Israel at 60 (Part 2): Zionism and early Palestine

Every anti-Zionst publication devotes some space to Israel’s history. Some accord this history more explanatory power than others. It would be convenient to view the opposition of Truman-era State department officials, particularly Secretary of State Marshall, to the partition of Palestine as having been validated by sixty years of conflict. Truman walked a strategic high-wire before opting to support the U.N. partition, and criticisms of his foreign policy nous are not hard to find. Or as one biographer told it straight up

A simplistic, provincial, at times amazingly ignorant president, highly controversial, toiling arduously to keep the high office he attained because of an accident of history. By his side, a secretary of state who was a renowned general in the last war, and an intelligence agency whose doubts prior to a crisis are swept aside - not least because of political considerations, the president's critics will say. [1]


However, to speculate how things might have turned out had Truman decided otherwise, “if only Israel had not been created,” is to miss the point. What needs to be re-iterated in letters ten feet high is that the state of Israel was not created by the U.N. let alone given to the Jews: rather, the UN recognised and the international community accepted a functioning and prosperous nation-state that the Jews had built and defended. Yes, the UN General Assembly voted for a Partition. But the UN did nothing to effect that Partition. Indeed, as we shall see, events took over, and it was only after the dust settled that Israel was a reality. It is also the failure of the nations and citizens of the broader Muslim world to accept this reality that is at the root of their own dissolution: to state the reality bluntly, a rag-tag of lowly dhimmi, and to add insult to injury Jews, won.

So the question of Truman’s wisdom or counter-factual “what ifs” miss the point. The ongoing misery of the Palestinians is not the fault of U.S. miscalculation, much less perfidy. It is overwhelmingly the fault of the Palestinians themselves and their Arab brethren. Further, there has never really existed anything remotely approaching a consensus of what “problem solved” would entail or look like: the geostrategic threats and ambitions of all the parties - Israel, the various Arab states, and the refugees have all ebb and flowed constantly; and never in-sync.


2.1 What and why is Zionism?

Alarm bells started ringing on AL’s acknowledgements pages where he thanks “Israel’s finest historian, Ilan Pappe, [who] agreed to read the history of Zionism chapter and offered expert advice.”[2] As we shall see, Pappe as ‘expert on Zionism’ folds in with the evidence fabrication that sparked our very own history wars. It also partly explains AL’s own egregious evidence-tampering. There is nothing controversial in AL’s claim that Zionism began in 1895 and was quickly followed, in 1897, by the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The movement’s founder, Austrian journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl, a secular and assimilated Jew, was so affected by the Dreyfuss Affair in France that he could no longer accept the belief long-held by Europe’s secular Jews that assimilation was the best hope for security. Europe’s Jews needed a homeland of their own, a sanctuary for world Jewry to be rid once and for all, the centuries of persecution they had experienced. With this minor historical narrative correctly recounted, AL quickly spins off into fantasy land.

AL loathes Israel as it is an expression of Zionism’s racist and exclusionary ideology. Hullo? Zionism was a response to the anti-Semitic societies throughout the world. The Jews had very good reasons for needing an exclusive pied a terre! The implication of AL’s riff that a cabal of European Jews suddenly concluded they constituted some biologically superior master race, and barge into some foreign land to spend their days bathing in the glow of the collective racial superiority would be comical if the consequences of the exact opposite were not the reality.

AL thunders “Herzl’s seminal essay on the Jewish state shamefully ignored the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.”[3] There is actually a very good reason for this. For you see, in 1895 Therzl assumed “that we shall go to Argentina,” and that “when we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us.”[4] (emphasis added). Herzl envisioned the future Jewish homeland would have to be built through treaties and voluntary land-purchases. He assumed that the influx of Jewish capital and technical knowledge would bring economic benefits to the indigenous populations. AL could reasonably argue that Herzl was being presumptuous: a more unbiased or even empathetic commentator might argue that Herzl was being whimsical or perhaps naïve. But to accuse Herzl of ignoring the indigenous population when even the sources AL rely on say the exact opposite is not only sloppy; it is unethical. Especially, as he does not present the evolution in Herzl’s thinking as Herzl moved from essayist and pamphleteer to the real world of actually negotiating to seek a Jewish homeland with the world’s leaders.

AL contradicts himself in the very same sentence insisting “even though it is clear that Herzl realised that the Palestinians would not simply disappear and make way for massive Jewish immigration. It was perhaps the first but certainly not the last time that the Palestinians were treated simply as if they didn‘t exist.”[5] AL qualifies this in a footnote. “Palestinian Israeli writer Nur Masalha has proven that Herzl did not entirely ignore the indigenous population and even hoped some would stay and be grateful for Zionism’s generosity.”[6] (emphasis added). Putting aside the fact that historians do not seek to “prove” anything, is Herzl now redeemed from shame? Well, no. AL continues as though Masalha’s intra-sentence contradiction had never happened. And how could Herzl “realise that the Palestinians would not simply disappear if Herzl “shamefully ignored” them? This editing sloppiness occurs again and again throughout the entire book. Besides I challenge AL to produce Muslim and Arab writers who acknowledged the existence of “Palestinians.”

As PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said on March 31, 1977 in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It is no secret that the book’s publication date was put back several times. Anybody who has visited AL’s blog can see that last minute edits like footnote seven have been inserted by an editorial assistant or proof-reader, maybe “Israel’s finest historian!” Unfortunately, they did not think to let AL know that these edits contradict his earlier, and later, arguments. In this instance, Masahla is a notorious and sloppy polemicist who copied and distorted from a 1972 work that was based on the earlier work of an Israeli scholar.[7] Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan anyone?

Not content with painting Zionism’s founder as an ethnic chauvinist, AL blames the Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. He quotes Herzl as commenting that ‘anti-Semitism served to inhibit the ostentatious flaunting of conspicuous wealth, curb the unscrupulous behaviour of Jewish financiers and contribute in many ways to the education of the Jews.’[8] AL libels the “shameful” Herzl who “was not alone in thinking that Jewish behaviour was directly related to anti-Semitic attitudes and therefore could be altered.”[9] As is so often the case with AL’s prose we are none the wiser whether it is Jewish behaviour or anti-Semitic attitudes that could be altered. Or perhaps he is having a Lady Bracknell moment, who, when asked whether the side of Belgrave Square or its fashion could be changed, boomed “both if necessary!” Will AL next argue that Zionism was born in a handbag?

Distorting Herzl is so endemic among the far left - whether Communist, Stalinist, Trotsky, moggie Marxist, or postmodern - that it no longer raises an eyebrow. As we shall see, we can see where Australia’s own history warriors learnt their lessons. Yet here we have it again in AL and M&W. What is tragic about this is that the same distortions are shamelessly shuffled around from Finkelstein to Tariq Ali to Chomsky, even all the so-called Israel “new historians” Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, and of course the entire cadre of Arab and Palestinian historian get in on it. It is ironic that Finkelstein rose to fame, and made a motza, by pointing out a number of instances of Alan Dershwoitz citing primary sources that had been published with some errors in Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.

AL dutifully repeats the Leftist canard that “the indigenous population of Palestine was regarded as a distraction from Zionism’s grand plan as was ignored. This denial has become a mainstay of Zionist thought.”[10] In fact, Palestine was lightly populated in the late nineteenth century. The entire population of Palestine (defined as current Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) was probably in the vicinity of half a million at the time of the first Jewish aliyah in the early 1880s.[11] The inclusion of the population of eastern Palestine that was divided and named Transjordan in 1922 - renamed Jordan in 1949 - would have the effect of reducing even further the population impact of early Jewish immigration to Palestine.

However, Palestinian and Arab historians and activists have always tactically rejected classifying Jordan as part of “historic Palestine.”[12] Suspiciously, they are mute on what exactly those who lived in what is today called Jordan were known as before 1949; let alone before 1922. Indeed right up to 1988, Jordanians and Syrians had always maintained they spoke for the “Palestinian people.”[13] The same area today supports a population of nearly 11 million.[14] At the time of the first aliyah, the area that was eventually partitioned into Israel by the United Nations in 1947 contained only a fraction of that number, with estimates varying from 100,000 to 150,000.[15] During that time, Palestine was certainly not a political entity in any meaningful sense.

Between 1516 and 1918 Palestine - or what came to be called Palestine - was part of the Ottoman empire, and ruled from Istanbul. In the 1870s, the Ottomans restructured the empire: the Mediterranean near-east was divided into several districts called sanjaks. These sanjaks were part of larger administrative units called vilayets.[16] A reasonable analogy might be local councils and states in Australia: except the vilayets had nothing like the autonomy that Australian states have. The largest portion of Palestine was part of the vilayet of Syria and was governed from Damascus by a pasha.[17] For centuries Palestine had been known as southern Syria, part of bilad al-sham or Greater Syria.[18] As the Arab Higher Committee said when the UN was discussing the second partition of Mandatory Palestine

Palestine was part of the province of Syria...politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity.

The Ottoman restructuring was partly prompted by the ten year occupation by Muhammad Ali, the Albanian-born governor of Egypt, in the 1830s. This growing antagonism between the core of the Ottoman Empire and its periphery is conveniently ignored by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said hilariously describes the eastern Mediterranean as being under the yoke of European imperialism from the mid 1700s.[19]

The vilayet of Beirut was sub-divided into four sanjaks: Beirut, Tyre, Acre, and Nablus. The vilayet of Beirut thus extended along the Mediterranean coast from Lebanon down to Haifa and onward just north of what is now Tel Aviv. Immediately south of the vilayet of Beirut were the sanjaks of Jaffa and Gaza, which in turn were administrative units of the vilayet of Damascus. The sanjak of Jerusalem, which covered roughly from Jaffa to Jerusalem and south to Gaza, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva remained under direct rule of Istanbul. It is fair to say that vague stirrings of regional identity began to form skeletally around these new administrative divisions: an identity that only began to develop muscle during the British Mandate. Arab Israeli historian Brutus Abu-Manneh has, more ambitiously, argued

This administrative act taken by the Ottomans which helped formulate a clearer sense of boundaries and belonging in the land of Palestine, centred around the city of Jerusalem…This enhanced the social position of the leading family in Jerusalem, the Husseinis, who formed the core of the national movement during the British occupation of Palestine.[20]


Abu-Manneh, however, does not explain how this implies a Palestinian identity, particularly as the sanjak of Jerusalem was only one of five sanjaks formed in the region, and Jerusalem was the only one that remained under direct rule from Istanbul. Further, he does not explain why the embryonic regional identities created by the “clearer sense of boundaries” of Acre, Tyre and the vilayet of Syria would not have gravitated more to Syrian or Lebanese identities: identities already much stronger than the non-existent putative Palestinian identity.

It is unclear what it would mean to say that the Palestinians were the people who originally populated the “nation” of Palestine. In fact, Benny Morris concludes “historians have concluded that only ‘several thousand’ families were displaced following land sales to Jews between the 1880s and the late 1930s.[21] Even Ilan Pappe, “Israel’s finest historian,” is adamant that that there was no nation of Palestine prior to Jewish emigration, or even such as thing as a ‘Palestinian identity.’ Pappe rather argues that the inhabitants of mandate Palestine identified primarily with towns and villages rather than the ‘country’ of ‘Palestine.’

Basically, as long as the ruling Turkish Empire was Muslim and Islamic in civilisation and nature, most of the Arabs saw themselves as part of it. Until 1908, if you look at what most of the Arab nationalist intellectuals talk about, they talk about the Austro-Hungarian model of sharing the empire with the Turks. was no Palestine, no Syria or Iraq. [22]


Morris convincingly shows that the quantity of Arab land offered for sale was far in excess of the Jewish ability to purchase.”[23] Further, between 1880 and 1948 three-quarters of the plots purchased by Jews were from Arab mega-landowners rather than from those Arabs who worked those lands. It is reasonable to describe the society and economy of nineteenth century Palestine as feudal. Even Arab-American historian Rached Kalidi - a descendant, and current patriarch, of one of these feudal aristocratic clans - acknowledges the widespread land sales by “absentee landlords”[24] The claims of Palestinian and countless other scholars, activists and ratbags on Jews stealing land, and the alleged continuous habitation of Palestine by Arabs for hundreds and even thousands of years really is insupportable.[25]

The first aliyah in 1882 comprised ten thousand or so Russian and eastern European Jews who were fleeing tsarist pogroms. Even during the 1830s, during the Egyptian occupation of Jerusalem, under Muhammad Ali, the Jewish indigenes were subjected to merciless persecution by Muslims. During this period of repression, Jews fled to western Europe, Asia, and the United States as well. Indeed, contrary to au courant anti-globalisation doomsayers and MacDonald’s trashers, globalisation was all the rage in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It must be remembered that this was a period of immense immigration world-wide with Irish people fleeing the potato-famine as well as Italians, Greeks, polish, German, Chinese and Japanese settling in the “new world” and South America. During this period approximately 10,000 eastern European Jews immigrated to Palestine, while nearly one million settled in the United States.[26]

The extent to which this 10,000 unsettled the existing populace is much debated. In March 2006, Phillip Adams on his LNL repeated the decades-old mantra of Israel‘s enemies that the Zionists fled Europe and Russia to claim “a land without people, for a people without a land.” Of the fifty or so people AL mentions in his acknowledgements here is what the most prominent historians and scholars have argue. One of the last-remaining granddaddies Trotskists, Tariq Ali, in one of his characteristically sleazy misquotes inveighs against “a fundamental Zionist myth: Palestine as ‘a land without people’ designed for Jews, ’people without a land.’”[27] Note his deliberate omission of the indefinite article before the first “people?” In fact, there in not the slightest morsel of evidence that any of the Zionists ever thought this was the case. As we shall see, fraudulent omissions and insertions of articles (definite and indefinite) has become a mainstay of leftist anti-Zionists in this debate. AL cites Norman Finkelstein arguing that “From the British in North America to the Dutch in South Africa, from the Nazis in Eastern Europe to the Zionists in Palestine, every conquering regime has invoked the same claim the territory appointed for conquest was deserted.”[28]


In fact it was not Zionist Jews who coined the phrase; rather the British Lord Shaftsbury in his 1884 memoir. Lord Shaftsbury opined, of the homeless Hebrews, that Palestine could be “a country without a nation for a nation without a country.”[29] His comment did not imply there being no individuals, families, towns, villages, etc: he meant ‘a nation’ in the unique ethnic sense, such as ‘Maori,’ ‘German,’ ‘Persian,’ ‘Karen,’ ‘Aztecs,’ ‘Murri,” ‘Chinese,’ ‘Malays,’ etc; nevertheless it is still quoted - invariably bowdlerized - even today, by anti-Zionists as evidence of the true design of Jewish migration.[30] Further, when Shaftsbury formed his observations of the region and was writing his memoirs, Palestine had recently undergone a significant depopulation due to the draconian occupation of the forces of Muhammad Ali.

A leading Palestinian website sums up the attitude that is repeated in just about any book, article, blog, etc. that deals with this conflict. In a typical porridge of the patois of postmodernism, or a postmodernist polemic for a pre-modernist people

Zionist identity was built from the beginning on a two-fold negation: it negates time and space of the Jews outside Zion, a 'negation of exile' which extends beyond the realm of religion, and it negates time and space of those indigenous to the territory of Zion. The latter is best defined by the well-known statement of Zionist leader Israel Zangvil about, "a people without land returning to a land without people."[31]


The irony is that Zangvil actually wrote that contrary to Lord Shaftesbury’s musings. Zangvil wrote this forty years after Shaftsbury’s memoir; yet it has been misrepresented from then until Phillip Adams and beyond. Why has AL not gone straight to the original sources to check this? I am not being some mere “footnote pedant” when I ask this. After all, AL shares with us that he had nothing to do with Israel until his two week visit in 2005. And yet, he is so fired up at the shameless and rotten-to-the-core Zionist enterprise. How could he know that it was so rotten ab initio? If I were going to publish a book with such strident views I would imagine I would consult the actual words of those I was impugning: if not for anything more than curiosity. And especially as AL likes to remind us he majored in History at Monash in the early to mid 1990s. Let us hope that Monash has lifted its game since then.

All of these fine historians and experts acknowledged by AL insist Zionism was motivated by a belief that Palestine was deserted. And yet they all then quote screeds of the early Zionists who reject the notion that Palestine was deserted. In other words they cite endless early Zionist’s actual words and thoughts to reject non-existent Zionist’s allegations that Palestine was uninhabited! So where on earth do these people get their ideas?

Equally specious is in the more radical forms of this Palestinian/anti-Zionist mythology is that by 1880 there was a unique Palestinian people, and even a Palestinian nation that was displaced by the Zionist invasion.
[1]
[2] p.xiii
[3]
[4] Patai, R. (ed.) The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. 1 (1960) pp, 90 and 88.
[5]
[6] fn 7. on p.268 citing Masalha, N. Expulsion of the Palestinians: the concept of ‘transfer’ in Zionist political thought, 1882-1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
[7] Laquere, W. A History of Zionism
[8] Quoted from Lindermann, A. Esau’s tears, Camridge:2000 p.125
[9] 71
[10] AL
[11] This is unsourced from Dershowitz, p.24
[12] provide examples
[13]
[14] get an exact number from CIA fact book etc.
[15] Again, unsourced from Dershowitz p.24.
[16] Unsourced from Dershowitz p.24
[17] Unsourced from Dershowitz p.25
[18] The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World.
[19]
[20] Abu-Manneh, Brutus. “The Rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Pappe, Ilan (ed.) The Israel Palestine Question, Routledge: London, 1999, p.41.
[21] Morris 2001 p.123
[22] Ilan Pappe Interview by Don Atapattu” 19/9/05 CNI Foundation http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=114
[23] ibid. p.111
[24] discussed in Said., Edward and Hitchens., Christopher, eds. Blaming the Victims (London: Verso, 2001).
[25]
[26]
[27] Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms. p.90
[28] AL p.74 quoting NF.
[29]
[30] Said, Edward
[31] www.palestinerememebered.com/???