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When will it ever end? When will it end.
Palestine Talk Probus.
Good morning Gentlemen. I trust you can hear me.
At the start of this talk I must make something abundantly clear. I have no expertise in the Middle East. On the other hand despite speaking Hebrew...I am persona non grata in Israel. This is because I have stamped in my passport that have lived and worked in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
And my only other middle east connection was when I was returning to Ghana as a Church of Scotland missionary. To save the Church some money, I flew to Paris then Cairo in Egypt. It was an overnight transit stop during the Israeli –Egyptian war of 1973. There was a blackout at the airport. We were taken to a table, where on a card, was written the number 6. That was my given room number. I proceeded along a moonlit corridor to the room with an armed guard. Room No 6 was slightly open. I could see a flat mattress on the floor and it was moving.
‘I am sorry, I seem to have the wrong room number,’ I said perplexed.
The voice in reply was Black; slightly husky, American and ...female.
‘Hey, there’s a war on’, she said. ‘You just keep to your side of the bed and by the way......no.... hanky panky.’
• I did as instructed. And as I lay my head down and as I spent my first night on African Egyptian soil, a thought came to my mind. This was a most unusual missionary position I was in.
On my arrival in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, I sent the required telegram to the Church. “Arrived Safely.”
So why is this talk about Palestine 1967? Palestine in that peaceful pre IRA troubles era; pre oil price fluctuations; pre global terrorism? Well; I found this little pot; a canister. On the lid it explains it’s a 35mm film strip entitled: Everyday Life in Palestine.
Before we see some pictures of Palestine in the late 1960s, I’d like to share a Middle East Memoir by Richard Gibbs who spent his early childhood in Palestine and returned in 1992 to find out more about his father who had been an Assistant District Commissioner in the Mandated administration and the events which shaped the region.
He writes:
It was 1940. My parents lived in the Mustard Pot, a block of flats high on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Below lay the gardens of the Ba’hai Temple; beyond was a dramatic view over the city of Haifa, with its docks, the curve of its natural harbour and the blue sweep of the Mediterranean.
Haifa was a strategic major seaport in the state of Palestine, governed by the British under a League of Nations mandate. Britain stood alone in 1940 against Nazi Germany and its allies BUT Haifa supported the supply lines to the desert war, the Middle East and beyond.
It was a thankless job. Politicians in London had made conflicting promises about the same territory. To the Palestinians, they promised that they would have their own state; to the Jews that the long-promised biblical homeland would at last be theirs. Meanwhile increasingly, refugees from Nazi persecution in Europe were finding their way through Haifa into Palestine, disturbing the already volatile balance between Arabs and Jews.
November 1940 saw an escalating dispute between Jewish organisations and the Mandated government over restrictions on the number of Jewish refugees allowed in. Two ships carrying refugees were intercepted by the Royal Navy. The British High Commissioner ordered their removal to British colonies in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean.
They were to be taken from Haifa in a French built liner the SS Patria. A few days afterwards, Richard Gibbs writes, my father rang my mother from his office. He told her to keep a look out over the harbour. Vague rumours had reached him that something was afoot. On 25th November 1940 my mother witnessed a massive explosion. The SS Patria had just left its berth when a bomb ripped a huge hole in the side of the ship, which sank in minutes; Over 250 people died that day, mostly Jewish Refugees, but included some British nationals.
The bomb had been planted by agents of Haganah, a Jewish organisation determined to prevent the removal of refugees and to cause maximum damage to British Interests. The question which remains to this day is this: Were they prepared to deliberately slaughter their own people and blame the British or had there been a fatal miscalculation in the amount of explosives used? History and hindsight, gives Haganah the benefit of the doubt, as you will soon discover.
Shortly before Easter in 1992 Richard Gibbs and his mother travelled from Jerusalem to Haifa to find the Mustard Pot. As they approached, a Palestinian came out of the entrance. He was a caretaker of the building. He showed them the flat they had once lived in. Afterwards their driver took them to see the caretaker’s uncle who lived near the docks. There they were entertained to tea by a dapper Arab well into his 70s, with a neatly trimmed moustache, blazer and striped tie. Conversation turned to the Mandate, for whom he had worked. Did he know anything about the SS Patria?
He said: ‘I was on board as it was leaving the port, working as a pilot. Suddenly there was a massive explosion and water started to pour in. I grabbed a girl near me, and pulled her out through a porthole. Somehow I managed to get her from the water into a life raft and a minute later the ship sank. In the confusion I didn’t see the girl again. However about a year later a young Jewish woman threw her arms around me, crying, “You saved my life”.
Gibbs would of course liked to have asked his father about the rumours before the explosion. But he never got that opportunity.
On 22nd July 1946 he was sitting at his desk in the Mandate Secretariat in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, exhausted by trying to square the circle of Jews, Arabs, British and American politicians with their preconceived and conflicting agendas. His father had been granted his wish of a transfer from Palestine and he was looking forward to leaving in a week’s time.
Not long after mid-day, there was an explosion. He was struck by a flying beam and died immediately. Members of the Irgun, a militant Zionist organisation, had smuggled bombs hidden in milk churns into the basement, which when detonated destroyed all six storeys of the south western section of the building. 41 Arabs; 28 British and 17 Jews were killed. In charge of the operation was Menachem Begin, a Polish Jew whose close family had been murdered by the Nazis.
Israeli guides sometimes describe the King David, wrongly, as a Military HQ. In fact it housed the civilian administration. The Irgun, who never apologised for the attack blamed the British’s for ignoring warnings and failing to evacuate the building. The British responded that any warnings were too vague and too late. The Truth, as ever in the Middle East, lies somewhere in between.
In 1992 Menachem Begin, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and former Prime Minister of Israel, was in his last days of honoured retirement. The King David International Hotel was restored to its smart International status. Nearby is an equally impressive 1930s building. It is the YMCA. A tiled plaque on its front wall reads:
Here is a place whose atmosphere is peace, where political and religious jealousies can be forgotten and international unity can be fostered and developed.’
The history of the Palestine problem originated with the disintegration of the Turkish Ottoman Empire towards the end of WW I. Palestine had been placed under the administration of Great Britain under the Mandates System adopted by the League of Nations. All of the Mandated Territories became independent states except for Palestine. Here the primary objective was the implementation of the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government in 1917 which expressed support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
During the years of the Mandate there had been large scale immigration of Jews into Palestine, mostly from Eastern Europe and Palestinian demands for independence and resistance to Jewish immigration led to a rebellion in 1936 which lasted until 1939.
It began with a Palestinian general strike from April to October 1936 which started in Nablus and spread rapidly to other parts. There followed bombing of the Trans Arabian pipeline, attacks on trains, Jewish settlements and even on individual Jews. Violence abated for around a year after the strike was called off and the Peel Commission discussed and eventually recommended partition of Palestine. However, on the rejection of this proposal violence resumed in autumn 1937 and continued in 1938, eventually ending in 1939. The British response to the revolt and ensuing violence, was to clamp down on Arab dissent. Arabs were imprisoned without charge or trial, curfews were enforced and houses demolished. The “Haganah”, a Jewish paramilitary organization supported the British in their efforts to control order and British security forces cooperated with it by forming the Jewish Settlement Police, Jewish Auxiliary Forces and Special Night Squads.
The revolt gave birth to the Arab Palestinian identity and was instrumental in the British government issuing the White Paper of 1939 which renounced Britain’s intent of creating a Jewish National Home in Palestine as proclaimed in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
After WW II the Palestine problem was handed over to the United Nations which decided that it should be partitioned into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish.
On May 14 1948 the British withdrew from Israel and a State of Israel was declared which was immediately recognized by the US and the Soviets. The Arab League members consisting of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon declared war, renounced the UN partition decision and claimed the right of self-determination of the Arabs over the whole of Palestine. The Arab armies were initially successful but met very tough Jewish resistance. The Israel Defence Forces were formed whose numbers were strengthened by a large number of Jewish immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors.
In March 1949 a ceasefire was agreed and Israel’s interim borders, later known as the Green Line, were established. Israel held the area round Galilee and Negev whilst Syria held a strip of territory along the Sea of Galilee. The Lebanese occupied a small area at Rosh Hanika and the Egyptians held the Gaza strip, whilst the Jordanians occupied East-Jerusalem and the West Bank. The State of Israel was recognized by Britain and in May 1949, Israel was admitted as a member of the United Nations. The issue of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is one which continues today with no end in sight to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In fact some would say they are even more poles apart now.
I’ll now show some rural Palestinian photos. They were taken in 1967 and the quality of the film is somewhat grainy at best and some you will have to focus on the pictures very carefully.
As I say, these pictures were taken 47 years ago.
I cannot identify where they are in Palestine but what you may find of interest is the almost Biblical settings of the village life and the total lack of hijabs.
Interestingly it was taken for granted that the Prophet’s life was public property; and so the hijab grew out of the habit of people claiming constant access to him and his hospitality. The need to allow his family a little privacy was understandable.That is the origin of the hijab. Today the hijab is sometimes a political and often feminist statement, demanded by male relatives. But wearing the hijab is not required by or found in, the Holy Quran.
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