“The Arabs of Palestine”: Reports on the Dispossession of Palestinians in US Journalism, 1946-1961

• In Event: Development, Displacement, Dispossession

Abstract

In 1922, the Arab population of British Mandate Palestine was approximately 670,000 and the Jewish population was around 84,000. By 1948, the Arab Palestinian population was 1,070,000, while the Jewish population had grown to 720,000, largely as a result of Jewish migration from Europe. This dramatic demographic transformation in British Mandate Palestine was only one part of the fulfillment of half a century of Zionist political organizing aimed at the establishment of Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The other part of the political Zionist vision was the displacement of Palestinians from their land. Over 700,000 Palestine were displaced from their homes, uprooted from their ancestral lands and became refugees as a consequence of the creation of Israel in 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli War (1948-49). In the 1967 war, Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and 400,000 Palestinians were forced into exile. The ongoing processes of Israeli expropriation of land, Zionist settlement construction, and Palestinian territorial displacement have continued unabated with the unwavering support of the United States government and with the uncritical support of the US mainstream media.
This history of Palestinian dispossession is well known to anybody who has any interest in the modern Middle East. While some Israelis and apologists for Israel’s colonization of Palestine may narrate these events differently, reputable historians on both sides of the conflict acknowledge the general pattern of Zionist settlement and Palestinian dispossession (see for example Benny Morris). What is perhaps less well known is that US reporting on the situation in the years between 1946 and 1967 was not so clearly pro-Israeli and in some cases was explicitly critical of political Zionism. Especially important in this regard are the photo essays by David Douglas Duncan published in Life magazine in November 1946 and in Collier’s magazine in August 1956. In contrast with Duncan’s work, which manifested an evident awareness of the transformation that had taken place in Palestine across the shadow line of partition, stands Martha Gellhorn’s essay “The Arabs of Palestine,” which appeared in the Atlantic in October 1961.
This paper reads these three essays as an archive of the competing US discourses on the dispossession of Palestinians. Whereas Duncan tried to represent the violence of Zionism in the pre-Partition period and then depict the ensuing suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza in 1956, Gellhorn questioned the very notion of Palestinian dispossession, dismissing the Arab narratives of Zionist violence in 1948 as little more than Pan-Arab nationalist doctrine. There is certainly an evolution in the US as it comes to embrace Israel as a strategic asset. But what is perhaps more interesting are the competing ethical positions adopted by these journalists as they seek to make sense of the difficult situation of the dispossessed Palestinians of 1948.

Author

• Salah D. Hassan, Michigan State University (MI)