The Palestinians: A Detailed Documented Eyewitness History of Palestine Under British Mandate

By Dr. Izzat Tanous. I.G.T. Company, 1988. 779 pp. List $45 -, AET: $30 for one, $45 for two.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

"The conversation between Job and God resolves the dramatic tension without, however, solving the problem of undeserved suffering."

—Encyclopedia Brittanica on The Book of Job.

No evidence in the book of Job supports the contention of Job's friends that his sufferings stemmed from his own transgressions. Convinced of his own righteousness, Job sought a clarifying conversation with God. He received no satisfactory answers, even from the Divinity. Job (Ayyoub) became a symbol for the innocent victim. And few would deny the status of victimhood to the persecuted Jews.

The quietly angry theme of Dr. Izzat Tannous's massive The Palestinians is that this is more consideration than the Palestinians ever got from their persecutors, Israel, Britain and the United States.

Throughout the book the author, a 94-year old Christian Palestinian physician, asks an unarticulated question, "How can you do this to us? How could you teach me in your Christian schools in Nablus and Jerusalem; train me in medicine at your incomparable American University of Beirut, where I grew to love so many fine Americans; and then, Britain and America, take away my country and turn my people into pariahs in our lands?"

There is no satisfactory answer to his question, just as there was none to Job. Dr. Tannous' nearly 800 pages cover three-quarters of a century, from 1876 to 1949, of the Palestinian tragedy with a scope never before equaled. Even for Americans who know the problem well, reading The Palestinians is a not-very-pleasant catharsis.

First Britain and then the US desecrated Palestine. Now, as its people suffer psychological and physical brutalization by Israelis, Israel's American supporters defame Palestinians with multitudinous lies designed to portray the Palestinians themselves as responsible for their miserable fate.

A brilliant physician, Dr. Tannous gave up his medical practice while still a young man to devote, literally, the rest of his life to Palestine. His accounts of the Palestinian Rebellion (1936-1939) are far more detailed than any seen before. Generally called "The Great Strike" by Palestinians, it kept Palestine in turmoil for three years.

This first of the Arab-Jewish wars, an attempt by the Palestinians to slow Jewish immigration from Europe into Palestine, cost the Palestinians 5,032 dead (including 112 executed by the British authorities) and 14,760 wounded, according to Palestinian historian and Harvard professor, Dr. Walid Khalidi.

Jewish immigration did not stop, but the Palestinians did prove that they were ready to fight and die to preserve their country. That bloody era in Palestine just prior to the outbreak of World War II also proved the ruthless determination of a politically dominant Britain to turn Palestine over to another people, no matter how disastrous for its native inhabitants.

Dr. Tannous believes that there might have been an independent Palestine long ago if the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Ameen al-Husseini, had accepted Britain's promises in 1939 to limit future Jewish immigration to Palestine. For readers who have seen at first hand the power of the Zionist lobby in Britain and, especially, in America, it is hard to concur. The British White Paper did promise to limit Jewish immigration, but almost everything that went before or came afterward makes the promise look like it was merely a tactical maneuver. It calmed Arab and Muslim opinion as World War II approached, but there was little follow-through once the Germans were defeated.

The author's diplomatic efforts in the 1930s on behalf of Palestine in Britain and the United States will be basically new material for almost all readers. In both countries he found officials and others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. But always they were too weak or too few to stand against the Zionist tide at the highest levels of government.

The Palestinians clarifies some murky questions of the 1947-1949 period, especially of the fighting around Jerusalem, the role of the Iraqi Army in Palestine, and the activities of King Abdallah of Jordan, grandfather of the present King Hussein. Dr. Tannous demonstrates with convincing detail that the Palestinians fought much more effectively than has been generally acknowledged. It seems clear from his account that when the Iraqi Army pulled back from Pales tine, causing the loss of additional Palestinian territory, it was due to machinations of the British government. The ambiguous role of King Abdallah in the 1947 to 1949 events comes into a sharper focus.

While Abdallah clearly was not sympathetic to the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the overwhelming impression from The Palestinians is that he played his hand from extreme weakness. One of his weaknesses was that the Arab Legion (Jordanian Army) was not under the King's co troll, but actually under that of British General John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pashz Throughout this period the party that was determined, at all costs, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state was Israel, just as is the case today.

Dr. Tannous provides the Most comprehensive picture of Jewish terrorism in Palestine published to date. Although, with every fiber of his being, he rejects the use of force and terror, ironically his book demonstrates that Jewish terrorism worked. It forced the British decision to evacuate Palestine. It also succeeded in terrorizing 750,000 Palestinians into fleeing from Jewish areas in in 1948 and 1949.

Historians, both those well-informed on the Middle East and those not so knowledgeable, all have a lot to learn from The Palestinians. They also face a poignant experience. Like the hero of George Santayana's touching novel, The Lost Puritan, Izzat Tannous is the last of his kind. No other person will be able to match his experience, or the scope of this unique book.

Nor will any honest reader come away with any better understanding of Job/Tannous was so unjustly punished.

Andrew I. Killgore was US ambassador to state of Qatar when he retired from the career foreign service, He is president of the American Educational Trust and publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.