Early Zionism and Its Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arabs

The Western School

The most obvious and famous Zionist from the Western school is Theodor Herzl, author of Der Judenstaat and the first president of the Zionist Congress. Herzl “epitomized the class of the German-speaking Grenzjuden [marginal Jew],” which meant “untiring attempts to be accepted by the Austrians as Austrian” (Golomb 24). He sought “success and fame within European culture by trying to distinguish himself in belles-letters” (27). He embraced Zionism not out of a desire to build something new, but out of the “realization that assimilation was an illusion” (28). He even based his “new Jew,” which would later become essential to the ideology and ethos of the halutz, on the Nietzschean ideal of the “new European man” (25).

Not surprisingly, Herzl utopian vision in Altneuland is highly Eurocentric. He described the Jewish towns that had replaced Arab villages, which had formerly been “hotbeds of filth.” A Jewish escort boasts, “we Jews have brought culture here” (Gorny 31). Not surprisingly, the utopia Herzl describes is German-speaking and it bears the technology and values of Western Europe. Herzl does, however, show some knowledge of Palestinian culture and concern over their fate. He recognizes that the orange citriculture in the Levant began with Arabs, not Europeans. He also addresses their possibly displacement or mistreatment by saying that they will be full citizens in the new Jewish state. Nonetheless, Herzl did write in a “paternalistic, even missionary tone” that was Eurocentric in describing both the shortcomings of Palestinian Arabs and the character of the future Jewish state (32).

Max Nordau, who was second to Herzl in the leadership of the World Zionist Organization, outdid Herzl in his unabashed Eurocentrism. Responding to Ahad Ha-Am's critique of the non-Jewish character of the Herzl's hypothetical state, Nordau wrote that the “Altneuland is a European sector within Asia” because the Jewish people, after their national liberation, will want “to remain a cultured people” (33). He shamelessly declared that Zionism should not “constitute a retreat to barbarism.” The Jews were to develop their essence within “Western culture, like every other cultured people […] Not within savage, culture-hating Asianism, as Ahad Ha-Am would apparently wish” (Nordau). His social hierarchy did not distinguish just between Europe and Asia, but within Europe also: he claimed that “culture” was still largely alien to Eastern European Jews, who ought to be grateful to the Western Jews for introducing them to their superior culture (Gorny 34). Nordau's descriptions of the indigenous population and unquestioned confidence in the superiority of Western culture were dehumanizing and insulting to both the Arab Palestinians who had inhabited Eretz Israel for hundreds of years and to the Eastern European Jews who eventually built the State of Israel.

The End of the Two Schools

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion, a Russian-born Jew who came to Palestine during the Second Aliyah, declared independence for the State of Israel. While the document he signed promised equal rights to all inhabitants of the new state, his attitude and the attitudes of most of his co-signatories towards their Arab neighbors were closer to that of Herzl, whose picture was framed behind them as a dramatic backdrop, than those of the Arab-friendly Eastern Europeans who had preceded them. How did this come to be? How and why did these leaders adopt attitudes and policies that were, at best, indifferent to Arab suffering and mistreatment?

First we must examine the changes that went on in Palestine after World War I ended and after Ottoman rule gave way to British. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, which obviously angered and scared many Palestinian Arabs. The early years of the British mandate were characterized by an “almost total disregard for the Arab outlook,” which paved the way for the rise of extremist leaders in the Palestinian national movement, such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem (Gorny 89). Palestinian nationalism soon separated itself quite completely from its Syrian counterpart for being too moderate towards Zionism, and also adopted mob violence as its weapon of choice. In April 1920, Arabs chanted “the Jews are our dogs!” in Jerusalem (Segev 128), and then started a massive riot which killed five Jews, injured 216, and forced 300 to flee. The following May in Jaffa, Palestinian Arabs again attacked Jewish civilians, killing 45 and wounding 146. While the violence was more even this time (48 Arabs were killed and 73 were wounded, though most were due to British attempts to restore order), the interethnic violence against civilians was again started by Arabs and again adopted anti-Semitic tactics, ripping open quilts and pillows in a way that reminded Jews of Russian pogroms (180-183). In 1929, the Arab residents of Hebron started a massacre, murdering 67 Jews and forcing the entire surviving Jewish population of the city to flee. The murderous mob violence adopted by the Palestinians during the early years of the British mandate naturally reminded the Jews of Palestine of the anti-Semitism they had faced in their former countries and caused the Yishuv to distrust their Arab neighbors and to become less concerned with their rights and demands.