A Short Professional Note on Palestine

Many people seem to feel very strongly that LinkedIn is a platform for business and professionalism, and clearly NOT for activism. In that spirit, I would like to share with my 1,500+ followers the 'Executive Summary' of my Master's thesis which I wrote at the American University of Beirut in 2011 (where I graduated top of my class in Political Studies, and for my research, under the direction of now University of Cambridge Professor, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, I won the Abdul Hadi Debs Award, an academic prize at AUB). I have been cited in such works as Boston University Professor Emerita Irene Gendzier’s definitive volume, Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015). I am not claiming to be an expert or to speak for Palestine, only, perhaps, to write freely on this and any other platform, as a matter of democratic expression and personal conscience.

In short, my primary research at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa (where I unsealed the Samuel Zacks archives, including papers of the Zionist Organization of Canada, and other critical sources in the Prime Minister's Office and the Department of Commerce and Trade) revealed the true extent of Canada’s clandestine support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in the crucial years leading up to 1948. This support included (beyond the well-known efforts of Justice I.C. Rand, and the External Affairs delegation at the United Nations) significant unofficial transfer of surplus Canadian war materiel (including naval assets), acquiescence to the recruitment of Canadian mercenaries (many of whom were veterans at that time returning from overseas duty), and other deliberate but secret provisions of aid for those planning conquest in Palestine. In short, I found that this transfer was premised on anti-Semitism (as those who have read Abella and Troper’s famous book, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, sadly understand) and that this anti-Semitism was tied to the dynamics of domestic realpolitik, i.e. the desire of the weak Mackenzie King administration that Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) from the Second World War should not be relocated to Canada where they were not wanted, and were perceived as a potential cause of political instability. Rather, the DPs should be sent to Palestine, with no consideration as to the will or capacity of the Indigenous population of that small country to accept them (interestingly, the British mandate in Palestine E.I. was then under attack by Jewish terrorists, who aimed to expeditiously and forcibly expel the weakened British so that they could consolidate power for the existing proto-state, a project never intended to be binational or accepting of the Arab majority). Norman Angell pointed out at the time that no major industrialized democracy on earth was prepared to accept Jewish refugees in any significant numbers, this despite the DPs' abject suffering and the increasing awareness in the West of the extent of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War.

I have found generically in my research and in my own life that support for Zionism is almost invariably linked to anti-Semitism, while at the same time, it seems that it is always the activists, philosophers, scholars, humanitarians and pacifists who speak out for Palestine who are officially branded as the anti-Semites. Ironically, they are the ones most likely to have been formatively influenced (as I was) by the best traditions of Jewish humanism, of the exilic imagination, of critical theory, anti-totalitarianism and the pursuit of social justice--not just for one's own people, but for all of humanity. Now I see this contradiction as yet one more fatal example of the irredeemable wreckages of Western history (as Walter Benjamin no doubt would have said), which is why we should not be surprised that it is a Palestinian, the late Edward Said, who so perfectly embodies this lost humanistic spirit, in his immortal writings, and certainly not any Israeli.

I should mention that during my period of concurrent research on Palestine and mid-century Canadian Foreign Relations and the Middle East (which took me to the archives in Beirut and Amman as well), I was able to reconstruct the previously unknown biography of the Palestinian diplomat, Khulusy al-Khairy, who presented and argued for a principled democratic and unitary ‘one-state solution’ before the Standing Committee on External Affairs in Ottawa in 1946. Here was a Palestinian arguing passionately from the perspective of liberalism, secularism, modernity and the universality of human rights. But I have learned through my study of Palestinian diplomacy that for every supposed domain of human rights that we have constructed in the West and that is invoked by the native (in Fanon's terminology), there is also, if you will, a limes arabicus. The photograph I have included above was given to me by Khulusy's son, Fawaz al-Khairy. We are back at the same crossroads again today, as if looking back at the orange groves of al-Ramla from a distant and hopeless frontier.

Beyond the still relevant nature of all of this archival research and historical reflection, the current firebombing of Gaza reminded me of a letter I wrote many years ago that was read on CBC Radio’s flagship Sunday Morning show by Michael Enright, in response to his previous week’s guest who had claimed that the Palestinians have an innate “culture of death”. Having lived and studied in the West Bank myself, on the beautiful campus of Birzeit University, I felt that I should report to Enright’s listenership across the country that in fact, the Palestinians have if anything a “culture of life”, one that goes on living, creating, and resisting tyranny--despite the brutality of their ongoing forced dispossession, segregation, expulsion, surveillance, restriction and brutalisation under a ruthless apartheid regime. But that was back at a time when it was still (astonishingly) possible to say the word Palestine in public, not only in a letter to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but one that was read aloud on air by Michael Enright. These days, even an Indigenous Canadian journalist at the CBC, like Duncan McCue (an Anishinaabe man from Ontario, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation) is forbidden from saying the word Palestine, and must be humiliated and made to abjectly apologize by his managers. McCue had dared to enter into a discussion with the internationally critically acclaimed graphic novelist Joe Sacco, the author of Palestine (a compelling reflection on his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the early 1990s).

In 2021, in our mainstream media and self-censored professional networks, we have seen virtually no mention of my alma mater's (the noble University of Toronto and its vaunted Law School's) censure by the the Canadian Association of University Teachers for donor interference in the independent hiring of an academic critical of Israeli human rights abuses, nor any major commentary on the recent Human Rights Watch report on Israeli apartheid, to say nothing of a realistic assessment of the present conjuncture, of which at the time of writing, well over 200 Palestinians have been killed, more than 60 of whom are children, with thousands more critically injured and tens of thousands displaced in a territory of refugees left intentionally without clean water, basic municipal infrastructure, or adequate emergency medical care. This “mowing the grass” as Israelis call it, happens every few years unfailingly, with all of its attendant carnage and familiar Orwellian justifications.

Unfortunately, despite the obvious underlying injustices and wave after wave after wave of collective punishment visited on the Palestinian people, Canada’s major political parties, media apparatus, defense sector and corporate power brokers remain wedded to the ideology of Israeli apartheid. This has not changed, in essence, since the 1940s, despite what I see as widespread popular disapproval (a kind of discontent which has grown to the point wherein even establishment monopolies of knowledge and heavily censored and pre-programmed mainstream media like the CBC are faltering and losing control of their message and legitimacy). One has the sense, as one did during the First Intifada, that this corrupt edifice of lies is finally beginning to rot away under its own weight.

I will leave you now with one last point for consideration, and speaking only on the level of strategic military history, political science and area studies, to keep this completely professional as appropriate for a LinkedIn audience. I’d like to highlight a fragment I declassified in my archival research in Ottawa, which was a fascinating report reviewed by the Canadian government, entitled A Study of the Military Aspects of the Partition of Palestine, Secret, 27 February 1948, a Joint Intelligence Committee report approved by the Chiefs of Staff at their 417th meeting on 2 March 1948, RG 24-B-1. I interpret in summary the unsentimental analysis in this document as follows: that the Palestinian resistance will never end, and that no matter what level of violence is brought to bear against them, the Palestinians can never truly be vanquished. Anyone who has read the academic literature on asymmetric conflict knows that they were right, then and now, and nothing has changed.

End Note: if you would like to read my entire thesis, it is deposited at the Jafet Library, at the American University of Beirut. Grab a Nescafé at Main Gate and take a stroll through the leafy campus first before sitting down with the 215-page document and its 867 footnotes. The library staff will gladly retrieve it for you.