Indian Removal Act

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Indian Removal Act

Long title	An Act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.
Enacted by	the 21st United States Congress
Citations
Public law	Pub. L. 21–148
Statutes at Large	4 Stat. 411
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S. 102 Passed the Senate on April 24, 1830 (28-19) Passed the House on May 26, 1830 (101-97) Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830

The Indian Removal Act was signed into law on May 28, 1830, by United States President Andrew Jackson. The law, as described by Congress, provided "for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi." During the Presidency of Jackson (1829-1837) and his successor Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) more than 60,000 Indians from at least 18 tribes were forced to move west of the Mississippi River where they were allocated new lands. The southern tribes were resettled mostly in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The northern tribes were resettled initially in Kansas. With a few exceptions the United States east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes was emptied of its Indian population. The movement westward of the Indian tribes was characterized by a large number of deaths occasioned by the hardships of the journey.

The U.S. Congress approved the Act by a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. The Indian Removal Act was supported by President Jackson, southern and white settlers, and several state governments, especially that of Georgia. Indian tribes, the Whig Party, and many Americans opposed the bill. Legal efforts to allow Indian tribes to remain on their land in the eastern U.S. failed. Most famously, the Cherokee (excluding the Treaty Party) challenged their relocation, but were unsuccessful in the courts; they were forcibly removed by the United States government in a march to the west that later became known as the Trail of Tears.

Background

President Andrew Jackson called for an American Indian Removal Act in his first (1829) State of the Union address.

Cultural assimilation

When Europeans and Native Americans came into contact during colonial times or in the early United States, the Europeans felt their civilization to be superior: they were Christians, and they believed their notions of private property to be a superior system of land tenure. European encroachers inflicted a practice of cultural assimilation, meaning that Cherokee peoples were forced to adopt aspects of European civilization. This acculturation was originally proposed by George Washington and was well underway among the Cherokee and the Choctaw by the beginning of the 19th century. Native peoples were encouraged to adopt European customs. First, they were forced to convert to Christianity and abandon traditional religious practices. They were also required to learn to speak and read English, although there was interest in creating a writing and printing system for a few Native languages, especially Cherokee, exemplified by Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary. The Native Americans also had to adopt settler values, such as monogamous heterosexual marriage and abandon non-marital sex. Finally, they had to accept the concept of individual ownership of land and other property (including, in some instances, African people as slaves). Many Cherokee people adopted all, or some, of these practices, including Cherokee chief John Ross, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, as represented by the newspaper he edited, The Cherokee Phoenix.

The perceived failure of the policy

The United States government began a systematic effort to remove Native peoples from the Southeast. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and original Cherokee nations had been established as autonomous nations in the southeastern United States.

Andrew Jackson sought to renew a policy of political and military action for the removal of the Natives from these lands and worked toward enacting a law for "Indian removal". In his 1829 State of the Union address, Jackson called for Indian removal.

The Indian Removal Act was put in place to annex Native land and then transfer that ownership to Southern states, especially Georgia. The Act was passed in 1830, although dialogue had been ongoing since 1802 between Georgia and the federal government concerning the possibility of such an act. Ethan Davis states that "the federal government had promised Georgia that it would extinguish Indian title within the state's borders by purchase 'as soon as such purchase could be made upon reasonable terms'". As time passed, Southern states began to speed up the expulsions by claiming that the deal between Georgia and the federal government was invalid and that Southern states could pass laws extinguishing Indian title themselves. In response, the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830, in which President Jackson agreed to divide the United States territory west of the Mississippi River into districts for tribes to replace the land from which they were removed.

In the 1823 case of Johnson v. M'Intosh, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision stating that Indians could occupy and control lands within the United States but could not hold title to those lands. Jackson viewed the union as a federation of highly esteemed states, as was common before the American Civil War. He opposed Washington's policy of establishing treaties with Indian tribes as if they were sovereign foreign nations. Thus, the creation of Indian jurisdictions was a violation of state sovereignty under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution. As Jackson saw it, either Indians comprised sovereign states (which violated the Constitution) or they were subject to the laws of existing states of the Union. Jackson urged Indians to assimilate and obey state laws. Further, he believed that he could only accommodate the desire for Native self-rule in federal territories, which required resettlement on Federal lands west of the Mississippi River.

Support and opposition

Congressional debates concerning the Indian Removal Act, April 1830

The Removal Act was strongly supported in the South, especially in Georgia, which was the largest state in 1802 and was involved in a jurisdictional dispute with the Cherokee. President Jackson hoped that removal would resolve the Georgia crisis. Besides the Five Civilized Tribes, additional people affected included the Wyandot, the Kickapoo, the Potowatomi, the Shawnee, and the Lenape.

The Indian Removal Act was controversial. Many Americans during this time favored its passage, but there was also significant opposition. Many Christian missionaries protested against it, most notably missionary organizer Jeremiah Evarts. In Congress, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett spoke out against the legislation. The Removal Act passed only after a bitter debate in Congress. Clay extensively campaigned against it on the National Republican Party ticket in the 1832 United States presidential election.

Jackson viewed the demise of Native nations as inevitable, pointing to the steady expansion of European-based lifestyle and the decimation of Native nations in the U.S.'s northeast region. He called his Northern critics hypocrites, given the North's history regarding Natives nations within their claimed territory. Jackson stated that "progress requires moving forward."

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth... But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another... In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes… Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

According to historian H. W. Brands, Jackson sincerely believed that his population transfer was a "wise and humane policy" that would save the Native Americans from "utter annihilation". Jackson portrayed the removal as a generous act of mercy.

According to Robert M. Keeton, proponents of the bill used biblical narratives to justify the forced resettlement of Native Americans.

Vote

On April 24, 1830, the Senate passed the Indian Removal Act by a vote of 28 to 19. On May 26, 1830, the House of Representatives passed the Act by a vote of 101 to 97. On May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson.

Implementation

Main article: Indian removal

The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their land into the West in an event widely known as the "Trail of Tears," a forced resettlement of the Indian population. The first removal treaty signed was the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, in which Choctaws in Mississippi ceded land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the West. The Treaty of New Echota was signed in 1835 and resulted in the removal of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears.

The Seminoles and other tribes did not leave peacefully, as they resisted the removal along with fugitive slaves. The Second Seminole War lasted from 1835 to 1842 and resulted in the government allowing them to remain in south Florida swampland. Only a small number remained, and around 3,000 were removed in the war.

Deportation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation 

Prisoners and gendarmes on the road to Siberia, 1845

 

Certificate of identity of deported individual that pertains other Chinese deportation records of the US District court, Los Angeles County, California.

Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term expulsion is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation is more used in national (municipal) law. Forced displacement or forced migration of an individual or a group may be caused by deportation, for example ethnic cleansing, and other reasons. A person who has been deported or is under sentence of deportation is called a deportee.

Definition

Definitions of deportation apply equally to nationals and foreigners. Nonetheless, in the common usage the expulsion of foreign nationals is usually called deportation, whereas the expulsion of nationals is called extradition, banishment, exile, or penal transportation. For example, in the United States:

"Strictly speaking, transportation, extradition, and deportation, although each has the effect of removing a person from the country, are different things, and have different purposes. Transportation is by way of punishment of one convicted of an offense against the laws of the country. Extradition is the surrender to another country of one accused of an offense against its laws, there to be tried, and, if found guilty, punished. Deportation is the removal of an alien out of the country, simply because his presence is deemed inconsistent with the public welfare and without any punishment being imposed or contemplated either under the laws of the country out of which he is sent or of those of the country to which he is taken."

Expulsion is an act by a public authority to remove a person or persons against his or her will from the territory of that state. A successful expulsion of a person by a country is called a deportation.

According to the European Court of Human Rights, collective expulsion is any measure compelling non-nationals, as a group, to leave a country, except where such a measure is taken on the basis of a reasonable and objective examination of the particular case of each individual non-national of the group. Mass expulsion may also occur when members of an ethnic group are sent out of a state regardless of nationality. Collective expulsion, or expulsion en masse, is prohibited by several instruments of international law.

History

Deportations widely occurred in ancient history, and is well-recorded particularly in ancient Mesopotamia.

Deportation in the Assyrian Empire

• Mass deportations of conquered nations, including Jewish Assyrian captivity.

Deportation in the Achaemenid Empire

Deportation was practiced as a policy toward rebellious people in Achaemenid Empire. The precise legal status of the deportees is unclear; but ill-treatment is not recorded. Instances include:

Deportations in the Achaemenid Empire

Deported people	Deported to	Deporter
6,000 Egyptians (including the king Amyrtaeus and many artisans)	Susa	Cambyses II
Barcaeans	A village in Bactria	Darius I
Paeonians of Thrace	Sardes, Asia Minor (later returned)	Darius I
Milesians	Ampé, on the mouth of Tigris near the Persian Gulf	Darius I
Carians and Sitacemians	Babylonia
Eretrians	Ardericca in Susiana	Darius I
Beotians	Tigris region
Sidonian prisoners of war	Susa and Babylon	Artaxerxes III
Jews who supported the Sidonian revolt	Hyrcania	Artaxerxes III

Deportation in the Parthian Empire

Unlike in the Achaemenid and Sassanian periods, records of deportation are rare during the Arsacid Parthian period. One notable example was the deportation of the Mards in Charax, near Rhages (Ray) by Phraates I. The 10,000 Roman prisoners of war after the Battle of Carrhae appear to have been deported to Alexandria Margiana (Merv) near the eastern border in 53 BC, who are said to married to local people. It is hypothesized that some of them founded the Chinese city of Li-Jien after becoming soldiers for the Hsiung-nu, but this is doubted.

Hyrcanus II, the Jewish king of Judea (Jerusalem), was settled among the Jews of Babylon in Parthia after being taken as captive by the Parthian-Jewish forces in 40 BC.

Roman POWs in the Antony's Parthian War may have suffered deportation.

Deportation in the Sasanian Empire

Deportation was widely used by the Sasanians, especially during the wars with the Romans.

During Shapur I's reign, the Romans (including Valerian) who were defeated at the Battle of Edessa were deported to Persis. Other destinations were Parthia, Khuzestan, and Asorestan. There were cities which were founded and were populated by Romans prisoners of war, including Shadh-Shapur (Dayr Mikhraq) in Meshan, Bishapur in Persis, Wuzurg-Shapur (Ukbara; Marw-Ḥābūr), and Gundeshapur. Agricultural land were also given to the deportees. These deportations initiated the spread Christianity in the Sassanian empire. In Rēw-Ardashīr (Rishahr; Yarānshahr), Persis, there was a church for the Romans and another one for Carmanians. Their hypothesized decisive role in the spread of Christianity in Persia and their major contribution to Persian economy has been recently criticized by Mosig-Walburg (2010). In the mid-3rd century, Greek-speaking deportees from north-western Syria were settled in Kashkar, Mesopotamia.

After the Arab incursion into Persia during Shapur II's reign, he scattered the defeated Arab tribes by deporting them to other regions. Some were deported to Bahrain and Kirman, possibly to both populate these unattractive regions (due to their climate) and bringing the tribes under control.

In 395 AD, 18,000 Roman populations of Sophene, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Cappadocia were captured and deported by the "Huns". the prisoners were freed by the Persians as they reached Persia, and were settled in Slōk (Wēh Ardashīr) and Kōkbā (Kōkhē). The author of the text Liber Calipharum has praised the king Yazdegerd I (399–420) for his treatment of the deportees, who also allowed some to return.

Major deportations occurred during the Anastasian War, including Kavad I's deportation of the populations of Theodosiopolis and Amida to Arrajan (Weh-az-Amid Kavad).

Major deportations occurred during the campaigns of Khosrau I from the Roman cities of Sura, Beroea, Antioch, Apamea, Callinicum, and Batnai in Osrhoene, to Wēh-Antiyōk-Khosrow (also known as Rūmagān; in Arabic: al-Rūmiyya). The city was founded near Ctesiphon especially for them, and Khosrow reportedly "did everything in his power to make the residents want to stay". The number of the deportees is recorded to be 292,000 in another source.

Military occupation

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the deportation of people into or out of occupied territory under belligerent military occupation:

Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.... The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

External deportation

Ethnic Germans being deported from the Sudetenland during the aftermath of World War II

 

Radicals awaiting deportation, Ellis Island, New York Harbor, 1920

All countries reserve the right to deport persons without right of abode even those who are longtime residents or possess permanent residency. In general, foreigners who have committed serious crimes, entered the country illegally, overstayed or broken the conditions of their visa, or otherwise lost their legal status to remain in the country may be administratively removed or deported. In some cases, even citizens can be deported; some of the countries in the Persian Gulf have deported their own citizens. They have paid the Comoros to give them passports and accept them.

In many cases, deportation is done by the government's executive apparatus, and as such is often subject to a simpler legal process (or none), with reduced or no right to trial, legal representation or appeal due to the subject's lack of citizenship. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, more stringent enforcement of immigration laws were ordered by the executive branch of the U.S. government, which led to increased deportation and repatriation to Mexico. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, between 355,000 and 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported or repatriated to Mexico, an estimated 40 to 60% of whom were U.S. citizens - overwhelmingly children. At least 82,000 Mexicans were formally deported between 1929 and 1935 by the government. Voluntary repatriations were more common than deportations. In 1954, the executive branch of the U.S. government implemented Operation Wetback, a program created in response to public hysteria about immigration and immigrants from Mexico. Operation Wetback led to the deportation of nearly 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States. Between 2009 and 2016, about 3.2 million people were deported from the United States. Since 1997 U.S. mass deportations of non-citizens particularly convicted felons have risen steadily with the passing into law by the U.S. Congress of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRRA) which brought sweeping changes to the threshold for deportation of convicted felons that have been criticized by some as having human rights abuses. Since this time, the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) has been transformed into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has renamed deportation as "expedited removal". The ICE website publishes removal statistics annually on its website. According to recent numbers ICE removed a total of 240,255 aliens in FY 2016, a two percent increase over FY 2015, but a 24 percent decrease from FY 2014.

Already in natural law of the 18th century, philosophers agreed that expulsion of a nation from the territory that it historically inhabits is not allowable. In the late 20th century, the United Nations drafted a code related to crimes against humanity; Article 18 of the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind declares "large scale" arbitrary or forcible deportation to be a crime against humanity.

Deportation often requires a specific process that must be validated by a court or senior government official. It should not be confused with administrative removal, which is the process of a country denying entry to individuals at a port of entry and expelling them.

Internal deportation

Striking miners and others being deported at gunpoint from Lowell, Arizona, on July 12, 1917, during the Bisbee Deportation.

Deportation can also happen within a state, when (for example) an individual or a group of people is forcibly resettled to a different part of the country. If ethnic groups are affected by this, it may also be referred to as population transfer. The rationale is often that these groups might assist the enemy in war or insurrection. For example, the American state of Georgia deported 400 female mill workers during the Civil War on the suspicion they were Northern sympathizers.

In the 18th Century the Tipu Sultan, of Mysore, deported tens of thousands of civilians, from lands he had annexed, to serve as slave labour in other parts of his empire, for example the: Captivity of Mangalorean Catholics at Seringapatam.

During World War II, Joseph Stalin (see Population transfer in the Soviet Union) ordered the deportation of Volga Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and others to areas away from the front, including central and western Soviet Union. Some historians have estimated the number of deaths from the deportation to be as high as 1 in 3 among some populations. On February 26, 2004 the European Parliament characterized deportations of the Chechens as an act of genocide.

The Soviet Union also used deportation, as well as instituting the Russian language as the only working language and other such tactics, to achieve Russification of its occupied territories (such as the Baltic nations and Bessarabia). In this way, it removed the historical ethnic populations and repopulated the areas with Russian nationals. The deported people were sent to remote, scarcely populated areas or to GULAG labour camps. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people. Of these, some 1 to 1.5 million perished.

After World War II approximately 50,000 Hungarians were deported from South Slovakia by Czechoslovak authorities to the Czech borderlands in order to alter the ethnic composition of the region. Between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast, as well as about 3,000 Italian American and about 11,500 German American families, were forcibly resettled from the coasts to internment camps in interior areas of the United States of America by President Franklin Roosevelt.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, deportation of union members and labor leaders was not uncommon in the United States during strikes or labor disputes. For an example, see the Bisbee Deportation.

Colonial deportations

See also: Convicts in Australia and Penal transportation

Deporting individuals to an overseas colony is a special case that is neither completely internal nor external. For example, from 1717 onwards, Great Britain deported around 40,000 British religious objectors and "criminals" to America before the practice ceased in 1776. Jailers sold the "criminals" to shipping contractors, who then sold them to plantation owners. The "criminals" worked for the plantation owner for the duration of their sentence. After Britain lost control of the area which became the United States, Australia became the destination for "criminals" deported to British colonies. Britain transported more than 160,000 British "criminals" to the Australian colonies between 1787 and 1855.

It may help deporting authorities to have access to a far-flung empire. During the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 the British deported about 26,000 Boer prisoners-of-war to overseas POW camps in Saint Helena, Ceylon, Bermuda and India.

Medical deportation

Russia expelled dozens of Chinese for violating their terms of quarantine in 2020.

Deportation during World War II

Deportation in Nazi Germany

Main article: the Holocaust

 

People being deported during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Nazi policies deported homosexuals, Jews, Poles, and Romani from their established places of residence to Nazi concentration camps or extermination camps set up at a considerable distance from their original residences. During the Holocaust, the Nazis made heavy use of euphemisms, where "deportation" frequently meant the victims were subsequently murdered, as opposed to simply being relocated.

Deportation in the Soviet Union

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Under orders of Joseph Stalin the Soviet Union carried out a forced transfer of various groups before, during and after World War II (from 1930s up to the 1950s). During the June deportation of 1941, after the occupation of the Baltic countries, Eastern Poland and Moldavia, as was agreed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in an attempt to subdue the countries for their forced incorporation into the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union deported tens-of-thousands of innocent people to Siberia.

Deportation in the Independent State of Croatia

Main articles: The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia and World War II persecution of Serbs

An estimated 120,000 Serbs were deported from the Independent State of Croatia to German-occupied Serbia, and 300,000 fled by 1943.

Noteworthy deportees

See also: List of denaturalized former citizens of the United States

Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Fritz Julius Kuhn, Lucky Luciano, and Anna Sage were all deported from the United States by being arrested and brought to the federal immigration control station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor and, from there, forcibly removed from the United States on ships.

Opposition

Anarchists protesting against deportations

Many criticize deportations, calling them inhuman, as the questioning the effectiveness of deportations. Some are completely opposed towards any deportations, while others state it is inhuman to take somebody to a foreign land without their consent.

In popular culture

In literature, deportation appears as an overriding theme in the 1935 novel, Strange Passage by Theodore D. Irwin. Films depicting or dealing with fictional cases of deportation are many and varied. Among them are Ellis Island (1936), Exile Express (1939), Five Came Back (1939), Deported (1950), and Gambling House (1951). More recently, Shottas (2002) treated the issue of U.S. deportation to the Caribbean post-1997.

History of the Palestinians

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Palestinians

The Palestinian people (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha'ab il-filastini) are an Arabic-speaking people with family origins in the region of Palestine. Since 1964, they have been referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيين, al-filastiniyyin), but before that they were usually referred to as Palestinian Arabs (Arabic: العربي الفلسطيني, al-'arabi il-filastini). During the period of the British Mandate, the term Palestinian was also used to describe the Jewish community living in Palestine. The Arabic-language newspaper Falastin (Palestine) was founded in 1911 by Palestinian Christians.

During Ottoman times (1834–1917)

Birth of the nationalist feeling

See also: Palestinian people

Under the Ottomans, Palestine's Arab population mostly saw themselves as Ottoman subjects. Kimmerling and Migdal consider the revolt in 1834 of the Arabs in Palestine as the first formative event of the Palestinian people. In the 1830s, Palestine was occupied by the Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha. The revolt was precipitated by popular resistance against heavy demands for conscripts. Peasants were well aware that conscription was nothing less than a death sentence. Starting in May 1834, the rebels took many cities, among them Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus. In response, Ibrahim Pasha sent in his army, finally defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron. Nevertheless, the Arabs in Palestine remained part of a Pan-Islamist or Pan-Arab national movement.

In 1882 the population numbered approximately 320,000 people, 25,000 of whom were Jewish. Many of these were Arab Jews and in the narrative works of Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period – as evidenced in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh – "native" Jews were often referred to as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country), 'compatriots', or Yahud awlad Arab ("Jews, sons of Arabs").

At the beginning of the 20th century, a "local and specific Palestinian patriotism" emerged. The Palestinian identity grew progressively. In 1911, a newspaper named Falastin was established in Jaffa by Palestinian Christians and the first Palestinian nationalist organisations appeared at the end of the World War I Two political factions emerged. al-Muntada al-Adabi, dominated by the Nashashibi family, militated for the promotion of the Arab language and culture, for the defense of Islamic values and for an independent Syria and Palestine. In Damascus, al-Nadi al-Arabi, dominated by the Husayni family, defended the same values.

When the First Palestinian Congress of February 1919 issued its anti-Zionist manifesto rejecting Zionist immigration, it extended a welcome to those Jews "among us who have been Arabicized, who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own."

According to Benny Morris, Palestinian Arab nationalism as a distinct movement appeared between April and July 1920, after the Nebi Musa riots, the San Remo conference and the failure of Faisal to establish the Kingdom of Greater Syria.

Zionism

When Zionism began taking root among Jewish communities in Europe, many Jews emigrated to Palestine and established settlements there. When Palestinian Arabs concerned themselves with Zionists, they generally assumed the movement would fail. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Arab Nationalism grew rapidly in the area and most Arab Nationalists regarded Zionism as a threat, although a minority perceived Zionism as providing a path to modernity. Though there had already been Arab protests to the Ottoman authorities in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist enterprise became known. There was a general sense of threat. This sense was heightened in the early years of the 20th century by Zionist attempts to develop an economy from which Arab people were largely excluded, such as the "Hebrew labor" movement which campaigned against the employment of cheap Arab labour. The creation of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1918 and the Balfour Declaration greatly increased Arab fears.

Contemporary writing

The Outline of History, by H.G.Wells (1920), notes the following about this geographic region and the turmoil of the times:

It was clearly a source of strength to them [Turks], rather than weakness, that they were cut off altogether from their age-long ineffective conflict with the Arab. Syria, Mesopotamia, were entirely detached from Turkish rule. Palestine was made a separate state within the British sphere, earmarked as a national home for the Jews. A flood of poor Jewish immigrants poured into the promised land and was speedily involved in serious conflicts with the Arab population. The Arabs had been consolidated against the Turks and inspired with a conception of national unity through the exertions of a young Oxford scholar, Colonel Lawrence. His dream of an Arab kingdom with its capital at Damascus was speedily shattered by the hunger of the French and British for mandatory territory, and in the end his Arab kingdom shrank to the desert kingdom of the Hedjaz and various other small and insecure imamates, emirates and sultanates. If ever they are united, and struggle into civilization, it will not be under Western auspices.

Arab Revolt and conquest of Palestine by the British army

Main articles: Arab Revolt and Mandatory Palestine

During the British Mandate (1920–1947)

Palestinian Arabs' political rights

The Palestinian Arabs felt ignored by the terms of the Mandate. Though at the beginning of the Mandate they constituted a 90 percent majority of the population, the text only referred to them as "non-Jewish communities" that, though having civil and religious rights, were not given any national or political rights. As far as the League of Nations and the British were concerned the Palestinian Arabs were not a distinct people. In contrast the text included six articles (2, 4, 6, 7, 11 and 22) with obligations for the mandatory power to foster and support a "national home" for the Jewish people. Moreover, a representative body of the Jewish people, the Jewish Agency, was recognised.

The Palestinian Arab leadership repeatedly pressed the British to grant them national and political rights like representative government, reminding the British of president Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Covenant of the League of Nations and British promises during World War I. The British however made acceptance of the terms of the Mandate a precondition for any change in the constitutional position of the Palestinian Arabs. For the Palestinian Arabs this was unacceptable, as they felt that this would be "self murder". During the whole interwar period the British, appealing to the terms of the Mandate, which they had designed themselves, rejected the principle of majority rule or any other measure that would give a Palestinian Arab majority control over the government of Palestine.

There was also a contrast with other Class A Mandates. By 1932 Iraq was independent, and Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan had national parliaments, Arab government officials up to the rank of minister, and substantial power in Arabs hands. In other Arab countries there were also indigenous state structures, except in some countries like Libya and Algeria, which, like Palestine, were subject to large-scale settlement programmes.

Not having a recognized body of representatives was a severe handicap for the Palestinian Arabs compared to the Zionists. The Jewish Agency was entitled to diplomatic representation e.g. in Geneva before the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, while the Palestinian Arabs had to be represented by the British.

Development

Rashid Khalidi made a comparison between the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and the Palestinian Arabs on the one hand, and between the Palestinian Arabs and other Arabs on the other hand. From 1922 to 1947 the annual growth rate of the Jewish sector of the economy was 13.2%, mainly due to immigration and foreign capital, while that of the Arab was 6.5%. Per capita these figures were 4.8% and 3.6% respectively. By 1936 the Jewish sector had eclipsed the Arab one, and Jewish individuals earned 2.6 times as much as Arabs. Compared to other Arab countries the Palestinian Arab individuals earned slightly better. In terms of human capital there was a huge difference. For instance the literacy rates in 1932 were 86% for the Jews against 22% for the Palestinian Arabs, but Arab literacy was steadily increasing. In this respect the Palestinian Arabs compared favorably to Egypt and Turkey, but unfavorably to Lebanon. On the scale of the UN Human Development Index determined for around 1939, of 36 countries, Palestinian Jews were placed 15th, Palestinian Arabs 30th, Egypt 33rd and Turkey 35th. The Jews in Palestine were mainly urban, 76.2% in 1942, while the Arabs were mainly rural, 68,3% in 1942. Overall Khalidi concludes that the Palestinian Arab society, while being overmatched by the Yishuv, was as advanced as any other Arab society in the region and considerably more as several.

Palestinian leadership

The Palestinian Arabs were led by two main camps. The Nashashibis, led by Raghib al-Nashashibi, who was Mayor of Jerusalem from 1920 to 1934, were moderates who sought dialogue with the British and the Jews. The Nashashibis were overshadowed by the al-Husaynis who came to dominate Palestinian-Arab politics in the years before 1948. The al-Husaynis, like most Arab Nationalists, denied that Jews had any national rights in Palestine.

The British granted the Palestinian Arabs a religious leadership, but they always kept it dependent. The office of Mufti of Jerusalem, traditionally limited in authority and geographical scope, was refashioned into that of Grand Mufti of Palestine. Furthermore, a Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) was established and given various duties like the administration of religious endowments and the appointment of religious judges and local muftis. In Ottoman times these duties had been fulfilled by the bureaucracy in Istanbul.

In ruling the Palestinian Arabs the British preferred to deal with elites, rather than with political formations rooted in the middle or lower classes. For instance they ignored the Palestine Arab Congress. The British also tried to create divisions among these elites. For instance they chose Hajj Amin al-Husayni to become Grand Mufti, although he was young and had received the fewest votes from Jerusalem's Islamic leaders. Hajj Amin was a distant cousin of Musa Kazim al-Husainy, the leader of the Palestine Arab Congress. According to Khalidi, by appointing a younger relative, the British hoped to undermine the position of Musa Kazim. Indeed, they stayed rivals until the death of Musa Kazim in 1934. Another of the mufti's rivals, Raghib Bey al-Nashashibi, had already been appointed mayor of Jerusalem in 1920, replacing Musa Kazim whom the British removed after the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, during which he exhorted the crowd to give their blood for Palestine. During the entire Mandate period, but especially during the latter half the rivalry between the mufti and al-Nashashibi dominated Palestinian politics.

Many notables were dependent on the British for their income. In return for their support of the notables the British required them to appease the population. According to Khalidi this worked admirably well until the mid-1930s, when the mufti was pushed into serious opposition by a popular explosion. After that the mufti became the deadly foe of the British and the Zionists.

According to Khalidi before the mid-1930s the notables from both the al-Husayni and the al-Nashashibi factions acted as though by simply continuing to negotiate with the British they could convince them to grant the Palestinians their political rights. The Arab population considered both factions as ineffective in their national struggle, and linked to and dependent on the British administration. Khalidi ascribes the failure of the Palestinian leaders to enroll mass support to their experience during the Ottoman period, when they were part of the ruling elite and were accustomed to command. The idea of mobilising the masses was thoroughly alien to them.

There had already been rioting and attacks on and massacres of Jews in 1921 and 1929. During the 1930s Palestinian Arab popular discontent with Jewish immigration and increasing Arab landlessness grew. In the late 1920s and early 1930s several factions of Palestinian society, especially from the younger generation, became impatient with the internecine divisions and ineffectiveness of the Palestinian elite and engaged in grass-roots anti-British and anti-Zionist activism organized by groups such as the Young Men's Muslim Association. There was also support for the growth in influence of the radical nationalist Independence Party (Hizb al-Istiqlal), which called for a boycott of the British in the manner of the Indian Congress Party. Some even took to the hills to fight the British and the Zionists. Most of these initiatives were contained and defeated by notables in the pay of the Mandatory Administration, particularly the mufti and his cousin Jamal al-Husayni. The younger generation also formed the backbone of the organisation of the six-month general strike of 1936, which marked the start of the great Palestinian Revolt. According to Khalidi this was a grass-roots uprising, which was eventually adopted by the old Palestinian leadership, whose 'inept leadership helped to doom these movements as well'.

The Great Arab Revolt (1936–1939)

The death of the Shaykh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam at the hands of the British police near Jenin in November 1935 generated widespread outrage and huge crowds accompanied Qassam's body to his grave in Haifa. A few months later, in April 1936, an Arab national general strike broke out. This lasted until October 1936. During the summer of that year thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed, Jews were attacked and killed and some Jewish communities, such as those in Beisan and Acre, fled to safer areas. After the strike, one of the longest ever anticolonial strikes, the violence abated for about a year while the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate.

In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed a partition between a small Jewish state, with a proposal to transfer its Arab population to the neighboring Arab state, and an Arab state to be attached to Jordan. The proposal was rejected by the Arabs. The 2 main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress to approve equivocally the Peel recommendations as a basis for more negotiation.

In the wake of the Peel Commission recommendation an armed uprising spread through the country. Over the next 18 months the British lost control of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron. British forces, supported by 6,000 armed Jewish auxiliary police, suppressed the widespread riots with overwhelming force. The British officer Charles Orde Wingate (who supported a Zionist revival for religious reasons) organized Special Night Squads composed of British soldiers and Jewish volunteers such as Yigal Alon, which "scored significant successes against the Arab rebels in the lower Galilee and in the Jezreel valley" by conducting raids on Arab villages. The British mobilised up to 20,000 Jews (policemen, field troops and night squads). The Jewish militias the Stern Gang and Irgun used violence also against civilians, attacking marketplaces and buses.

The Revolt resulted in the deaths of 5,000 Palestinians and the wounding of 10,000. In total 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. The Jewish population had 400 killed; the British 200. Significantly, from 1936 to 1945, whilst establishing collaborative security arrangements with the Jewish Agency, the British confiscated 13,200 firearms from Arabs and 521 weapons from Jews.

The attacks on the Jewish population by Arabs had three lasting effects: First, they led to the formation and development of Jewish underground militias, primarily the Haganah ("The Defense"), which were to prove decisive in 1948. Secondly, it became clear that the two communities could not be reconciled, and the idea of partition was born. Thirdly, the British responded to Arab opposition with the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish land purchase and immigration. However, with the advent of World War II, even this reduced immigration quota was not reached. The White Paper policy also radicalized segments of the Jewish population, who after the war would no longer cooperate with the British.

The revolt had a negative effect on Palestinian national leadership, social cohesion and military capabilities and contributed to the outcome of the 1948 War because "when the Palestinians faced their most fateful challenge in 1947–49, they were still suffering from the British repression of 1936–39, and were in effect without a unified leadership. Indeed, it might be argued that they were virtually without any leadership at all".

Arab nationalism

Throughout the Mandatory period, some Arab residents of Palestine preferred a future as part of a broader Arab nation, usually concretized either as a nation of Greater Syria (to include what are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza,) or a unified Arab state including what are now Jordan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

1948 Palestinian Exodus (1948–1949)

Palestinian refugees in 1948

The 1948 Palestinian exodus refers to the refugee flight of Palestinian Arabs during and after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. It is referred to by most Palestinians and Arabs as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة), meaning "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm".

The United Nations (UN) final estimate of the number of Palestinian refugees outside Israel after the 1948 War was placed at 711,000 in 1951. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East defines a Palestine refugee as a person "whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948". About a quarter of the estimated 160,000 Arab Palestinians remaining in Israel were internal refugees. Today, Palestinian refugees and their descendants are estimated to number over 4 million people.