Daily Times

For Marx, Indian history is the history of invaders, it finds its parallel in the Palestinian history which is the history of expropriation, and accumulation of capital through dispossession of the periphery by the western capitalism. In the process it applied the logic of supply and demand to the indigenous population, ejecting its larger segment out of the productive process making it redundant, expelling half of it from the state while committing the rest, the “superfluous eaters” of the Nazis’ to genocide through seclusion and ghettoisation. Much -maligned Hitler was not the only culprit in the history who arranged a holocaust – not singularly a Jewish phenomenon, for its initial victims were Marxists, Roma, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled – to follow the capitalistic dynamics. The gory precedence of Andrew Jackson’s ‘Trail of Tears’ of forcibly dislocating nearly 60,000 native Americans from their ancestral homelandsin the South-eastern United States areas to the west of the Mississippi River, killing thousands in the process, was already there. The Australian and Canadian aborigines, and the South American Indians, suffered the identical fate. The process continues unabated even today but contrary to Hitler, no one neither Andrew Jackson nor Netanyahu nor Pinochet has become a metaphorical hate figure. Keeping Hitler alive is beneficial, it serves to overshadow and masquerade the grisly crimes of Zionism, posing itself a historic victim, it justifies the massacre in the name of its security.

“The tendency to create the world market” Marx says “is directly given in the concept of capital itself” the remaining task of incorporating such mission into the theory of accumulation is left to the theorists of imperialism/colonialism and they tailor the task according to the necessity of its demands. To achieve the objective, states were created, destroyed, recreated, to function as satellites fulfilling no criterion of meeting statehood, even by the bourgeois standards. The end of the second world war saw the partitioning of the world in many states. The Partition of India and Palestine – fate of the latter was already decided in 1917 – were the part of the same design to create the spaces of hegemonies to thwart not only the ever-increasing influence of the Soviets but to control the material resources of the former colonies.

The end of the First World War had the identical pattern. The liquidation of Ottoman Empire by the western imperialism led to its Balkanisation, multiple small states emerged from its womb in the Middle East to serve the interests of imperialism. Many Sheikhdoms, for Lloyd George inhabited by the ‘incoherent, tribal people’ possessing enormous oil wealth appeared on the world map, in their midst ‘motivated by a self-interest that coalesced with the ambition of the Zionist movement’ to rein the Arabs, a Jewish state was created. For Ronald Storrs It was ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. The dream of Herzl who begged for a Jewish nation state from every ruler including Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Ottoman Sultan, the Pope, and King Victor Emmanuel III, Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, Vyacheslav von Plehve, the anti-Semitic interior minister in the Russian Tsarist government, was finally realized.

Two factors contributed to the creation of a Zionist state, the direct one was the British desire to have a land base near the Suez Canal to maintain its control on India and its other colonies

However, Herzl’s ideas of anti-Semitism and Jewish nationhood were not shared by many Jews including CG Montefiore, president of Anglo-Jewish Association who refuted Herzl’s assertion of antisemitism being eternal and its removal a hopeless task. He rejected those remarks as “a libel against both Jews and human nature”. LL Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Board of Guardians, believed Jews were not a nation and support for such ideas was bound to strengthen the hands of the anti-Semitics. Edwin Montagu, [a practicing Jew and the then Secretary of State for India] like Gertrude Bell, considered the call for a Jewish state as the demand of an unrepresentative minority, and not something coming from those prominent Jews he felt the government should listen to.

”Jewish immigration to Palestine” Gertrude Lowthian Bell wrote, ”is artificially fostered by doles and subventions from millionaire co-religionists in Europe . . . hoping an independent Jewish state may be established in Palestine . . . though it may be questioned whether the local Jews have any acute desire to see it realised . . . it is perhaps livelier in the breasts of those who live far from the rocky Palestinian hills and have no intention of changing their domicile”. The process in some form continues even today, the American Jewish organisation is instrumental in guarding Israeli interests in the US, by funnelling money and exerting political pressure on White House which Obama in his recent autobiography has complained about.

But despite the opposition within and outside the Jewish circles Bernard Regan writes the ‘non-religious hierarchised notions of civilisation and secularised interpretations of religious beliefs were shaped into an imperialist discourse to validate political practice. The Balfour Declaration constituted a unique manifestation of this fusion’. For Edward Said 1917 heralded the biggest tragedy of his life, his country was doomed.

Two factors contributed to the creation of a Zionist state, the direct one was the British desire to have a land base near the Suez Canal to maintain its control on India and its other colonies. ‘Zionism’ Bernard Regan says, ‘was a useful and timely adjunct to British imperialism’s functioning’ as Weissman admitted that a future state of Israel was to ‘form a very effective guard for the [British to secure] Suez Canal’. The importance of Canal for the British could be gauged by Hugh Cairns letter to Disraeli, ”It is now the Canal and India’ he said ‘there is no such thing now as India alone. India is any number of ciphers; but the Canal is the unit that makes these ciphers valuable.’ The indirect but potent reason was the Bolsheviks’ threat. The Bolsheviks not only published the secret details of Sykes-Picot agreement exposing the hideous designs of imperialism of dividing the resources and the territory of Ottoman empire in between them but the right of self-determination of the people they championed became a bigger threat to colonialism and the expansion of its market. It is interesting to note that despite their lack of influence in the Arab world their revolutionary steps were extremely popular in the region.

‘The main feature of modern constitutional state’ for Alain Badiou ‘is universal conformity with the law, not with the truth’ and the law that follows the logic of capitalist development not only justifies the class domination but the domination of metropolitan capital too hence it has a flawed truth, an untruth for the suffering humanity. The modern constitutional states created artificially or liberated through resistance have to follow the capitalist rationality that makes their hegemony dependent upon coercion. Immediately after the creation of the state of Israel, the process of primitive accumulation began. Land expropriation backed by the British was the first step. The land was initially bought from the absentee landlords living abroad, later the buyers turned to small scale indebted peasants, after losing the price of their crops they had no option but to sell their lands. ”To achieve the ‘close settlement by Jews on the land’, the British administration resorted to use the changes introduced by the Ottoman Land Laws, facilitating the sale of land, which in turn triggered the dispossession of those who worked [on] it”. Once the Jewish National Fund purchased the land, it not only restricted its lease to the Jewish settlers but also forbade its sale to the Palestinians. The land grab did not go unnoticed. Despite repression, a mass uprising of the Palestinian peasants against the dispossession began in 1920 and 1921.

Till 1930 the Palestinians had no banks to enhance their agricultural productivity. The interest charged on loans taken from other resources was nearly 30 percent and most of the Palestinian peasants living in poverty and indebtedness were unable to pay it. On the other hand, ‘investment from abroad was frequently provided interest free by Zionist supporters, and on occasion the British assisted by supporting appeals from the Zionists for loans. A series of ordinances encouraged Zionist banks, credit and cooperative societies.’

The writer, an academic has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com