The Arab Issue

Relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine “are totally different from those of the Jewish people with any other throughout its lengthy history.” ^[41] Jewish political traditions were of little use in dealing with non-Jewish nationalities within its own sphere. Jewish politics dealt with the non-Jewish world as a separate and hostile external environment, to be kept at bay as far as possible. Early Zionists thus had no precedents upon which to rely regarding the place of an Arab population in a Jewish state, as the very confusion of their responses would indicate.

The Zionist response to the Arab presence represents the usual spectrum of human adjustment to uncongenial realities: avoidance, denial, wishful thinking, hostility (and sometimes some or all of these responses simultaneously). And while the very profusion and confusion of the responses are testimony to lack of clear guidelines in tradition, most were consonant with one aspect or another of this tradition.

Avoidance is a normal response to a problem that did not exist in the past. For the Zionist pioneers, Palestine was effectively empty because “they did not expect to model the society they intended to build upon anything provided by the indigenous population.” ^[42] Theodor Herzl, when he passed through a large number of Arab villages during his visit to Palestine, made no references to Arabs in his diary or his written reports afterward: “the natives seemed to have vanished before his eyes. . . .” ^[43] Apart from the inconvenience of their presence, the invisibility of the inhabitants was probably reinforced by the assumption in European nationalism—also basic to Zionism—that a people without a state did not, in fact, have a national identity. In any event, such myopia was common among Zionist leaders, especially those outside Palestine (inside Palestine it was harder to ignore the issue), in the period before the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 pushed national questions to the fore. Furthermore, it has persisted as a recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the conflict, often in the form of a tendency to minimize the importance or reality of Israeli Arab issues (as in David Ben-Gurion writing, in 1952, that Israel “was virtually emptied of its former owners” even though Arabs still constituted 12.5 percent of its population).^[44]

One form that avoidance took among early Zionists was to place an undue weight on the achievement of a Jewish majority. Once Jews could simply outvote the Arab population in Palestine, it was felt, all would be settled in congruence with democratic procedures and the “minority problem” would fall into place. Even Ahad Ha’am, whose famous 1891 article on the Arab issue was the first to challenge the prevailing avoidance of the issue, came eventually to the conclusion that a Jewish majority would make it possible to respect Arab rights as individuals while achieving Jewish national rights in Palestine.^[45] But as Jewish history demonstrates, establishing the right of a majority to rule does not, in itself, resolve the issue of minority rights.

Most Zionists, however, found it impossible simply to ignore the Arab problem. As time went on, especially among those settled in Palestine, better answers were required. The publication of Yitzhak Epstein’s article “The Hidden Question” in Hashiloah, in 1907, inaugurated a vigorous debate over attitudes toward the Arabs, which Epstein defined as a question “which outweighs all others.” ^[46] This debate did not, however, provide any resolution but reflected the confusion on the issue. The very proliferation of ways of viewing Arabs—as Semitic cousins, as natives, as Gentiles, as Canaanites, as an oppressed class, as a second national movement alongside the Jewish one—indicated the lack of a clear dominant view.

Naive assimilationism was a response favored by some early settlers, who recognized that the Arab presence could not be ignored but who sought to deny the reality of any underlying conflict. The established population could be viewed as kinsmen, as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews who would willingly cooperate in the reestablishment of the ancient homeland. Even if they did not convert to Judaism, an appeal on the grounds of common ancestry and ethnic kinship might serve to reconcile Arabs to the Zionist enterprise.^[47] Such ideas did not strike a chord among either Jews or Arabs, however, and withered over time. Nevertheless, they did not die out completely; in the 1930s, Rabbi Benjamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann, founder of Brit Shalom, a movement that advocated a binational ArabJewish state) was still promoting his own version of pan-Semitism.^[48]

Paternalism was another variant of the approaches that sought to transcend Arab-Jewish conflict by stressing common interests. The Westernized Jews who led the Zionist movement saw the native population of Palestine as a backward people who could only benefit from the blessings of modern civilization that Jewish settlers would bring. When Herzl finally dealt with the Arab problem, in Altneuland, he portrayed an Arab notable deeply grateful for the economic prosperity and modernization brought by Jewish skills; Max Nordau, in defending Herzl from Ahad Ha’am’s accusations of insensitivity on the issue, argued that Jews would bring progress and civilization to Palestine just as the English had to India. Chaim Weizmann later explained to Lord Balfour that the Arab problem was economic rather than political and that Zionism would coexist peacefully with the Arabs of Palestine by insuring economic development.^[49] Of course all of this was being argued at a time when the superiority of European culture and the advantages of its diffusion were articles of faith and “colonialism” was still considered a progressive concept in the West.

Class solidarity was a more sophisticated path for denying the reality of a national conflict. Labor Zionists argued that the common class interests of Jewish workers and the masses of impoverished Arab peasants created the basis for joint action against the (Arab) effendi, or landowning class. Despite the lack of response from the Arab “proletariat,” this conception had at least two practical advantages that guaranteed it a long lease on life. First, Arab hostility to Zionism could in this view be attributed to the reactionary interests of the effendi rather than to the bulk of the Arab population, with which Zionism was said to have no quarrel. Second, analysis on a class basis made it possible to skirt the issue of whether the Arabs of Palestine constituted a nation or a people, equal in status (and rights) with the Jewish people.

In reality, both paternalistic and class solidarity perspectives, like the naive kinship theories, saw assimilation as the answer to the Arab problem. The basis and form of assimilation had simply become more sophisticated. All three assimilationist approaches had in common the denial of an objective conflict between the Arab and Jewish populations in Palestine, or at least a stress on common interests that would override conflicts. They stressed the material benefits that would accrue to the Arab population, whose interests are defined as economic or social rather than political or national. As Herzl wrote in an oft-quoted letter to Ziah El-Khaldi in 1899, “[Arab] well-being and individual wealth will increase through the importation of ours. Do you believe that an Arab who owns land in Palestine…will be sorry to see [its] value rise five- and ten-fold? But this would most certainly happen with the coming of the Jews.” ^[50]

Behind the stress on material benefits lay the even more important tendency to recognize Arab rights on the individual level, and not as a national group. This was of course entirely consonant with the traditional Jewish view of non-Jews, who were accorded humane treatment as individuals but were not recognized as a collectivity. Needless to say, it also fit perfectly into the political arguments being made by the Zionist movement. The demographic realities of Palestine at the time lent some credence to this view; Arab nationalism was in its infancy, a strong Palestinian Arab identity had yet to take shape, and both Jewish and non-Jewish observers tended to describe the population in segmented terms as “Muslims,” “Christians,” or according to tribal or clan affiliations.^[51]

This distinction between individual and national rights made it possible for Zionist leaders to affirm full support for the civil rights of the non-Jewish “residents” or “inhabitants” of Palestine, while pressing the Jewish national claim to Palestine as a whole. David Ben-Gurion, for example, could argue that “we have no right whatsoever to deprive a single Arab child…” while also making the claim that in a “historical and moral sense” Palestine was a country “without inhabitants.” ^[52] Even those who did recognize the Arabs as a nationality or as a parallel national movement—a number that grew over time—still tended to deny that they possessed the same kind of national rights in Palestine that Jews did. At best, they might be accorded the status of a recognized and protected but subordinated minority.

Separatism was the natural response of those who found the various assimilationist models untenable or undesirable. While the label covers a spectrum of responses, what they had in common was belief that Zionist goals, even in the minimalist version, were bound to be unacceptable to the Arab population of Palestine and that a clash of interests was inevitable. While some thought that this clash might be worked out in nonviolent ways, all saw a strongly competitive element in the relationship and felt that the integrity and security of the Zionist undertaking dictated a course of selfreliance rather than pursuing the chimera of Jewish-Arab collaboration.

In some ways, those skeptical about assimilation found it easier to recognize and deal with Arabs as a collectivity. Since they did not expect Arabs to forego their national identity in pursuit of individual or material gain, Arab nationhood could be viewed as a simple fact of life. This did not necessarily mean recognition of equal national rights, but at least as recognized rivals Arabs were visible as a group.

In later years, separatism was increasingly a defense against Arab hostility. Among the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky it took the form of preparation for the armed conflict that was regarded as inevitable. But streaks of separatism appeared among nearly all Zionist groups, as a natural (and Jewish) response to an environment perceived as basically hostile. Jews had been unremittedly conditioned over long historical periods to regard the external environment as hostile; in traditional terms, the Arabs were simply the latest group of Gentiles to whose hatred Jews were exposed. This seemed to be readily confirmed in the Palestinian context: Arabs refused to recognize Jews as a people or nation with rights in Palestine; they engaged in frequent acts of anti-Jewish violence that were seen as a continuation of traditional anti-Semitic persecution; and they displayed no interest in the various visions of integration or cooperation that more idealistic Zionists put forward.

Zionist approaches to the Arab question thus moved between integrative and separatist strategies.^[53] While particular leaders and parties could and did mix elements from different strategies, there were often conflicts and inconsistencies as a result: Arabs could not benefit fully from the Jewish enterprise without being a part of it nor could security considerations take precedence without impinging on Jewish-Arab interaction. Both tradition and the immediate environment gave mixed signals on how to resolve these dilemmas, and many were left unresolved then as well as after the founding of the state. But at the same time, it must be said that both tradition and the immediate environment gave an advantage to separatist tendencies over the integrative visions.

For example, Labor Zionists, who might have been in the forefront in developing institutions of class solidarity with Arab workers, opted instead for “socialist separatism.” This was extended to the principle of avoda ivrit, the employment of Jewish labor in all Jewish enterprises in the yishuv. It was simply assumed, with little explicit thought of exclusion, that the institutions of Zionism were established by and for Jews. Arab participation in them was not a major issue, even if it did cause ideological difficulty for a few. While such practices appear as illiberal discrimination to later generations, at the time they had the progressive connotations of self-reliance, the rebuilding of a normal Jewish occupational structure, and the avoidance of colonial practices based on exploitation of cheap native labor.