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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Since the brutal massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been thrust back to the centre of the world’s attention. How can this deep-rooted conflict, stretching back for more than 75 years, be brought to an end? What kind of political structure might one day enable Israelis and Palestinians to overcome the seemingly interminable cycle of violence and live in peace with one another?
For many years, politicians and citizens of different persuasions have called for a two-state solution – two independent states, Israel and Palestine, co-existing side by side. This was Shlomo Sand’s view too: a distinguished Israeli historian and political activist on the left, he had long supported the idea of a two-state solution. But as more and more settlements were built in the occupied West Bank and millions of Palestinians were forced to live in a situation of de facto apartheid, deprived of their basic civil rights and political freedoms, he came to the conclusion that the two-state solution had become an empty formula that no one seriously intended to implement.
It was in this context that Sand sought to find an alternative way out of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. His journey into the dark corners of Zionism’s ideological past threw up some surprises. He discovered that some Zionists and other Jewish intellectuals had rejected the idea of an exclusive Jewish state and had supported moves to create a bi-national federation. They believed that only egalitarian integration within the framework of a common state would ensure that Israel could be a safe haven for all of its inhabitants. While the chances of realizing this egalitarian vision may seem remote in the current hostile context, it may well be that a bi-national state in which Israelis and Palestinians are treated as equals is the only realistic solution in the end.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
1 ‘Land of the Ancestors’ or Land of the Indigenous People
The Ancestral Homeland
On the Nation
Ethnocentrism
Binationalism?
Notes
2 ‘When a Slave Becomes a King’: A Hidden Question
The Lover of Others?
A Spiritual Centre?
Ignoring the Other
Notes
3 Alliance of Peace against the ‘Iron Wall’
The Beginnings of the Alliance
The ‘Extremist’ Faction
Hans Kohn and the End of the Alliance
Notes
4 Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and the Undivided Territory
From Volkism to ‘I and Thou’
Towards Binationalism
Hannah Arendt and Anti-Semitism
A Jewish Nation State?
Notes
5 Theopolitics and the Pacifist Ihud Association
The Unquiet American
The Prophetic Chancellor
The Ihud Association
Last of the Mohicans
Notes
6 The Left and ‘Fraternity between Peoples’
Zionist Marxism
Communists in Palestine
End of an Idea
Notes
7 Semitic Action and an Arab–Hebrew Federation
The ‘Canaanite’ Background
A Semitic Left?
The Hebrew Manifesto
Notes
8 1967: A Land to Be Shared or a Land to Be Unified?
Three Petitions
Menachem Begin against Apartheid
The Distress of the White Sabra
Cracks on the Left
The Disillusionment Continues
Heightened Sensitivities
Notes
9 ‘You Can’t Clap with One Hand’
Curiosity and Reconciliation
The Palestinian National Idea
A Single Democratic State?
The Binational Paradigm
Notes
10 Alternatives: Apartheid? Transfer? Or a Binational Compromise?
The Homeland Expands
The New Pioneers
Hegemony on the Ground
Stychic and Catastrophic
The Secret Option
Imaginary Options
Utopias and Calamities
Notes
Afterword
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Afterword
Index
End User License Agreement
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Israel–Palestine
Federation or Apartheid?
SHLOMO SAND
Translated by Robin Mackay
polity
Originally published in Hebrew by Resling. This translation is based on the French edition, published as Deux peuples pour un État ? Relire l’histoire du sionisme by Éditions du Seuil in 2024.
Copyright © Shlomo Sand, 2024
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Two poems by Mahmoud Darwish reproduced with kind permission of the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6441-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024933986
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.
However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.
Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service), interview with Associated Press, 6 September 20231
Towards the end of 1967, shortly after returning from combat in Jerusalem, I became a political activist. From that point on I began to write ‘Down with the occupation’ on the walls of Tel Aviv. Since then and until quite recently – in other words, for half a century – I remained stubborn in my support for the idea of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel, within the 1967 borders. The right to self-determination for the two peoples that, over the course of a most painful and violent process, have become established between the sea and the river Jordan – this has been my guiding principle. As a soldier and as a citizen, I had to apply my anticolonialist ideas in my everyday life: just as I had fought for Israel to become a state for all Israeli citizens (and not the state of all Jewish people in the world, who, as is known, don’t live there), I have also wished wholeheartedly for the creation of an independent Palestinian republic alongside it.
With the passing years, Israel has continued to consolidate its hold on the occupied territories. Thousands of Israelis have set up home close to indigenous villages and Palestinian towns. They have acquired a great deal of land at low prices, and this has become the property of the new settlers, for whom a whole network of roads are exclusively reserved. Severe oppression and denial of the basic rights of the local population have engendered violent resistance, which in turn has fuelled ever harsher repression.
The outbreak in 1987 of the first Intifada, which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, inspired new hopes for a potential end to the conflict. Many believed that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would evacuate the settlements and return Israel to the 1967 borders, but the profound inequality of power between the two sides prevented them from reaching any sincere and balanced agreement; violence flared up again, while colonisation continued to expand.
The left-wing camp to which I had pledged allegiance continued to call for the evacuation of all territories occupied in 1967, hoping that the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them. We penned numerous articles, organised hundreds of demonstrations, and spoke at many meetings and public gatherings. None of it worked! The demographic balance has shifted; the Israeli presence in the West Bank – particularly in the vast belt around Al-Quds, which is officially annexed to Israel – was rapidly boosted by 875,000 new settlers. Four of the ministers of the actual government live in West Bank settlements, as do a number of senior state officials (the chief of the general staff, for example). In parallel, budget allocations to settlers have soared to unprecedented heights.
In 2023 there were mass protests against the new government’s arbitrary antiliberal measures, but the protestors made no mention of Israel’s presence in the occupied territories. Public calls to defend Israeli democracy have passed over in silence the fact that, for fifty-six years, millions of Palestinians have been living under a military regime, being deprived of civil, legal, and political rights. Worse still, Palestinians under occupation have to live side by side with colonisers in what is becoming ever more obviously an apartheid system. They are forbidden to live in the settlements; they are allowed only to work in them. They are forbidden to marry Jews and cannot apply for Israeli citizenship. Many Palestinian workers cross the old borders every day, to come and work in poor conditions in the Israeli economy, and must return to their homes before nightfall.
And then 7 October came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.
The events of 7 October came as an utter shock to the Israeli public. True, Gaza was under siege and the quality of life remained insufferable, but the Israeli settlements were now long gone, uprooted by Sharon. In addition, unlike the West Bank, Gaza lacked the oppressive presence of a foreign army. So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?
It was convenient for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din. Others rushed to argue that Jews anywhere in the world have always been and will always be hated for no reason, and that 7 October was some kind of an encapsulated Holocaust.
In 1956 Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of staff at the time, eulogised a fallen Israeli soldier who had been cruelly murdered by insurgents from Gaza. He said: ‘Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.’2 Not many Israeli leaders have dared to speak in such a manner.
Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, was born in 1936 in Al-Jura, a village that once stood where the Israeli city of Ashkelon now stands. After his parents were expelled to Gaza in 1950, he grew up in Al-Shati, a refugee camp. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau on 7 October, was born in the same camp in 1963. His parents were also expelled from Al-Jura – in 1950, after the place was emptied and then annexed to Ashkelon. Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas on 7 October, was born in 1962 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. In 1950 his parents were expelled from Al-Majdal, which later became part of Ashkelon as well. These leaders’ stories are not uncommon, nor are the stories of other leaders. More than 60 per cent of Gaza’s current population of 2 million consists of descendants of refugees who were driven from their land and homes after 1948 and have lived in the camps ever since.
The 7 October massacre was in some ways an indirect repercussion of the Nakba, which occurred seventy-five years ago. The origins of the Palestinians’ hatred and of the long, heart-breaking conflict lie in 1948 even more than in the occupation of 1967. Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future? The only answer given by the Israeli government in response to the devastating blow was a war of revenge, without any clear political objectives and arguably just as cruel as the October 7 attack. A solution to the bloody conflict seems further away than ever.
At the time of writing this preface, the immediate consequences of the latest catastrophe are still unknown to me. The animosity between the two groups has only increased, and the occupation of the Palestinian people remains entrenched and unyielding. Meanwhile the world pays lip service to the idea that, at some point in the future, a Palestinian state may be recognised. What remains of the Israeli left continues to chant the hollow mantra ‘two states for two peoples’, with no real intention of making it happen. The Palestinian Authority, totally dependent upon Israeli power and without any real popular support, echoes the tragicomedy of these empty formulas and collaborates in this unbearable situation, while knowing perfectly well that Israel has no intention of recognising real Palestinian sovereignty.
It is this situation, in which hollow, abstract political discourse rubs shoulders with the reality of a binational situation, that prompted me to write this essay. I began writing it with a great deal of scepticism as to the possibility of ever seeing an egalitarian Israeli–Palestinian federation come about, and I am still wrestling with a great many theoretical doubts. My excursion into the dark corners of Zionism’s ideological past did, however, present me with some surprises. When I began writing, I had no idea that the great thinkers of the pacifist currents in Zionism, and those who came into close contact with them, had rejected the notion of an exclusive Jewish state in a land predominantly populated by Arabs and had instead supported moves to construct a binational political entity. Across generations, from Ahad Ha’am, one of the founders of spiritual Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century, through Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt, to the famous writer A.B. Yehoshua, the intellectual elite worried that the future of a little Jewish Sparta at war with a hostile Middle East was by no means secure. They believed that only egalitarian integration within the framework of a common state would ensure that Israel becomes a safe haven for all of its inhabitants.
I am highly sceptical as to whether what is in actuality a binational existence can be embodied in a federal entity of the same type as Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, or other similar states. Recent developments and the growing symbiosis, on both sides, between religion and radical nationalism are hardly conducive to the emergence of compromise and political integration. It seems that the region is condemned to undergo a number of catastrophes before reason, equality, and justice find some way to take root in it. But, as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said, ‘if you will it, it is no dream’.
Notes
1.
Visit
https://apnews.com/article/israel-apartheid-palestinians-occupation-c8137c9e7f33c2cba7b0b5ac7fa8d115
.
2.
Anita Shapira,
Israel: A History
(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 271.
1‘Land of the Ancestors’ or Land of the Indigenous People
Identity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit, what we invent, not what we remember.
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘You, from now on, Are Not Yourself’1
People write on the gate of their house, ‘No entry to strangers’, yet they themselves are strangers within it.
Yehuda Amichai, ‘Four Resurrections on Emek Rephaim Street’2
Vladimir Jabotinsky is remembered in the historiographical and political tradition as the founding father of the Zionist right. An original and uncompromising thinker, he never gave an inch to his many opponents in the Jewish national movement. In 1923 he wrote (in Russian) the essay ‘The Iron Wall’, which to this day is considered the principal summary of his position on Palestine. Unlike most Zionist leaders, who often hailed from the left, Jabotinsky always refused to wrap his words in sanctimonious, hypocritical language. In his view, the arrival of Jews in Palestine quite clearly announced a colonial undertaking, indisputably comparable to other colonisations in history. ‘My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries’, he writes. ‘I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.’3 By the admission of this future leader of the nationalist right, the Zionists were no different from the Spanish conquistadors of South America or the Puritan settlers in the North. Just as in other places natives fought with all their might against foreigners coming to colonise their lands, it is quite logical for the Arabs of Palestine to oppose foreign Zionist colonisation, and this opposition could be expected to continue.
For Jabotinsky, though, this did not mean that Zionism was immoral. In a follow-up article, he set out an argument that he saw as being decisive: from Morocco to Mesopotamia, the Arabs had vast areas of land at their disposal, whereas the Jews had not even the slightest of territories.
The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any. It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people. And if such a big landowning nation resists, which is perfectly natural – it must be made to comply by compulsion.4
But Jabotinsky says quite explicitly that this in no way implies expulsion of the local residents: ‘I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine.’ Two peoples will live in Palestine, he proposes, but the wandering people will have to secure a position of military superiority – an ‘iron wall’ – in order to gain the upper hand over the indigenous people, which refuses to welcome the wanderers onto its territory.
Most Zionists were well aware that the Christian evangelical slogan ‘Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land’ brandished by Israel Zangwill at the beginning of the twentieth century was erroneous and misleading. No less significant is the fact that, in his founding text, Jabotinsky did not appeal to ‘historical rights’ in order to claim the land, nor did he assert that it did not belong to the indigenous Arabs. In 1923 many educated Zionists knew full well that there had been no mass exodus of the local population in antiquity, not even a significant wave of emigration. The dominance of the age-old Christian belief in the exile of the people–race that had been cursed for having participated in the crucifixion of Jesus nonetheless left its mark upon a Jewish faith that, riddled with shame, came to see itself as condemned to exile (metaphysical rather than geographical) while awaiting the coming of the messiah. It should also be borne in mind that, throughout their long and painful religious history, Jews did not read the heroic, earthly Bible but the Talmud, a book about law that is not linked to any particular time or place and distances itself from the use of force.
From Israel Belkind, one of the very first to arrive in Palestine, in 1882, to David Ben-Gurion, who founded the State of Israel in 1948, there were many who thought it likely that the local peasants were descendants of ancient Hebrews, which would have made it absolutely unacceptable to deny their presence or to uproot them. Belkind was convinced throughout his life that the indigenous people of Palestine constituted ‘a significant section of our people […] bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh’.5 As early as 1918, Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the future president of the State of Israel, strongly insisted:
the peasants are not descended from the Arab invaders who conquered the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) and Syria in the seventh century. The victorious Arabs did not exterminate the rural population they found there. They only drove out the foreign Byzantine rulers; they did not attack the local population.6
The Ancestral Homeland
As we know, Jabotinsky’s principal claim – ‘I have no other country’ – was not in itself sufficient to morally justify Zionist colonisation and its iron wall. Hence the increasing appeal to the myth of exile and return to ‘the land of the ancestors’ after two thousand years of wandering – until it became secular Zionist dogma, presented as authentic historical truth.
In the first half of the twentieth century nationalism was still at its height all across Europe. The Germans were convinced that they were the descendants of Teutonic tribes, just as the French were convinced that their ancestors were the Gauls who had fought against Julius Caesar’s Roman legions, whose direct heirs the Italians believed themselves to be. The forming of a national consciousness has always involved the need for an ‘origin’ and a great deal of ‘history’. So there is nothing exceptional about Zionists’ ability to imagine a lengthy genealogy for themselves. They set about constructing a land of the ancestors on the basis of Bible stories transformed into historical facts, which would then become a compulsory subject taught in all Israeli schools. Academic historiography and archaeology were summoned to sculpt a consistent ‘scientific’ past out of snippets of legend, bits of ruins, and rocks that were not always identified. The journey from the exodus from Egypt in the second millennium BC to the return of the people to the land of its ancestors and the creation of the State of Israel in the twentieth century completed a mythological circle designed to establish the quasi-eternal existence of a specific and extraordinary Jewish nation that, from time immemorial right up to the present day, has been guaranteed, by divine edict, the right to settle the entire expanse of land between the sea and the river Jordan, and even beyond.
The French of today know full well that they are not really descendants of Gauls; the same goes for Italians vis-à-vis ancient Romans. Most Germans will cringe if you remind them that their forebears thought of themselves as Aryans. Fortunately for them, Americans have been less preoccupied with such biological dilemmas (so long as the skin is white, of course). But the majority of Israeli Jews who have chosen not to pay attention to the historical existence of at least five Judaised kingdoms outside the land of Canaan continue to hold on to the dogma of their common origin, and are even willing to fund DNA research designed to prove that they have a genetic link with King Solomon and his thousand wives. (Moreover, many Jews from Ethiopia are convinced that they are the descendants of the liaison between this same polygamous king and the beautiful Queen of Sheba, who later returned to Africa.)7
From the outset, colonisation was justified through arguments based on existential distress, discrimination, and historical rights to a land supposedly given to the chosen people (if not the accursed people). This idea of an imaginary ownership was favourably received in the western Christian world, which did a great deal to promote it, not least because it seemed to promise a reduction in the Jewish presence in Europe. Lord Balfour, who had little sympathy for Jews, banked on the fact that his November 1917 Declaration would on the one hand consolidate British hegemony in the Middle East and, on the other, make it possible to divert to Palestine some of the Jewish masses that had come knocking on England’s door.
Contrary to what Zionist historiography teaches, the national myth under construction was not convincing to the majority of Jews and their descendants. Religious leaders, both Orthodox and Reform, were well aware that a collective influx to the Holy Land contradicted their principles of hope in the coming of the messiah. In their view, beyond the nationalism en vogue, ‘the homeland’ referred to the Scriptures, not to a physical piece of land.8 As for laypeople, what they sought was a haven of tranquillity and security, far from the harsh realities of Eastern Europe. The hearts of distressed Jewish emigrants from those regions did not yearn for Zion: up until 1924, more than two million Jews had emigrated to the United States, while between 1882 and 1924 only around 65,000 landed in Palestine. Most of the latter were young nationalist idealists who, like Naftali Herz Imber – the author of ‘Hatikvah’ (‘Hope’ in Hebrew), the song that became the national anthem of the State of Israel – failed to put down roots in the East and soon joined the flow of westward immigration instead.
New restrictions on North American immigration along racial lines, restrictions aimed specifically at non-whites and non-Protestants, hit Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe hard (were it not for this drastic limit on immigration, almost a million Jews might have escaped Nazi extermination). Between 1924 and 1936, in other words beginning with the American racial immigration laws and after the adoption of the racist Nuremberg Laws, almost a quarter of a million more Jews arrived in Palestine. More than 600,000 were present in 1948, when the State of Israel was created, most of them being Second World War refugees and survivors who had been refused asylum in western states. At that time, the Arab population of Palestine stood at 1.25 million.9
Jabotinsky knew perfectly well that the encounter between the Jewish settlers and the indigenous population could not possibly proceed calmly and peacefully. The former’s acquisition of land sold by effendis (elite property owners) and the consequent expulsion of the fellahin (peasants) who had cultivated it for generations, along with a growing Jewish presence in the towns, aroused resentment and anger in the local population. Clashes occurred in Jerusalem as early as 1920, and then even more violently in Jaffa in 1921, where the death toll was forty-eight Arabs and forty-seven Jews. Deadly clashes with a religious dimension then took place in Hebron in 1929, where 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed. The year 1936 saw the outbreak of the great Arab Revolt – a revolt against British rule, but also against Jewish settlements. It lasted until 1939: almost five thousand Arabs, four hundred Jews, and two hundred British lost their lives. It was to mark the beginning of an ongoing confrontation that, despite periods of truce, continues to this day. Although it began as a clash between colonists and the indigenous people, the conflict subsequently took many other dimensions.
Gradually, in parallel with the imaginary, retrospective construction of a quasi-eternal Jewish people, the Jewish national movement succeeded in effectively founding an Israeli Jewish people – or a Hebrew people, according to the terminology in use before the founding of the State of Israel. Zionism developed an original local culture. The ancient Hebrew language, which Jews had not spoken for centuries, was revived, becoming both a vernacular and a poetic language. Zionism also founded municipal and national institutions, as well as a paramilitary force. It exploited the inspiring socialist myth, which it skilfully channelled into the national needs of colonisation. Within a short space of time, the pioneer immigrants had succeeded in laying the foundations of a new nation in the making, diverse but riven by antagonism and inequality – a nation that increasingly commanded a sense of patriotism.
Among the Arab population of Palestine, the emergence of a national consciousness took place more slowly. In my view, we cannot speak of a Palestinian nation in the full sense of the term, or even of a Palestinian people, before the 1950s. This, of course, should in no way diminish our moral judgement of the harm done to the local population, from expulsion from their land to mass expulsion from the country. The peasant’s ties to the soil are certainly different from those of the patriot to the homeland, but they are no less intense. In order to fully understand the nature of the conflict, however, and the factors behind the success of Zionist colonisation, it is important, very obviously, to take into account the support provided by British colonialism and the fact that a specific, organised Palestinian nationalism emerged relatively late. With due caveats, it may be said that it came into being only after the Nakba – in Arabic, ‘the Catastrophe’, with reference to the forced exodus of 1948 – and it subsequently developed in decisive phases, in response to traumatic political situations such as the alienating dispersal into neighbouring Arab countries.10
Many Palestinian historians claim that a Palestinian people existed long before biblical times, and all the more – ‘with scientific certainty’ – before the beginning of the Zionist colonisation at the end of the nineteenth century. However, it is doubtful that the ploughman in Galilee thought of himself as a ‘Palestinian’ and would thereby have felt more solidarity with a farmer from near Jerusalem than with an Arabic-speaking peasant closer to him, in southern Lebanon. The same is true of other parts of the world: whether we look at colonists in North America or French who settle in Algeria, initial opposition to the colonisers is not nationalist in nature.
Let us recall that, throughout the period of the British Mandate (1920–48), all inhabitants and institutions in the United Kingdom called Arabs and Jews alike ‘Palestinians’. The Jewish Agency bank was called the Anglo-Palestinian Bank, and the Tel Aviv philharmonic orchestra was known as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Jewish and Arab volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and in the British armed forces during the Second World War were called ‘Palestinians’. One of the Arab newspapers published in Jaffa was called Falastin, but the English-language Zionist organ also went by the name of The Palestine Post.
It is quite natural, therefore, that, in the initial expressions of their nationalism, the nascent intellectual elites in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century advertised themselves as ‘Arab’ rather than ‘Palestinian’. The dominant discourse among these elites, and indeed among Zionists, placed the emphasis on the term ‘Arab people’. In 1920, the Arab Executive Committee was founded to represent the Arabs of Palestine vis-à-vis the British, alongside the Supreme Muslim Council. The year 1936 saw the establishing of the High Arab Committee, which would lead the great revolt; the Independence Party (Istiqlal), a pan-Arab organisation, had been founded just shortly before.
Taqi a-Din al-Nabhani, a Muslim preacher from Jerusalem, was quite right when, in the early 1950s, he noted that the country’s Arab inhabitants had ‘adopted the name Palestine (and its derivatives) and use it as an Arab name, but refused to make it a designation of a distinct national identity or citizenship. When an Arab said he was “Palestinian”, this was a mark of his bond to the country in which he lived; just as someone might say that they are “Damascene” or “Beiruti”: in other words, it did not imply the existence of Palestinian citizenship or nationality in the same sense that, for example, “English” or “French” would imply.’11
Perhaps this absence of a specific Palestinian national consciousness explains, among other things, the weak mobilisation of the local population during the 1948 conflicts, as well as the absence of political movements for the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories that remained unconquered by Israel after the war and were annexed without resistance to the kingdoms of Jordan and Egypt.
Moreover, during the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, the non-Zionist Israeli Communist Party commonly used the term ‘Israeli Arabs’. The energetic nationalist movement El Ard (‘The Land’), founded in Nazareth in 1958, initially rejected the idea of a specific Palestinian identity. In 1964, the year that saw the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the first movement to seriously and systematically promote and disseminate a Palestinian national consciousness, the poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote ‘Identity Card’, a poem of national anger and protest against Israeli oppression, which opens with the exclamation ‘I am an Arab’. This identification is hammered home in every verse of the poem, but without making any reference to a Palestinian identity.
From Hellenistic historiography onwards, the place has been known as Palaestina everywhere but in the Jewish religious tradition, of course. This name was incorporated into the Arabic language as early as the seventh century, but residents in the area who had farmed there for centuries had a recognised identity not as ‘Palestinians’ but as local Arabs, who in all probability were descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity or Islam.
With the exception of Egypt, the formation of specific nations in the Middle East within the framework of the arbitrary borders drawn by colonialism was relatively slow and occurred later than many researchers tend to assume. This should come as no surprise: contrary to what traditional historiography teaches, it is not peoples that found states; on the contrary, it is states or national movements that create and shape peoples.
On the Nation
We have mentioned the terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, so it is worth pausing to briefly clarify their use in this book, whose aim is to reflect on ideas of binationalism. There is a great deal of confusion around central concepts in political history such as ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘socialism’; and the same is true of ‘nationalism’. Many historians continue to regard premodern monarchies and principalities as national entities – as if the England of King Edward I (‘Longshanks’) in the thirteenth century, or the France reigned over by Philip the Fair during the same period, were societies with a common national identity. These same historians like to present premodern revolts with a tribal or religious background as national insurrections. So Vercingetorix was a ‘French’ rebel, just as the Teutonic Arminius was ‘German’. As for Judas Maccabaeus and Bar Kokhba, it goes without saying that they were heroes of the ancestral Jewish ‘nation’ – and so on and so forth … But in premodern societies – where the absolute majority of the population could neither read nor write, where there were no schools or printed books, where the peasantry spoke a different dialect in each region, and where the educated elite was extremely small, under the rule of feudal lords, and generally very religious – it is astonishingly lazy to speak of a national consciousness.
About forty years ago, for a variety of reasons, a number of researchers in history put forward the thesis that nations did not begin to form until the end of the eighteenth century. Major changes took place at that time: changes in the organisation and distribution of work; evolution in the modes of production and urbanisation, which required the development and extension of means of communication, given especially the spread of the printing press; creation of education systems that gradually opened up to the whole population … All of this, along with the advent of the principles of political equality and the idea of democracy, had the effect of transforming ancient monarchies into nation states in which the dominant collective consciousness ceased to be religious, traditional, local, or regional, gradually giving way to a national identity that would soon establish itself as hegemonic. Without embarking upon a detailed analysis here, let us simply put forward the hypothesis that the impact of nationalism stems (among other things) from the idea of democracy and from the democratic mindset. And I don’t mean its liberal and pluralist characteristics, which have developed in many western democracies, but the simple populist principle that proclaims that the state belongs to all citizens, who wield sovereignty through their representatives.
In order to realise this vision of national identity and democracy, whether liberal or authoritarian, there had to be a maximal cultural and linguistic consensus between voters and their elected representatives, between citizens and leaders. For citizens to be convinced, almost instinctively, that the apparatus of power reflected their will and was working in favour of their fundamental interests, this apparatus had to speak their language as much as possible, making use of shared cultural expressions – in other words, it had to resemble them closely. It is only by doing so that the state can establish itself as the bedrock of nationalism; for the state is meant to ensure the security of the existence a people in a given territory, in the face of threats and dangers from other sovereign nations, with foreign mentalities and languages. The elected leader must therefore be ‘of the people’, but also patriotic. And so, whereas in the past the village fields were the peasant’s homeland, now the great national homeland begins to appear on maps that hang in every schoolroom, often next to a portrait of the nation’s leader.
But national mass culture was not created ex nihilo, nor did it emerge fully formed into a vacuum. It drew heavily upon cultures from the premodern past, partial and distorted collective memories, recent dialects, and declining religious beliefs that it kneaded and manipulated and to which it added a collective imaginary past. At the same time, with the help of school systems and state apparatuses, it shaped and sculpted a common memory and language. This process was sometimes relatively smooth, sometimes more like a steamroller (England being a good example of the former, France of the latter). In countries outside Europe, colonial oppression often played a major role in the birth of national cultures, as the struggles for liberation helped to drive the process forward.
After the unification of Italy in 1861, Massimo d’Azeglio, the former Piedmontese minister of foreign affairs, famously said: ‘We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’ The process of nationalising the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula made slow progress, apparently only reaching completion with the advent of television after the Second World War. In other countries, on the other hand, the process of creating the nation state came up against various kinds of obstacles: these included strong linguistic traditions and widespread dialects, which in some places were formed on the threshold of modernity and held back the creation of states and of uniform national cultures.
In France, for example, the languages and cultural particularities of Occitania and Brittany were crushed under the steamroller of state centralism, while in Great Britain the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish retained their premodern integrity, contributing to the existence of a hybrid multinational state. In Switzerland the confederal union of German, French, and Italian speakers has also resulted in a multi-identity state. The same is true of Belgium and Canada, which are considered binational or multinational states to this day. Despite friction and sometimes acute conflicts, these plurinational frameworks have survived and most of the population has accepted the linguistic division and the cultural plurality, taking care to preserve a specific relationship between citizens and their direct representatives in the democratic system.12
The dismantling of the premodern monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe gave rise to the creation of new nation states, with parallel multilingual political entities. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even the Soviet Union constituted themselves as fragile federations, which struggled to survive under multinational bureaucratic state apparatuses until the communist regimes finally fell. One of the primary reasons for this fragility is that, as Hans Kohn demonstrated as early as the 1940s,13 the dominant form of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe has always been an ethnocentric nationalism rather than an inclusive and political one encompassing all citizens. Imaginary origins and ‘blood ties’ were the essential criteria for new collective identities in this region, in marked contrast to the inclusive civil and political identities that had emerged in western liberal states long since. Just as, in Poland or Hungary, a Jew could not be truly Polish or Hungarian, so a Slovak could not be primarily Czechoslovakian and a Croat did not really identify as a Yugoslav.
For most Britons, Canadians, Swiss, and Belgians, internal tensions, fracture lines, and alienation aside, some kind of common national consciousness has emerged. These nations are not just traditional liberal democracies based on the principle of ‘one person, one vote’; they are also concordance democracies, as they not only recognise the civil rights of the individual but also incorporate a legal recognition of the collective rights of their various linguistic and cultural communities.14
Ethnocentrism
Zionism was born in regions where ethnic nationalism had flourished. Most of the thinkers, leaders, and activists of Jewish nationalism came from the lands between Vienna and Warsaw, or Odessa and Vilnius. They rejected out of hand the positions of the autonomist Bund party, which supported the formation in Eastern Europe of a Yiddish people with a language and culture that would be specific and open. The Zionists, on the contrary, claimed to speak on behalf of all Jewish believers and their secular descendants, across the whole world. No less significantly, most Zionists adhered not only to ancient Christian dogma but also to modern anti-Semitic discourse, seeing themselves as foreigners in Europe, ‘orientals’ whose origins in the East made them a ‘Semitic race’.
The ethnocentric mindframe of Zionism was to have a considerable impact upon the development of its identity politics. This essentialist and exclusive attitude enabled the Zionist movement to keep Arab peasants on the sidelines rather than integrate them as members of ‘socialist’ kibbutzes, agricultural cooperatives, or workers’ unions, supposedly vehicles of an inclusive and even internationalist ideology. In the future, the full weight of this rigid ethnocentrism would be felt in the prohibitions and discrimination against non-Jews who lived in the State of Israel and in the territories it would go on to conquer. Time and time again, one would invoke the biblical lines: ‘Behold, a people who dwells apart / And shall not be reckoned among the nations’ (Numbers 23: 9). This policy of ethnic purism has proved to be dominant in establishing relations with ‘foreigners’, including those who had no choice but to become Israeli citizens.
Surprisingly, however, this particularist ethnic conception contributed to the emergence of currents that were more open toward local Arabs. In reaction to the indifference of the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Ukrainians toward them, many Jews, feeling excluded, developed an imaginary sense of identity that was based on origin and race in equal measure, but that led to a strong sense of identification with ‘Semites’. As noted earlier, some saw the local Arabs as distant cousins who had remained in the homeland and had not dispersed; others imagined themselves having blood ties to these very ‘cousins’.15
Among the members of pacifist organisations such as Brit Shalom (the Peace Alliance), Kedmah-Mizraha (Eastward), and Ihud (the Union), alongside a whole lineage of figures that included Arthur Ruppin, Jacob Thon, Rabbi Binyamin, and Martin Buber, there were many who, as well as supporting a binational project and fighting the pompous policies of the Zionist establishment, continued to advocate a racial conception of Israel; this was by no means exceptional at the time. As we shall see later, strange as it may seem, this ‘racism’ sometimes played a significant role in providing an impetus for coexistence with the indigenous Arabs.
Unlike and in opposition to the arrogant orientalist attitude, which was dominant in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and was shared by Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Vladimir Jabotinsky, these ‘Semitic’ pacifists were sure that they could identify a great many spiritual and biological commonalities with the orient and draw from its legacy fruitful elements towards the development of a modern Jewish nationalism. The concept of race, then, fuelled not only the arrogant separatism that has left its mark upon the entire history of the conflict, but also visions of coexistence, integration, and even fusion with the other in the promised land.16
Many of those who, up until 1948, aspired to peace and partnership with the Arabs of Palestine, were driven by a desire to come together with them, something that seems astonishing today, in view of the new radical fusion between religion and nationalism on the part of Judaism and Islam alike. This may be linked to the fact that many of these pacifists were devoutly religious, rather than being atheists like Herzl, Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion. We also know that, up until 1967, the Mizrahi party, which emerged out of the religious faction of the Zionist movement, took a rather moderate and cautious stance on taking possession of the ‘Land of Israel’ (this national–religious party even supported the plan for a Jewish state in Uganda in 1903). It is even less well known that not only Rabbi Binyamin, a strong supporter of federalism, but also eminent figures from Brit Shalom and Ihud including Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Simon, Martin Buber, and Leon Magnes were motivated by a strong religious ethic, which deeply influenced their liberal and pacifist vision of the world.
Binationalism?
The chapters that follow will show how binational and federative ideas in Palestine were largely the preserve of select, isolated intellectual groups. This is not to say that the central Zionist currents totally rejected binational, multinational, or federalist solutions. For as long as Jewish immigrants were in the minority in Palestine, the movement’s leaders continued to tactically formulate various proposals for federative coexistence.17 Stalling tactics of this kind appear almost constantly in the writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Berl Katznelson, and David Ben-Gurion. They are always subject to a condition sine qua non – the achievement of a dominant Jewish majority as a prerequisite for any solution of statal coexistence – along with a staunch refusal to establish a political structure based on the democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote’, which would risk impeding Jewish colonisation. The Zionist leadership has engaged in frantic attacks against those who backed out from this consensus.
Ben-Gurion recounts the following anecdote from his past:
One day I was invited to a meeting of this Brit Shalom; it was nineteen years ago, in 1925. There was a discussion between me and them […] I told them that the Jews would not accept the binational formula, nor would the Arabs, because the main issue was aliyah (the ‘ascent’ of Jews into Palestine). Then they asked what ‘binational state’ means: does it mean like in Canada? In Canada there are two nations: the British are in the majority, the French in the minority. And they have national equality and the French language, a dominant French culture, but that’s only for the French in Canada. They have no right to bring in French people from France or elsewhere. Nor do they claim any such right. Is that the kind of binational state we want?18
The question was, of course, purely rhetorical. Like most members of his party, Ben-Gurion had clearly understood that the Zionist colonisation project stood in fundamental contradiction to the idea of a common and egalitarian political structure shared with the indigenous inhabitants.
In 1918, Jabotinsky formulated the idea of a binational government, shared between the Jewish people returning to Eretz Israel (Greater Israel), which includes both banks of the river Jordan, and the local population. Did he sincerely believe that this was a real possibility? A liberal as well as a militarist, right up to the end of his life Jabotinsky supported cultural and linguistic autonomy for the Arabs and spoke out in favour of their equal civil and political rights while stating that he would not be opposed to the emigration of most of them.19 And in 1925, in a private letter, he admitted: ‘I am not a supporter of an Arab–Hebrew federation […]. We are Europe: not only its disciples, but also the creators of European civilisation. What do we have to do with the “Orient”? In any case, everything Oriental is destined to be forgotten.’20 Jabotinsky would be faced with quite a problem, however: his precious Enlightenment Europe barbarically expelled him and left him no choice but to emigrate to America or go and live in Palestine with the ‘orientals’.
