Zionist Colonialism in Palestine

Summary

Fayez Sayegh argues that Zionist colonisation in Palestine was a distinctive form of European settler colonialism: a movement for Jewish nation-building through colonisation, animated neither by ordinary economic exploitation nor by annexation for a metropolitan power, and inherently incompatible with the continued existence of Palestine’s Arab population because its programme was racial self-segregation and statehood in a fully populated country. Unilateral Zionist colonisation failed in 1882-1914, he argues, and succeeded only through its 1917 alliance with British imperialism, which for thirty years opened Palestine, protected the settler community and its armed forces, and paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people and the creation of the Zionist settler-state in 1948, thereafter sustained by a new sponsor, the United States. The resulting state, in Sayegh’s account, is characterised by three permanent features: racism — racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy, expressed in Palestine not as hierarchical coexistence but as racial elimination and then discriminatory apartheid against the Arabs who remained — addiction to violence and terrorism, against Arabs first, and also against the British and United Nations personnel when they stood in its way, and territorial expansion towards all of so-called Eretz Israel, the unfinished business of Zionism. The Palestinian response passed through five stages, from welcome, through local anger and the resistance of 1917-1948, to forcible dispossession in 1948 and, in 1964, the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization to seize the initiative for liberation.

What the file is

• The file is the journal reprint: Settler Colonial Studies 2, 1 (2012), issue titled Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743, printed p.206-225, one printed page per PDF page (PDF p.1 / printed p.206 to PDF p.20 / printed p.225).
• It presents excerpts, prepared by this issue’s editors, of Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965) (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.2 / printed p.207). It is therefore excerpts of a pamphlet/book, not the whole 1965 work: editors’ ellipses ([…]) appear throughout Sayegh’s text, marking passages omitted in the reprint, and two bracketed identifications are inserted in his text, [Herbert Samuel] (PDF p.7) and [Count Folke Bernadotte and André Serot] (PDF p.13), together with [Jewish] (PDF p.7).
• Structure: an unsigned editors’ introduction with a biography of Sayegh (PDF p.1-2); Sayegh’s sections I. The Historical Setting of Zionist Colonialism, II. The Alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, III. The Character of the Zionist Settler-State (A. Racism, B. Violence and Terrorism, C. Territorial Expansion), IV. The Palestinian Response, and Epilogue: The Liberation of Palestine; and four Notes (PDF p.20).
• Access basis given with delivery: open-license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), downloaded from the URL in the frontmatter. The PDF metadata (not the text) gives creation in 2012.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/1965-sayegh-zionist-colonialism-in-palestine.txt, from Josh’s memex vault) has a page marker for every page, 1-20, and 6,628 words in the copy as counted on intake. It is clean and single-column. In places the extraction splits a word or phrase one word per line (notably PDF p.4, p.6, p.8, p.12-13, p.16-18); those passages were reassembled in printed order and flagged in the reading notes. Occasional slips as printed are noted below under Open questions. Nothing was found unreadable, and the original did not need to be opened for gaps.
• Attribution inside the file: the introduction and its biography and framing of Sayegh are the journal editors’, unsigned in the text as read, and are credited to the unsigned editors’ introduction on this page. Quotations inside it that the editors attribute to Sayegh are credited as Sayegh quoted by the editors. Sayegh’s own sections begin at I. on PDF p.2. The veteran Prime Minister quoted in section II is sourced in Note 2 to David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p.489.

Section by section

Editors’ introduction — PDF p.1-2 / printed p.206-207

The unsigned editors’ introduction gives Fayez Sayegh’s biography (born Kharraba, Syria, 1922, died 1980; Georgetown PhD 1949; taught at the American University of Beirut, Yale, Stanford and Macalester College; founded the PLO Research Center in 1965 and sat on the PLO Executive Committee; Chargé d’Affaires of the Arab States Delegations’ Office at the United Nations), and names as his most lasting legacy 10 November 1975, when as a delegate of Kuwait he jointly authored and presented UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, revoked in 1991 by Resolution 46/86 as a precondition set by Israel for the Madrid Conference. The editors praise the excerpted work as possibly one of the clearest and most concise descriptions of its generation of the organisational set-up of the Zionist settler colonial movement, its diplomatic strategies, and its ideology and structural features; they summarise its distinguishing claims — racial self-segregation, rejection of coexistence or assimilation, an unbending drive to territorial expansion, and necessary structural and physical violence, all congenial, essential and permanent in Sayegh’s remark — and its close: Palestinian sacrifices were not in vain, and the duty to challenge Zionism is regional and universal, not Palestinian alone.

I. The Historical Setting of Zionist Colonialism — PDF p.2-7 / printed p.207-212

Sayegh opens with the Scramble for Africa of the 1880s as the stimulus for the beginnings of Zionist colonisation, and with European Nationalism’s idea that religious and alleged racial bonds made Jews a nationality entitled to separate existence and a Jewish state in a piece of Afro-Asian territory, a state that would be a home-base in its own right for the whole Jewish nation to converge upon, not an imperial outpost. Colonisation would be the instrument of nation-building, not its by-product. The improvised colonisation of the following years was no spectacular success despite lavish subsidies, because emigration to the United States or Argentina served escape from anti-Jewish practices as well, and nation-building was not yet widespread among European Jews. The failure of the first fifteen years (1882-1897) led to the First Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1897 under Theodor Herzl, which replaced haphazard philanthropic-colonial colonisation with an organised, nationalistic programme and stated the overall objective, a home in Palestine secured by public law. Sayegh then gives the three features that differentiated Zionist colonisation from European colonisation elsewhere: (1) its motive was neither economic exploitation nor imperial annexation but attaining nationhood and an independent Jewish state that would attract the Jews of the world; (2) unlike other settlers it could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants, because fully populated, nationally conscious Palestine could not physically or politically accommodate the programme while its Arab people remained — Zionist colonisation was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the native population in the coveted country; and (3) it could count on no imperial sponsor’s protection, facing resistance from the Palestinian Arabs and from the Ottoman authorities. The Congress’s practical programme answered with organisation (the World Zionist Organization as a quasi-state apparatus, given supreme priority), colonisation instruments (the Jewish Colonial Trust and Colonization Commission, both 1898, the Jewish National Fund, 1901, and the Palestine Office, 1908), and negotiation, first aimed at the Ottoman Sultan, the German Emperor and Britain (a Sinai settlement as a stepping-stone), none of which bore fruit. A second, more nationalistic, militantly segregationist and strategically sited phase from 1907/1908 was no larger; by the First World War Zionists were about 1% of the Jews of the world, Jews in Palestine were still under 8% of the population holding no more than 2.5% of the land, and no Ottoman or European endorsement had been obtained. The war set the stage for the 1917 alliance with British imperialism, which in the following thirty years accomplished what thirty years of unilateral colonisation had not.

II. The Alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism — PDF p.7-8 / printed p.212-213

Britain, Sayegh lists, appointed a Zionist Jew, Herbert Samuel, as its first High Commissioner, recognised the World Zionist Organisation as a representative Jewish Agency (see Jewish Agency), opened Palestine to massive Zionist immigration despite Arab protests, transferred state lands to the Zionists, protected the National Home’s institutions, permitted the Zionist community its own schools and its military establishment, the Haganah, trained the Palmach, and condoned the Stern Group and the Irgun — so that by the mid-thirties a British Royal Commission described the settler-community as a state within a state — while the Arab majority was denied analogous facilities and deprived of the means of self-protection. Britain had expected the partnership also to serve British imperialism, and pulled against the acceleration of Zionist state-building; the Second World War precipitated the showdown and the dissolution of the alliance. In the mid-forties the Zionist movement found a more powerful and more militant supporter in the United States. The settler-state remains, Sayegh argues, an alien body in the region, by its association with European imperialism, its importation of Western colonial practices, and its racial exclusiveness and self-segregation; he quotes Ben-Gurion (Note 2) that Israel is part of the Middle East only in geography and draws its strength from world Jewry.

III. The Character of the Zionist Settler-State — PDF p.9-16 / printed p.214-221

Introduction (PDF p.9): besides its link with imperialism and its status as a total stranger to the Middle East, the political embodiment of Zionist colonialism is characterised by (1) its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern, (2) its addiction to violence, and (3) its expansionist stance.

A. Racism (PDF p.9-13 / printed p.214-218). Racism is congenial, essential and permanent in Sayegh’s account because it is inherent in Zionism’s ideology: the national oneness of all Jews by supposedly common ancestry, neither religion (few Zionists are believing or practicing Jews) nor language (Hebrew was resuscitated only after Zionism’s birth) being the alleged national bond. Its three corollaries are racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy. Self-segregation precludes integration or assimilation: from Herzl to Weizmann, from Ben Gurion to Goldmann, Zionist leaders preached that the chief enemy is not Gentile anti-Semitism but Jewish assimilation, and anti-Semitism and Zionism agree on the premise that all Jews are one nation. The credo also demands racial purity in the land of regrouping: it demands with equal imperativeness the departure of all Jews from the lands of their exile and the eviction of all non-Jews from Palestine, so that Jewish superiority and the Chosen People’s special destiny can manifest when they are all together and all by themselves. Against other European racism, which expressed supremacy within hierarchical racial coexistence — separate and unequal, tolerating natives as useful for menial functions — Zionist racism isolated itself from the Arabs and then evicted them: nowhere in Asia or Africa, not even in South Africa or Rhodesia, had race-supremacism shown so passionate a zeal for thoroughgoing racial exclusiveness and physical expulsion. While powerless to dislodge the Arabs, the colonists boycotted Arab produce and labor and established Jewish labor only in Zionist colonies, enforced by the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Foundation Fund and the Jewish Federation of Labor — a tactical and temporary suspension of the dogma, never abandoning the aim of ousting the Arabs. The regime’s motto, against European discrimination, was racial elimination; discrimination was reserved for the remnants who stayed. In that discrimination the settler-state learned from and could surpass the white settler-states, with the difference that the Afrikaner apostles of Apartheid proclaim their sin while the Zionist practitioners protest their innocence. The Arabs remaining since 1948 have their own Bantustans, native reserves and ghettoes, under the euphemistic name security zones; their lands and homes are subject to confiscation by administrative decree under drastic laws of 1948-1953 denying redress through the courts, and whole villages have been expropriated for Zionist settlements; and under the Nationality Law a Jew is eligible for citizenship immediately on arrival while indigenous Arabs face qualified eligibility that has left a majority of them in the limbo of non-citizenship.

B. Violence and Terrorism (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.218-219). Habitual resort to force by the state’s military and para-military arms was directed principally against the Arabs, whose very existence in the coveted land made them the primary and ultimate target. Late in the Mandate the para-military and terrorist organisations Britain had aided and condoned turned on the British garrison and civil authorities, and after United Nations mediators and truce observers arrived, Zionist violence turned on international personnel: the assassination of the first United Nations Mediator and his military aide, identified in the editors’ bracket as Count Folke Bernadotte and André Serot, and occasional detention of UN observers. Against the Arabs the violence was most long-lasting, methodical and ruthless: prenatally and at birth the state used violence to intimidate and evict, and the massacres at Dair Yaseen, Ain ez-Zaitoun and Salah ed-Deen in April 1948 were calculated measures in a formal program of eviction-by-terrorisation. Since its establishment the state turned violence inward and outward: massacres and outrages at Iqrith (December 1951), Al-Tirah (July 1953), Abu Gosh (September 1953), Kafr Qasim (October 1956) and Acre (June 1965), a program of racial hate elevated to state policy; large-scale pogroms on the Arab population of Gaza and Khan Younis during the occupation that followed the Tripartite Invasion of Egypt in 1956; and systematic military attacks on neighbouring Arab states, many fully discussed by the United Nations Security Council.

C. Territorial Expansion (PDF p.14-16 / printed p.219-221). Zionist attainments falling short of the standing objective are only temporary stations, not terminal points, despite solemn assurances. The same stratagem of deceptive public disavowal covered statehood (publicly denied, a mere home sought, from 1897 until 1942, while internal documents and leaders’ diaries show statehood was the objective all along) and eviction (publicly denied until 1948, while the aim from the beginning was the thorough Zionisation and de-Arabisation of Palestine, carried out when the opportunity arose in 1948). For territorial extent the camouflage is only partially removed because the aim is only partly realised. The perennial aim was and still is statehood in all of Palestine, called by Zionists Eretz Israel, completely emptied of its Arabs (see Eretz Israel). Its minimum definition, officially formulated in 1919, covers about double the area currently occupied by the settler-state: in present terms the Kingdom of Jordan on both sides of the River, the Gaza strip, Southern Lebanon, and Southern and south-western Syria, plus the portions of Palestine now occupied — still short of the Nile-to-Euphrates territory claimed by Zionist extremists. Of the three essential elements of the Zionist programme, only occupation of all of so-called Eretz Israel remains unrealised, the unfinished business of Zionism; for the settler-state, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion.

IV. The Palestinian Response — PDF p.16-19 / printed p.221-224

Five stages. (1) Welcome: early immigrants, in small numbers and emphasising religious or humanitarian motives while concealing the movement’s political, ideological and colonial-racist character, were taken for pilgrims or refugees and hospitably welcomed; even Herzl noted the friendly attitude of the population. (2) Suspicion and local anger: from 1907/1908 the second wave’s methodical ouster of Arab farmers, labourers and watchmen and boycott of Arab produce aroused anger, but the larger political-nationalist dimensions remained concealed, and hostility stayed more or less local while colonisation was modest. (3) Resistance, 1917-1948: the Anglo-Zionist alliance expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 and the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 opened Arab eyes; for thirty years Palestine was the scene of persistent and tireless resistance. It began in 1919 with diplomatic representations and collective declarations: the American King-Crane Commission reported on 29 August 1919 that the non-Jewish population, nearly nine-tenths of the whole, were emphatically against the entire Zionist program, and the unanimous resolution of the General Syrian Congress of 2 July 1919 opposed Zionist pretensions and migration while affirming that Jewish compatriots would enjoy common rights and assume common responsibilities. Armed resistance followed: hostilities in northern Palestine in March 1920 and fighting in Jerusalem in April 1920, uprisings in 1921, 1929 and 1933, the country-wide rebellion of 1936 renewed in 1937 until the Second World War, and from December 1947 to May 1948 a life-and-death battle with the British garrison and the Zionist colonists. At the height of the 1936 rebellion a civil disobedience movement and country-wide strike lasted 174 days (perhaps the longest national strike in history), called off only when the rulers of the neighbouring Arab States intervened and promised collective Arab negotiations with Britain. (4) Dispossession, 1948: the Palestinian Arab people was forcibly dispossessed and most Palestinians evicted; its sacrifices over three decades failed to avert the catastrophe but safeguarded Palestinian national rights and the legitimacy of the Arabs’ claim, for rights undefended are rights surrendered. (5) Liberation: after sixteen years of dispersion and exile in which faith was reposed in world conscience, the United Nations and/or the Arab states, in 1964 the Palestinian people reasserted its corporate personality by creating the Palestine Liberation Organization; only in the liberation of Palestine, spearheaded by Palestinians prepared to pay the price, can past sacrifices be vindicated.

Epilogue: The Liberation of Palestine — PDF p.19-20 / printed p.224-225

The problem is not the Palestinians’ concern alone: the expansionist settler-state threatens the Arab states, whose lands it has invaded and still covets; as a colonial venture that anomalously bloomed precisely when colonialism was beginning to fade, it challenges all anti-colonial peoples in Asia and Africa, for the cause of anti-colonialism and liberation is one and indivisible; and as a racist system translating its doctrines into discrimination and oppression it is a menace to all dedicated to the dignity of man, closing with the sentence quoted in full under Key passages.

Notes — PDF p.20 / printed p.225

Four notes only: (1) Israel Cohen, A Short History of Zionism (London: Frederick Muller Co., 1951), p.47, for the Basle Congress aim; (2) David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p.489, for the Prime Minister quotation; (3) the King-Crane Commission quoted in George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Beirut: Khayats, 1955), p.449; (4) the General Syrian Congress resolution quoted in Antonius, p.441.

Key passages

• “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonisation in Palestine.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.2 / printed p.207)
• “the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.4 / printed p.209)
• “Racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler-state. Nor is it an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene. It is congenial, essential and permanent.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214)
• “The Zionist ideal of racial self-segregation demands, with equal imperativeness, the departure of all Jews from the lands of their ‘exile’ and the eviction of all non-Jews from the land of ‘Jewish destination’, namely, Palestine.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.215)
• “Nowhere in Asia or Africa – not even in South Africa or Rhodesia – has European race-supremacism expressed itself in so passionate a zeal for thoroughgoing racial exclusiveness and for the physical expulsion of ‘native’ populations across the frontiers of the settler-state, as it has in Palestine, under the compulsion of Zionist doctrines.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.11 / printed p.216)
• “If racial discrimination against the ‘inferior natives’ was the motto of race-supremacist European settler-regimes in Asia and Africa, the motto of the race-supremacist Zionist settler-regime in Palestine was racial elimination.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.217)
• “whereas the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid in South Africa, for example, brazenly proclaim their sin, the Zionist practitioners of apartheid in Palestine beguilingly protest their innocence!” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.217)
• “The perennial aim of Zionism was and still is statehood in all of Palestine (called by Zionists ‘Eretz Israel’, or the Land of Israel), completely emptied of its Arabs.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.220)
• “Of the three essential elements of the Zionist program – racial self-segregation in a Zionist state, racial exclusiveness and eviction of Arabs, and occupation of all of so-called ‘Eretz Israel’ – only the third remains unrealised. It is the ‘unfinished business’ of Zionism.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.221)
• “For the Zionist settler-state, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.221)
• “The period from 1917 to 1948 was the period of Arab resistance par excellence.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.17 / printed p.222)
• “Rights undefended are rights surrendered. Unopposed and acquiesced in, usurpation is legitimised by default.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.19 / printed p.224)
• “For whenever and wherever the dignity of but one single human being is violated, in pursuance of the creed of racism, a heinous sin is committed against the dignity of all men, everywhere.” (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.20 / printed p.225)

Evidence the work relies on

Sayegh’s excerpt as reprinted is an argumentative essay with only four footnotes; most of its evidence is presented without citation in the excerpt, which is a limit recorded here as the work presents it.

• Israel Cohen, A Short History of Zionism (London: Frederick Muller Co., 1951), p.47 — cited (Note 1) for the Basle Congress’s formulation of Zionism’s aim, quoted on PDF p.3.
• David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p.489 — cited (Note 2) for the veteran Prime Minister’s statement, quoted on PDF p.8, that Israel is part of the Middle East only in geography and part of world Jewry in dynamism, creation and growth.
• The King-Crane Commission report of 29 August 1919, as quoted in George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Beirut: Khayats, 1955), p.449 — cited (Note 3) for Palestinian opposition in 1919, quoted on PDF p.17.
• The General Syrian Congress resolution of 2 July 1919, as quoted in Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p.441 — cited (Note 4), quoted on PDF p.17-18.
• Uncited in the excerpt: Herzl’s noting the friendly attitude of the population to the first colonists (PDF p.16); a British Royal Commission’s description of the settler-community as a state within a state by the mid-thirties (PDF p.7); the internal documents of the Zionist Movement and the diaries of its leaders said to show statehood was the objective all along (PDF p.14); the 1919 official formulation of the minimum territorial scope of Eretz Israel (PDF p.15); the drastic laws of 1948-1953 on confiscation and the Nationality Law on citizenship (PDF p.12-13); and the lists of massacres and attacks in section III.B (PDF p.13-14). The excerpt gives no source for these beyond Sayegh’s own statement.

Analysis

• Method: a conceptual and comparative argument. Sayegh defines Zionist colonisation by contrasting it, feature by feature, with European colonisation in Asia and Africa (motive, coexistence, sponsorship; and, for racism, hierarchical coexistence versus elimination), derives the settler-state’s three characteristics from Zionism’s ideology as he defines it, and then reads Palestinian history as a five-stage response. Historical narrative frames the concepts rather than the other way round: dates, institutions and figures are marshalled to instantiate the three differentiating features and the three characteristics.
• Perspective: Sayegh wrote as the founder, in the year of this work, of the Research Center of the Palestine Liberation Organization and as a member of its Executive Committee, per the editors’ introduction; the work is a programmatic statement of the 1960s Palestinian national movement as much as a history, ending with the PLO’s 1964 creation and liberation as its telos. The editors present it as such, a document of its time.
• Support and limits: within the excerpt, the four footnoted quotations (Basle aim, Ben-Gurion, King-Crane, General Syrian Congress) are documented to named published sources; the rest of the factual apparatus — population and land percentages for 1914 (about 1% of world Jewry Zionist; under 8% of Palestine’s population; no more than 2.5% of the land), the 174-day strike of 1936, the massacre lists, the 1948-1953 laws, the 1919 territorial formulation — is asserted without footnotes in the excerpts as reprinted. Because the file is editors’ excerpts, some of that apparatus may sit in the passages the ellipses omit; the excerpt alone cannot show it. Its spellings and categories are of 1965 and are kept as printed (see Open questions).
• The work’s central analytical distinctions: colonisation as the instrument of nation-building rather than its by-product; incompatibility with the continued existence of the native population as the feature separating Zionist from other European colonisation; racial elimination versus racial discrimination as the respective mottos of the Zionist and other settler regimes; and unfinished territorial expansion as the state’s defining future orientation.

People, organizations, places and events

Fayez Sayegh, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Herbert Samuel, First Zionist Congress, World Zionist Organization, Jewish National Fund, Jewish Agency, Haganah, Palmach, Irgun, Stern Group, Balfour Declaration, King-Crane Commission, General Syrian Congress, Palestine Liberation Organization, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, Israel, Gaza, Acre, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine

Concepts

Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Racial Self-Segregation, Racism, Jewish Labour Only, Apartheid, Eretz Israel, Territorial Expansion, Liberation of Palestine

How it relates to other sources

• With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine (ingested first): agreement on the frame. Both present Zionist settlement under British protection dispossessing Arab workers and peasants; both name the Jewish labour only policy as a central mechanism — Sayegh makes it the earliest, institutionally enforced expression of racial exclusiveness, with the Jewish National Fund among its enforcers, where Kanafani documents its wage and employment effects in the 1930s; both treat the alliance with Britain as decisive, Kanafani through the Mandate’s machinery and the revolt years, Sayegh through a thirty-years/thirty-years contrast between unilateral failure and alliance success.
• Difference of emphasis: Kanafani’s three enemies are internal as well as external (the feudal-clerical leadership and the surrounding Arab regimes alongside the imperialist-Zionist enemy), and his analysis is class-based; Sayegh’s excerpt has no Palestinian or Arab leadership enemy — the surrounding Arab rulers appear only as the interveners who ended the 1936 strike — and his analysis is organised by race and colonisation, not class. Sayegh’s Palestinian response is a national five-stage sequence ending in liberation through the PLO (1964); Kanafani, writing for the PFLP milieu, ends his revolt account in 1939 with the foundations of 1948.
• New here: a pre-1914 history of Zionist organisation and diplomacy (Basel 1897, the colonisation instruments of 1898-1908, the failed Ottoman, German and Sinai approaches); an explicit comparison with South African apartheid; a post-1948 account (confiscation laws 1948-1953, citizenship, the massacre lists to June 1965, expansion as unfinished business); 1919 Palestinian opposition through the King-Crane Commission and the General Syrian Congress; and Sayegh himself, his PLO Research Center, and Resolution 3379.
• On the 1936 strike: Sayegh gives a duration of 174 days and says it was called off only when the neighbouring Arab rulers intervened with a promise of collective negotiations; Kanafani likewise has the strike called off in October 1936 by the Arab Higher Committee in obedience to the Arab kings. The accounts agree on the intervention; Sayegh’s 174 days is a figure Kanafani’s excerpt of numbers does not give, so no conflict is recorded, and it is kept attributed to Sayegh on the revolt page.

Open questions

• Basel or Basle: the text uses both spellings for the 1897 congress city (Basel for the congress held there, PDF p.3 and p.5; Basle Congress for its formulated aim, PDF p.3). Both are recorded as printed.
• Organisation spelling: the body uses both World Zionist Organization (PDF p.5) and World Zionist Organisation (PDF p.7), and Colonization Commission (PDF p.5) alongside colonisation elsewhere. Recorded as printed.
• Editors’ introduction slip: “The following excerpts are from of his ‘Zionist Colonialism in Palestine’” (PDF p.1), as printed.
• Nationality Law passage: “a majority of Israel’s Arab languishing in the limbo of non-citizenship” (PDF p.13), as printed, appears to drop a noun such as population; recorded as printed, not corrected.
• Racial discrimination passage: Sayegh writes that the remnants faced the precepts of “radical discrimination” (PDF p.12); whether the 1965 original reads racial there cannot be checked from this excerpt. Recorded as printed.
• Organisations slip: “para-military and terrorist Zionist organsations” (PDF p.13), as printed.
• Acre, June 1965: Sayegh lists Acre among the Arab towns and villages where massacres and outrages were visited, dated June 1965 (PDF p.14), without further detail in the excerpt; what event in Acre this refers to is not explained in the file. Context the work does not supply goes here, not into the pages.
• The veteran Prime Minister quoted on PDF p.8 is named only in Note 2’s source (Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel); the body calls him only its veteran Prime Minister. Attribution on this page follows Note 2.
• State within a state: the excerpt does not name the British Royal Commission of the mid-thirties that Sayegh says described the settler-community so (PDF p.7); it is not identified here with the Peel Commission, which this file does not name.
• Jewish Federation of Labor: Sayegh names it among the enforcers of Jewish labor only (PDF p.11). This file does not equate it with the Histadrut named in Kanafani; whether Sayegh means that body is left open, and no such claim is made on the Histadrut page from this source.
• Excerpting: because the file is editors’ excerpts, the full 1965 work’s sections, footnotes and evidence cannot be accounted for from this file; passages behind the ellipses are unknown here.

Coverage

PDF p.1-20 of 20, read in full. Reading notes in reading/sayegh-1965-zionist-colonialism-in-palestine.md cover PDF p.1-10 and PDF p.11-20 with no gaps.