What was the reaction of the Palestinian people to the Nakba ?
The Nakba is our catastrophe; it is where our villages, history, culture, memories, and lives were erased. The Nakba didn’t start or end in 1947–1950. We still suffer the consequences of it to this very day. Let’s get right into the origins of the Nakba and its prelude.
When the early Zionist Jewish colonists arrived in Palestine in the 1880s, they displaced Palestinians from some of the land that they had bought from absentee landlords, marking the beginning of the Nakba—the loss of land and homes by the Palestinian people.
The Nakba is a persistent catastrophe that continues to characterize the Palestinian situation today. 1948 and 1967 are pivotal years marked by significant losses of land and rights, while 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords, represents a critical juncture in the Palestinians' forfeiture of their right to reclaim their usurped ancestral homeland due to the collaboration of their former liberation movement.
The Zionist Jewish colonization of Palestine was the climax of European Christian endeavors to colonize Palestine, initiated by Napoleon's invasion and subsequent defeat at Acre in 1799 by the Ottomans and their British allies.
Indeed, this European Christian colonization of the land during the 19th century was the prelude to Zionist Jewish colonization.
The Protestant Reformation was the first Christian movement in Europe advocating for the conversion of Jews and their "return" to Palestine; however, it was the British who initiated the colonization and Christianization efforts led by the zealous missionaries of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, established in 1809, commonly referred to as the London Jews Society.
Anglican zealots aimed to convert European Jews and promote their emigration to Palestine, where they created a missionary network. In the 1820s, this society, supported by British politicians and aristocrats, was directed by Jewish converts who deemed it necessary to dispatch other Jewish converts to Palestine to proselytize the Jews.
In 1838, the British founded the first foreign consulate in Jerusalem, followed by the establishment of an Anglican Bishopric by the Church of England in 1842.
The first bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, was a German Jewish convert who previously was a rabbi. The British acquired land, and their consul established various institutes to employ Jews in agricultural activities, among other initiatives. The British colonists themselves also began to buy land and to dabble in agriculture.
By the 1850s, the population of Palestine was around 400,000, including around 8,000. Half were Palestinian Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century; the remaining fifty percent were Messianic kabbalistic Jews, who arrived in the early 19th century from Russia in expectation of the Messiah's coming.
The London Jews Society converted several dozen individuals, but rabbis retaliated by excommunicating Jews who engaged with the missionaries. They sought assistance from European Jewish benefactors, including the Rothschilds and Moses Montefiore. The latter established hospitals and acquired land for poor Jews to prevent their conversion to Protestantism.
European claims to "protect" the Christians of Palestine sparked the first significant European war, the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which marked the onset of the colonial "scramble for Palestine." French and British worries about Russia's intentions to take over Palestine, particularly in light of the significant yearly Russian Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem during Easter, provoked the conflict.
In addition to the jealousy and worries of Western European Christian powers regarding Russia's actual and imagined expansionism at the expense of a diminished Ottoman Empire, which France and Britain had significantly influenced, the belief that Palestine—encompassing its sacred Christian sites and Arab Christian populace—should be exclusively the concern of Western Christian powers would come to threaten Russian interests.
The Russians were concerned about the development of Protestant and Catholic institutions in Palestine, as well as the neglect and corruption of the Greek clergy, appointed by the Ottomans after the death of the last Palestinian Patriarch Atallah in 1543, who had been in charge of Orthodox Palestinians since the 16th century.
Prior to the Crimean War, European Latin Catholics demanded the reinstatement of their exclusive rights to Palestinian Christian holy sites, originally established during the Crusades, reclaimed under the Mamluks in the 14th century, but subsequently lost to the Greek Orthodox Church following the Ottoman conquest.
The Ottomans issued an edict that reinstated certain privileges for themselves at the expense of the Orthodox at the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity, and Gethsemane. Tsar Nicholas I and the Palestinian Orthodox, both clergy and people, were enraged. This served as justification for the Crimean War. After Russia's defeat, the invasion of Latin Catholic and Protestant missionaries into Palestine significantly intensified.
Simultaneously, another fanatical missionary organization, the Church Missionary Society, established in 1799, emerged in 1851 to convert Palestinian Eastern Christians. The British fanatics founded educational institutions, clinics, and medical facilities to facilitate conversion, despite facing opposition from Eastern Christian churches throughout Palestine.
A French Jewish nobleman founded the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools in 1860 for Ottoman Jews in reaction to the missionaries. A French Jewish philanthropist also created agricultural initiatives aimed at the Jewish population.
In the 1820s, American Protestant missionaries were sent to Palestine but opted to relocate to Syria, departing in the 1840s, certain that their British counterparts would take care of the Palestinians.
However, further groups emerged, including several Adams colonists and former Mormons who established a settler colony in Jaffa from 1866 to 1868 to prepare the area for the anticipated "return" of Jews who would undergo conversion prior to the ‘’Second Coming.’’ Their endeavors were unsuccessful; nonetheless, this ultimately benefited a new community of German Protestant colonists, referred to as the Templers, who arrived in Palestine during the 1860s and founded colonies around the region, including on the Adams colony lands in Jaffa.
The German fleet arrived at the coasts of Palestine to provide defense during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877–78. The Templers sought to establish Palestine as a Christian state, expecting Germany to seize it after the war; however, their aspirations fell short. They thrived until the British and subsequently the Jewish Zionists harassed them out of the country.
In 1881, other Americans, including the fundamentalist Spafford family from Chicago, founded a colony in Jerusalem. Swedish fundamentalists accompanied them in the 1890s. They acquired the palace of Rabah al-Husayni to establish their colony. Currently, it is the American Colony Hotel situated in Jerusalem.
European monarchs visited the nation and advocated for their missionaries, insisting on more rights and privileges for them. However, the final two decades of the 19th century witnessed significant changes as early Zionist Jewish immigration began from the Russian colonial settlement of Odessa, established on the ruins of the Ottoman town of Hacibey.
The London Jews Society was delighted by the influx of Jews it could convert. The Jewish Refugees’ Aid Society was established in London to facilitate their immigration. Moses Friedlaender, a Jewish convert, was appointed to oversee affairs in Palestine. Land was acquired for the Jewish colonists southwest of Jerusalem, but, as the Rothschilds were already establishing Jewish colonies, the majority of Friedlaender’s Jewish followers aligned with the Zionist colonies in 1886.
Notwithstanding this failure, the London Jews Society asserted its role as pioneers of Jewish colonization in the nation, implying that Jewish philanthropists were incited to “jealousy and emulation.” The arrival of the Jewish Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Zion) colonists from Odessa marked the establishment of the first Zionist colonies, initiating the Palestinian Nakba that persists to the present day.
The fervor of the British, German, and American Protestant colonists in Palestine throughout the 19th century foreshadowed numerous subsequent tragedies for the native Palestinian populace. Jewish fanatical Zionists would finish the job.
Contemporary American Evangelical extremists who endorse the persistent Zionist colonization of the land exhibit antisemitism like that of their 19th-century counterparts. By the end of the 19th century, Protestant zealots realized that Palestine could not become a Protestant nation, as they had only succeeded in converting approximately 700 Jews and 1,000 Palestinian Eastern Christians.
Their colonial sponsors recognized that the optimal outcome for European colonial settlement in Palestine was a Jewish settler colony aligned with Protestant fundamentalism. This encapsulates the essence of Zionism in the 19th century and its current form.