The current conflict in the Middle East involving Israel and Palestinian people, as well as much of the Arab world, is one that has proven to be, thus far, unresolvable and controversial to say the least

The current conflict in the Middle East involving Israel and Palestinian people is one that has proven to be, thus far, unresolvable and controversial. The news headlines over the past century have been filled on a daily basis with stories of bloodshed, terrorism, and failed diplomatic efforts between the two sides. The conflict’s history is incredibly complex, as are the different issues surrounding it. Yet one must wonder specifically how the conflict came to be. The purpose of this investigation is to determine the root cause of the current Middle East conflict.

Many of the sources used in this investigation incorporate the three major players in the Middle East crisis, the Palestinians, the British, and the Zionists, in their explanation for how the crisis was created during the first half of the 20^th century. This investigation however, considers solely internal problems in Palestinian society to blame for the current crisis. In other words, the current Middle East crisis was not created by the Zionists or the British but by the Palestinians: the native inhabitants of the region. How exactly did the Palestinians turn their native land into a modern war ground? This question can be answered in a chronological review and analysis of three stages of Palestinian history during the first half of the 20^th century. To begin with, the Palestinian social hierarchy, which had been in existence for centuries, was dominated a conservative elite class that showed little concern for the Palestinian lower classes. British royal commissions that were conducted to investigate the causes of the Palestinian riots of the 1920’s recognized that the tension in the region was a result of the weaknesses in this Palestinian social structure; a social structure that placed the lower classes Palestinians at an economic and political disadvantage. Ultimately, the Palestinian people would express their outrage against the Palestinian aristocracy in the Arab Revolt of 1936-1936, which this investigation views as the official beginning of the Middle East crisis.

There are thus three inter-linking stages to the creation of the Middle East conflict: during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the Palestinian upper class placed economic and political disadvantages on the Palestinian lower classes; during the 1930’s, the British conducted investigations into causes of tension in the region; finally, from 1936 to 1939, the Arab Revolt occurred. A recurrent theme in these three stages is the class disparity between the Palestinian peasant class and the Palestinian elite. It is therefore manifest that the root cause of the current Middle East conflict is class antagonism between the lower and upper class Palestinians.

In the early 20^th century, when the Zionists began to increase their presence in the region of Palestine, there already existed in Palestinian society a feudal hierarchy that had been in place for centuries. Any major events and incidences of violence in Palestine that occurred during the 1920’s and 30’s can be traced to faults in this Palestinian social hierarchy that was dominated by conservative elite Palestinians and placed the Palestinian masses in a state of poverty and servitude. Yet the existence of this aristocratic feudal society must be viewed in context of modern Arab history. In the 19^th century, faced with European colonialism in the Arab world, Arabs became increasingly nationalistic.[1] They felt united as a people and believed in Arab sovereignty.[2] There were, however, disagreements over source of and solution to European colonialism. There was a sharp division between conservative Arabs, who were against European-style modernization, and the liberal Arabs, who promoted the reforms and ideas of Europeans.[3]

In the social structure of Palestine during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the dominant elite class fell into the category of conservative Arabs. As historian Mark Tessler points out, “the political class in Palestine was dominated by conservative families…opposed to meaningful social transformation…largely devoid of concern for genuine modernization.”[4] The attitude of the elite Palestinians, who relied on the old feudal socioeconomic structures, placed the large peasant class at a disadvantage. The peasant class was politically powerless and remained poor as a result of the elite’s refusal to modernize agricultural production. The disparity between Palestinian aristocrats and the larger class of Palestinian peasants, who in 1930, still accounted for nearly 80 percent of the region’s total (Jewish and Arab) population, would have grave repercussions.[5]

The Palestinian peasant moreover, was aware of the injustice of his position and the feudal nature of his society. The political consciousness of the common Palestinian is evidenced by the creation and growing popularity of Palestinian newspapers and grassroots political organizations during the pre-World War I years. Newspapers, such as al-Asmai and Filastin, and political organizations, such as al-Nahda al-Urthuduxiyya and the Literary Club, represented the nationalist sentiment of the Palestinian people.[6] The viewpoints expressed in these clubs and journals emphasize the peasant class’ strong understanding of the injustice of their position. And while the Palestinian newspapers and political groups were staunchly anti-Zionist, Zionism was only a minor issue before World War I.[7] The primary concern of the Palestinian political groups was the conservative attitude of the Palestinian elite.[8] While praising Jews for their modern methods of irrigation, these newspapers and political groups were harshly critical of the Palestinian elite families that dominated the region’s political and economic activity.[9] Unlike the progressive nature of the elite class of other Arab countries, the Palestinian elite was opposed to any change in the economic and social structure of the region. Any such radical reform would have altered the Palestinian social structure, potentially toppling the Palestinian elite and benefiting the Palestinian lower classes. Thus, despite the growing political conscious of Palestinians, no far-reaching social and economic changes were made that could have assisted the despairing Palestinian masses. Instead the 1920’s saw the deterioration of the Palestinian laborer’s economic and political position.

Thus, by the 1920’s, the Palestinian peasant has been placed in a position of increasing poverty and political impotence. In addition, the Palestinian peasant was fully aware of the injustice of his situation and his anger against this injustice was growing. Having come to this juncture, it is must be understood exactly how this situation came to be. This investigation unequivocally considers the reason for the poverty and hopelessness facing nearly a million Palestinian peasants to be the hamula (or clan) system, a feudal system that had been prominent in Palestine for centuries and remained influential well into the 1930’s.[10] Each hamula possessed a piece of land with about 1000 to 5000 inhabitants and was governed by a headman or mukhtar.[11] However, some hamulas had multiple and often rival mukhtars.[12] In addition, hamulas would ally themselves with other hamulas as well as the wealthy conservative families that owned over one-quarter of the land in Palestine and dominated the region’s political and economic activity.[13]

In this hierarchical system, competition was intense between clans and wealthy families. One scholar noted, “The upper classes could not think in terms of being obligated to the lower classes.”[14] The agrarian hamula system’s influence was reduced during the 1920’s and 1930’s with the increasing size of the Palestinian working and middle-classes, a result of growing British and Jewish influence and of the Palestinian failure to modernize agricultural methods.[15] However, Palestinian society was still controlled by the competitive, self-serving elite. Historian Richard Allen summarizes the situation of Palestinian society by stating, “the system…tended to function as a conservative political machine…an important obstacle to political development.”[16]In such a social system, the Palestinian masses were locked into a position of poverty and servitude. This had been the case before the Zionists and British began efforts to colonize Palestine and this continued to be the case after the Zionists and British began to settle in Palestine. The Zionist and British presence in fact reduced the influence of the hamula system and gave Palestinians greater economic opportunities as urban workers or professionals.[17] The hamula system remained prevalent however; Palestinian political control was still vested in the self-serving elite who wished to maintain the status quo. Palestinian society was thus controlled by an upper class whose primary concern was increasing their wealth and power. The class antagonisms between the Palestinian peasant and the Palestinian aristocrat, which ultimately led to the current Middle East crisis, had thus been well established by the early 20^th century.

Incidences of lower class Palestinian uprisings increased during the late 1920’s and 1930’s, which brings this investigation to the second stage of the creation of the Palestinian conflict: the British commission findings. Numerous British government studies, the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Report being the two most important, were conducted to investigate the causes of the Palestinian riots. They determined that the riots were a result of class antagonisms between the Palestinian elite and the Palestinian lower class. Focusing on the Palestinian lower classes, the reports acknowledged the disadvantages placed on Arab lower classes by the hamula system.[18] The reports also emphasized the lack of arable land available to lower class Palestinians as a cause of Palestinian poverty.[19]

Dealing with the land issue, Jewish purchases of land left thousands of lower class Arab tenant farmers and peasants landless or without work. Blaming the land issue largely on the Jews, one Arab source believes by 1935, 30 percent of the Palestinian peasantry was landless.[20] This investigation disagrees with this one-sided viewpoint. The elite Palestinians and Arabs who held interests in the region are to be equally blamed. Zionists, after all, purchased their land from the Lebanese aristocracy, which owned large tracts in Palestine, and the upper-class Palestinian landowners, who claimed publicly to be anti-Zionist.[21] In what Tessler calls the “seller’s market”, elite landowners, taking note of the Jewish desire for land, often sold large tracts for unfairly high prices.[22] The Jews though, eager to fulfill their goals, were willing to form a buying-selling relationship with the elite landowning class. Middle-East historian Michael Cohen accuses the Arab elite of cooperating with the Zionists for the purposes of making a profit.[23] Cohen also accuses the British of knowing the situation but being unwilling to act.[24] This last claim is well founded. The British required good relations with the Zionists and the elite Palestinian class. The former, while forming 17 percent of the population in 1928, brought in 44 percent of the government revenue, and the latter held considerable political power.[25]

Furthermore, the Hope-Simpson report of 1930 recommended a British investment of 7.2 million pounds to modernize Palestinian agricultural techniques and machinery, thus improving the economic status of the Palestinian peasants and increasing the amount of arable land available in Palestine.[26] Sir John Hope-Simpson’s recommendations did not unfortunately affect British policy. The Palestinian elite obviously saw making such investments themselves as not only costly but also contrary to their own interests. The net result was an increasing number of small tenants and peasants unable to pay their taxes and debts to the government and landlords because of either the poor productivity of their land or because they no longer possessed land. And while 25 percent of the Palestinian peasants lived below the subsistence living standard in 1930, the Palestinian elite made handsome profits from land sales to Zionists.[27] Facing poverty and playing the victim of Palestinian elite self-interest, the lower class Palestinians found no other option than to rebel. Unfortunately, under the guidance of Palestinian elite propaganda, the Palestinian masses considered the Zionists and British as the causes of their adversity and hence, the victims of their violence. The class antagonisms inherent in the Palestinian social structure were left intact despite the findings of the Hope-Simpson Report.

The Hope-Simpson Report also pointed out that there was not enough arable land in Palestine to support additional farmers or tenants. As it was, up to 30 percent of Palestinian peasants were without land or work.[28] Additional Jewish immigration, another major economic concern of the Hope-Simpson Report and Shaw Commission, would only cause the situation to worsen. Had the British mandate government paid greater attention to the findings of the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Report, the economic turmoil of the 1930’s that led to the uprisings later in the decade could have been avoided. The Hope-Simpson Report in fact, offered many recommendations such as the abolition of the hamula system, the creation of Palestinian credit and commercial institutions, and most importantly, large-scale investment in the development of Palestinian agriculture.[29] All of these suggestions could have potentially solved the issues mentioned above and dramatically increased the limited ‘economic absorptive capacity’[30] of the region at the time. In effect, Palestinian society could have progressed and become modernized, thus reducing the power of conservative landowners and improving the economic and political status of the common Palestinian people.

The accurate findings and recommendations of the Hope-Simpson Report and the Shaw Commission were combined in the Passfield White Paper of 1930.[31] The White Paper was, not surprisingly, viewed with hatred by both the Zionists and the dominant elite Palestinian class.[32] The British, met with intensely negative pressure, choose not to execute the improvements recommended by the Passfield White Paper. Consequently, the Palestinian people fell into deeper adversity and the class antagonism between they and the Palestinian elite would escalate as the 1930’s progressed. Ultimately, the Palestinian people decided to respond with violence. Their anger at the injustice of their position would culminate into the third stage of the Middle East crisis’ creation: Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.

Following 1934 and 1935, when Jewish immigration numbers to Palestine peaked,[33] the Arabs began the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, what this investigation considers the third and final stage of the creation of the Middle East crisis. During this time period, the Jews and British would suffer casualty numbers in the hundreds, while the Palestinian casualty figures would be in the thousands.[34] Palestinians attacked Jewish settlements and British soldiers. There were also frequent retaliatory strikes by more militant Zionist groups such as the Revisionist Party, which planted bombs in Palestinian market places.[35] The first year of the revolt, 1936, featured a six-month strike conducted by both rural and urban Palestinians, a rare example of Arab unity.[36] The strike was remarkably well organized. The violence following the strike however, consisted of ferocious and spontaneous internal class warfare among the Palestinians. By 1939, the Arab Revolt came to a halt.[37] However, those four years marked the official beginning of the current Middle East crisis.

Before the Arab Revolt, there had been occasional instances of violence between the British, Jews, and Palestinians. However, the Arab Revolt was the turning point of the conflict, when diplomacy and negotiations were considered trivial and Arabs began using extreme violence to achieve their means. The Arab Revolt began as a violent expression of Arab disillusion and disappointment in the British mandate and growing Jewish domination of the region of Palestine. There could be no return to peace following this expression of disillusion. Following the six-month strike in 1936, the Arab Revolt forcibly changed into a popular rural Palestinian rebellion against the self-serving urban and upper class Palestinians.

David Porath, an Israeli historian, conducted a careful study on the revolt and determined 78 percent of the rebels to be of rural origin.[38] His study determined that the majority of rebels were common Palestinian peasants, not criminals or mercenaries, as many other Israelis tend to believe. Tessler also emphasizes the lower class rural nature of the rebellion. He writes, “they [the rebels] appear to have been motivated…by class antagonisms.”[39] In addition, as Tessler states, “Such [rebel] action included imposition of a moratorium on debt repayment and the reduction or cancellation of apartment rents.”[40] Perhaps the British high commissioner at the time, Sir Harold MacMichael, summarized the situation best; “something like a social revolution on a small scale is beginning. The influence of the landlord-politician is on the wane. He has done nothing but talk: others have taken the risks, and these others are disposed to take a line of their own.”[41]

Arab scholar, W.F. Abboushi, normally having a strong Arab bias in discussing the Middle East crisis, nevertheless acknowledges the rural and lower class domination of the rebellion. In what he calls “urban-rural dichotomy”,[42] Abboushi describes in detail the internal conflicts within the Palestinian ranks during the revolt. He remarks, “If the casualty statistics are used to rank the Arab revolution’s enemies, these statistics make it clear that in 1938 and 1939 the ‘Arab enemy’ was first followed by the Jewish and the British.”[43] The internal Palestinian conflict was a product of rural disgust with the Palestinian elite and personal rivalries between rebel commanders, this last fact being a point of emphasis by Abboushi.[44] In addressing the former issue, Abboushi confirms much of what was written by Tessler. He also adds that by 1938 and 1939, the rural rebel commanders became the fear of urban upper class Palestinians. Rural rebels would carry out assassination campaigns against wealthy families and in response, the upper and urban class fled to nearby countries.[45]

Despite the fact that the Arab Revolt succeeded in involving all Palestinians, not just the urban population as in previous smaller uprisings, large-scale bitter infighting between the Palestinian lower and upper classes did not stop Jewish immigration or the increasing Jewish economic domination of the region. Its failure can be attributed to internal issues within Palestinian society. Most notably, the exodus of the upper class left the revolt without a clear leadership. Abboushi is scathing in his criticism of the upper class when he writes:

When the heat became intense they [Palestinian elite] got out of the kitchen – and they left the ‘common man’ to roast. Many of them congregated in the coffeehouses of plush Beirut where they talked politics and pretended that they knew what was happening in far-away Palestine. They were an important factor in the dismal failure of the revolution.[46]

The influence that the upper classes still exerted on the rebellion, while in exodus, was largely negative. Rival elite families would often attempt to buy the protection of rural rebellion commanders. These commanders would in turn attempt to plot assassinations against each other or against the wealthy families.[47] Abboushi comments that the primary enemy of the Arab Revolt during its last two years was the “Arab traitor”.[48]

The ultimate failure of the rebellion would allow the Zionists to continue to build up the Jewish presence in Palestine during the Second World War. The international community’s understandable sympathy for the Jews following the discovery of the Holocaust, in combination with the poor military readiness of Arab nations would allow the Zionists to take the region of Palestine by force. By late 1947, the UN had officially voted to create the State of Israel.[49] Following the war of 1948, in which seven Arab nations attempted to dismantle the new Jewish State, Israel would emerge victorious and firmly control the territory formerly known as Palestine.[50] The near million or so common Palestinians would suddenly find themselves as refugees.[51]

Despite the increasingly international nature of the conflict, the Middle East conflict as it is now called, the conflict’s roots can still be traced back to the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The roots of the Arab Revolt meanwhile can be clearly traced to weaknesses in the Palestinian feudal structure. It was a structure, as underlined by the Passfield White Paper, which separated the elite class of self-interested Palestinians and the adverse lower Palestinian classes. Any doubts about the existence or the seriousness of this class disparity were repudiated by the events of the Arab Revolt, a rebellion that pitted the common Palestinian against his oppressor of many decades, the Palestinian aristocrat. The Arab Revolt would create a precedent of violence and antagonism in the region that has not been overcome ever since.

The Israeli-Arab conflict is one of the most heated conflicts of the 20^th century. The conflict itself has spanned the full length of the century and to this day remains a conflict without a clear-cut solution that could bring peace to the region and comfort to both Israelis and Palestinians. This conflict is not just a case of two parties claiming sole legitimate rights to Palestine nor is the conflict a product of religious and historic differences between the Jew and the Palestinian. When the conflict began during the 1920’s, the considerable majority of the inhabitants in the region were poor and disillusioned lower class Palestinians. It is the reasoning of this investigation that the roots of the current Middle East conflict must have some relation to these million or so common Palestinians. Research and analysis led to the conclusion that the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis is a result of economic and political disparities placed on the Palestinian lower classes by the Palestinian upper class during the first half of the 20^th century.

The Palestinian lower classes, which formed the majority of the region’s population, had been for centuries placed at a disadvantage in a feudal social system that gave the elite families dominant control over the regions political and economic activity. The elite Palestinian who claimed to be staunch anti-Zionists and protectors of the lower Palestinian classes, did nothing to help the Arab laborer improve his situation. British investigations stressed the unenviable position of the Palestinian laborer as a root cause of the tension and conflict of the 1920’s. Neglected by all sides, the lower Palestinian classes launched a violent rebellion against first, the Zionists and British, and then against the Palestinian elite. Their rebellion, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, marked the official beginning of the bloody and heated conflict between the Jews and Arabs.

While the nature of the conflict has changed, with Israel becoming independent in 1948 and the hundreds of thousands of common Palestinians becoming unwanted refugees, the rebellion of the late 30’s provided a precedent of deep antagonism and violence between Israelis and Arabs. Since the Arab Revolt, the history of the Palestinian region can be best described by cycles of violence and international warfare with neither side finding real incentive for creating peace with the other. Thus the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be traced to class antagonisms between the elite Palestinian class and the lower Palestinian classes, the indigenous people of modern day Israel. Neglected, used, and a source of controversy as they were and are today, the injustice facing the Palestinian lower classes and their reaction against this injustice created the foundation for the modern Middle East crisis.

Notes