Early Zionism, Palestine, and Its Inhabitants

This study focuses on the perceptions and practices of the left wing of the Zionist movement, to which I will turn shortly. But many of the Zionist left's most durable conceptions of, and attitudes toward, Palestine's indigenous Arab population drew on themes and images already manifested in the public and private writings and pronouncements of earlier nonsocialist Zionists, including the founder and first leader of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. Though Herzl and many of his colleagues initially knew very little about Palestine, their ideas about that land and its inhabitants should be understood not primarily as a matter of ignorance, of a lack of adequate information, easily enough remedied, but rather as the product of a coherent discourse which rendered certain things invisible or marginal.

Until relatively recently, students of Zionism and of the history of Palestine often took it for granted that before the First World War, the proto-Zionist and Zionist movements were simply unaware that Palestine was inhabited and thus did not realize that they had an “Arab problem”—their way of denoting the fact that the land in which Jewish national rebirth was to take place was already populated by another people.^[8] As illustration they have cited remarks like that of Max Nordau, quoted earlier, and the dearth of discussion about this issue at Zionist meetings and in Zionist publications. This way of posing the problem misses the point, however. There was undoubtedly a great deal of ignorance and misinformation about Palestine and its Arab inhabitants among early Zionists. But whether or not they explicitly addressed the issue of a substantial non-Jewish presence in Palestine or even acknowledged that it was an issue, that presence nonetheless constituted an important part of the context, the horizon, the background, in relation to which Zionism took shape, especially in Palestine itself. As such it certainly helped shape Zionist discourse, through the silences and exclusions it generated and through the ways in which it was represented (and acted upon). Though a great deal of research remains to be done on this question, it is nonetheless possible to isolate two persistent and interrelated themes that appear in much of Zionist discourse on the Arabs of Palestine.

Early on, Zionist discourse often simply rendered the country's indigenous Arab population invisible. From most early Zionist writing—including, for example, Herzl's The Jewish State, published in 1896—it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn that Palestine was at the time anything other than empty. The Arabs were simply not mentioned, as if they did not exist. But another, ultimately more durable and important theme emerged almost simultaneously, one which did not so much displace as supplement the representation of Palestine as empty and its inhabitants as invisible. Once it was beyond question that the country in which Zionism sought to establish a Jewish state was not empty in the literal sense, the Arabs of Palestine came to be represented as essentially, ontologically, marginal to the land and its destiny. Their physical presence in large numbers, closely settled in hundreds of villages and towns, was perhaps no longer disputable, but the character of their relationship to the country was represented as fundamentally different from, and inferior to, that of the Jews, regardless of where most of the latter had actually lived for centuries.

Palestine was represented in Zionist discourse as by definition a Jewish land, whose eternal essence was Jewish. Therefore no other people could have an equally authentic historical or contemporary presence in it, or an equally valid claim or organic link to it. At the same time, the dominant Zionist representation of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants asserted that they lacked the requisite characteristics which might entitle them to national rights in the country; they were not, and by their very essence could not be, a distinct or coherent people or nation. For most (though, as we will see, not all) Zionists, Palestine was inhabited not by a more or less coherent ethnos, nor even by a group in the process of becoming a distinct people or national entity, but rather by a heterogeneous and incoherent amalgam with no definite national characteristics. This motley assemblage of many different races and peoples had only shallow roots in the land and could therefore just as easily and happily be resettled somewhere else, or be reduced to a residual minority living alongside (and in subordination to) the land's new Jewish majority.

In contrast, it was taken as self-evident that despite their geographical dispersion, their cultural and social diversity, and their small numbers in Palestine itself, Jews everywhere constituted a single nation with permanent and exclusive rights in the country. Indeed, this was a core premise of Zionism. It is within this discursive context that we can make sense of the early Zionist slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” It was not so much that Palestine was deemed to be literally empty, though some Zionists may initially have imagined this to be the case; it was that the Arabs who were the majority of the population did not constitute a distinct people with a legitimate claim to the land, whereas the Jews did. The land lacked not people, in the sense of inhabitants, but a people, a nation organically linked to this particular territory, that is, the Jewish people. It was this lack which Zionism saw itself as remedying: by returning the Jews to this land, the land would be restored to its rightful owners.

As I will discuss shortly, not all Zionists shared these conceptions of the land and its inhabitants, and some would offer different representations which suggested alternative strategies for realizing the goals of Zionism. But with few exceptions these too presumed the heterogeneity of Palestine's Arab population (and thus their lack of national rights in it), represented the Arabs as newcomers to the land (and thus without any historic claim to it), recognized their rootedness but denied that Palestinian Arabs constituted a distinct and coherent national entity, or merely stressed the superiority of the Jewish connection with (and therefore claim to) the land. They were thus also rooted in a discourse, a distinct system of meaning, that took the alleged marginality of the Arabs in Palestine as their defining characteristic.^[9]

It is not difficult to discern these images and attitudes embedded in the writings and pronouncements, public and private, of early Zionist thinkers and leaders. Even while visiting Palestine in 1898, Herzl could see its non-Jewish inhabitants as no more than a “mixed multitude,” a motley assortment of different ethnic and racial types which obviously lacked any of the characteristics of a nation.^[10] That Palestine's Arab population was hardly visible to Herzl made it all the easier to imagine moving it elsewhere, or submerging it in a Jewish majority. In his diary Herzl could envision—without any apparent moral qualms—the dispossession of the indigenous peasant population: the land they worked would be discreetly bought by Jews and never resold to non-Jews, while the landless peasants would be “spirited” across the border through the provision of employment outside Palestine.^[11]

The invisibility, or at best marginality, of Palestine's Arab population is also evident in Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland (Old-New Land), first published in 1902. Set twenty years in the future, the novel depicts Palestine as having an overwhelmingly Jewish population, while its former Arab inhabitants are virtually absent from the scene. At the same time, Herzl insists that the Arabs have actually benefited from Zionism, that their economic prosperity more than compensates for—indeed, renders utterly irrelevant, hardly worthy of mention—their transformation into a small minority living in a predominantly Jewish society. The Arabs of Altneuland are apparently content with their new marginal status, their virtual invisibility in the land where twenty years earlier—at the time Herzl was actually writing—they had been demographically and culturally dominant.

That Herzl's attitudes were less the product of ignorance or misinformation than of a certain way of grasping reality is also confirmed by an episode that took place in 1899, a year after Herzl's first visit to Palestine. The chief rabbi of France passed on to Herzl a letter he had received from Yusuf al-Khalidi (1842–1906), a prominent notable of Jerusalem who had served as the city's mayor and a member of the Ottoman parliament of 1876–78 and held various posts in the local Ottoman administration.^[12] In his letter al-Khalidi expressed sympathy for the professed aim of Zionism, the relief of Jewish suffering. But, he insisted, large-scale Jewish settlement in, and ultimately Jewish sovereignty over, Palestine could only be achieved by force and violence, in the face of strong resistance by the local population, and he implored the Zionists to find some other territory in which to settle Jews and seek a Jewish state.^[13]

It is significant, and characteristic, that Herzl's reply to this plea, which might have impressed upon him the existence of an “Arab question” or at least a “native problem,” focused on the economic benefits Zionism would bring to the local population. Herzl insisted that the Jews had only peaceful intentions and emphasized the wealth which would accrue to the country's Arab landowners as Jewish immigration led to rising land prices. “That is what the indigenous population must realize, that they will gain excellent brothers as the Sultan will gain faithful and good subjects who will make this province flourish—this province which is their historic homeland.”^[14] For Herzl as for most Zionists, Palestine was the “historic homeland” only of the Jews, pointing up their conception of the indigenous population as lacking national characteristics or any genuine attachment to its land and culture—or at least of an attachment that was of the same order as the Jews', which brought with it political-national rights the Arabs were to be denied. The Arabs would and should be content with the prosperity which Zionism would bring to (some of) them as individuals. Of course, even as Herzl was reassuring al-Khalidi of his movement's peaceful and benevolent intentions, he was laying siege to the chancelleries of Europe, seeking the backing of a European power for Zionism if, as seemed likely, the Ottoman sultan proved reluctant to concede Palestine.

By contrast, Herzl was quite capable of understanding (and even sympathizing with) indigenous aspirations when they concerned places other than Palestine. For example, he was impressed by the educated young Egyptians he encountered while passing through Cairo in 1902, referring to them as the “coming masters” of the country and wondering why the British officials who controlled Egypt did not grasp this: “They think they are going to deal with Fellahin [peasants] forever.”^[15] Palestine was for Herzl a different matter altogether: there neither the peasants nor the emerging Arab intelligentsia merited mention, much less serious attention.

For Herzl and others, the subordination, dispossession, and even displacement of Palestine's indigenous population were implicitly or explicitly made thinkable and legitimate by the fact that those inhabitants were non-European, perhaps even nonwhite according to the typology of colonial discourse (and of contemporary “scientific racism”). Herzl explicitly located his project within a powerful contemporary European conception of the world when, in The Jewish State, he assured his readers—Jews and non-Jews, but certainly Europeans—that the future Jewish state in Palestine would form “a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”^[16] For Zionists, the new Jewish nation they sought to create might not be located in Europe but it would certainly be of Europe. Indeed, the attainment of Jewish sovereignty would for the first time allow Jews to participate in the great project of Western civilization on an equal footing. Except for a few marginal romantics, Zionists rejected any form of cultural integration into the Middle East, and when after 1948 Israel's Jewish population came to consist heavily of immigrants from Arab lands and their descendants, the state's political and cultural elites would denounce “levantinization” as a grave danger to Israel's essentially European cultural character. In a sense, then, Zionists were seeking a way to ensure that non-Jewish Europeans would treat the Jews not like inferior non-Europeans but like fellow Europeans with equal status and rights. Underpinning this perspective was a shared hierarchical conception of Europe and non-Europe and of the relations between them, which Zionists found it perfectly natural to apply to Palestine and its Arab inhabitants.

None of this should be taken to suggest that Herzl and his colleagues did not think of themselves as liberal humanists, as men who adhered to universalist values of reason and progress. They most certainly did, which is precisely my point (though one that many historians of Zionism seem unable to grasp): they were, inevitably, men of their time, and as such they were able without too much difficulty to reconcile their liberal and universalist humanism with confidence in the superiority of European civilization and an ability to ignore the aspirations, concerns, and rights of the non-Europeans whom their project affected.^[17] In this the early Zionists were not at all unique: the system of inclusions and exclusions, of superiority and subordination, which largely governed relations between Europeans and other peoples defined as less advanced was a powerful component of the culture in which they (and most other Europeans) were imbricated in this period. Many elements of Zionist discourse about Palestine and its Arab inhabitants—the conception of the land as empty and available for European settlement or exploitation, the depiction of the indigenous population as marginal, incoherent, backward, rootless, and therefore movable, the legitimization of coercion as a means of achieving European purposes, the denial of equal human, civil, or national rights, and so on—show up in other contemporary colonial-settler projects, and more broadly in a widespread and deeply rooted contemporary European discourse on non-European peoples and lands.^[18]

As with slavery in an earlier period, it would be some time before significant numbers of western Europeans would be brought to feel that the Asians and Africans subject to European control were entitled to the purportedly universal human rights which Europeans regarded as their birthright and a mark of the genius of their civilization. Anticolonial resistance by Asians and Africans themselves played an important role in bringing about this change, as did political, social, and cultural shifts within Europe. Until that time, however, colonialism, broadly defined as not simply a system of European political domination over non-Europeans but also as a relatively coherent set of perceptions and attitudes, was a central component of much of European culture. As such, it inevitably helped shape the perceptions and attitudes of adherents of Zionism, a European nationalism which regarded an already inhabited extra-European territory as the site of its realization.

Ironically, in this period and later many Europeans applied this same system of classifying human groups to the Jews, defining them as essentially non-European and therefore as undeserving of equal rights. Some would go even further and, drawing on the same “scientific” principles used to justify racist attitudes toward nonwhite colonial subjects, and oppressive and exploitative rule over them, would define Jews as less than fully human, with horrific consequences. It is also important to remember that Zionism won support among Jews (and many non-Jews as well) largely because it could portray itself as a solution to a very real and pressing crisis: the “Jewish problem” in Europe. By contrast, the non-Jewish “poor whites” who migrated to and settled in various European colonies overseas were largely motivated by a desire to improve their lot in life, rather than (as with Jewish immigrants to Palestine) by a nationalist project or (later) by the need to escape persecution. Though one may perhaps understand why members of Palestine's indigenous Arab population might not feel it particularly important to distinguish between the objective consequences of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the immigrants' subjective motivations, that distinction is certainly crucial to understanding how the Zionist movement, under whose auspices many of those Jews came to Palestine, understood what it was doing and why.

We must of course always be careful to avoid analyzing discourses, ideologies, and movements as if they were monolithic or immutable, and this caveat applies to Zionism as well. The representation of Palestine and its Arab population that characterized Herzl and Herzlian Zionism did not go entirely unchallenged. Among Herzl's contemporaries and successors there were individuals who, for various reasons, articulated perspectives that implicitly or explicitly acknowledged the presence in Palestine of a coherent Arab community with which the Zionist movement would have to reckon. However, I argue that the ultimate marginality of such voices to mainstream Zionist thought and practice demonstrates that the representation of Palestinian Arabs prevalent within the Zionist movement had less to do with ignorance than with a particular way of knowing and a particular kind of knowledge, one that served certain needs and furthered certain goals.

Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927), far better known by his pen name Ahad Ha‘am (“One of the People”), is a case in point. He was the preeminent Hebrew essayist of his day and the leading literary light and publicist of Hibbat Tziyon. After visiting Palestine in 1891, he published a scathing article (provocatively entitled “Truth from Eretz Yisra’el”) in which he told his readers that Palestine was not empty and desolate but densely settled and cultivated by Arabs, who were not ignorant savages but a people of intellect and cunning. While some Ottoman officials were doubtless corrupt and incompetent, the empire's rulers were patriots and would never give Palestine up without a struggle. Ahad Ha‘am went on to accuse many Jewish colonists in Palestine of treating Arabs in an unjust, cruel, and hostile manner. After another visit in 1911 he warned his readers that a national consciousness was beginning to develop among many Arabs in Palestine, which would only make Jewish immigration and land acquisition even more difficult.^[19]

In the 1890s Ahad Ha‘am criticized Hibbat Tziyon's model of settlement, and later he would criticize Herzl's vision of a sovereign Jewish state comprising all or most of the world's Jews, to be secured through the intervention of one or more of the European powers. Not only was Herzl's vision grandiose and unrealistic, he argued, but the Jewish state Herzl imagined (in Altneuland and elsewhere) lacked any authentic Jewish content, and Herzl also failed to take Arab opposition seriously.^[20] As an alternative, Ahad Ha‘am advocated a program of small-scale and gradual Jewish immigration and settlement, leading to the firm rooting in Palestine of a relatively small but viable and vigorous Jewish community which would serve as a “spiritual center” for the regeneration of Jewish national culture in the Diaspora.^[21]

Ahad Ha‘am was certainly one of the first major Zionist thinkers to acknowledge that Arabs were a collective presence in Palestine and to insist publicly that Zionism must recognize them as an important factor, even as a potential adversary. Yet few Zionists took his warnings seriously. Nor did they heed others who tried to raise the issue, and the mainstream of the Zionist movement continued to deny the existence of an “Arab problem.”^[22] During Herzl's tenure as president of the Zionist Organization (1897–1904), the movement focused on a primarily “political” Zionism whose main goal was to obtain a “charter” for Jewish settlement and autonomy in Palestine from the Ottoman government or one of the European imperialist powers. But no charter was forthcoming. After Herzl's death immigration, land acquisition, and settlement work in Palestine itself—an approach known as “practical Zionism” and supported by most Zionist activists in Russia, where the movement had its mass base—again began to assume pride of place in Zionist strategy, especially during the 1903–14 wave of Jewish immigration, the Second Aliya.

Yet the search for a European big-power sponsor was never really abandoned. Nor could it be, since as Herzl and his successors understood, without a powerful patron there was little likelihood that the Zionist project could succeed in the face of Ottoman restrictions on immigration and land acquisition, and the increasingly vigorous and coherent opposition of Palestine's Arab majority. This quest would eventually be crowned with success when, during the First World War, the British government decided that support for Zionism would serve its war aims and was compatible with its plans for the postwar disposition of the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire.

The new synthesis of “political” and “practical” Zionism which took shape during the Second Aliya also tended to ignore or reject Ahad Ha‘am's view of the Arabs of Palestine as an authentic and significant factor. That synthesis instead absorbed and reproduced the prevailing Zionist representation of the Arabs as essentially marginal and irrelevant. But this representation was now conditioned by two new factors: on the one hand, the need to reconcile Zionism with the universalistic moral claims of socialism, which had made its appearance as an organized ideological and political force within the Zionist movement as well as in the Yishuv, and on the other the concrete circumstances and problems encountered by Jewish immigrants who arrived in Palestine in the decade or so preceding the First World War. The representations of the Palestinian Arabs produced within socialist-Zionist discourse, and the attitudes and practices in which that discourse was manifested, would play a decisive role in determining the course of Zionist-Palestinian relations during the many decades during which labor Zionism played a prominent, and for a time hegemonic, role within the broader Zionist movement and the Yishuv.