Classic text remains fresh

Most Palestinians were peasants, loyal to their clan and their villages, where they lived fulfilling lives, according to the author, who is a social anthropologist. They had no national identity or leadership and were ill-prepared when their interests as tenants came under increasing threat from zionist land purchase.

The zionist boycott of Arab labour debarred them from working for the colonialists, when almost a third of them were landless.

Nevertheless, the peasants' fierce attachment to the land meant that zionist acquisition was limited to less than 9 per cent of Palestine's total land area by 1948.

They were not passive victims. Author Rosemary Sayigh says that their rebellion of 1936-9 was the longest militant anti-imperialist struggle in the Arab world before the Algerian war of independence. The ruthless suppression by the British army was an example later followed by Israel.

In the inter-war years, the Jewish population increased six times to over half a million, especially during the nazi persecution of the 1930s.

They built up a strong fighting force, partly with British help, including the terrorist organisations Irgun and Stern.

Plan Dalet aimed to capture towns and villages in the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs, thus preventing the creation of a Palestinian state as proposed in the 1947 partition plan.

Mass killings and atrocities became the technique used to terrorise the Palestinian peasants and drive them into the neighbouring Arab states.

The upshot was that the 900,000 Arab inhabitants of the territory that became Israel were reduced to 60,000, as counted by the first Israeli census.

The number displaced to the refugee camps outside Palestine was 300,000 and most of the rest ended up on the West Bank or crowded into Gaza.

Their flight resulted from lack of arms and leaders and the direct military attack. The Arab states that intervened in 1948 were paper tigers.

Sayigh ends with a sketch of the growth of the Palestine Resistance Movement in the 1960 when Israel used the six-day war to occupy the West bank.

Noam Chomsky, one of the indomitable Jewish critics of zionism, is as sensitive to the horrors of anti-semitism and the Holocaust as anyone, but, in a foreword, he says how appalled he is by Western politicians' claim to support Israel's policies because of "moral obligation" to the Jewish people.

It is like saying that "the sins of the nazis and their predecessors require the sacrifice of the Palestinians - on moral grounds." The sacrifice is far from over.

JOHN MOORE