11 de fevereiro de 2017

Após Balfour

Há 100 anos, uma declaração de 67 palavras do gabinete britânico moldou o futuro da Palestina.

Rashid Khalidi

Jacobin

Cópia da primeira página do jornal árabe na chegada de Lord Balfour, 1925. Colônia Americana (Jerusalém) / Biblioteca do Congresso

Em 2 de novembro de 1917, Arthur James Balfour divulgou uma declaração em nome do gabinete britânico pedindo uma "lar nacional para o povo judeu" na Palestina. A declaração ajudaria a moldar um século de conflito na região, sinalizando o apoio do Império britânico ao projeto sionista.

O objetivo final do sionismo político, tal como estabelecido pelo fundador Theodor Herzl em seu famoso folheto de 1896, Der Judenstaat, e em seus escritos privados, era tão abrangente quanto cristalino: um estado judeu, que significa soberania judaica e controle judaico sobre a imigração na Palestina. O movimento sionista começou como uma empresa colonial em busca de um patrocinador metropolitano. Não tendo conseguido conquistar a Alemanha ou o Império Otomano, seus líderes conseguiram o gabinete de guerra britânico. Posteriormente, eles apreciaram o apoio do maior poder da era, que em breve emergiria vitorioso da Grande Guerra.

Na verdade, os sionistas poderiam creditar duas décadas de apoio britânico imutável e o último mandato da Liga das Nações com base na declaração de Balfour por sua eventual vitória na Palestina. Eles também podem agradecer seus próprios esforços prodigiosos e seu impulso extraordinário e implacável, o famoso dito de Herzl resumiu perfeitamente: "Se você quiser, não é um conto de fadas".

Mas a Declaração de Balfour tem outro aspecto menos considerado - decidiu o futuro do povo palestino. Para eles, essa declaração era uma arma apontada diretamente para suas cabeças. Independente se os estadistas britânicos contemporâneos a considerasse nesses termos, constituía uma declaração de guerra, lançando um ataque à população nativa com o objetivo de implantar e promover um "lar nacional" às suas custas.

Os palestinos viram o movimento sionista preocupado desde o final do século XIX, mas a Declaração de Balfour provou que eles agora enfrentavam uma grave ameaça: no momento em que a declaração apareceu em Londres, as tropas britânicas avançavam pela Palestina.

O texto da declaração apresentava claramente a natureza desse perigo. Dirigido a Lord Rothschild, um líder do movimento sionista britânico, consistia em um único parágrafo:

O governo de Sua Majestade encara favoravelmente o estabelecimento, na Palestina, de um Lar Nacional para o Povo Judeu, e empregará todos os seus esforços no sentido de facilitar a realização desse objetivo, entendendo-se claramente que nada será feito que possa atentar contra os direitos civis e religiosos das coletividades não-judaicas existentes na Palestina, nem contra os direitos e o estatuto político de que gozam os judeus em qualquer outro país.

A esmagadora maioria de árabe na Palestina (cerca de 94% da população) aparece apenas de modo mais indireto, como as "coletividades não-judaicas existentes". A afirmação não os reconhece como pessoas - nem a palavra "palestino" nem "Árabe" aparece na declaração. O governo britânico ofereceu a esta maioria "direitos civis e religiosos", mas não direitos políticos ou nacionais.

Em contraste, Balfour atribuiu direitos nacionais ao que ele chamou de "povo judeu", que, em 1917, representava apenas 6% da população da Palestina. Ironicamente, a maioria dos judeus que viviam na Palestina eram judeus ortodoxos ou orientais (mizrahim), que eram esmagadoramente não ou anti-sionistas. Neste contexto, a decisão do Reino Unido de apoiar o apelo de Herzl para o Estado, a soberania e o controle dos judeus - suavizando a linguagem enganosa da diplomacia britânica para "um lar nacional para o povo judeu" - teve implicações portentosas. Significava que a nação mais poderosa do mundo apoiaria a implantação de uma maioria estrangeira na Palestina à custa dos nativos.

Ou seja, a Declaração de Balfour anunciou que os palestinos agora enfrentariam a eventual perspectiva de perder o controle de sua nação para o impulso sionista de soberania sobre um país que então era quase completamente árabe em população e cultura. Esta perspectiva poderia ter parecido distante na época, mas tornou-se realidade apenas três décadas depois.

Palestina em Guerra


Nos anos anteriores a 1914, muitos árabes na Palestina viram o rápido progresso do movimento sionista com trepidação, especialmente quando a imigração judaica aumentou. A imprensa de língua árabe documenta essa ansiedade: o jornal al-Karmil baseado em Haifa e o Falastin de Jaffa, publicaram mais de duzentos artigos hostis ao sionismo nos anos anteriores à Primeira Guerra Mundial.

Em áreas de colonização intensiva, como as comunidades agrícolas costeiras e os férteis vales do norte, o campesinato sentiu o avanço do sionismo em termos mais concretos. O movimento comprou grandes extensões de terra de proprietários ausentes, e a doutrina sionista de avoda ivrit (trabalho hebreu) costumava significar que os colonos deveriam remover os palestinos que haviam trabalhado a terra. Como resultado dessas vendas, muitos camponeses foram forçados a abandonar as fazendas que tinham visto como suas a gerações. Alguns deles sofreram em encontros armados com as primeiras unidades paramilitares que os colonos formaram.

Moradores da cidade em Haifa, Jaffa e Jerusalém - os principais centros de população judaica na Palestina então e agora - compartilhavam seus medos. Eles observaram a constante chegada de novos imigrantes judeus europeus nos anos anteriores à Primeira Guerra Mundial com crescente preocupação.

As notícias da Declaração Balfour se espalharam rapidamente na maioria das outras partes do mundo. Na própria Palestina, entretanto, passou praticamente despercebida. Isso não é muito surpreendente, considerando os desenvolvimentos do tempo de guerra. Por um lado, os jornais locais foram fechados desde o início da guerra porque o bloqueio naval dos Aliados a todos os portos otomanos produziu uma escassez de papel de jornal. Como resultado, a maioria das pessoas na Palestina não teve acesso imediato a nenhuma notícia internacional. Então, depois que as tropas britânicas capturaram Jerusalém em dezembro de 1917, o estrito regime militar que eles impuseram proibiu a cobertura da declaração.

Na verdade, as autoridades britânicas não permitiram que nenhum jornal fosse reaberto na Palestina por quase dois anos. Portanto, os palestinos ficaram sabendo da Declaração Balfour só mais tarde, à medida que a informação gotejava lentamente pelos jornais egípcios que viajantes traziam com eles do Cairo.

Mas razões menos imediatas também atrasaram a chegada da declaração e inicialmente silenciaram a reação dos palestinos a ela. Da primavera até o final do outono de 1917, uma série de batalhas opressivas envolvendo guerra de trincheiras e bombardeios intensivos de artilharia entre as forças britânicas e otomanas ocorreram no sul da Palestina. Os britânicos, sob o comando do General Allenby, lançaram uma série de grandes ofensivas que lentamente empurraram para trás os teimosos defensores otomanos. A luta se espalhou para o centro e o norte no inverno de 1917, continuando na primavera de 1918.

Heavy British ground and naval artillery shelling during the halting allied advance up the Palestinian coast nearly pulverized Gaza. This offensive involved three separate assaults on the city’s entrenched defenses and its environs, in March, April, and November 1917.

The war left the Palestinians exhausted as a result of shortages, poverty, dislocation, and famine. The Ottoman military requisitioned draft animals; a plague of locusts destroyed crops; and draconian conscription measures sent most working-age men to the front.

The Ottoman empire in fact suffered the heaviest death toll of any major combatant power, with over three million war dead — or 15 percent of the total population, most of whom were civilians. Some estimates put the number much higher, claiming a quarter of the population died in the course of the World War I. In greater Syria alone, which included Palestine, half a million people died due to famine between 1915 and 1918.

Horrific war casualties compounded these civilian deaths. As many as 750,000 Ottoman soldiers out of the 2.8 million originally mobilized may have died during the war. Casualties among Palestinian and other Arab units were very heavy because they often fought on the most contested battlefields. These factors had a massive impact on Palestine. Demographer Justin McCarthy estimates that, after growing about 1 percent annually in the prewar years, Palestine’s population declined by 6 percent during the war.

Against this grim background of mass suffering and deprivation, Palestinians learned, in a fragmentary fashion, about the Balfour Declaration. Though all citizens faced pressing concerns as the war wound down, the survivors greeted the news with dismay, whenever and however it reached them.

The Push for Liberation


The British occupation, which marked the end of four hundred years of Ottoman rule, intensified the shock of the Balfour Declaration. Political identities in Palestine had evolved in the late nineteenth century in keeping with global trends and with the considerable evolution of the Ottoman state. The empire had started to falter in the pre-World War I era, with territorial losses in the Balkans and Libya, but its dissolution following its crushing 1918 defeat swept away a government that had controlled the region for twenty generations — nearly twice the lifespan of the American republic. This transformation disoriented the Palestinian people, compounding the war’s devastation and the shock of living under the first foreign occupation they had ever known.

In the immediate postwar era, Palestinian national identity evolved significantly and rapidly. Indeed, in the wake of a great war driven by the participants’ unrestrained nationalism, the idea of national identity — a quintessentially nineteenth-century phenomenon — took on new importance. This was as true in Palestine and other parts of the Middle East as it was elsewhere in the world.

Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin’s very different calls for self-determination made the issue even more important. Whatever these two leaders’ actual intentions, their apparent endorsement of colonized people’s national aspirations had an enormous impact.

Wilson of course had no intention of applying these principles to most of the peoples whose hopes of liberation he inspired. Indeed, he confessed that he was bewildered by the plethora of groups, most of whom he had never heard of, who responded to his call for national self-determination.

Nevertheless, as a result of the hopes aroused and then disappointed by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, by the Bolshevik Revolution, and by the Versailles peace conference, Egypt, India, Korea, and many other countries became sites of massive anticolonial revolts in 1919 and immediately after. We can credit the growth of nationalism and its acceleration during and after the war with the dissolution of the Romanov, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires — three transnational dynastic states that had long repressed their population’s national sentiments.

The Palestinians, suffering from a kind of collective post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result of World War I, had to face new realities as they entered a postwar world suffused by nationalist fervor. The Ottoman Empire disappeared, replaced by Britain and France. In 1915-16, these two European powers secretly partitioned the region in the Sykes-Picot accords, a deal that the Bolsheviks revealed to the public in 1917.

The possibilities of Arab independence and self-determination — which the British guaranteed to Sharif Hussein of Mecca in 1916 and which became the subject of repeated pledges thereafter — had to be measured against this agreement for a colonial partition. At best, the British kept these promises partially and belatedly for other Arab peoples, but the empire never honored them for the indigenous Palestinian population. While Egyptians Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, and Turks all achieved a measure of independence in the years after World War I — albeit sometimes highly constrained and limited — the Palestinians had no such opportunity.

Instead, the British operated in Palestine with a different set of rules, those rigidly dictated first by the Balfour Declaration and then by the League of Nations mandate based on it. The declaration had been designed to suit the needs of Zionism, a colonizing movement that had allied with an empire whose armies were just then conquering Palestine. British troops would not leave for over thirty years, by which time the Zionist enterprise had become firmly entrenched, fully realizing many Palestinians’ worst fears.

Triple Bind


As in most of the Middle East and much of Europe as well, the national idea began taking root in Palestine in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, many see Palestinian nationalism as nothing more than an unreasonable reaction to Jewish self-determination. In fact, Palestinian identity, like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli. Ironically, the two movements grew up at about the same time, despite the claims of both modern nationalisms to ancient lineages.

Zionism’s colonial project was just one catalyst for Palestinian nationalism, just as antisemitism was only one spur for Zionism. Even before World War I, Palestinian identity included elements of a patriotic modernism, Muslim and Christian religious attachment to Palestine as a holy land, and fear of European encroachment. Later it drew strength from the widespread frustration at the colonial powers blocking the aspirations of Palestinians and other Arabs for freedom. This national sense closely resembles the other nation-state identities that emerged around the same time in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria — those new states that the European powers, largely on the basis of the Sykes-Picot accords, created out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

Without a doubt, Zionism played an integral role in the Palestinian case, but reducing Palestinian identity to opposition to Zionism ignores the very similar parallel histories of neighboring states. Neighboring Arab peoples — Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, and so forth — managed to develop twentieth-century national identities without the dubious benefit of Zionist colonialism.

As soon as they could, Palestinians began opposing the British government and the arrival of the Zionist movement as a privileged colonial interlocutor. They did so initially in the shadow of a strict military occupation that lasted until 1920, then under a series of British High Commissioners. The first of these, Sir Herbert Samuel, was a committed Zionist and former cabinet minister who laid the foundations for much of what followed.

In understanding the Palestinian efforts to oppose this regime, we must keep two crucial factors in mind. First, unlike most other colonized peoples, the Palestinians had to contend not only with the metropolitan colonial power, but also with the Balfour Declaration’s terms. Thus they had to deal with a settler-colonial movement that, while beholden to the United Kingdom, was also independent of it and enjoyed an international base, which importantly spread to the United States.

Second, the United Kingdom did not rule Palestine outright: it did so as a mandatory power of the new League of Nations. When British officials rejected Palestinian protests, they had international legitimacy thanks to the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which had incorporated the Balfour Declaration verbatim and substantially expanded on its commitments.

The Palestinians therefore found themselves in a triple bind, which may be unique in the history of indigenous resistance to European settler-colonial movements. They faced a colonizing movement with a national mission and independent sources of finance and power. They also had to confront the might of the British Empire in an era when not one colonial possession, with the partial exception of Ireland, had successfully freed itself from the clutches of European powers. And they had to face the international legitimacy that the League of Nations accorded British rule, with the League effectively sanctifying the Balfour Declaration by endowing it with the approval of the preeminent international body of the day.

The Balfour Declaration had ceased to be a statement from the British cabinet and became an internationally sanctioned legal document. This insight is all-important in understanding how the declaration and the mandate structured what happened next. It also partially explains the Palestinians’ failure to overcome their difficult circumstances and retain possession of their ancestral homeland.

Before the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist movement was a colonial enterprise without a fixed metropole — an orphan searching for a foster parent. When it found one in the United Kingdom, it could begin colonizing Palestine in earnest. Soon after, it gained strength from the indispensable “iron wall” of British bayonets and the League of Nation’s international credibility.

Seen from the perspective of its victims, the declaration’s careful, calibrated prose amounted to a proclamation of war. The Zionist movement waged this war with money, legal means, propaganda, guns, and car bombs, while the British deployed multiple forms of repression, exile, warplanes, artillery, and summary executions. The Balfour Declaration thus marked the beginning of a century-long conflict that continues to this day.

Sobre o autor


Rashid Khalidi é professor de Edward Said de Estudos Árabes Modernos na Universidade de Columbia, e diretor do Instituto do Oriente Médio da Escola de Assuntos publicos e Internacionais da Columbia.

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