In this post John McCarthy (Director of the International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy) discusses the history of Palestine and the current situation in the country. In it he remembers the work of Ronald Sultana, who was a lifelong advocate for Palestine.
I am sure that Ron would have me start by expressing outrage at massacre, violence, and trauma that happened on 7th October to Israeli citizens, residents, and visitors, and at the hostage taking and continued imprisonment of the remaining hostages, all of these perpetrated by Hamas and other radical organisations in Gaza.
Ron was very occupied by all that happened in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, and particularly about the present circumstances and future hopes of Palestinian people, young and old. He a number of his publications explored education and career guidance in the MENA countries and he assisted developments in some of them (see for example Career Guidance and Livelihood Planning across the Mediterranean and Career guidance and TVET: Critical intersections in the Arab Mediterranean Countries). I had the privilege of working with Palestinian teachers in refugee camps in the Lebanon under the auspices of the United Nations Relief Works Association (UNRWA) and at the behest of the European Training Foundation (ETF), and contributed to one of his publications.
As Ron often noted, context is everything: social, economic, and political ideologies and actions shape the contexts in which we live and impact on our vision for the future and planning for that. Human events do not happen sans context. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1944, for example, did not occur in a vacuum. It had a historical social, economic, and political context and antecedents, as have events in Palestine since 1947, so let’s start with the political.
Political and historical context
In 1917, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lionel Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, promising a land that the British Empire did not own to a people who did not own it or live there, and without consulting the inhabitants of that land. One could say that such a promise was the height of British imperial arrogance.
The Balfour Promise became British public policy and subsequent governments actively supported the migration of outsiders to Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel after World War 2. One cannot forget that many European powers after WW2 did not know what to do with the survivors of the Holocaust and that sending or encouraging them to go to Palestine was a convenient political solution.
The choices facing Holocaust survivors were both slim and grim; they had lost family, property, businesses, livelihoods, community, and could no longer trust European governments in almost every country to ensure their basic civil and human rights, not to mind giving them compensation for what they had suffered individually and as a community. So, the idea of going to a homeland with values aligned to their values was a much better choice than staying in an impoverished and hostile continent.
But this idea assumed that such a land actually existed and it must have been a big surprise to many Holocaust survivors that the land was actually already inhabited by people who knew nothing about them and whose agreement to welcome them as immigrants had never been sought by the British or other European governments. It was a decision externally and imperially imposed on the people of Palestine who quite soon discovered that those imposed outsiders wanted to create a country called Israel on their land.
This internal imposition was done by force by ‘Israelis’ leading to the Nabka, the ousting of Palestinians from their property, lands, and businesses, and to their deaths in many instances. Hence, now in 2024, most Palestinians live in refugee camps in their own country, and in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They don’t live in these by choice. They have slim and grim choices, just like the Holocaust survivors.
Legal context
There are at least two Israeli laws that copper fasten the imposition. The first is the Defence (Emergency) Regulations 1945, promulgated by the British during its ‘protectorate’ of Palestine, which gave British military commanders the power to destroy any building from which hostile acts were carried out or if the inhabitants were somehow implicated. Israel has relied upon these Regulations to destroy thousands of Palestinian homes as punishment since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The Supreme Court of Israel has frequently upheld this practice of collective punishment. This law is used to justify the current destruction of property in Gaza (over 70% destroyed as at time of writing) for a population of 2 million people.
The second relevant law, The Absentees’ Property Law, was established by the Israeli government in 1950. It enabled Israel to expropriate thousands of Palestinian movable and immovable property (including land, homes, assets, businesses, and more) in what became West Jerusalem and the rest of the 1948 territories. These properties belonged to Palestinians who were forcibly expelled or who fled to safety during the 1948 War (the Nakba), taking refuge in East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, Jordan, or elsewhere. The law enabled the Israeli government and its agencies to transfer them to the ownership of the state in order to move Jewish Israeli settlers into them. Though passed in 1950, the law worked retroactively by defining as an ‘absentee’ anyone who had left their property as of November 29, 1947, and was any of the following:
- Located in “any part of Palestine outside the area of Israel” (i.e., Israel’s borders of the time when the law was passed).
- A Palestinian citizen under the laws of the British Mandate (even if their status was unclear or undetermined) and left his residence for a place outside Palestine before September 1, 1948, or for a part of Palestine that was “held at the time by forces which sought to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel or which fought against it after its establishment”.
- Any group of persons in these categories (such as a board or corporation).
The definitions applied from that date until the date on which the “state of emergency shall cease to exist.” To this day, Israel has not removed the state of emergency, rendering millions of internally and externally displaced Palestinians in the region today “absentees.”
The law’s formulation could and did mean that Palestinians who took refuge in the next village or in a relative’s village or any of a myriad of imaginable situations were automatically legally labelled “absentees.” In effect, even if Palestinians exiled in 1948 whom Israel declared as “absentees” could find a way to return to their properties—even if they remained within the country—they could not claim them. Israel deprived exiled Palestinians of their right of return, and ensured that none could reclaim their properties due to their status as “absentees.” Those who remained in the country were classified as “present absentees.” Under Israeli law, this absentee status is passed on to one’s male children, meaning that even future generations had no hope of reclaiming property confiscated under this law. Every Palestinian living in a refugee camp anywhere is an absentee, present or original!
So why do I cite these particular laws? In 2011, Israeli and Palestinian delegations participated in the International Symposium on Career Development and Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary. I was approached by members of the Israeli delegation who wished to meet their Palestinian counterparts. I asked the Palestinian delegation if they were agreeable. They declined. The reasons they gave concerned their own families’ experiences of being driven from their own homes and lands or their homes destroyed by the Israelis since 1948. Even though the Palestinian delegates still possessed ownership documents, they were ‘absentees’ by Israeli law, their possessions and businesses confiscated, no compensation, no redress.
For those readers who have studied the history of the Holocaust, the irony of history is remarkable. Similar laws and actions of confiscation were established by Germany and other collaboration governments during WW2, specifically targeting Jews. Neither of these two Israeli laws would be acceptable and practised in the legal code of any civilised country worldwide.
Economic context
Let’s look briefly contextual economic issues that could provide opportunity for Palestinian youth and adults. Palestine is lucky to have a nice climate for agriculture, horticulture, and tourism, but not only. There are plentiful fields of oil and natural gas unexploited off the coast of Gaza and also in the West Bank area.
The Levant Basin (off the coast of Israel) has been exploited by Israel for the past 20 years for oil and natural gas. “The Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 and the blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007 have prevented the Palestinian people from exercising any control over their own fossil fuel resources, denying them much-needed fiscal and export revenues and leaving the Palestinian economy on the verge of collapse.
The economic costs inflicted on the Palestinian people under occupation are well documented: tight restrictions on the movement of people and goods; the confiscation and destruction of property and assets; loss of land, water and other natural resources; a fragmented domestic market and separation from neighbouring and international markets; and the expansion of Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law.
Since the blockade of Gaza in 2007, the Israeli government has established de facto control over Gaza’s offshore natural gas reserves. The contractor, British Gas, has since been dealing with the Israeli government, effectively bypassing the Palestinian government regarding exploration and development rights.
Israel has also taken control of the Meged oil and natural gas field, located inside the occupied West Bank. Israel states that the field lies west of the armistice line of 1948, yet most of the reservoir is situated beneath the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”. One can rightly ask: what are the strategic economic aims of Israel vis a vis Gaza and the West Bank? They are not innocent economic actors. Israeli government ministers publicly calling Palestinians ‘animals’ provides a context for ethnic cleansing and for ultimate Israeli national economic gain.
What possibilities for career development?
When one thinks of the career aspirations of young Palestinians, they are not only shaped by their parents’ and grandparents’ trauma and past experiences at the hands of Israel. They are also shaped by their own daily trauma of experiences of the Israeli occupation forces, and now by the present Israeli actions in both Gaza and the West Bank. They too have experienced ‘hostage taking’: the 7,000 plus West Bank Palestinians, mainly youth, who are currently being detained in Israeli jails without any legal process.
Palestinian visions and planning for the future are shaped by present and emerging opportunities. So what does present and emerging social and economic opportunities mean in the context of refugee camp residents whose families have been forced to live there since 1948? What do they mean in a context where Israel controls all Palestinian economic means, including oil and gas, in nefarious but ‘legal’ ways and as per the laws mentioned above? It’s akin to asking what were the present and emerging career prospects of those living in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944 prior to the uprising?
All conflict has context. The massacres of October 7th, as abominable, traumatic, and violent as they were, and the hostage taking, have context. If Ron was still with us, he would not be silent and turning a blind eye to what is happening now to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: currently over 24,000 dead, 8,000 missing, and 60,000 wounded. The career guidance community have a voice in confronting all forms of injustice that impact on individuals’ and communities’ capacities to visualise, plan, and action their futures. A Palestinian life is equal to an Israeli life in all respects, no more and no less.
Further reading
Sultana, R. G. (2006). Education in conflict situations: Palestinian children and distance education in Hebron. Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies, 11(1).
Sultana, R. (2007). Palestinian refugee children and education: challenges for UNRWA. World Studies in Education, 8(2), 5-32.
Sultana, R. G. (2014). Livelihood planning and career guidance in Palestine and the broader MENA region. International Review of Education.
Sultana, R. (2017). Career guidance and livelihood planning across the Mediterranean: Challenging transitions in South Europe and the MENA region. Sense Publishers
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