Early Zionism and Its Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arabs

The Zionists, during their War of Independence and the early days of their state, began an intense period of institutionalized mistreatment and marginalization of the Arab citizen whom they ruled over. Twelve out of nineteen Bedouin tribes were forced off of their lands (Abu-Saad 142). Many if not most of the approximately 700,000 Palestinians who fled during the Israeli War of Independence were forced off their land by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or the paramilitary organizations that preceded them. And those Palestinians who did stay were subject to 16 years of military rule and harsh, inhumane curfews. But these egregious human rights violations did not emerge from a movement that considered human rights irrelevant. Indeed, they emerged from a movement that saw itself quite oppositely. Zionism, and especially the Labor brand of Zionism which dominated the politics and social institutions of the Yishuv and of the Jewish state during its first three decades, saw its mission as the creation of a just society which could serve as a light unto the nations, proving to the world that a society based on human cooperation and historical renewal was possible, even in the most dire of circumstances for the most oppressed of peoples. Even mainstream Zionists like Herzl had utopian visions for the state the envisioned. In 1920, the Poalei Zion, the preeminent Labor Zionist movement, declared, “we wish to build this country not only for ourselves but for all its inhabitants” (Gorny 132). The first government of Israel echoed this pledge when it wrote the Declaration of Independence in May, 1948, promising to “foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants” and to ensure “completely equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

So how did this great disconnect between humanist rhetoric and ideology on the one hand, and dehumanizing actions and policies on the other, come to be? I propose that there are two primary reasons. The first is that there was an inevitable conflict with the indigenous Palestinian community over land and labor: partly because the ideology of Labor Zionism saw these things as essential to Jewish spiritual renewal and partly because of the demands of building a Jewish state. The less inevitable second reason is that, of the two attitudes towards Arabs, one positive, ideological, and humanitarian, the other pragmatic, condescending, and colonialist, the latter ultimately won out and gained acceptance among the Labor Zionist leadership that established the country.

Land and Labor - The Inevitable Clash

The Conflict over Land

Menachem Ussishkin, the rising leader of the Hovevei Zion, explained Zionism and its relation to land acquisition very clearly:

In order to establish autonomous Jewish community life - or, to be more precise, a Jewish state, in Eretz Israel, it is necessary, first of all, that all, or at least most, of Eretz Israel's lands will be the property of the Jewish people. Without ownership of the land, Eretz Israel will never become Jewish […] and Jews will remain in the very same abnormal situation which characterizes them in the diaspora. […] The only method to acquire Eretz Israel, at any time and under whatever political conditions, is but purchase with money. (105)

Thus were the early Zionists aware that lots of land in Eretz Israel needed to be acquired for their project to have any chance of success. But to understand how the acquisition of that land started and proceeded, we must first look into the history and status of land ownership in Palestine.

What become “Palestine” under the British Mandate was of course part of the Ottoman empires for several centuries preceding the First World War. From the 1830s until the late 1870s (right before the First Aliyah began), the Ottoman Empire pursued a reformist policy known as Tanzimat (Shafir 27). The goal of Tanzimat was “to develop strong centralized political institutions capable of fostering capitalistic economic growth, and, in turn, drawing further political and military strength from that economic growth” (Migdal 12). Palestine was a full participant in Tanzimat and saw considerable agricultural improvement starting in the mid-19th century (Shafir 28), and thus also economic growth. This economic growth led to important population growth, which I shall address later. Before Tanzimat, most of the lands in the Ottoman Empire were controlled by timariots, or cavalrymen, who were paid by taxes collected from local peasants. Tanzimat sought to replace this with a more centralized system whereby tax collectors are paid by the central government (31). This system also failed, and eventually the ayan, or provincial notables, became influential landowners through large-scale land accumulation and consolidation. The 1858 Land Code created a system of private property, and thus also the conditions for land acquisition (35). Much of the land that became Palestine was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy landowners, many of them absentee landlords who lived in Syria and Lebanon.