1. Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 16, 1519. [BACK]

2. On nationalism generally, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, U.K., 1992). [BACK]

3. In this connection, see Uri Eisenzweig, Territoires occupés de l'imaginaire juif: essai sur l'espace sioniste (Paris, 1980), and Uri Eisenzweig, “An Imaginary Territory: The Problematic of Space in Zionist Discourse,” Dialectical Anthropology 5, no. 4 (May 1981); and Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory. [BACK]

4. When I use the term “European” here I also include Europe's demographic extensions overseas, namely the states which European settlers established and dominated in the Western Hemisphere, the South Pacific, and southern Africa. On colonialism and European culture, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993). This discussion also draws on Said's The Question of Palestine (New York, 1979). [BACK]

5. More than two decades ago the French historian Maxime Rodinson pointed out the need for research on the images of, and ideas about, Palestine, Arabs, Turks, Islam, and “the Orient” in general which were current among Jews of different classes and educational levels in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which are likely to have colored Zionist notions of contemporary Palestine and of its inhabitants; see Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York, 1973), 38. To my knowledge no comprehensive study of this kind, which would entail delving into Jewish literature and popular culture as well as the emerging Yiddish- and Hebrew-language mass culture taking shape in newspapers, novels, and theater, has yet been carried out, and it is obviously beyond the scope of this book as well. Nor has there yet been sufficient research on the images and attitudes of those Jews who actually went to Palestine, and how those attitudes were affected by interaction with the indigenous Arab population. Yet it seems clear that just as recent research on popular and mass culture in Europe has shed important new light on the shaping of attitudes about empire, colonialism, and race, so similar studies on the cultures of Jews in Europe may tell us something important about how early Zionists perceived Palestine, its Arab inhabitants, and its Ottoman rulers. I am thinking of such studies as John MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, England, and Dover, N.H., 1986), and Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, 1986). Michael Berkowitz provides some interesting material in his Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge, U.K., 1993). [BACK]

6. On these representations, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (Seattle, 1987). My discussion here draws on the analyses in both these very important works. [BACK]

7. For discussions of Zionism's borrowings from various European projects of colonization, within Europe (e.g., Germans in predominantly Polish Silesia) as well as outside it, see, for example, Shafir, Land, and Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy. This topic merits much more scholarly attention. [BACK]

8. Thus even a relatively recent and critical study like Simha Flapan's Zionism and the Palestinians (London, 1979) takes 1917 as its starting point, without providing any rationale for that choice. [BACK]

9. The notion that most of Palestine's Arabs were, as late as the British mandate period, newly arrived in the land (and hence lacked any authentic claim to it) was recently resurrected in a notorious work of pseudoscholarship by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (New York, 1984). For critiques, see the review by Yehoshua Porath, Israel's leading historian of Palestinian nationalism, in New York Review of Books, January 16, 1986, and Norman Finkelstein's chapter in Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London, 1988). [BACK]

10. For example, when the German Imperial Chancellor questioned him about the current owners of the land in Palestine which the Jews would purchase, Herzl described them as “Arabs, Greeks, the whole mixed multitude of the Orient.” Entry for October 9, 1898, in The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York, 1960), edited by Raphael Patai, vol. 2, 702. A little later, writing in Jerusalem, Herzl uses the same English-language phrase to describe a group of “Arab beggars, womenfolk, children, and horsemen.” Entry for October 29, 1898, vol. 2, 743. [BACK]

11. Entry for June 12, 1895, in ibid., vol. 1, 88–89. The Jewish National Fund, formally established in 1901 and incorporated in 1907 as the Zionist Organization's land-purchasing agency, did in fact require that its lands never be leased to or cultivated by non-Jews. In Israel this stricture was not infrequently violated, but it is nonetheless emblematic of the specific character and consequences of the Zionist project for Palestine's Arab inhabitants. For details, see Walter Lehn (in association with Uri Davis), The Jewish National Fund (London, 1988), especially chs. 2 and 6. [BACK]

12. For a discussion of al-Khalidi and his career, see Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development (Washington, D.C., 1993), ch. 9. [BACK]

13. See Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley, 1976), 47–48. [BACK]

14. Quoted in Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (Washington, D.C., 1987), 91–93. [BACK]

16. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question (London, 1967), translated by Sylvie D'Avigdor, 30. [BACK]

17. I am thinking, for example, of Yosef Gorny, who manages to read Altneuland as manifesting only the “universalist, humanist essence” of Herzl's thought and his “compassion and concern for human beings”; see Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford, 1987), 31, 33. Gorny also apparently deems his analysis of Herzl's attitudes toward Arabs complete without so much as mentioning passages from Herzl's diaries in which he envisions dispossessing and displacing Palestine's Arab peasantry. More generally, Gorny's narrow focus on Zionist ideology obscures the broader issue of Zionism's relationship to contemporary colonial discourse and practice. In this book as in his other work, Gorny fails to transcend (or even perceive) the conceptual limits imposed by his unquestioning adherence to a Zionist framework of interpretation. In this regard, see my review of Gorny's book The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917–1948 (Totowa, N.J., 1983), in Middle East Journal 38, no. 1 (winter 1984).

To her credit, Anita Shapira at least mentions these diary entries in her Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York, 1992). But she does not devote serious attention to them, or to other texts (and ways of understanding them) that do not fit her interpretative paradigm, which posits a sharp dichotomy in Zionist thinking about the use of force between an early “defensive ethos” and a later “offensive ethos.” Shapira echoes Gorny when she argues that “If someone had predicted to Herzl that the state he had envisaged would ultimately be established in blood and fire and that its fate would rest on the point of a sword, the author of The Jewish State would undoubtedly have been repulsed and would have rejected the implications of this prophecy. His ideas about the establishment of a Jewish state were shaped by conceptions of progress in a global community of enlightened peoples, a world in which problems were solved by reason and common agreement” (354). This assertion ignores the fact that for Herzl and many of his contemporaries, the “community of enlightened peoples” was not truly global, since it excluded most of the population of the earth outside Europe and Europe's extensions overseas; consequently the “problems” of those so excluded—which often meant their resistance to European domination—could quite legitimately be “solved” not by reason but by force. As I argue here, most Zionists implicitly adopted this perspective and applied it to the Arabs of Palestine.

In other words, like Gorny, Shapira fails to situate Zionist conceptions of, and attitudes toward, Palestine and Arabs in relation to contemporary European colonial discourse and practice. She thereby ignores a significant part of the larger context within which Zionist thought and practice took shape, and outside of which it (and many of the specific texts she discusses) cannot be properly understood. More generally, while Land and Power's focus on Zionist culture is welcome and the book contains much that is interesting and useful, there are many things it deals with unsatisfactorily or simply leaves out, perhaps because Shapira still remains within the confines of Zionist discourse, if on its liberal fringe. [BACK]

18. See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), especially ch. 3, on southern Africa. [BACK]

19. Ahad Ha‘am's 1891 article was originally published in the Odessa Hebrew-language journal Hamelitz. It was soon republished in ‘Al parashat derakhim (Odessa, 1895), a collection of his articles and essays, and later in his collected works, Kol kitvei Ahad Ha‘am (Jerusalem, 1949). The 1911 article, “Sakh hakol,” is also in Kol kitvei Ahad Ha‘am. [BACK]

20. Ahad Ha‘am's scathing review of Altneuland is in ibid., 313–20. [BACK]

21. For a discussion of these aspects of Ahad Ha‘am's thought, see Jacques Kornberg, ed., At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-am (Albany, N.Y., 1983), especially chs. 8 and 10. [BACK]

22. Another case in point is Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher in Palestine whose 1907 article “A Hidden Question,” published in the Hebrew-language periodical Hashilo’ah, touched off debate by insisting that the Zionist movement had to come to terms with the fact that Palestine had long been settled by another people which was unlikely to leave in order to make room for Jewish immigrants. The controversy sparked by Epstein's article was short-lived, however, and the movement's attention soon turned to other issues. See Shapira, Land and Power, 45, 47, 49, 65–66. [BACK]

23. In Nahman Syrkin, Kitvei Nahman Syrkin (Tel Aviv, 1938–39), vol. 1, 1–59. [BACK]

24. This is certainly the way MAPAI'S leading thinker, Berl Katznelson, depicted Syrkin in his biographical preface to Syrkin's collected works; see ibid., and also Marie Syrkin, Nachman Syrkin, Socialist Zionist (New York, 1961). [BACK]

25. Kitvei Nahman Syrkin, vol. 1, 53. [BACK]

26. See B. Borokhov, Ketavim (Tel Aviv, 1955), vol. 1, 154–80. [BACK]

27. Large parts of his argument had already been set forth in his 1905 essay “On the Question of Zionism and Territory.” See Ketavim, vol. 1, 18–153. [BACK]

28. “Our Platform,” Ketavim, vol. 1, 283. [BACK]

29. “Zionism and Territory,” Ketavim, vol. 1, 148. [BACK]

30. “Our Platform,” Ketavim, vol. 1, 282–83. [BACK]

31. “Zionism and Territory,” Ketavim, vol. 1, 148. [BACK]

32. In Ketavim, vol. 1, 290. [BACK]

33. “Our Platform,” Ketavim, vol. 1, 284–85. [BACK]

34. Ketavim, vol. 2, 429. [BACK]

35. Ketavim, vol. 2, 403–5. [BACK]

36. See Yehuda Slutzki, “MPSI beve‘idat hayesod shel hahistadrut,” Asufot 1, no. 14 (December 1970), 135. [BACK]

37. On developments in this period, see Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, chs. 3–7. [BACK]

38. As the “Hebrew” in “Hebrew labor” indicates, the self-styled “workers” and “pioneers” who arrived in Palestine during the Second Aliya period generally referred to themselves and their organizations not as “Jewish” (yehudi) but as “Hebrew” (‘ivri). By adopting this term they expressed their denigration and rejection of Diaspora Judaism, associated in their minds primarily with statelessness, powerlessness, and passivity, and identified themselves instead with the (suitably mythologized) ancient Hebrews who had lived in their own homeland as a sovereign people. This move allowed them to link their own project with heroic episodes from the Jewish past, now reinterpreted nationalistically, such as the struggle of the Maccabees to free the land of alien rule and restore Jewish sovereignty. These Jewish immigrants newly arrived from Europe could thereby imagine themselves to be elementally connected to the land, giving them a claim to possess it stronger than that of its indigenous Arab inhabitants. At the same time, it gave them a way to see themselves as prototypes of the “new Jew” whom socialist Zionism would produce in Palestine, a person who was thoroughly modern yet deeply rooted in the national soil and intimately connected to the wellsprings of Jewish history and culture, which Zionism identified with national sovereignty. This self-image gave those who embraced it (particularly labor Zionists) a potent weapon to wield against rival forces within the Yishuv, the Zionist movement, and world Jewry. [BACK]

39. For a study of early debates over this issue, see Yosef Gorny, “Ha’ideologiya shel kibbush ha‘avoda,” Keshet, nos. 37–38 (1967–68). For a much broader and more useful perspective, see Shafir, Land. This chapter obviously draws on Shafir's perceptive analysis, though I have sought to broaden and enrich his rather structural approach by attending to the discursive aspect of the processes and developments under discussion. [BACK]

40. The second part of the essay, with which I am primarily concerned here, was entitled “Hashkafa proletarit vehagana le’umit” (Proletarian perspective and national defense). The essay as a whole, “Leshe’alot ‘avodateinu ba’aretz,” was published under Ben-Tzvi's pseudonym “Avner” and first appeared in the Po‘alei Tziyon organ Ha’ahdut 3, nos. 16–17 (1912); it was soon republished in pamphlet form. [BACK]

41. See Slutzki, “MPSI,” 135. [BACK]

42. For a discussion of these strategies from the standpoint of Bonacich's theory of split labor markets, see Michael Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians: A Study of State/Society Relations in Israel,” in Kimmerling, Israeli State and Society, 93–133. On the struggle for Hebrew labor on the Jewish-owned citrus plantations in the late 1920s and 1930s, see Anita Shapira, Hama’avak hanikhzav: ‘avoda ‘ivrit, 1929–1939 (Tel Aviv, 1977). [BACK]

43. Quoted in Shafir, Land, 198. [BACK]

44. The kibbutzim kept consumption and overhead costs low by socializing many of the costs of reproduction of labor (common kitchens, dining halls and laundries, shared living quarters, collective child rearing) as well as by promoting an ideology of asceticism and self-sacrifice. At the same time, collective labor made effective use of scarce resources and limited land. The kibbutzim also proved an efficient means of effecting the spatial extension of the Yishuv and would later play a significant military role as well.

The kibbutz soon came to occupy a unique place in the labor-Zionist imagination and in Zionist (and later Israeli) mythology, at least until the 1970s. Although kibbutz members never accounted for more than about 5 percent of the Yishuv's (and later of Israel's Jewish) population, the kibbutz was held up as the model of the Jewish commonwealth-in-the-making in Palestine. Into the 1960s, labor-Zionist politicians took pride in claiming membership in some kibbutz, even if they had in reality spent only a few months living and working there forty years earlier before going on to careers in the labor-Zionist movement's burgeoning bureaucracy. Though the Yishuv was always predominantly urban, labor Zionism cast the kibbutz member astride a tractor, rifle in hand, as the paragon of Zionist virtue and achievement, the prototype of the tough, hardworking “new Jew” which Zionism had produced in Palestine. The kibbutz became a powerful symbol not only of the “pioneering” spirit, of readiness for self-sacrifice in the national cause, but also of Zionism's authenticity and rootedness in the soil of Palestine and its ability to make the land productive, often counterposed to the Arabs' alleged failure to do so. One might usefully compare the kibbutz with the “red-roofed farmhouse” which, Jacques Berque suggests, became a central symbol of colon society in Algeria, even though the great majority of European settlers in Algeria actually lived in urban areas; see Jacques Berque, French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars (London, 1967), ch. 1 [BACK]

45. For an introduction to the origins and significance of the Balfour Declaration, see my entry in Joel Krieger, ed., The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (New York, 1993), 67–68. [BACK]