On This Day

28 October

FIRST ALL-JEWISH COLLECTIVE COLONY IN PALESTINE
On this day in 1910, the first Jewish kibbutz, Degania, was established in Palestine. The first members wrote, “We have arrived, ten men and two women, to receive the inventory from the ‘labour conquest group’”. In Zionist parlance ‘labour conquest’ means displacing Palestinians in favour of Jewish colonists. Arthur Ruppin’s JNF bought a large part of Degania’s land from absentee landlords, the Sursuk family of Beirut, and leased to the kibbutz, who expelled the estate’s Palestinian workers and tenants.

 

 

 

أول مستعمرة يهودية جماعية في فلسطين

28 أكتوبر

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام ١٩١٠ تم تأسيس اول كيبوتز (دغانيا) صهيوني في فلسطين. كتب الاعضاء الاوائل "وصلنا عشرة رجال وامرأتان لاستلام الموجودات في المخزن من (مجموعة الفتح العمالي)". و"الفتح العمالي" هذا يشير في لغه الصهيونية الى تهجير الفلسطينيين لصالح المستعمرين اليهود. اشترت منظمة الصندوق القومي اليهودي (JNF) والذي يرأسها آرثر روبن جزأ كبيرا من اراضي دغانيا من عقارات الغائبين (عائلة سرسق في بيروت)، وتم تأجيرها لادارة الكيبوتز والذين بدورهم طردوا العمال الفلسطينيين الذين قطنوا وفلحوا الارض.

From the mid-1850s to 1914, the number of Jews who fled Czarist Russia was about 2.5 million of whom two percent (about 50,000) emigrated to Palestine. In the 1880s, the community of Palestinian Jews, known as the Yishuv, amounted to three percent of the total population. They were apolitical and did not aspire to build a modern Jewish state.

But in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement - a political ideology - grew out of Eastern Europe, claiming that Jews were a nation or race that deserved a modern “Jewish state". The movement, citing the biblical belief that God promised Palestine to the Jews, began to buy land there and build settlements to strengthen their claim to the land.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi notes that the first wave of colonists (1882-1903 – often called the First Aliyah) were “pragmatic and relatively un-ideological”. After disputes between the fellahin and their new Jewish landowners, the settlers often ended up leasing the land back to its occupants or “came to treat the fellahin little differently than had their former Arab landlords. They disappropriated the fellahin, but in most cases they did not fully dispossess them, as they integrated them into plantation-style colonies”. The First Aliyah represented a traditional colonial enterprise that sought to exploit, not expel.

The more staunchly Zionist settlers of the second wave (or Second Aliyah) had different ideas. Their ideology was “Hebrew labour,” and had what Khalidi describes as “a more aggressive, forceful attitude to the Arabs”. Khalidi describes how this happened:

“The process would begin with the purchase of land, generally from an absentee landlord, followed by the imposition of a new order on the existing Arab cultivators – sometimes involving their transformation into tenant-farmers or agricultural laborers, and sometimes their expulsion – and finally the settlement of new Jewish immigrants… most of the land purchased… was fertile and therefore inhabited, and fellahin with long-standing traditional rights of tenure frequently stood in the way… The fellahin naturally considered the land to be theirs, and they would often discover that they had ceased to be the legal owners… only when the land was sold by an absentee landlord to a Zionist settlement agency”

Degania was the first kibbutz.  A group of Russian Zionists had become disgusted by the way Rishon Le Zion “and other farms like it were run ‘with their Jewish overseers, Arab peasant labourers, and Bedouin guards’.” In October 1909, while working a different farm, a strike broke out because “Jewish workers decided they could no longer put up with the oppressive, arbitrary administration and the use of hired Arab labour”. From this, a small group broke away to found Degania in 1910 “on a piece of land on the banks of the Jordan River called Umm Juni”.

Usually a sizeable part of kibbutz land, including the plot at Umm Juni, was bought from absentee landlords – in Degania’s case the Sursuk family of Beirut...”

Sometimes, the fellahin accepted compensation from Jewish settlement bodies, presumably feeling themselves unable to stand up to the new owners of the land… But at other times, they resisted their dispossession, on occasion with violence. In such cases, it was necessary for the purchasers to depend on the power of the state, whether the Ottoman, or, later on, the British Mandatory authorities, to enable them to take control.

The driving force behind Degania was hyper-racist Arthur Ruppin, a committed ethnic cleanser who wrote in 1938: “I do not believe in the transfer of an individual. I believe in the transfer of entire villages”. As Israeli historian Tom Segev aptly summarises: “Disappearing’ the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream”.

Kibbutz movement pioneer, Yosef Baratz, told the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937:

“Didn’t we transfer Arabs from Degania, Keneret, Merhavya, and Mishmar Haemek? I do remember the nights on which Shmuel Dayan [the father of Moshe Dayan] and I were called to Merhavya to help ‘Hashomer’… carrying out [Arab] evacuation." Hashomer was an armed Zionist militia.

1937 Zionist racist video: "the beauty and spirit of New Palestine as seen in the daily life of Degania...barren wastes of that country are turned again into a Land of Milk and Honey"
(from the Steven Spielberg film archive)

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Also on 28 October....

1956
An Israeli fighter aircraft shot down an unarmed Egyptian civilian plane, killing 16 people including four journalists, in an attempt to assassinate Field Marshall Abdul Hakim Amar, second to President Nasser, at a time when the two countries were not in a state of war.

Unaware that Britain and Israel were planning to invade Egypt the following day, and that the Israeli attack was the first strike in that joint attack, Egypt made a request to Britain on a humanitarian basis for help in searching for the missing plane. British aircraft criss-crossed the Mediterranean for several days, while their forces prepared to attack the Egyptian Government that had asked them for assistance.