Language and power

In this work, language is viewed first and foremost as a form of cultural practice and as an inevitable site of ideological contestation involving asymmetrical power relations between groups and individuals. This is one of the major premises upon which this study is based, wherein power signifies the capacity to act in a way that involves the consent, acquiescence or resistance of others (see Barnes 1988; Hindess 1996). I am therefore not interested here in language as a structural system. Structural information – phonological, grammatical or lexical – will be given when it is necessary to contextualize a point of linguistic structure, and only in so far as this relates to the issue of language and society, which is the main focus of this research.

From an instrumentalist point of view, language is a means of communication. In this role, language links the members of a speech community to each other in the present. But it also serves to link these speakers to their history, endowing them with a sense of identity whose roots are located in the past. And it is this past, mythical or real, that animates the cultural practices and ideological concerns that drive the members of the community towards an imagined future. Language always stands at the crossroads of (social) time, linking the past with the present, and linking these two with the future.

In the course of 1948 and the first half of 1949, a number of processes definitively changed the physical and demographic face of Palestine. Taken collectively, they steadily rendered the possibility of a mass refugee return more and more remote until, by mid-1949, it became virtually inconceivable. These processes were the gradual destruction of the abandoned Arab villages, the cultivation or destruction of Arab fields and the share-out of the Arab lands to Jewish settlements, the establishment of new settlements, on abandoned lands and sites and the settlement of Jewish immigrants in empty Arab housing in the countryside and in urban neighbourhoods. Taken together, they assured that the refugees would have nowhere, and nothing, to return to.

These processes occurred under the protective carapace of the Haganah\IDF's periodically reiterated policy of preventing the return of refugees across the lines, including by fire, and of the repeated bouts of warfare between the Israeli and Arab armies, which effectively curtailed the movement of civilians near the often fluid front lines. At the same time, these processes were natural and integral, major elements in the overall consolidation of the State of Israel. They were not, at least initially, geared or primarily geared to blocking the return of the refugees. They began in order to meet certain basic needs of the new State. Some of the processes, such as the destruction of the villages and the establishment of new settlements along the borders, were dictated in large part by immediate military needs.

The Yishuv looked to the end of March with foreboding: Its back was to the wall in almost every sense. Politically, the United States appeared to be withdrawing from its earlier commitment to partition, and was pressing for ‘trusteeship’ – an extension of foreign rule – after 15 May. Militarily, the Palestinian campaign along the roads, interdicting Jewish convoys, was slowly strangling West Jerusalem and threatening the existence of clusters of outlying settlements. The Galilee Panhandle settlements could be reached only via the Jordan Valley road and the Nahariya–Upper Galilee road; both were dominated by Arab villages. Nahariya and the kibbutzim of Western Galilee were themselves cut off from Jewish Haifa by Acre and a string of Arab villages. Haifa itself could not be reached from Tel Aviv via the main coast road as a chain of Arab villages dominated its northern stretch. The veteran Mapam kibbutz, Mishmar Ha‘emek, which sat astride the main potential route of advance from the ‘Triangle’ to Haifa, was itself surrounded by Arab villages. To the south, in the Hebron Hills, the four kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc were under siege, and the 20-odd settlements of the Negev were intermittently blockaded, with their vital water pipeline continuously sabotaged. Three large Jewish convoys, the Yehiam Convoy, the Nabi Daniel Convoy and the Khulda Convoy, were ambushed and destroyed during the last week of March, with the loss of more than 100 Haganah troops and the bulk of the Haganah's armoured truck fleet.

THE NUMBER OF PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

Over the years, a minor point of dispute between Israel and the Arab states has been the number of Palestinian Arabs who became refugees during and as a result of the 1948 war. From 1949 onwards, Arab officials spoke of a total of 900,000 or one million. Israeli spokesmen, in public, usually referred to ‘about 520,000’. The United Nations Economic Survey Mission and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) put the figure at 726,000.

Other estimates ranged between the Israeli and Arab figures. For example, the British, in February 1949, thought that there were 810,000, of whom 210,000 were in the Gaza Strip, 320,000 in the West Bank and 280,000 in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan (East Bank). The director general of the Israel Foreign Ministry, Walter Eytan, in a private letter in late 1950 referred to the UNRWA registration in 1949 of 726,000 as ‘meticulous’ but thought that ‘the real number was close to 800,000’. However, officially, Israel stuck to the low figure of 520,000–530,000. The reason was simple:

In July 1948, about midway in the first Arab–Israeli war, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Ernst Bevin, wrote that ‘on a long term view … there may be something to be said for an exchange of populations between the areas assigned to the Arabs and the Jews respectively.’ A few days later, he expatiated:

But he then went on to argue that as there were only a handful of Jews living in the territory earmarked for Arab sovereignty in Palestine, there was no ‘basis for an equitable exchange of population’ and therefore Britain should pursue with the United Nations Mediator the possibility of a return of the displaced Palestinian Arabs to their homes. By this time, 400,000–500,000 Arabs (and less than five thousand Jews) had been displaced in the fighting.

But the logic propelling Bevin's thinking, before he pulled on the reins, was highly persuasive: The transfer of the large Arab minority out of the areas of the Jewish state (as of the minuscule Jewish minority out of the Arab-designated areas) would solve an otherwise basic, insurmountable minority problem that had the potential to subvert any peace settlement.

The exodus confronted the Yishuv with a major problem: Whether or not to allow those who had fled or been expelled to return. Already during the spring, refugees in various localities began pressing to return. Local Haganah and civic leaders had to decide, without having national guidelines, whether to allow this – and almost invariably ruled against. In May, the Arab states, led by Jordan, began clamouring for a refugee return. From early summer, the Yishuv's leaders came under intense international pressure – spearheaded first by Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish United Nations Mediator for Palestine, and later by the United States – to repatriate the refugees. At the same time, the government was subjected to lobbying by army and local authorities in various parts of the country to bar a refugee return. In mid-June the Cabinet discussed the matter and a consensus emerged to prevent a return, at least so long as the hostilities continued. The consensus turned into a formal Cabinet decision in July. Without doubt, this was one of the most important decisions taken by the new State in its first formative months.

The decision, taken against the backdrop of the pan-Arab invasion and the intensification of the fighting, had crystallised over April–June. Already in early April, as the Haganah switched to the offensive, local commanders and Arab affairs advisers in predominantly Jewish areas decided to bar a return to their areas.

The UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, which endorsed the partition of Palestine into two states, triggered haphazard Arab attacks against Jewish traffic. The first roadside ambushes occurred near Kfar Syrkin the following day, when two buses were attacked and seven Jewish passengers were shot dead. The same day, snipers in Jaffa began firing at passers-by in Tel Aviv. The AHC, which flatly rejected the resolution and any thought of partition, declared a three-day general strike, beginning on 1 December, thus releasing the urban masses for action. On 2 December a mob, unobstructed by British forces, stormed the (Jewish) new commercial centre in Jerusalem, looting, burning shops and attacking Jews. Snipers exchanged fire in Haifa and attacks were launched on the neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv that adjoined Jaffa and its suburbs. Parts of Palestine were gripped by chaos; the escalation towards full-scale civil war had begun. As in 1936, NCs were set up in the Arab towns to direct the struggle and life in each locality, and bands of irregulars re-emerged in the hill country. The AHC reasserted itself as the leader of the national struggle.

Strategically speaking, the period December 1947 – March 1948 was marked by Arab initiatives and attacks and Jewish defensiveness, increasingly punctuated by Jewish reprisals. Arab gunmen attacked Jewish cars and trucks, from late December increasingly organised in British- and Haganah-protected convoys, urban neigbourhoods and rural settlements and cultivators. The attackers never pretended to single out combatants; every Jew was a legitimate target.

Bernadotte's report of 16 September, proposing the award of the Negev to the Arabs in exchange for Jewish sovereignty over Western Galilee, compelled the Israeli political and military leadership to focus attention on the south, where the surrounded, poorly supplied enclave of less than two dozen settlements was cut off from the core of the Yishuv by Egyptian forces holding the Majdal–Faluja–Beit Jibrin–Hebron axis. Contrary to the truce terms, the Egyptians refused to allow Israeli supply of the enclave by land. The threat of an award of the Negev to the Arabs, the untenable geo-military situation and the plight of the besieged settlements made the breakdown of the truce, in the absence of a political settlement, inevitable. In early October, the Cabinet approved an Israeli offensive to link up with the enclave and to rout the Egyptian army. The IDF deployed elements of four brigades (amounting to 12–14 battalions) and, on 15 October, a supply convoy was sent in. The Egyptians, as expected, opened fire, providing a casus belli. The IDF immediately launched Operation Yoav, originally named ‘Operation Ten Plagues,’ which lasted, with its appendages, until 9 November. During the three weeks of fighting, the IDF overran much of the southern coastal strip, including the small towns of Isdud, Hamama and al Majdal; Beersheba, the Negev's ‘capital’; Beit Jibrin, in the Hebron foothills; ‘Ajjur, in the Judean Hills; and several dozen smaller villages, including Beit Tima, Qauqaba, Barbara, Hirbiya, al Qubeiba and Dawayima, between the Mediterranean and Hebron.

Modern Zionism began with the prophetic-programmatic writings of Moses Hess, Judah Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Theodor Herzl and the immigration from Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in the 1880s of Jews dedicated to rebuilding a national home for the Jewish people on their ancient land, the Land of Israel, in Zionist parlance. The immigrants were impelled both by the positive ideal and by the negative experience of oppression in Eastern Europe; a wave of pogroms had engulfed Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in March 1881.

Simultaneously, during the last decades of the 19th century, Arab intellectuals in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt began to advocate a revival of Arab culture and cultural ‘independence’ from the Ottoman Empire. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the spread of the spirit of nationalism to the area, they began to think and talk about ‘decentralising’ Ottoman rule and, more hesitantly, eventual political liberation and the establishment of an independent Arab state.

The spread of Jewish settlement in Palestine resulted in friction between neighbouring Arab and Jewish communities. Townspeople and villagers resented the influx of Russian- and Yiddish-speaking, Allah-rejecting foreigners and began to fear cultural–religious subversion of their way of life and physical encroachment and even displacement.

The First World War, which destroyed the Ottoman Empire, exacerbated regional nationalist hopes and fears and changed the face of the Middle East. The idea of national self-determination, trumpeted by the victorious Allies, fired the imaginations of the educated throughout the colonial world.