EXCERPT
Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel
Teaching Activity - 2024 - 33 pages
A mixer/mystery activity on Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more
By Bill Bigelow
The historian-activist Howard Zinn was fond of saying, “If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”
There is nothing in the world today more in need of an accurate historical account than the violence in Palestine-Israel — or more infected with obfuscation. Many people’s historical reckoning seems to go back no further than October 7, 2023. Even those more committed to understanding the present in terms of the past often reach back only to the Six Day War and occupation in 1967 or the UN partition of Palestine in 1947 and the 1948 War for Independence — for Israelis — or the Nakba, the Catastrophe — for Palestinians. Or they may simply say: It began with the Holocaust.
But as this activity demonstrates, the roots of today’s violence can be seen much earlier — from the first years of Zionist immigration and land purchases in Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th century, the expulsion of Palestinian peasants, the Zionists’ partnership with the British Empire to effect its goal of “a national home for the Jewish people,” and Palestinians’ gradual recognition of the sweeping nature of the Zionists’ ambitions. As Rashid Khalidi summarizes in his essential book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, “the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Seemingly to frighten teachers and students from grappling with the origins of today’s crisis, politicians, as well as corporate media and textbooks, have a thousand ways to warn us how “complex” the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is. And it is. But Khalidi distills this complexity in the simplicity of that single sentence. In a participatory way, the “Seeds of Violence” mixer/mystery seeks to do the same thing for students — applying that framework to the conflict’s earliest days.
And I want to underscore the “earliest days.” It may be an obvious point, but this activity does not deal with a huge amount of essential history: the almost-30 years of British rule in Palestine; British Mandate conflicts between Palestinians and Zionist settlers, between Zionists and British, between Palestinians and British, especially the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936–1939; the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust; World War II; as mentioned above, the UN partition of Palestine and the violence of the Palestinian Nakba/the Israeli War of Independence and the creation of more than 700,000 refugees. The “Seeds of Violence” depicted in this activity happened before all these life-shattering events. The more I read about this early period, up to the beginning of the British Mandate in 1922, the more I realized how much of this history foreshadowed the conflicts to come.
Source:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/teaching-the-seeds-of-violence-in-palestine-israel/