Summary
In this booklet imperialism, principally British imperialism in Palestine, is the third of Kanafani’s three enemies, allied with Zionism, ruling through the Mandate, and in the Tribute a worldwide body colonising and exploiting through western monopolistic enterprises.
Details
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The imperialist-Zionist enemy is named as the third of the three separate enemies at whose hands the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered its 1936-1939 setback (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10).
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Britain is recorded accepting, on 19 June 1936, the importance of the organic link between the safety of British interests and the success of Zionism in Palestine, and during the revolt years British colonialism threw all its weight into supporting the Zionist presence (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.23 / printed p.45; PDF p.22 / printed p.43).
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The Mandate’s fiscal and administrative machinery is presented as serving Jewish settlement: discriminatory taxation, exemptions for Jewish industry, and a government that censored books, objected to cultural links with the Arab world, and built no school in the first thirteen years of occupation (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.22-23; PDF p.14 / printed p.26).
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In the Tribute, Kanafani’s conception is of imperialism as a mobile body, an octopus which colonises and exploits, spreading over the world through western monopolistic enterprises, and the primary contradiction as the one with imperialism, Zionism and racism (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.33-34 / printed p.65-66).
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Sayegh’s central historical claim about British imperialism is an alliance, concluded in 1917, between British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, which during the following thirty years opened the gates of Palestine to Zionist colonisers, facilitated the settler-community, and paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people and the creation of the settler-state in 1948 (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.212).
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His list of what Britain did under the alliance: appointed Herbert Samuel, recognised the World Zionist Organization as a Jewish Agency, opened Palestine to massive immigration despite Arab protests, transferred state lands, protected the National Home, permitted the Haganah and trained the Palmach, and condoned the Stern Group and the Irgun, while denying the Arab majority analogous facilities and the means of self-protection (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.7-8 / printed p.212-213).
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The alliance dissolved, in Sayegh’s account, because Britain expected it also to serve British imperialism and pulled against accelerated Zionist state-building; the Second World War precipitated the showdown, and Zionism turned in the mid-forties to the United States as a more powerful and more militant supporter (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.8 / printed p.213).
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In Said, Balfour’s declaration and his August 1919 memorandum are the type case of a colonial power disposing of a non-European territory as it saw fit: the contradiction with the promises made to the Arabs did not count against the priority of Zionism, in the judgement of a privileged member of a superior political, cultural and even racial caste (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.37-38 / printed p.16-17).
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Said places both the British imperialist vision and the Zionist vision inside the ethos of a European Mission civilisatrice, built on notions of the inequality of men, races and civilizations (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.39-40 / printed p.18-19).
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In Said, Chapter Two I: imperialism is a political philosophy whose aim and purpose is territorial expansion and its legitimisation; gaining an imperium includes constituting an area, accumulating its inhabitants and converting people, land and ideas to a hegemonic imperial design, so claiming an idea and claiming a territory were sides of the same process in nineteenth-century culture. Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing uselessly unoccupied territories into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.94, p.99 / printed p.73, p.78).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Haganah, Charles Orde Wingate