Socialist Zionism and the Arabs of Palestine

As a distinct tendency, socialist Zionism was almost contemporaneous with Herzl's liberal political Zionism, although it could lay claim to such forerunners as Moses Hess (1812–75), an associate of Karl Marx in the 1840s and later the author of the proto-Zionist essay Rome and Jerusalem (1862). The first major theoretician of socialist Zionism, Nahman Syrkin (1868–1924), published his essay “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” only a year after the First Zionist Congress, to which he was a delegate.^[23] Syrkin sought to synthesize his conception of socialism—ethical and utopian rather than Marxist—and his strong commitment to Zionism, arguing against bourgeois Zionists like Herzl that only the proletarianized Jewish masses could realize Zionism (which therefore had to be socialist in content), and against anti-Zionist Jewish socialists that there could be no solution to the Jewish problem without the creation of a Jewish state.

Syrkin was not always convinced that that state had to be located in Palestine: for a few years after the Seventh Zionist Congress (1905) Syrkin quit the Zionist Organization and headed the Russian socialist wing of the Territorialist movement, which regarded Palestine as only one of several possible sites for Jewish settlement and autonomy. By 1909, however, he had returned to the Palestine-oriented Zionist mainstream by joining Po‘alei Tziyon (“Workers of Zion”), the strongest socialist-Zionist tendency within the Zionist movement. In time, Syrkin would come to be regarded as the intellectual godfather of labor Zionism in the non-Marxist, social-democratic form embodied in MAPAI (“Party of the Workers of the Land of Israel”) from 1930 onward.^[24]

It is therefore worthy of note that Syrkin apparently did not feel it necessary to justify Zionism's claims to Palestine or its likely impact on the country's indigenous population in terms of socialist principles. In fact, none of his pre–First World War theoretical or programmatic works makes any implicit or explicit mention of Arabs or of an “Arab problem.” In “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State” Syrkin proposes that Zionism acquire Palestine from the Ottoman government by purchase, by diplomacy, or by mobilizing European democratic and proletarian opinion to pressure the Ottomans into conceding the country to the Jews. The best option, Syrkin argued, was for Zionism to aid the oppressed Christian peoples of the Ottoman empire—he mentions the Macedonians, the Armenians, and the Greeks—in their struggles for independence. After victory, each people would have its own state in the former Ottoman territories in which it constituted a majority, while in territories with mixed populations partition and peaceful exchanges of population would ensue. For their role in the anti-Ottoman struggle the Jews would get Palestine: “Eretz Yisra’el, which is very sparsely populated and in which Jews are even today 10 percent of the population, should be turned over to the Jews.”^[25]

Syrkin's ability to ignore the fact that Palestine had a substantial Arab population and his failure to see anything problematic in the transformation of a small Jewish minority into an exclusively Jewish (albeit socialist) state and society, apparently by the removal of the indigenous population, suggest that, despite his sharp differences with Herzl over the social character of the future Jewish state, he shared the dominant Zionist representation of Palestine's Arabs as invisible or marginal. For Syrkin as for Herzl, Palestine's indigenous population was to be the object of power politics, to be moved elsewhere to satisfy the needs and aspirations of Europeans, and it was certainly not entitled to national rights in Palestine equivalent to those which Jews were presumed to possess.