"I've seen the vultures, filthy, stealthily approaching a dead donkey. They need not feed on donkey flesh today.
"How you love those humble folk, native Christians and native Moslems! How you love persecuted Jews! You and other nations proved that at Evian les Bains*, didn't you? You say 'all the nations did.' Yes, but under your sole control is the sovereign remedy proposed at Evian, to wit, that the victims of European meanness be sent to Palestine. In other words that the Holy Land of Christians, Moslems and Jews be liquidated to make a graveyard of all three.
"What of the world's pious pilgrims who would fain go annually to the one country of peace and sacred memories. Do you remember the stream? Why did you launch the devastating 'experiment'? Why do you continue it? Are you mystified by the changes in Palestine since 1916-17? Can you not detect each step that has led to the present ruin? Would you dare ask your neighbors? Will you ever find a more dependable friend or ally than the Arab, any Arab? Remember your vast Arabic learning, memories, scholarly works, statesmen, many highly trained Christian orientalists to this very hour? Do you remember and will you use?
"As the season of 'grapes' returns to Palestine, August and later, season of gladness, will you be treading the wine-press over there or what representatives of yours will be treading? Who will be under your feet? What color will your feet be?
"Have you assayed the necessity for all this? Have you reckoned with the end? Will you be proud of the result? Who as effectively as yourself has chastised the Holy Land and its rightful people? If you import another people there by any specious title will you chastise them the same way in the interests of PEACE: YOU, CAESAR: WHAT OF THE PAX BRITTANICA, LATELY, NOW? PEACE!
"Is it Palestine you dearly love, or Mosul, or India, or Suez, and even they, why do you love them so? Are you truly loving and loyal to England? You emancipator of the blacks! And your pride, the not-nice manner in which you bandy the word 'native'. Was that the reason for championing wholesale immigration of aliens with shreds of title 2000 years old!
"Are Palestinians bad people? Do you really think that these despoiled peasants are terrorists? Do you remember any terrors visited upon them since 1914? Do you remember the exultation with which they welcomed you and your message of fairness, of peace, of reverence in 1917? Some of your dead would remember and do. Are there not sufficient living living who remember, who worship, who understand?
"Besides the Palestine of place, there is the Palestine of dream with which all mortals may rightfully be concerned. When outsiders come to grips with the Palestine of place then strange iniquities ensue. Test this as you will at any time in the experiences of the past.
"What of the incongruity of the Foreign Office meddling with the Palestine of place, or the Colonial Office, or any bureau and I except none: then begins misery and mockery. The heart of the meddler becomes dry and hard; the very health of the native custodian of that soil goes glimmering to a sickness worse than the enterics of which we have knowledge.
"Where else in this troubled world are the faiths of mankind so inextricably bound? Where else is there so providential an opportunity for non-aggression? for noblesse oblige? Let the chaffering in Palestine real estate cease. Let the western bribery of the impecunious farmer of that country stop forthwith! Decency commands it.
"Holy cities, material shrines, are notoriously offensive when venal considerations obtain. Outsiders beware! When your patient dreams go on to the registry of real estate titles and you seek to close your fist over a parcel of ground for selfish gratification you have seared your soul beyond hope of sweetness or idealism.
"The sword may be offensive but the pen of the realist has been even more terrible a horror in Palestine, the Holy Land. Look at it today! Let those who know tell you how it was in the yesterday before the World War! What human would say that today could compare with yesterday? The Turk was a dreamer, a poet, a philosopher, a saint compared with certain so-called statesmen, certain political meddlers of the past twenty years. Read the travel literature of fifty or a hundred years preceding 1917, and con the reiteration of peccadilloes, amusing contretemps, despised chicaneries along the tourist routes, guides, shrines, pretense and crass materialism and then compare the atrocities of the last few years in European mal-administration in Palestine. The pre-war trivialities are as the errant ways of sparrows compared with the work of tigers, hyenas, and vultures." (Palestine Today, pp 14-22)
[*See my 2/8/13 post Misrepresenting the Evian Conference of 1938.]
Showing posts with label Elihu Grant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elihu Grant. Show all posts
Friday, September 26, 2014
Awake, England! 1
In my last post, I touched on the subject of the 1936-39 Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule and Zionist immigration.*
The brutal crushing of that 4-year intifada by the British army left Palestinian society so weakened that it lacked the stamina and resources to withstand the armed Zionist takeover of Palestine 9 years later, in 1948.
As a reminder of that struggle, the high point of Palestinian resistance to the British mandate and Zionist colonisation, I reproduce here the eloquent and impassioned 1938 protest by American archeologist and biblical scholar Elihu Grant (1873-1942), Awake, England!
Grant was a man who had lived among and studied the Palestinian peasantry prior to World War 1, writing a warm and sympathetic account of their society and customs, The Peasantry of Palestine, in 1907.
Written 78 years ago, Awake, England! is both a lament for the peaceful Palestine of Ottoman times and a cri de coeur at what Palestine has become under the British, with their policy of imposing a 'National Home for the Jewish people' on an unwilling, non-Jewish native population. This is simply referred to by Grant as the 'experiment'**.
Sadly, it also reveals how little has changed in the history of the Palestinians' agonisingly protracted struggle for self-determination in their ancestral homeland:
"England! Where thousands live who, or whose kindred, have served over there in decent Christian ways these scores of years, who know the East, the Arab, who have bred such as Lawrence of Arabia, Hogarth of the Bodleian, Palmer and Allenby... Now look at the thousands of photographs of your 'authorities' in Palestine, today, of evictions and dynamiting, with accompaniments of machine-gunning, bayonetting, tanks, planes, gas, bombs, and starvation. Some of your representatives you would not trust in your stable. Yet you let them carry your name and fame among the peasants of a usually peaceable land which you are turning into a daily horror, while you lift your palms upward and outward when the owner of a few feddans, a few tools, a cow, a pair of goats, perchance sheep and chickens, or a plot of vineyard, when he strikes in his misery at his tormentors paid from the taxes you wring from him.
"One of your scions, officer in a district, told me that one of his concerns was to obliterate the native guest-rooms in the villages, muddafiehs, humble centres of fraternity and democracy, because he considered them seditious, harmful to the empire. That is tearing the ewe lamb apart and not even eating it decently.
"I could draw you pictures and have before of scenes, places, and people in Palestine, as dear, simple, and sweet as any in your fair England. But that would be pre-war. And the resentment that has burned in those places recently is not a 'circumstance,' as we say colloquially, to what would have happened in Somerset if half of the wrongs had been perpetrated there by an insider or an outsider. One of your own assured me of this five years ago and Lo, and behold, your artistry of misery since!
"And consider the provocation in Palestine in twenty years past, in twenty months past. Even today I could point you to places in Palestine where your 'experiment' has scarce touched as yet and where you might observe a measure of the peace and kindness among the natives which we knew thirty or more years ago.
"A dear, good, saintly Christian from the midst of peace-loving England said to me concerning one of my own native pupils in Palestine 'We fear he is not loyal.' Loyal to what? To the Empire? To a tormentor that he was trained to view was a civilised force in the world long before it turned persecutor with its 'experiments' and to what end, native welfare? That savors of the remark of an Irish officer in service in Palestine to one of the native nobility there charged with office, a man educated and qualified by years of European training to serve any good cause or purpose in the Moslem East. Charged by this Irishman, with being too sympathetic with the peasantry of the district!! with being less than fully loyal to the despoiling busybody busy with his papers, white, or other shade. Remember a few years ago when a white paper showed merciful comprehension of the aggravated native state of affairs in Palestine that it was officially pigeon-holed? Under what pressure?
"Oh, England, you are not fair to the England we admired. You are not frank, you are not English: at least in Palestine. Do you shudder for Abyssinia, for Spain, for China? What about Palestine!?! There are those among the thousands in Syria, refugees from Palestine, or among the hundreds of good Palestinian brains in other countries who could help you learn a truer function for young educated Palestinians.
"Once it was the wawy (jackal) whose bark we heard in the vineyards. Now it would be the bark and rattle of deadly weapons. Once it was the hyena prowling for dead flesh. Now it is those who provide death daily for the contest, the race between the scavenger and the family of the dead who at their peril seek the bodies of their dead after the official strafing by your orders. Once it was the kilmy frangieh*** and veneration by those Easterners who admired you. Still it is the kilmy frangieh but with a difference in those 'holy fields!'
Concluded in my next post...
[*See my 21/3/11 post Jogging Uri Avnery's Memory; **"It may fail. I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?" Lord Balfour, House of Lords, 21/6/22; ***foreign word]
The brutal crushing of that 4-year intifada by the British army left Palestinian society so weakened that it lacked the stamina and resources to withstand the armed Zionist takeover of Palestine 9 years later, in 1948.
As a reminder of that struggle, the high point of Palestinian resistance to the British mandate and Zionist colonisation, I reproduce here the eloquent and impassioned 1938 protest by American archeologist and biblical scholar Elihu Grant (1873-1942), Awake, England!
Grant was a man who had lived among and studied the Palestinian peasantry prior to World War 1, writing a warm and sympathetic account of their society and customs, The Peasantry of Palestine, in 1907.
Written 78 years ago, Awake, England! is both a lament for the peaceful Palestine of Ottoman times and a cri de coeur at what Palestine has become under the British, with their policy of imposing a 'National Home for the Jewish people' on an unwilling, non-Jewish native population. This is simply referred to by Grant as the 'experiment'**.
Sadly, it also reveals how little has changed in the history of the Palestinians' agonisingly protracted struggle for self-determination in their ancestral homeland:
"England! Where thousands live who, or whose kindred, have served over there in decent Christian ways these scores of years, who know the East, the Arab, who have bred such as Lawrence of Arabia, Hogarth of the Bodleian, Palmer and Allenby... Now look at the thousands of photographs of your 'authorities' in Palestine, today, of evictions and dynamiting, with accompaniments of machine-gunning, bayonetting, tanks, planes, gas, bombs, and starvation. Some of your representatives you would not trust in your stable. Yet you let them carry your name and fame among the peasants of a usually peaceable land which you are turning into a daily horror, while you lift your palms upward and outward when the owner of a few feddans, a few tools, a cow, a pair of goats, perchance sheep and chickens, or a plot of vineyard, when he strikes in his misery at his tormentors paid from the taxes you wring from him.
"One of your scions, officer in a district, told me that one of his concerns was to obliterate the native guest-rooms in the villages, muddafiehs, humble centres of fraternity and democracy, because he considered them seditious, harmful to the empire. That is tearing the ewe lamb apart and not even eating it decently.
"I could draw you pictures and have before of scenes, places, and people in Palestine, as dear, simple, and sweet as any in your fair England. But that would be pre-war. And the resentment that has burned in those places recently is not a 'circumstance,' as we say colloquially, to what would have happened in Somerset if half of the wrongs had been perpetrated there by an insider or an outsider. One of your own assured me of this five years ago and Lo, and behold, your artistry of misery since!
"And consider the provocation in Palestine in twenty years past, in twenty months past. Even today I could point you to places in Palestine where your 'experiment' has scarce touched as yet and where you might observe a measure of the peace and kindness among the natives which we knew thirty or more years ago.
"A dear, good, saintly Christian from the midst of peace-loving England said to me concerning one of my own native pupils in Palestine 'We fear he is not loyal.' Loyal to what? To the Empire? To a tormentor that he was trained to view was a civilised force in the world long before it turned persecutor with its 'experiments' and to what end, native welfare? That savors of the remark of an Irish officer in service in Palestine to one of the native nobility there charged with office, a man educated and qualified by years of European training to serve any good cause or purpose in the Moslem East. Charged by this Irishman, with being too sympathetic with the peasantry of the district!! with being less than fully loyal to the despoiling busybody busy with his papers, white, or other shade. Remember a few years ago when a white paper showed merciful comprehension of the aggravated native state of affairs in Palestine that it was officially pigeon-holed? Under what pressure?
"Oh, England, you are not fair to the England we admired. You are not frank, you are not English: at least in Palestine. Do you shudder for Abyssinia, for Spain, for China? What about Palestine!?! There are those among the thousands in Syria, refugees from Palestine, or among the hundreds of good Palestinian brains in other countries who could help you learn a truer function for young educated Palestinians.
"Once it was the wawy (jackal) whose bark we heard in the vineyards. Now it would be the bark and rattle of deadly weapons. Once it was the hyena prowling for dead flesh. Now it is those who provide death daily for the contest, the race between the scavenger and the family of the dead who at their peril seek the bodies of their dead after the official strafing by your orders. Once it was the kilmy frangieh*** and veneration by those Easterners who admired you. Still it is the kilmy frangieh but with a difference in those 'holy fields!'
Concluded in my next post...
[*See my 21/3/11 post Jogging Uri Avnery's Memory; **"It may fail. I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?" Lord Balfour, House of Lords, 21/6/22; ***foreign word]
Friday, February 28, 2014
Palestine... Before Israel 2
Tired of mutton dressed up as lamb? Weary of pretenders? Sick of fakes like Israel's insufferable Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, whose parents came to Palestine from Poland via the US, touting his mob as the real Semitic thing?
"Israel has been our home for roughly 3,800 years. Archaeology shows that. The Bible says it... I just yesterday gave a coin that's 2,200 years old to Martin Shultz as a gift and it's got Hebrew on it."* (HARDtalk, BBC, 24/2/14)
You want the real thing? Here it is:
"The Semitic peasant has always been a conservative. In many ways he is to-day much like what the Canaanite occupier of the land must have been. Each wave of conquest or shower of civilization has left its effect, but underneath the Palestine peasant is a primitive Semite. Until within a few score years religion of one sort or another has usually come to him at the point of the sword. He has often adopted the veneer of a new faith in order to escape death. So it was when Joshua and the Hebrew host swept into the land, Bedawy fashion; so when Maccabean, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, and Moslem again took control. The Palestine peasant has worshiped the Baalim, Yahweh, Moloch, the God of Israel, the Son of God, the God of Islam. All the time he has kept a certain core of Semitic custom and superstition, a sort of basic religion that has been much the same all through these changes. But it is ofttimes impossible to distinguish between a survival of the old and a reversion or degeneration." (The Peasantry of Palestine, Elihu Grant, 1907, p 45)
[*Netanyahu likes to play the same game. See my 24/9/11 post Benzion, My Father.]
"Israel has been our home for roughly 3,800 years. Archaeology shows that. The Bible says it... I just yesterday gave a coin that's 2,200 years old to Martin Shultz as a gift and it's got Hebrew on it."* (HARDtalk, BBC, 24/2/14)
You want the real thing? Here it is:
"The Semitic peasant has always been a conservative. In many ways he is to-day much like what the Canaanite occupier of the land must have been. Each wave of conquest or shower of civilization has left its effect, but underneath the Palestine peasant is a primitive Semite. Until within a few score years religion of one sort or another has usually come to him at the point of the sword. He has often adopted the veneer of a new faith in order to escape death. So it was when Joshua and the Hebrew host swept into the land, Bedawy fashion; so when Maccabean, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, and Moslem again took control. The Palestine peasant has worshiped the Baalim, Yahweh, Moloch, the God of Israel, the Son of God, the God of Islam. All the time he has kept a certain core of Semitic custom and superstition, a sort of basic religion that has been much the same all through these changes. But it is ofttimes impossible to distinguish between a survival of the old and a reversion or degeneration." (The Peasantry of Palestine, Elihu Grant, 1907, p 45)
[*Netanyahu likes to play the same game. See my 24/9/11 post Benzion, My Father.]
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Palestine... Before Israel 1
The opening paragraphs of The Peasantry of Palestine (1907) by Elihu Grant*:
"This little book will make no attempt to tell all that could be said of its subject, but we hope that its selection of things to tell will be gratifying to you. Our wish is that not many of its pages will be condemned as dry, but that most of them have interest and refreshment. If sometimes when you are tired you can sit down and be pleased with some of these pages, here or there, you will know a little of how the trudging peasant of the village feels as, going over hill after hill, from each top he gazes off towards the west and sees the evening mists thickening and looking like good, cool mountains in the sea. It is pleasant to see the face of the native light up as he catches sight of the clouds heavy with blessings of moisture. Perhaps fierce sirocco days have followed one another for some time, longer than usual. Such days are actually looked for in trios at least, but often they hold for a longer time. Their peculiarly enervating heat is very trying, and when they have passed one welcomes eagerly an evening that brings the heavy mist. This announces that the succession of hot days is broken and that some days of respite are coming. The welcome moisture blesses the vineyards, the fig orchards, the tomatoes, squashes and melons, and it is sure to bring out ejaculations of blessing from the fervent peasant, praising the Father of all, whose favoring mercy he feels.
"Look out on a morning early and you will see the mists scudding, drifting, veiling and dissevering like masses of gauze, like streamers of truant air. Perhaps some near mountain may be cut off from the little hill half-way down by a moat filled with billowing fog. Soon the sun cuts it and scatters it away and the hot, dry day sets in. The roads and rocks are powdered with lime dust, the somber morning tones on the hills are touched with whitening brightness. Here and there is the dusty grey of an olive-orchard or the bright green of vineyards. Overhead, the brightest blue is set with one yellow gem of fire that creeps up and up until noon, and then the toiling peasantry, who have watched this timepiece of the heavens, sit down in the nearest shade to eat their food and chat. That done, they roll over for the luxury of a nap and forget a hot, dry hour in a healthy doze. The click of the chisel in the quarry ceases, the hoe is cast aside, the driver is lying on his face, fast asleep, while the donkey nibbles and rolls his load-sore back deliciously in the dust. The camel sits like a salamander, apparently minding no change of weather. Little birds pant for breath. All is very still and hot.
"But work-time comes again before the heat goes, and the workmen half sit up, looking around, perhaps playfully tossing a stick or clod on the head of a lazier comrade. The work-saddles are roped on the backs of the animals. The camel, long habituated to complaining, whether made to kneel or rise again, utters grating gutturals from his long throat. He is the Oriental striker, objecting, vocally, at least, to every new demand upon him. Well walked, the countryside begins to be busy again and work goes on until sundown. As the afternoon slips into the evening you will see traveling peasants hastening to make their villages. The hills are touched with pinks and purples that shade into dark blue. The grey owl calls, the foxes reconnoiter the fields, the village dogs bark, lights straggle out from the settlements. One may hear the song of a watcher in a vineyard or the bang of his musket as he shoots at a dog or fox meddling with the vines. As we hastened one evening through a village two hours distance from our own, the people, sitting about the doors and in the alleys, seemed astonished and urged us to stop overnight, not understanding our preference to travel on in the growing dark. But we went on, passing possible sites for Ai, then Bethel and Beeroth, and so to our own Ram Allah. The way was precarious and stony, with only the starlight to help us, and the evening was chilly."
[*Grant (1873-1942) was an archaeologist and Professor of Biblical Literature at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. Expect more such extracts from this wonderful book about Palestine's indigenous people.]
"This little book will make no attempt to tell all that could be said of its subject, but we hope that its selection of things to tell will be gratifying to you. Our wish is that not many of its pages will be condemned as dry, but that most of them have interest and refreshment. If sometimes when you are tired you can sit down and be pleased with some of these pages, here or there, you will know a little of how the trudging peasant of the village feels as, going over hill after hill, from each top he gazes off towards the west and sees the evening mists thickening and looking like good, cool mountains in the sea. It is pleasant to see the face of the native light up as he catches sight of the clouds heavy with blessings of moisture. Perhaps fierce sirocco days have followed one another for some time, longer than usual. Such days are actually looked for in trios at least, but often they hold for a longer time. Their peculiarly enervating heat is very trying, and when they have passed one welcomes eagerly an evening that brings the heavy mist. This announces that the succession of hot days is broken and that some days of respite are coming. The welcome moisture blesses the vineyards, the fig orchards, the tomatoes, squashes and melons, and it is sure to bring out ejaculations of blessing from the fervent peasant, praising the Father of all, whose favoring mercy he feels.
"Look out on a morning early and you will see the mists scudding, drifting, veiling and dissevering like masses of gauze, like streamers of truant air. Perhaps some near mountain may be cut off from the little hill half-way down by a moat filled with billowing fog. Soon the sun cuts it and scatters it away and the hot, dry day sets in. The roads and rocks are powdered with lime dust, the somber morning tones on the hills are touched with whitening brightness. Here and there is the dusty grey of an olive-orchard or the bright green of vineyards. Overhead, the brightest blue is set with one yellow gem of fire that creeps up and up until noon, and then the toiling peasantry, who have watched this timepiece of the heavens, sit down in the nearest shade to eat their food and chat. That done, they roll over for the luxury of a nap and forget a hot, dry hour in a healthy doze. The click of the chisel in the quarry ceases, the hoe is cast aside, the driver is lying on his face, fast asleep, while the donkey nibbles and rolls his load-sore back deliciously in the dust. The camel sits like a salamander, apparently minding no change of weather. Little birds pant for breath. All is very still and hot.
"But work-time comes again before the heat goes, and the workmen half sit up, looking around, perhaps playfully tossing a stick or clod on the head of a lazier comrade. The work-saddles are roped on the backs of the animals. The camel, long habituated to complaining, whether made to kneel or rise again, utters grating gutturals from his long throat. He is the Oriental striker, objecting, vocally, at least, to every new demand upon him. Well walked, the countryside begins to be busy again and work goes on until sundown. As the afternoon slips into the evening you will see traveling peasants hastening to make their villages. The hills are touched with pinks and purples that shade into dark blue. The grey owl calls, the foxes reconnoiter the fields, the village dogs bark, lights straggle out from the settlements. One may hear the song of a watcher in a vineyard or the bang of his musket as he shoots at a dog or fox meddling with the vines. As we hastened one evening through a village two hours distance from our own, the people, sitting about the doors and in the alleys, seemed astonished and urged us to stop overnight, not understanding our preference to travel on in the growing dark. But we went on, passing possible sites for Ai, then Bethel and Beeroth, and so to our own Ram Allah. The way was precarious and stony, with only the starlight to help us, and the evening was chilly."
[*Grant (1873-1942) was an archaeologist and Professor of Biblical Literature at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. Expect more such extracts from this wonderful book about Palestine's indigenous people.]
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