Excellent background on Palestine

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
June 28/30, 2002
The Palestinian Saga
Seething With Rage
by N.D. Jayaprakash

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Palestine was an excellent ground in the 1920s and 1930s for a peasant led
revolution. Large numbers of absentee landlords (mainly from Lebanon and
Syria) were ready to surrender to the temptations of selling their estates
at generous prices offered by the Jews. The Jewish campaign of
dispossessing the natives in favour of immigrants inevitably created an
acute sense of economic outrage and helped politicise the Arab peasantry.
The British occupation of Palestine also kindled the passion for national
liberation. As a result, the entire objective conditions for a successful
peasant revolution existed except one: radical leadership [15]. Istiqlal
was an organization that was capable of throwing up such a leadership but
the traditional overlords had quickly stepped in to stifle its growth.
Nevertheless, Sheikh Izzeddin al Qassam, one of those who joined the
Istiqlal in 1932, rose to become a national hero in Palestine.

Sheikh Izzeddin, a man of immense religious learning, was a Syrian born
Arab who came to Palestine in 1921 after the failure of the Syrian revolt
against French occupation of which he was a prominent leader. As an ardent
patriot and a fiery orator, he stood up against Zionism and British rule
and preached about the necessity of armed revolt against subservience. He
succeeded in setting up secret cells among the growing number of land-less
peasants, but in a pre-mature encounter with the British forces he and his
closest associates attained martyrdom on 19 November 1935. Less than a
month after the killing of Sheikh Izzeddin, hostility towards the British
government spread to the villages of Palestine where the Sheikh and his
followers were held in high esteem. In the major towns radical youth groups
began to emerge to replace the discredited older political leadership. The
Great Arab Revolt (1936-39) was in effect triggered off by the killing of
Sheikh Izzeddin. The overall losses suffered by the Palestinians during
1936-39 - both in terms of lives and property - was quite substantial [16].
Thus, the Zionist were able to ride roughshod over the Palestinians in the
1940s because most of the revolutionary Palestinian cadres were wiped out
by then and there was no effective force within Palestine to counter the
organized Zionist offensive.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/jayaprakash0628.html


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