Palestinians and Israelis (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the Conflict

• Why did European Jews migrate to Palestine?

• What was the impact of Zionism on the Arabs in Palestine?

Palestine before the First World War

The land of Palestine, a strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, was conquered by Arab Muslims in the seventh century following the emergence of the religion of Islam in what today is Saudi Arabia. Over time, most of the population adopted Arabic as its language and Islam as its religion, although a substantial Christian community and a small Jewish one remained. Then, in the sixteenth century, Palestine was conquered by the Ottomans (a Turkish dynasty named after its founder, Osman). The Ottomans were Muslims but not Arab speaking. They went on to conquer most of the Arab lands of the Middle East and thus came into possession of the three most holy sites for Muslims: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.

In the Ottoman Middle East, there was no officially designated area called “Palestine,” as such. Instead, the area to the west of the Jordan River and south of Beirut made up the three administrative districts of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. However, the region was generally referred to as Palestine (Filastin in Arabic).

The population of late nineteenth-century Palestine was 85 percent Muslim and about 10 percent Christian. It was largely rural and most of the population were fellahin, or peasant farmers. Palestinian society and politics were dominated by a small number of urban families. These “notables,” as they were often referred to, were landowners, often with commercial interests. They acted as intermediaries between the Ottoman government and the local population. Some were elected as members of the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Many held senior government posts and religious positions. They collected taxes for the Ottoman authorities.

A family of Arab fellahin, or peasant, farmers

In the late nineteenth century, Palestine came into increasing contact with European traders and its farmers began to grow more cotton, cereals, olives, and oranges for export. The port city of Jaffa increased the value of its agricultural exports from roughly $120,000 in 1850 to $1,875,000 by 1914 and its population quadrupled in size between 1880 and 1914.1 It was not only trade that brought Palestine into closer contact with the European world: increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims came by steamship to visit the biblical sites of the Holy Land. They contributed funds for church building and stimulated the development of a tourist industry.

Most Palestinian Arabs were loyal to the Ottoman state, participating in elections to the parliament in Istanbul and in local government, as well as sending their children to the growing number of state schools. However, a change of government in Istanbul in 1908 led to insistence on the use of Turkish, as opposed to Arabic, in schools, law courts, and government offices in Palestine. This aroused criticism in Palestine’s Arabic press and contributed to the emergence of a nascent Arab nationalism. Yet it was the issue of Jewish immigration that increasingly exercised Arab opinion in Palestine and led to calls for preventive action by the Ottoman government.

Zionism and Jewish Communities in Palestine

The Jews had lived in what is today Israel and Palestine from about 1500 BCE. In 64 BCE the Romans conquered Jerusalem and Palestine became part of the Roman Empire. Then, in 135 CE, after a series of revolts against Roman imperial rule, the Jews were finally dispersed. A minority remained but the majority settled in Europe and other parts of the Arab world.

By the late nineteenth century, most Jews lived in the European parts of the Russian Empire. Many were forced to live in specially designated areas in the Russian Pale of Settlement and were subject to severe restrictions, the result of a policy designed to exclude them from the life of Christians in the Russian Empire. After the assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which the Jews were widely blamed, a series of pogroms, officially approved riots, and campaigns of persecution were launched. Jews increasingly became the targets of anti-Semitism, verbal and often physical abuse directed at them because they were Jews. This experience had the effect of strengthening the belief among many Jews that they shared an identity, history, and culture, regardless of whether they were religiously observant or not. But it also persuaded many to flee. Between 1882 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews left Russia, the vast majority to the US and Europe to the west of Russia. However, a small number, about fifty-five thousand, made their way to Palestine, their ancestral home.

A print of an attack on a Jew in late nineteenth-century Russia

Jews had dreamed of returning to Eretz Israel, the biblical “Land of Israel,” and had prayed for “Next Year in Jerusalem” for hundreds of years. Now, especially with the development of the steamship in the nineteenth century, it became a more practical proposition for some of them. Those who emigrated to Palestine were motivated by the desire to escape persecution and find a safe haven, but, for many, that wish was combined with a desire for a national homeland.

Palestine had been home to a small number of Jews for hundreds of years, half of them living in Jerusalem, largely in harmony with their Palestinian Arab neighbours. They were made up of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. The former, mostly considered to be the descendants of Jews from Spain and North Africa, were predominantly Arabic speaking and some held positions in the Ottoman government. The latter had often come from Europe in preceding decades and tended to speak Yiddish (the language of most Eastern European Jews, derived primarily from German and Hebrew). Most of these so-called Ottoman Jews living in Palestine, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi, were highly religious and eager to preserve and develop their Jewish identity within the Ottoman Empire. In contrast with those who were fleeing Russia, very few sought a separate, national homeland, let alone an independent Jewish state.

The Jewish settlers who arrived in the First Aliyah (Hebrew for “ascent”) from 1882 onward were mostly farmers. Many found their new life very harsh and departed after a short time, usually to Western Europe or the US, while those who acquired land and survived often only managed to do so with the help of cheap Arab labour. Although most of the settlers who arrived in the 1880s came from Russia, particularly from what is present-day Poland, their ideology and political organisation, and that of their supporters, was to be formulated not by a Russian Jew but one from Vienna.

Theodor Herzl, a lawyer and journalist, wrote a book titled The Jewish State, which was published in 1896. He called for the Jews to form a single nation-state like that of France or Germany. Echoing the sentiments of other European colonisers at the time, he claimed that the Jewish state could also be an “an outpost of civilization,” a defence against the perceived barbarism of “Asia.”2

Theodor Herzl

In 1897, Herzl organised a congress in Switzerland in which the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was formed. Though it was not the first time that the term had been used, the delegates at the congress now defined Zionism as the belief in “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”3 Herzl’s political priority was to secure the diplomatic support of a great power in Europe and financial backing from European and American Jewry, some of whose members had acquired considerable wealth. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was set up in 1901 to buy land in Palestine. Today, most of the land of Israel is held in trust for the world’s Jews by the JNF. It cannot be sold to non-Jews.

The Jewish immigrants of the Second Aliyah from 1904 onward also came mostly from the Polish lands of the Russian Empire. However, they were much more ideologically driven, and keen to implement Herzl’s ideas. After centuries of persecution, they stressed the importance of using the biblical language of Hebrew as a sign of their rebirth in what they saw as their Jewish homeland. Many of them displayed the characteristics of the pioneer – tough and self-reliant – and were determined to show how different they were from the image of the weak, helpless Jews of the Russian Pale. They developed the concepts of the Conquest of Land and the Conquest of Labor.

The Conquest of Land emphasised the importance of colonizing, irrigating, and cultivating the land. The Conquest of Labor articulated the belief that the Jews’ rebirth as a nation was best achieved through becoming economically independent and reliant on Jewish-only labour.

Many Jews living in Jerusalem, especially those who had been resident for many generations, were far from enthusiastic. Similarly, only a minority of Jews in Europe supported the Zionist project: for example, the more assimilated ones feared that their loyalty to the states in which they lived might be questioned and that the Zionist project would make Jews less welcome to stay in Europe.

Arabs...