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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What explains the peculiar intensity and evident intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Of all the ""hot spots"" in the world today, the apparently endless clash between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East seems unique in its longevity and resistance to resolution. Is this conflict really different from other ethnic and nationalist confrontations, and if so, in what way? In this fully revised and expanded fifth edition of his highly respected introductory text, Alan Dowty demystifies the conflict by putting it in broad historical perspective, identifying its roots, and tracing its evolution up to the current impasse. His account offers a clear analytic framework for understanding transformations over time, and in doing so, punctures the myths of an ""age-old"" conflict with an unbridgeable gap between the two sides. Rather than simply reciting historical detail, this book presents a clear overview that serves as a road map through the thicket of conflicting claims. Updated to include recent developments, such as the recent Israeli elections and the debate over the two-state solution, the new edition presents in full the opposed perspectives of the two sides, leaving readers to make their own evaluations of the issues. The book thus expresses fairly and objectively the concerns, hopes, fears, and passions of both sides, making it clear why this conflict is waged with such vehemence - and how, for all that, the gap between the two sides has narrowed over time.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1 Introduction: Two Worlds Collide
Dispelling Myths
Defining the Conflict
The Setting: Ottoman Palestine Before World War I
2 The Jewish Story to 1914
A Fossilized Relic?
The Theme of Persecution
“Come, Let Us Go”
Herzl and the Second Aliyah
First Encounters
3 The Arab Story to 1914
The Glory of Islam
The Rise of the West
Palestine and Palestinism
First Encounters
The Debut of Arab Nationalism
4 The Emergence of Israel, 1914–1967
The British Mandate
A Mischievous Pretence?
Holocaust and Partition
The War of Independence/An-Nakba: The Second Stage of the Conflict
Nasser and Nationalism
5 The Re-emergence of the Palestinians, 1967–1988
The War that No One Wanted?
The Peculiar Legacy of 1967
The Decade of Sadat: Entering the Third Stage of the Conflict
The Lebanese Tangle
Shaking Things Up: The First Intifada
6 The First Pass at Peace, 1988–2001
The Oslo Breakthrough
The Rocky Road to Peace
What Went Wrong?
The Roof Falls In
7 The Fourth Stage of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 2001–2009
The End of the Arafat Era
Israel Turns to Unilateralism
A Turning Point: Ideology Prevails
8 The Downward Spiral since 2009
Palestinian Unilateralism
The Arab Spring
The Second Round in Gaza
The Kerry Initiative
Third Round in Gaza: The Gap Widens
International Dimensions: Shifting Sands
Divided Voices, Palestinian and Israeli
Fourth Round in Gaza
9 The Impasse that Remains
The End of the Two-State Solution?
Territory and Settlements
Jerusalem
Security Issues
Refugees
A General Prognosis
10 The Perfect Conflict
Right against Right?
A Practical Solution
Building Foundations: Extremists and Illusions
Reflections
Chronology
Further Reading
Internet Links
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Maps
Chapter 1
Map 1.1
Ottoman Palestine, 1888–1918
Chapter 4
Map 4.1
1947 UN Partition Plan
Map 4.2
1949 armistice lines and 1967 cease-fire lines
Chapter 6
Map 6.1
1995 interim agreement (Oslo II)
Map 6.2
Redeployment following 1998 Wye River Memorandum
Chapter 7
Map 7.1
West Bank Separation Barrier
Chapter 9
Map 9.1
Jewish Settlements in the West Bank
List of Illustrations
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Possible solutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Impact of the intifada: territorial concessions
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
Refugees’ first choice (for the exercise of the right of return)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Begin Reading
Chronology
Further Reading
Internet Links
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Hot Spots in Global Politics series
Samer N. Abboud, Syria, 2nd edition
Kidane Mengisteab, The Horn of Africa
Amalendu Misra, Afghanistan
Jacob Mundy, Libya
Robert Springborg, Egypt
Gareth Stansfield, Iraq, 2nd edition
Jonathan Tonge, Northern Ireland
Thomas Turner, Congo
Israel/Palestine
Fifth Edition
Alan Dowty
polity
Copyright © Alan Dowty 2023
The right of Alan Dowty to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
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: 978-1-5095-5483-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940606
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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
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of
SANDRA WINICUR
Strength and honor are her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
Proverbs 31: 25–6
Preface
Can an introduction to the highly charged Arab–Israel conflict be “objective” and yet communicate the depth of emotions and humanity on both sides? Perhaps the goal is hopelessly naive, as modern theories of knowledge have repeatedly claimed; indeed, the very concept of objectivity has in recent decades been subjected to relentless attack. Yet it is precisely in the discussion of hotly contested issues, where it is hardest to achieve, that the subject refuses to go away. Perhaps it is an unachievable goal, but in my view that does not relieve us as scholars from the responsibility of trying to approach it as much as we possibly can.
The approach I have followed in this introduction to the clash between Israelis and Palestinians is to present the opposed perspectives in their full intensity, leaving readers to think through the claims and counterclaims for themselves. The analysis follows a conceptual framework that emphasizes the various approaches to resolution of the conflict.
The book assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader. It covers the basic features of the confrontation with a strong historical emphasis, since the very vocabulary of the conflict requires historical knowledge. The text is followed by a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and Internet links. Throughout the text there are references to related primary sources in the accompanying reader, The Israel/Palestine Reader (Polity 2019).
Within this framework, the book focuses on larger developments such as changing public attitudes on both sides, rather than the details of forgotten diplomatic episodes. The original purpose in offering this account, as stated at the outset, was “to chart the origins and evolution of the conflict, to explore the different motivations and claims of those groups involved, and to discuss the prospects for resolution.” As it happens these prospects seemed more promising when the first edition appeared, and subsequent editions have tracked the growing impasse in diplomatic efforts toward conflict reduction if not resolution. In particular, this current edition asks whether the two-state solution, long the centerpiece of this diplomacy, retains its relevance and feasibility.
I am grateful to Louise Knight, Inès Boxman and their fellow editors at Polity for their confidence and support at all stages, and to Susan Beer for copy-editing. Since this book draws on the accumulated wisdom, such as it is, of almost sixty years of academic and personal involvement in the conflict, it would be pointlessly tedious to try to mention everyone who has had some influence, direct or indirect, on the content of these pages. I will simply mention those who read all or part of the manuscript and made useful suggestions, which I probably should have used more extensively: Sandra Winicur (as usual, my closest reader), Phil Mikesell, David Freeman. Gail, my life’s partner, who was an extraordinary source of support through the first three editions of this book, is no longer with me. But her presence is on every page.
1Introduction: Two Worlds Collide
However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place …
Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am (Ginzberg 1891: 162)
Dispelling Myths
The conflict over Israel/Palestine may be the quintessential “hot spot” on today’s globe. Even the label attached to it is contentious. If we call it a conflict over “Israel,” Palestinian or Arab observers would consider that a Zionist or pro-Israel framework. By the same token, calling it a conflict over “Palestine” favors the definition and terminology of anti-Zionist critics of Israel. I will, therefore, use both labels, depending on whose viewpoint is on stage, and also employ the somewhat awkward compromise of “Israel/ Palestine.”
There is another problem with the label. Although the clash between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is the core of the conflict, the involvement of neighboring Arab states after the emergence of Israel in 1948 expanded the confrontation into an “Arab–Israeli” conflict. This label is still more common, even though Palestinians have reclaimed their previous position as Israel’s major antagonist, and Arab states have to some extent disengaged (Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel and other Arab states have established diplomatic relations). Given this re-emergence of the core conflict, we will focus on “Israel/Palestine” while not overlooking the role of Arab nations.
By any label, the Arab–Israeli conflict is often described as one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in today’s world. Pundits speak about “age-old ethnic hatreds,” about the “clash of religions” between Islam and Judaism, and about the “unceasing cycle of violence” that makes it an “unending and insoluble” dilemma. There is a major problem with these characterizations. They are all myths.
This is not an “age-old” conflict. Its origins lie in the 1880s, when Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began settling in the historical Land of Israel (
Eretz Yisrael
), then a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, in order to re-establish a Jewish presence there. The broader Arab–Israeli dimension came into full existence only with the 1947–9 war.
This is not a conflict
caused
by ethnic hatreds. The ethnic identity of the existing population in
Eretz Yisrael/Filastin
as Arabs or as Palestinians was only beginning to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the assertion that Jews constitute an ethnic group as well as a religion was also a relatively new, and not yet universally accepted idea. On the other hand, mutual hatred between Jews and Arabs has grown apace over the course of the conflict and has much in common with patterns of ethnic conflict elsewhere. But historically, Jewish minorities generally fared better among Arab populations than in most European states.
This is not a conflict
rooted
in a “clash of religions.” To be sure, as the conflict developed it created religious issues. But Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion that accepts Islam as a legitimate monotheistic faith, while Islam regards Jews (and Christians) as “People of the Book” or
dhimmi
(protected people) who, while not having equal status with Muslims, are regarded as part of a common tradition and are given freedom to practice their own religions. Jews were subject to certain restrictions, but within this framework were generally secure from arbitrary persecution (Lewis 1984). If Jews fleeing the pogroms (racial massacres) of late nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia had entered the Ottoman Empire seeking no more than the right to live as a minority practicing its own religion, there would have been no Arab–Israeli conflict.
Finally – though this is more arguable – this is not a conflict of unceasing violence, nor are there compelling grounds for pronouncing it “insoluble.” During the last 140 years, the struggle between Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians has undergone several key transformations in intensity and scope. Along with periods of dramatic and explosive violence, there have been periods of relative stability and quiet. There has been continued economic interaction. In terms of loss of human life, the Arab–Israel conflict is far from the “bloodiest” conflict of the last century; it is dwarfed not only by general wars such as the two world wars, but also by other ethnic conflicts that have involved the slaughter of entire populations.
Seeing the conflict in this long-range perspective also provides the best evidence that it is not, in fact, insoluble. We see that the violence is not constant; there must be, therefore, some conditions under which the two sides exercise restraint. This is not simply an irrational eruption of hatred and hostility. In fact, contrary to the popular image, the gap between mainstream opinion on the two sides has actually narrowed over time. To show this, we must look at the broad historical picture, which will follow this introduction.
Defining the Conflict
The Israel/Palestine issue is not, then, age-old; it is not a result of long-standing antipathies between Arab and Jew, is not (at least initially) about religious differences, and is less unremittingly and hopelessly violent than its public image would indicate. This clears away some common misunderstandings. But how, then, do we define and characterize this dramatic clash?
The core of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the claim of two peoples to the same land. Stripped of other dimensions added over the years, it was and is a clash between a Jewish national movement (Zionism) seeking to establish a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael – the historic Land of Israel – and an Arab/Palestinian national movement defining the same territory as Filastin (Palestine) and regarding it as an integral part of the Arab world. Supporters of Israel would prefer to define the core issue as the refusal of Palestinians and other Arabs to acknowledge the existence and legitimacy of a Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland. Arabs define the core issue as the violation of the natural right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in its ancestral homeland. But these two opposed formulations both actually confirm the basic definition above; stripped of the advocacy of their own answers, both agree that this is a question of conflicting claims to the same territory.
This hardly makes Israel/Palestine a unique case. Nations and groups within nations fight over territory as often as anything. But in contrast to most other territorial conflicts, the claims overlap totally in this case. Eretz Yisrael and Filastin are both usually identified today with the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine as set after World War I. So long as both sides claim all of it, the loser faces the threat of being left stateless. Without territorial compromise, this becomes what game theorists call a zero-sum game: whatever one side gains comes at the expense of the other (gains and losses thus total zero). There is no potential “win–win” outcome where both sides gain. It is a situation of total conflict, with no incentives for cooperation or negotiation.
A fight over territory is a “real” conflict, in that it is not simply a result of emotions, misunderstandings, misperceptions, and other human imperfections. Even if all hostile thoughts and emotions could be eliminated, the question would remain: Who gets what? This brings us to a basic distinction that is critical in analyzing international conflicts. Objective sources of conflict, like territory, can be thought of as “givens”: they exist independently of our thoughts and feelings, and by their very existence they create differences of interest among us. Not only land, but also wealth and material resources raise the issue of “who gets what.” The same is true of intangible assets such as political power and national security; more for one side means less for its rivals. Land, wealth, and power are all “scarce goods”; measures that make one state feel more secure (arms buildups, territorial gains, alliances, intervention) makes other states feel less secure.
Emphasis on objective sources of conflict is characteristic of those who stress rational behavior and focus on “interests” in the analysis of politics, such as the “realist” school of thought. When different interests are created by the fact that not all demands can be met, pursuit of one’s own interest is hardly irrational. To the extent that conflicts are “objective” there are certain expectations about the behavior of the parties involved. In the first place, there should be less expectation that the conflict can be eliminated completely, since no amount of goodwill can offset the fact that something real is at stake and that each side will emerge with either less or more of it. On the other hand, since the two parties are presumably acting on the basis of interest rather than emotion or doctrine, there is greater hope for compromise rather than violent encounters that are costly to both sides.
This is important in the Israeli/Palestinian case. The core issue – land – is a real issue in which a rational negotiated solution, such as partition, is theoretically possible. Chapter 4 will take up this thread of thought. But in the meantime we need to look at nonobjective sources of conflict, which may not have been critical in its origins but have developed over time as a result of it. What is not objective is, by definition, subjective: produced by the mind, feelings, or temperament of the subject. This includes ideas and ideologies, perceptions and misperceptions, cultural and societal biases, emotions and passions – in short, the whole spectrum of mental activity.
Theoretically, conflicts rooted in subjective thoughts and feelings could be totally eliminated, since they are not necessarily “real” conflicts of interest. Misunderstandings, passions, and distrust are creations of our minds, our minds can also erase them. But, by the same token, they may be less responsive to a self-interested bargaining process, since they are not the result of a “rational” process. Are “irrational” hatreds or distrusts necessarily easier to resolve than conflicts of interest? It seems that aggressive ideas or emotions, or even simple distrust, can sometimes drive combatants into a “lose–lose” outcome, damaging their presumed interests.
Subjective sources of conflict are a natural focus for behavioral scientists who study the psychological, cultural, and societal aspects of human behavior. Scholars and practitioners in the field of conflict resolution also tend to emphasize subjective factors such as misunderstanding or misperception, since these flaws are in theory correctable. Questions from this perspective include such issues as: What is the image of “the enemy”? What is the perception of the other side’s aims and methods? How do fear and insecurity influence attitudes and behavior? As we shall see, these questions are all relevant to the Israeli/Palestinian impasse. Thus, while we begin with an objective core issue (land), we will also pay close attention to the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians perceive and express their respective positions, beginning with the Jewish and Arab backgrounds in chapters 2 and 3 respectively.
This is important because, while Israelis and Palestinians have a territorial conflict, it is not only a territorial conflict. Jewish and Arab national movements emerged in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century the idea of national self-determination and the nation-state as the basic unit of world politics swept over Europe as group after group discovered, or rediscovered, its identity as a “nation” entitled to statehood. In some cases (Germany, Italy) this led to unification of existing states, while in others (Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria) it sparked movements for secession from existing multinational empires. What was required for nationhood was, in the words of French scholar Ernest Renan, “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories … [and] the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received” (Renan, 1882; see Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Israel/Palestine Reader).
By this standard both Jews and Arabs qualified as nations, and nationalism made its mark on both. A vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Europe at this time, over half of them in Tsarist Russia (which then included most of Poland). The idea of a Jewish nation-state had tremendous positive appeal, given the long Jewish history of statelessness. But Jews were also pushed toward this option by two seemingly contradictory threats. The first, felt more in Western Europe, was the fear that liberalization and extension of civic equality to Jews would lead to massive assimilation and threaten Jewish survival. The second, stronger in Eastern Europe, was that nationalism actually made life more precarious for remaining minorities; emerging nationalist governments celebrated their newly affirmed identities by tyrannizing those who did not share it. The last two decades of the 1800s were scarred by waves of anti-Jewish persecution that threatened simple physical survival. These pressures on the Jewish community will be explored more fully in chapter 2.
Arab populations in the Middle East were also becoming aware of the new winds blowing out of Europe. Most lived in the Ottoman Empire, which had for two centuries been vainly resisting the loss of territory to European powers and the expansion of European influence within its borders. During the nineteenth century the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, one by one, liberated themselves from Turkish rule and proclaimed their own nation-states: Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania. Arab intellectuals grasped the potential power of nationalism as a mobilizing and unifying force that could restore the Arab world to its grandeur of past centuries, countering both the stagnation of the Ottoman Empire and the threat from European states that seemed to believe that self-determination applied only in Europe. These currents in the Arab world, and in Palestine in particular, will be traced more fully in chapter 3.
Out of this emerged both Jewish and Arab national movements. In an age when others were rediscovering or inventing their own national identities, nationalist Jews (Zionists) felt that by virtue of their 3,500-year history as a people with a distinct identity, culture, religion, history, and language, their claim to national rights was as solid as any. In fact Jews possessed many of the attributes of a “nation,” in the modern sense, long before modern nationalism came onto the scene. Yet in one respect Jews were certainly not like other “nations” in nineteenth-century Europe: they lacked a defined territorial base. They were a minority in every European nation, and no state or region on that continent could be claimed as an ancestral homeland. This claim could only be made on another continent and across two millennia of history.
Palestinian/Arab nationalism was also anomalous in one important respect. Was it Palestinian nationalism or Arab nationalism, or both? The answer has implications for the response to Zionism. In the early days there was even talk of Arab nationalist– Zionist cooperation against European imperialism: Arabs would concede one corner of their vast domain to the Zionists in return for Jewish support for liberation of the rest. The first Arab nationalists, who appeared in Beirut and Damascus around the turn of the twentieth century, had a pan-Arab focus, calling for the unification of all Arabic-speaking peoples. But in the first decade of the new century the word Filastin also made its appearance as a political, and not just a geographic, term within what was to become the Palestinian Arab community. In the decades to come, the pendulum was to swing back and forth between the two poles of identity, depending on the situation in Palestine and, even more, on trends in the broader Arab world.
Yet while Jewish and Palestinian/Arab nationalism both had unusual features, they also had striking parallels to each other. Both involved a Semitic people with roots in antiquity and a long history as a coherent political community. Both peoples looked back to a “golden age” that inspired efforts to restore the position they had once enjoyed. Both felt challenged in one way or another by European modernization and penetration, viewing it as a threat to their identity, and both reacted by turning to an idea that, although itself European in origin, could be turned to their own defense: the idea of national self-determination (Tessler 1994: 2–4).
So far we have seen that Israel/Palestine is a territorial conflict, though one with some unique features. It is also a nationalist conflict, or a conflict between two national movements, though once again one with unique features. There is a third category that is often seen as relevant, and once again the case at hand is not typical of conflicts in that category. This is the category of colonialist conflicts, involving the establishment of settlements in foreign lands with the intent of expanding one’s own culture and influence. A recent variant is Thomas G. Mitchell’s characterization of Israel/ Palestine as a “settler conflict,” defined as “conflict between a settler population, which was part of a colonization effort, and a native population, which was resisting the colonizing enterprise” (Mitchell 2000: 1). Many elements of this picture fit: Jewish settlers from Europe did enter Palestine in order to establish a new community not based on the existing culture there, and – living in an age when few questioned the superiority of European culture – they believed that their presence would bring the benefits of a more advanced civilization to the native population. From the Palestinian perspective, the uninvited intrusion of European Jewish settlers is part and parcel of the overall penetration of European influence and culture into the Middle East, and cannot be understood outside that context. The Jewish settlers even referred to themselves as “colonists.”
However, there was no home country whose interests or specific culture was tied to the enterprise; the settlers received some help from particular powers, but never saw themselves as agents of those powers. In their minds they were re-establishing a Jewish homeland that would, above all, be independent; that was a core element of Zionist thinking. They did not even come from a single home country, but from many; in addition, before 1948 they had no control over the territory in which they settled, and made no effort to rule over the native population (Penslar 2003: 84–98). In sum, since they were not acting on behalf of any colonial power, it is more accurate to characterize their settlement as “colonization” rather than “colonialism.”
The Setting: Ottoman Palestine Before World War I
There was another sense in which the Jewish settlers in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine were not typical colonizers: the land of their dreams was anything but prime colonial territory. Apart from the hostility they faced from both government and populace, the Palestinian provinces of the Ottoman Empire were poor in resources, economic potential, and strategic importance. It would have been hard to locate a more unpromising focus for colonial ambitions. Eretz Yisrael/Filastin was rich only in history, as the birthplace of monotheism and the three monotheistic world faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
For the Hebrew tribes who spent forty years in the wastes of the Sinai desert, the biblical Land of Israel may have seemed to be “flowing with milk and honey.” Visitors to the same area in the 1800s came away with a different impression. Arid, bleak, and uninviting, the landscape is described as a desolate backwater within a larger stagnant Ottoman state and society. Visiting in 1867, Mark Twain exclaimed: “Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince … It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land” (Twain 1974: 606; see Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, in Israel/Palestine Reader). The southern half of what became Palestine was the Negev Desert, essentially a continuation of the Sinai Desert. The northern half was divided geographically into three north-to-south zones: a coastal plain, much of it marshy and malarial, which was considered unhealthy and had a sparse population; a central hilly region that, despite its arid and stony appearance, contained most of the cultivable land and most of the population, and the Jordan valley from the ridge of the hills to the river, which received almost no rainfall and thus had few settlements apart from an occasional oasis such as Jericho. Splitting through the central hilly range in the north was the Jezre’el Valley, connecting the coastal plain to the Sea of Galilee, with hot and often marshy conditions similar to both of those areas. The Jordan River, the conventional modern eastern border of Eretz Yisrael/ Filastin, is already below sea level where it enters and leaves the Sea of Galilee; by the time it reaches the Dead Sea in the south, it marks the lowest spot on earth and one of the most desolate.
The three Ottoman districts corresponding to modern Palestine had, according to adjusted Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 in 1881–2, on the eve of the first new wave of Jewish immigration. Of this number, 403,795 (87%) were Muslim, 43,659 (10%) were Christian, and 15,011 (3%) were Jews (McCarthy 1990: 10). Nearly all the Muslims, and the vast majority of the Christians, were Arab in language and culture. Since many Jewish residents were not Ottoman citizens, other scholars put the Jewish total at 20,000–25,000 (Ben-Aryeh 1989–90: 78). But whatever the total number, Jews still constituted a small percentage of the population at this time. The Jewish population was almost totally urban, concentrated in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, and very religiously traditional in its way of life.
As a whole, however, the population was still largely rural and agrarian; in 1890, it is estimated, the population of the three provinces was 67 percent rural (though only six percent of Jews lived in rural areas) (Bachi 1974: 32).
The picture of stagnation in Ottoman Palestine needs to be qualified. The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change in the Middle East, and the Ottoman government was reacting to enormous internal and external challenges with serious efforts of reform and renewal. In the middle of the century it embarked on a broad program of reform – the Tanzimat – designed to strengthen its own authority throughout the Empire. In Palestinian areas this brought about greater security in the countryside, better transport and communication, and increased attention to maintaining the loyalty of the Arab population to Constantinople (Divine 1994: 107–35). While the 1881–2 population may still have been fewer than half a million, this was almost double the population of 275,000 in 1800 (Bachi 1974: 32). While the region may have appeared technologically backward to European eyes, significant changes were taking place. In contrast to visitors such as Mark Twain, Muslim travelers (such as Nu’man al-Qasatli in 1874) painted a much more positive portrait of life in Palestine at the time (Rafeq 2000; see Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Nu’man al-Qasatli’s Travels in Palestine,” in Israel/Palestine Reader).
The “Holy Land,” that area made familiar to Western civilization by the Christian Bible, had, except during the Crusades, been under Muslim rule since 638 CE. The Ottomans, a Turkish dynasty founded by the first Sultan, Osman, at the end of the thirteenth century, conquered the area along with Syria and Egypt in 1516–17. Based in Western Anatolia, the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) in 1453 and made it their capital, and embarked on campaigns of expansion that brought most of the Muslim world, and many other areas, under their control.
The Turks came from Central Asia, speaking a language unrelated to either Indo-European tongues (such as Persian) or Semitic languages (such as Arabic and Hebrew). When the early Arab conquests brought Islam within reach, they (like the Persians) became Muslims, adopted the Arabic alphabet for their own language, and became a part of the extensive multicultural World of Islam (dar al-islam). The Turks were known as formidable warriors, which led Arab Muslim rulers, beginning in the ninth century, to begin importing Turkish slaves for service as soldiers. The “slaves” soon became a privileged military caste, and within two centuries translated their military command into a political domination that lasted for almost 1,000 years. The Ottomans were preceded by other Turkish dynasties – the Seljuks, the Mamluks – and over time, the division of labor between Turks, as commanders and rulers, and Arabs, as religious and cultural leaders, became the standard pattern (Lewis 1963).
At its peak, in the seventeenth century, Ottoman rule stretched from the borders of Morocco in the west, across North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf in the east, and in the north included most of southeastern Europe and the north shore of the Black Sea. Twice (in 1529 and 1683) Ottoman armies laid siege to Vienna. The Ottoman ruler was not only Sultan of the Empire, but was also generally recognized as Caliph (khalifa), successor to Muhammad as leader of all Muslims, which translated into influence beyond Ottoman borders. For two centuries the military might of “the terrible Turk” was the nightmare of Europe, while the Ottoman regime was also known for “its thriving economy, its meticulous government, and its rich and brilliant culture” (Lewis 1963: 33).
But the legendary grandeur of the first two centuries was matched by an equally legendary decline during the two centuries that followed. In the words of Bernard Lewis, “if the first ten Sultans of the house of Osman astonish us with the spectacle of a series of able and intelligent men rare if not unique in the annals of dynastic succession, the remainder of the rulers of that line provides an even more astonishing series of incompetents, degenerates, and misfits” (Lewis 1968: 22–3). Prior to the second attack on Vienna, the Sultan’s forces had seldom suffered defeat; from that time forward, they seldom tasted victory. By the time Zionism appeared on the scene, the Ottoman Empire had lost half its territory to a combination of Western imperialism and nationalist unrest. War with Russia was almost constant; by 1917 the two autocratic empires had fought over a dozen times, with the Russians seizing all Ottoman territories north and east of the Black Sea. North African territories, ruled by Constantinople through local dynasties, were lost in the course of the nineteenth century, with France claiming Algeria (1830) and Tunisia (1881) and Great Britain occupying Egypt in 1882 (in 1912 Italy completed the sweep by annexing Tripoli and Benghazi, present-day Libya). The British, who had earlier protected the Ottomans against other European powers, also established a dominant presence in Aden (present-day Yemen) and the Persian Gulf.
Finally, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all its European territories. Austria took Hungary, Croatia, and Transylvania in the eighteenth century. In the century that followed, the non-Muslim nationalities in the Balkans managed to win their independence from “the yoke of the Turk”: Greece in 1830, Serbia and Romania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1905. In the Balkan Wars of 1911–12, even Muslim Albania emerged as a new nation, and the Ottomans were left with a bare toehold in Europe, around Constantinople itself.
But the loss of territory is not the entire story. The declining Ottoman regime, no longer a match for European armies that had surpassed it technologically, was also threatened by broader Western economic, cultural, and political penetration. In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt as part of France’s war with Great Britain, advancing as far as Acre on the Palestinian coast. His campaign was not only a military embarrassment for the Ottoman defenders, but also brought with it an influx of Western economic, scientific, and political influences that, within a few years, made deep inroads in Egypt and elsewhere (providing the basis for a regime in Cairo, under one Muhammad Ali, that later threatened Constantinople itself).
The decline of the Ottoman Empire was part of a broader development that changed the shape of human history: the rise of Europe relative to other parts of the globe and the spread of European (“Western”) imperial control into all other regions. This transformation included Europeanization of the entire Western hemisphere, domination over equally venerable civilizations in Asia, and subjugation of Africa. In this light the question might be: How did the Middle East, located on the borders of Europe, resist these pressures as long as it did? The answer, in part, was the existence of the Ottoman Empire, which up to the end of the seventeenth century still threatened Europe more than vice versa, and even thereafter constituted a leaky but still substantial shield against the West. And in large part it was because, before the twentieth century, European powers blocked each other.
The United States was still a minor player in this drama: studiously neutral in the European power game, but by no means “isolated” from the Old World, as later mythology would have it. During the Crimean War, for example, while Britain and France defended the Ottomans against Russia, US policy tilted toward Russia as a means of putting pressure on the British to make concessions on outstanding issues elsewhere (Dowty 1971). In its stance toward the Middle East, including Palestine, the United States was torn between its identity as part of the West and its ideology as the champion of freedom and democracy. As part of the West, the new American nation made war on the Barbary pirates, maintained a naval presence in the Mediterranean throughout the nineteenth century, and was active – privately, not governmentally – in the “civilizing mission” through a missionary/ educational/ philanthropic nexus. As champions of a new world order, the United States spoke up for human rights in locations from Morocco to Bulgaria, and on occasion Middle Eastern regimes appealed to American anti-colonialism as a possible counterweight to European pressures.
One trend in US thinking that united Western identity and ideology was a religious movement known as “Restorationism”: a Christian doctrine promoting the restoration of the Jews to their historic homeland. The idea attracted wide support from such figures as former President John Adams, who envisioned “a hundred thousand Israelites” conquering Palestine (Oren 2007:90). This was well before the advent of Zionism among Jews, but it fostered several attempts to found American Christian colonies in the Holy Land dedicated to the revival (and conversion) of Jews.
Western penetration took many forms, but one that Ottoman authorities found particularly humiliating was the “Capitulations” under which European nations exercised judicial powers in the heart of Ottoman territory. The Capitulations were actually introduced as a result of one of the more tolerant aspects of Ottoman (and earlier Muslim) tradition, under which recognized non-Muslim minorities (Christians and Jews) were allowed to settle disputes within their own communities according to their own religious traditions. The Ottoman government had willingly agreed, for example, to allow French representatives to handle legal issues among French Catholics within the Empire’s borders. But as Ottoman power declined, the demands of European states grew more intrusive, with competing powers using these extraterritorial rights to increase their own influence and block their rivals inside Ottoman territory. France sought the right to protect all Catholics, and Russia posed as guardian of all Orthodox Christians, while Britain and Prussia (later Germany) competed for the Protestants. Russia’s claim of the right to intervene on behalf of all Orthodox Christians was a major cause of the 1853–6 Crimean War, when Britain and France defended the Turks against overbearing Russian demands (Isaiah Friedman 1986: 280–93). By this time, of course, Ottoman authorities were determined to eliminate the Capitulations entirely.
The issue was especially sensitive in the “Palestinian” provinces. Since the Crusades, Jerusalem had been closed to European diplomats, and foreign non-Muslims had no right of permanent residence there. Only when Muhammad Ali of Egypt controlled the city were the first European consuls allowed in Jerusalem, beginning with Britain in 1838, and the hostility to Europeans was still such that at first the consuls moved about the city only with an armed escort, and no open display of Christian or Jewish symbols was allowed. After the Crimean War the Ottoman government, having been rescued by Britain and France, was compelled to issue an edict extending legal equality and non-discrimination to non-Muslims throughout the Empire. This of course strengthened the hand of foreign consuls acting on behalf of those whom they protected.
In this context, Ottoman authorities were hardly likely to welcome European Jews able to claim the protection of their country of origin. Ironically, the Ottoman Empire had traditionally been open to Jewish refugees; it took pride in having offered a haven to those expelled from Spain in 1492. But earlier refugees had settled throughout the Empire, and those who did choose the Palestinian provinces did so as individuals, not as an organized movement; they also assimilated into Arab culture and became Ottoman citizens. The Muslim tradition of religious tolerance accommodated this easily. European Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century were another matter. Even before the rise of Zionism, Ottoman officials had developed an aversion to European Jews who clung to their foreign citizenship, invoked the protection of their consul, and showed no inclination to assimilate. Furthermore, foreign consuls were actually competing for the right to represent Jewish immigrants; for a time Great Britain claimed the right to protect Russian Jews, since the Russian government had hardly bothered to protect them even when they were still in Russia.
As indicated, while there was no territorial unit within the Ottoman Empire corresponding to historical Eretz Yisrael/ Filastin, there was a particular sensitivity with regard to Jerusalem and the areas associated with it historically. The Ottoman administrative borders went through many changes. But after the first wave of Jewish immigration had sensitized Constantinople, in 1888 the Jerusalem area (corresponding to the southern half of Palestine) was constituted as an independent district (sanjak) under direct rule from Constantinople. The northern half of present-day Palestine was divided into two districts (sanjaks), centered in Nablus (Shechem) and Acre, both of which were part of the Beirut province (vilayet) (see map 1.1).
In short, the Ottoman government, in these final decades of its existence, was fighting a rearguard action against foreign penetration and internal disintegration. It feared the European powers that had reduced its power both externally and internally; only by exploiting the splits among these powers had the Ottomans managed to survive such crises as the challenge from Muhammad Ali’s Egypt and the Crimean War. The creation of a new, Westernoriented, non-Muslim minority in the Ottoman heartland, and precisely in an area of particular sensitivity in the long struggle between Islam and the West going back to the Crusades, was simply out of the question. With the loss of its European possessions, the Arabs were – apart from the Turks themselves – the last remaining bastion of the Empire. Ottoman authorities could not fail to be solicitous toward the concerns of their fellow Muslims.
But would Arabs also be infected by the nationalist fever emanating from the West? This had not been an issue in the past; the dominant identities within the Empire were religion, clan, tribe, and family. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century were voices heard calling for Arab liberation from Turkish rule, on the basis of a rediscovered identity as members of an Arab-speaking nation stretching from Morocco to Iraq. The first glimmers came in the late 1870s, when a secret society (with 22 members) in Beirut, Damascus, Tripoli, and Sidon (in present-day Lebanon and Syria) posted placards denouncing the evils of Turkish rule and calling for an Arab uprising against it (Antonius 1946: 79–80).
However, before these ideas reached the Palestinian areas of the Ottoman Empire, they had already reached the Jews of Tsarist Russia and had evoked a thunderous echo.
Map 1.1 Ottoman Palestine, 1888–1918
2The Jewish Story to 1914
As long as in the inner heart a Jewish soul still beats, and an eye still searches for Zion in the East,
our hope is not lost; the hope of two thousand years,
to be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.
Hatikvah (The Hope) – Israeli national anthem (Naftali Herz Imber, 1878)
A Fossilized Relic?
Both Jews and Arabs have long and proud histories. The conflict between them may be comparatively recent, but to understand it, we must consider each side’s historical traditions and memories. This chapter traces the Jewish historical experience, in its full intensity, and then takes a closer look at Jewish perspectives and prospects during the early period of Zionist settlement. Chapter 3 will provide a parallel narrative showing the great importance of Arab history in shaping Arab views and actions during this same period.
Jewish history, according to the Jewish Bible (the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), began about 4,000 years ago with the patriarch Abraham, traditional forefather of both Jews and Arabs. Apart from its religious importance, the Bible is a remarkable historical document for the detail it offers regarding the chronicles of the Hebrew people, centuries before any such accounts existed elsewhere, and for its focus on defeats and tragedies as well as victories and glory (it is, after all, a morality tale).
The first non-biblical mention of the Jewish people is an Egyptian inscription, the Merneptah Stele, dated c. 1220 BCE, in which the Egyptian ruler boasts that “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not” (Malamat 1976: 42). This corresponds roughly to the period of the Israelite conquest of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt, as recorded in the Bible. Many of the conquered peoples were related Semitic groups, some of which apparently assimilated to the Israelite tradition while others remained separate during and after the biblical period. Other archeological and historical records of biblical people and events begin appearing around the time of Kings David and Solomon and the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem, roughly 1000 BCE, and they multiply over the following centuries.
Jews therefore have one of the longest histories – if not the longest – as a distinct people with a continuous identity expressed in language, culture, genealogy, and religious practice. Furthermore, this identity endured despite geographic dispersion and the lack of a physical homeland. The survival of the Jews as a distinct people is often regarded as one of history’s greatest puzzles. The eminent historian Arnold Toynbee, who constructed an elegant intellectual edifice of world history built on the rhythmic rise and fall of successive civilizations, classified the Jews of today as one of a handful of “fossilized relics of societies now extinct” (Toynbee 1955: 51). How could the Hebrews or Israelites of antiquity have survived when other peoples of the Bible – Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines, Hittites, Babylonians, Moabites, etc. – had long since vanished from the stage of history?
The answer to this question clearly relates in some way to the key contribution that Judaism made to human history: Jews introduced monotheism to the world. From this small patch of arid land came the stunning insight that revolutionized religious belief and practice everywhere. In the words of Israel’s 1948 Proclamation of Independence, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people … Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.” The monotheistic revelation was not just a theological event; it also introduced an entirely new way of looking at the world. Thomas Cahill, in The Gifts of the Jews (1998), sums it up in the book’s subtitle: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. The belief in one God moved people from a cyclical view of history, in which change is illusory, to a linear view that lays the foundation for ethical responsibility. In Cahill’s words, “the Jews were able to give us the Great Whole, a unified universe that makes sense and that, because of its evident superiority as a worldview, completely overwhelms the warring and contradictory phenomena of polytheism” (Cahill 1998: 240).
Out of this tradition came three monotheistic world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Toynbee himself connected Jewish survival to its relationship with Christianity and Islam: “The Jews’ present-day importance, celebrity, and discomfort all derive from the historic fact that they have involuntarily begotten two Judaic world-religions whose millions of adherents make the preposterous but redoubtable claim to have superseded the Jews” (Toynbee 1961: 479). Though often at war with each other (and within themselves), the three faiths constitute an “Abrahamic” family of religions, and in more reflective moments they recognize their mutual kinship. As Pope Pius XI declared, “we are spiritual progeny of Abraham. Spiritually, we are all Semites” (Martin 1983: 18).
But while Christianity and Islam claim universal validity, and have sought converts among all nations and peoples, Judaism has retained a sense of peoplehood. Being Jewish is not a matter of professed belief, but of sharing a common heritage; one may be Jewish without being religious. From one perspective, this makes Judaism more limited and parochial, with an emphasis on the “particularism” of one’s own identity rather than on a universalist message that (at least in theory) is addressed to all races and cultures. However, by the same token there is a fundamental tolerance for other traditions and religions since there is no expectation of converting non-Jews into Jews.
The particularism of Judaism is a matter not only of shared ancestry and history as a people, but also of attachment to a particular place. The geography of Eretz Yisrael is interwoven into Jewish scripture, litany, ritual, and tradition. Jews have a portable package of religious practices that they carry with them to any place, but Eretz Yisrael remains the eternal spiritual center. Religious Jews pray three times a day for the return to Jerusalem. As long ago as the Babylonian exile (fifth–sixth centuries BCE), the yearning to return was expressed lyrically in Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat,
And we wept, as we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps,
For our captors there asked us for songs,
Our tormentors, for amusement,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning;
If I do not remember thee,
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
The theme of exile and return is a central motif in Jewish tradition that, given the biblical tales of Joseph and Moses, predates the Babylonian captivity by several centuries. After the return from Babylon, and the building of the Second Temple, came exile at the hands of the Romans, in the first and second centuries CE, following the crushing of two Jewish revolts against Roman rule. In the traditional structure of a morality tale, exile is punishment by God for the collective failings of the Jewish people, while return signifies divine mercy as the sinners are given another chance to redeem themselves. The idea of Return to Zion also came to be associated with messianism, the belief in the promised appearance of the messiah (the “anointed one”) who would not only lead Jews back to Zion (emblem of the Holy Land), but would also bring about the final redemption of Jews and, ultimately, of all mankind.
Palestine, like most areas of the Roman Empire, was gradually Christianized in the early centuries of the Christian era. After the Arab conquest of 636–40, immigration and conversion created an Islamic and Arab majority, though Christian and Jewish minorities remained. From the third to the tenth centuries the center of Jewish life passed to Babylonia, where a significant Jewish population had remained. It was during this period that the Talmud, the great repository of Jewish law, was compiled, with the Babylonian rendition as the dominant version.
As a protected minority under Islam, from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries Jews also became active participants in a vibrant Muslim culture centered in Spain. This period is considered a “golden age” in both traditions. Spain replaced Babylonia as the center of Jewish culture and creativity, producing many of the most illustrious names in Jewish history: among them the great philosopher-theologian-scientist Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon). Eventually, however, religious zeal and intolerance undermined the creative interaction of the three traditions that had sustained this cultural flowering. The Christian reconquest of Spain, completed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492, brought with it a surge in Christian zealotry. For the century before this, Jews had been under enormous pressure to convert; those who did were then subjected to the Inquisition, established in 1483 to determine whether their new Christianity was genuine. Finally – and also, strikingly, in 1492 – the remaining Jews were given the choice of conversion or expulsion.
The Spanish expulsion of 1492 was a major watershed in Jewish history. It produced a flood of refugees (known as Sephardim: “Spaniards” in Hebrew), many of whom found their way into the rising Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Sultan Bajazet reputedly exclaimed, “What! Call ye this Ferdinand ‘wise’ – he who depopulates his own dominions in order to enrich mine?” (Roth 1961: 252). Some settled in Eretz Yisrael, where they were prominent in the emergence of Safed (in the Galilee) as a center of Jewish law and religious mysticism.
Throughout Jewish history, and especially in turbulent times, the idea of Return to Zion remained an important fixture in Jewish thought. The medieval Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, for example, expressed the thought that “My heart is in the East and I am on the far edge of the West” (Carmi 1981; see Two Poems by Yehuda Halevi in Israel/Palestine Reader). Many individuals, including Halevi, did manage to return so that they might at least be buried in holy ground. The vision of a collective return of Jews to Zion was never far from the surface, as evidenced in the excitement raised by a series of “false messiahs” who stirred the Jewish world over succeeding centuries: Solomon Molcho (in sixteenth-century Italy), Shabbetai Zevi (in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire), and Jacob Frank (in eighteenth-century Poland and Ukraine).
From the fifteenth century the center of Jewish life shifted to Eastern Europe. Persecutions and expulsions in Western Europe forced many Jews to flee, while some rulers in Eastern Europe were welcoming Jewish refugees bringing Western commercial and artisanal skills. In 1264 the Polish Duke Boleslaw issued the Statute of Kalisz, granting Jews rights of residence and protection. This began a tradition of Polish and other rulers granting autonomy to Jewish communities, which developed into flourishing and largely self-governing entities. The refugees brought with them a mixture of medieval German dialects that evolved into Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew characters. From the Hebrew word for Germany, Ashkenaz, came the designation of this community, and most European Jews, as Ashkenazim.
Beginning in the 1700s these communities experienced an astounding population growth as the mortality rate dropped sharply with improved health and living conditions. The estimated world Jewish population in 1700 was roughly one million, about what it had been 1,200 years earlier (after peaking in the first century at about 4.5 million). Two centuries later, in 1900, there were an estimated 10.6 million Jews in the world, with Eastern Europe accounting for about 90 percent of this total (Barnavi 1992: xii–xiii; Ettinger 1976: 790–3). By this time, following the partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, about half of the world’s Jews were living in territory annexed by Tsarist Russia, a state that had traditionally tried to forbid Jewish residence on its soil.
The Theme of Persecution
As this brief overview indicates, the central thread of Jewish history was the omnipresent threat of persecution. Persecution lay behind Jewish population movements, demography, and geography. Persecution was the recurrent theme connecting Jewish life in widely separated times and places.
What explains the persistence and virulence of antisemitism? (The term itself was invented by the antisemites to make hatred of Jews sound more clinical (Wistrich 1991: 252).) Hostility to Jews does not differ essentially from persecution of other minorities; what is different is that, historically, Jews found themselves more often in an exposed, isolated, and vulnerable situation. Jews were, for example, the major visible non-Christian group in times and places when militant Christianity was on the march. In addition, the organic link with Christianity (and Islam to a lesser extent) was a curse rather than a blessing, since it led both faiths, at certain times, to consign Jews to a theological role as villains.
