls, the Safavids and the Ottomans. Some adapted to the modern era. Instead of religious training, they went to Malta or Istanbul, or to American missionary institutions. They acquired a modern education; instead of wearing a turban or a fez, they sported a top hat. But they were exquisitely ill-suited to dealing with the British.

This social structure was completely destroyed in 1948. The material base of the class that had dominated Palestinian society for centuries disappeared. Landlords lost their lands, merchants lost their businesses, and so on. And with the odd exception, none of these elites re-emerged after 1948. Palestinian society was essentially revolutionized, in the way that many other Arab societies were by social revolution—in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, where the age-old elites and the landlord class were overthrown in the 1950s. Dynasties like the Azms in Damascus disappeared from politics. The same thing happened in Palestine because of the Nakba. In a sense, it opened the door to those from the educated middle-class. The leadership of the plo was not made up of people from old notable families. The only exception I can think of was Faisal Husseini; he was the only prominent Palestinian leader after 1948 who came from the old elite class, and he was the son of an outstanding military leader who was killed in battle in 1948.

What happened to your own family at that point?

The family was scattered. Some were traumatized by the experience and others were galvanized. My grandparents lost the family home at Tal al-Rish, near Jaffa, and became refugees. My uncles and aunts and cousins ended up between Jerusalem, Nablus, Beirut, Amman, Damascus and Alexandria. As a result, I have cousins all over the Arab world and others in Europe and the us. Nevertheless, members of my family were among the lucky and privileged ones, as they had good educations thanks to my grandfather, and some of them had careers as professors, like my cousins Walid, Usama and Tarif, or as writers and translators like my aunt Anbara, or my cousin Randa. My parents, who had been planning to return to Palestine after my father finished his PhD at Columbia, ended up having to stay in the us, which is why I was born here in New York, in 1948. My father then worked for the United Nations.

Where did you go to school?

I went to the un International School in New York, and I also went to school in Korea. I studied history at Yale and did my PhD at Oxford, with Hourani. So I was educated in three different places.

And Palestine was absent in all these places.

Yes. I’ve only lived in Palestine for short periods, a couple of years total. I lived in Libya for a few years when I was very young, and I lived in Lebanon for over fifteen years, in the 1970s and 80s, teaching at the American University of Beirut. I’ve lived in other places, but most of my youth and more than half my life has been spent in the United States.

To go back to the radical upheavals of the 1940s: as you were saying, the class structure changed all over the Arab world.

With one categorical exception: the remaining monarchies. The old social order in Morocco has not changed, nor in Jordan or Saudi Arabia. At least, it didn’t change in the same way.

The British kept on the monarchies wherever they could. Churchill in particular loved them and even discussed the possibility of creating one for the Indian province of the Punjab.

British colonialists loved to replicate their own aristocracy and their own system. They would find a landed gentry in places that had never known such a thing. The French preferred colonial republics.

The other consequence of these radicalized middle-class upheavals was that the urban petit bourgeoisie gained access to the army, especially in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. This was the basis of the revolutionary nationalist movements—in India, the native officer corps was limited to the second sons of the landed gentry. How did these transformations play out among the Palestinian communities, in the diaspora and in Palestine? Nasser was a great hero for the post-Nakba generation. And he did try, to be fair—it’s not that he didn’t try. I remember saying this to a Palestinian in Egypt, who replied with a joke: ‘Yes, Tariq, he tried, but, you know, he’s like a bad clock. A clock says tick tock and moves forward. Nasser says tac-tic and moves backward.’ In my view, the new generation of Palestinian leaders really came into its own after the Six-Day War, when they recognized that no Arab state was going to defend them and they had to fight for themselves. What would you say to that?

My view of Abdel Nasser would be somewhat similar; one of my former students berated me the other day for criticizing him. But the point to stress is that I don’t think Palestine was ever Nasser’s priority, even in 1948. If you read his memoir, which was ghost written of course, it’s clear that his obsession was Egypt. He was an Egyptian nationalist, understandably. Palestine was important, but it was never the priority. But to address the other question you ask: how did this new generation of Palestinian resistance leaders arise? It had started to coalesce before 1967, but the trauma of the Six-Day War had an enormous impact. As you say, it cemented the understanding that the Arab states weren’t going to help. I think many believed that Nasser would—and this was the last straw. The successive defeats of 1948, 1956 and 1967 showed that the Arab states didn’t have the means to defeat Israel, irrespective of whether they had the will to do so. Initiatives that had been brewing in Palestinian society led to the takeover of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which Nasser had established in 1964 in order to co-opt and control the rising tide of national fervour. In 1968 the plo was taken over by independent Palestinian groups, dissatisfied with Egyptian control. Fatah was the largest of these, and Arafat soon became plo chairman. Once again, this was a movement from below against the co-opted elites, Ahmad Shukeiri and others, who originally ran the plo. Shukeiri, by the way, was another member of the old ruling class. But from this point on, there was a new generation of Palestinian leaders—Arafat, Hawatmeh, Habash, Abu Jihad and others—who represent a different class, a different set of identities, to everything that went before.

One of Arafat’s most important slogans was al-qarar al-Filistini al-mustaqil—independent Palestinian decision-making power. His insistence on Palestinian autonomy and self-determination was key to his popularity in this early period: ‘The Arab regimes don’t control us’. This was one of his relatively few successes, but a major one: keeping the plo largely independent from the Arab powers who wanted to control the Palestinian movement, just as they have tried to do since the 1930s. During the Great Revolt, at the 1939 St James Conference, in the debate over the un Partition resolution or the establishment of the plo—the Arab regimes consistently tried to dominate the Palestine question, for their own benefit; in rivalry with one another, of course. They are still trying to do so, even as they look on impassively and do absolutely nothing as Gaza is martyred.

You’ve already touched on another leading figure from this generation, Ghassan Kanafani. You write very movingly of him in The Hundred Years’ War in Palestine. I met him once at a conference in Kuwait in 1966 and was bowled over.

He was enormously charismatic. You read him now, and the charisma almost comes off the page. But if you met him . . . I only met him a couple of times. The man was extraordinary.

I can’t remember his exact words, which have since become famous, but I asked, is there any possibility of a negotiated settlement with these bastards? And he said—I’ll never forget his voice or his smile—Tariq, explain to me how the neck negotiates with the sword. I laughed a lot. I said, that’s a very brilliant analogy. He was a great intellectual, a writer as well as a political leader. He seemed to represent a whole culture. And so they killed him. Mossad blew him up, while he was travelling with his niece.

Exactly. His literary works resonate to this day. My son Ismail adapted his novella Returning to Haifa for the stage, with Naomi Wallace. It’s impossible to get a major theatre in the us to show it, though it premiered in London at the Finborough Theatre. The adaptation was commissioned by the Public Theatre in New York, but the board refused to allow it to be produced; they said Kanafani was a ‘terrorist’. Yet in spite of the establishment censorship, his work is everywhere. To this day, the novellas are in print, as well as his plays, his poetry, his other writings, both in Arabic and in translation. Along with Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, I think he’s the most important Palestinian intellectual of the 20th century.

This is what we were saying earlier: they know whom to kill.

And whom not to kill.

What led to Arafat and the team around him finally deciding to sell out at Oslo in 1993? Our friend Edward Said called it a ‘Palestinian Versailles’—a punitive peace.

Edward was right, but he didn’t know how right. In fact, it was far worse than Versailles. The turning point was 1988, when Arafat’s team on the Palestinian National Council essentially capitulated to the Americans’ conditions for entering bilateral dialogue—the Palestinians must renounce violence, something the Israelis were never asked to do, and accept partition, signing on to un Resolution 242, which confined the issues to the outcome of the 1967 war. That un resolution was drafted by Arthur Goldberg, Abba Eban and Lord Caradon: its authors were the great imperial powers and their Israeli client, though endorsed on the un Security Council by the ussr. In fact, the Israelis didn’t want the plo to capitulate at that point. They were not interested in talking, no matter what the plo accepted. They could agree to unsc 242, accept the ‘two-state solution’, renounce violence—and the Israelis still wouldn’t talk to them; until Rabin finally broke the taboo in 1992.

Behind the plo turn lay the outcome of the 1973 October War, when the Egyptian and Syrian regimes made clear that their interests were limited to their own territories occupied in 1967, Sinai and the Golan Heights. Beyond that, they didn’t care. And this was made clear to the Palestinian leadership. I saw some of them coming back from Cairo. I was living in Beirut at the time and I was interpreting for a Palestinian–American delegation. They talked about their experience in Cairo with Sadat and how he made it clear that, this is it. This is what we’re in for, and this is all we’re in for. You guys take care of yourselves. He didn’t say that in so many words . . .

But that’s what he meant and that’s what they did.

That’s what the plo leadership understood. And from that point on, they began to shift away from armed struggle and the liberation of Palestine towards negotiations for a so-called two-state solution. In 1974, at the Palestine National Council, they pushed through the first change to the wording. The pflp footnote5 and the bulk of the Fatah membership understood perfectly well what they were trying to do and opposed it. It took the leadership years to get to the point where they were able to win the pnc’s explicit approval for this programme—to move the plo from a position of liberation of all of Palestine, with a secular-democratic state for Muslims, Christians and Jews in which everybody is equal, to a one-state plus multiple-Bantustans solution, which is what the us-brokered two-state solution has always meant in practice. That’s what the Israelis have given us, little bits and pieces separated by huge swathes of illegal Israeli settlements. The Arafat leadership arguably accepted this in principle in 1974 and then moved, slowly but surely, towards winning over Palestinian public opinion and the movement.

The other day Hillary Clinton entered the fray, adding her pebble to the mountain of lies that has been built around the ‘peace process’. She basically said, ‘We offered the Palestinians everything at the Camp David Accords in 1979, but they turned us down. They could have had their own state by now.’ You know that phase intimately.

One of my students, a scholar called Seth Anziska, wrote the best book on the long-term impact of Camp David.footnote6 I focused on the Madrid and Washington negotiations in Brokers of Deceit. The basic point is that Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, and an end to occupation and settlement, have never been on the table, ever, anywhere, at any stage, from any party, the United States or Israel or anybody else. At Camp David in 1979, ‘autonomy’ was offered; at Madrid and Washington, in 1991, we were only allowed to negotiate for ‘autonomy’, or self-government under Israeli sovereignty; all we were told was that ‘final-status issues’ would include discussion of these other things. But we know what the bottom line was. Rabin told us. In his last speech in 1995, just before he was assassinated for going too far, he explained how far he would actually go. He said: what we are offering the Palestinians is less than a state and we would maintain security control over the Jordan Valley. In other words, no self-determination, no sovereignty, no statehood. A one-state, multiple-Bantustans solution.

That was Israel’s offer. And it never changed. Rabin was assassinated—he might have changed, you can speculate on that, if he had not been killed. But this is what he said in his last speech to the Knesset. And that was the bottom line for Ehud Barak in 2000, who negotiated with the plo, unlike most other Israeli leaders. Rabin, Barak and later Olmert were actually willing to negotiate—they were willing to put the sword to the neck, in Kanafani’s inimitable expression. But what were they offering? Not statehood, not sovereignty, not self-determination, not an end to occupation and not a removal of settlements. As for Clinton: one of the greatest liars in American politics and involved in multiple war crimes. She said the students don’t understand history. Well, what she’s propagating is certainly not history. It’s a completely distorted narrative which is false in almost every respect.

Let’s turn to Hamas. Is it accurate to say, as many of its opponents in the plo insist, that it was created by Israel?

No. Let me be very clear. Hamas emerged in 1987–88, in the situation we’ve just talked about. It grew out of the Islamist movement in Gaza, as a separate Palestinian extension of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This occurred just at the moment when Fatah and the plo moved away from the goal of liberating the entirety of Palestine, as a secular-democratic state, to accepting the American-Israeli conditions laid out in unsc 242, laying down arms, agreeing to a divided Palestinian statelet side-by-side with Israel. The plo formally accepted this in 1987–88, which is precisely when Hamas emerged as a breakaway from the Islamist movement.

Now, were they encouraged by the Israelis? Yes, of course they were encouraged. Israel saw the plo as its chief nationalist opponent, the primary danger. Any dissident movement which undermined the wall-to-wall support of the Palestinians for the plo was welcome to Israeli intelligence. Of course it was. Two Israeli specialists, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, wrote a good book on Hamas which talks about this.footnote7 There was also an excellent Reuters article, which went into detail about how the Israeli intelligence services manipulated and supported the Islamist movement in Gaza. Everything else was shut down—every expression of Palestinian identity, even the Palestine Red Crescent—but not the Islamists. They operated freely. When the Israelis needed somebody to beat up plo demonstrators on the Birzeit campus, in the West Bank, they would bus Islamists from Gaza across Israel, equipped with tyre irons and batons, to beat the living daylights out of pro-plo demonstrators. Friends told me about kids having their arms broken by these guys. The Islamists were allowed to operate without being arrested, without being interfered with, as no other Palestinian civil-society organizations were.

When Hamas emerged, the Israeli occupation authorities were divided at first, because Hamas produced its notorious antisemitic charter and launched operations against Israeli soldiers and settlers in Gaza, after the start of the Intifada in December 1987. There was a debate within Israeli intelligence and the military: do we really want to continue supporting these people or not? But at different times, they were, if not supported, at least allowed to operate, for divide-and-rule reasons, by the Israeli intelligence services that controlled the Gaza Strip. I just saw a wonderful film called Gaza Ghetto made by Joan Mandell in 1984 which talks about what the Gaza Strip was like under Israeli occupation up to that point. She lived in Palestine at the time. The Israeli occupation controlled everything, as it controls everything in the West Bank today. There were attempts at resistance, obviously, some of which were successful, others not. But over time, Hamas turned into a resistance movement, and then the Israelis were not so happy with it. But they went back to supporting it in the last few years, under Netanyahu, because they thought they could use Hamas to pacify the Gaza Strip, with cash coming from the Gulf countries, Qatar in particular.

But that turned out not to be the case.

It didn’t work out so well for them.

We now have the irony that the so-called secular-democratic plo is 100 per cent or 99.9 per cent collaborationist with the Israelis, that there is no Palestinian ‘Authority’, that effectively, the idf issues the orders and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority carries them out. While the Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist organization, Hamas, has become the leadership of what we have to call, and what is in fact, today’s Palestinian resistance. Ctd....