Early Zionism and Its Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arabs

In 1918, he wrote that “Palestine is not an empty country […] on no account must we injure the rights of the inhabitants” (Teveth 37-8). But this concern started to disappear completely. After the Arab riots of 1936 broke out, he declared that peace was necessary to build a state, but that “peace for us is a means” and that the end was the realization of Zionism: “Only for that do we need an agreement” (18). A comprehensive agreement with the Arabs could not be reached at the time, he concluded, but “only after total despair on the part of the Arabs” (18-9). This analysis of the Arab question closely resembles the “Iron Wall” platform of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revision Zionism who advocated violent conquest of land and who was quite openly unconcerned with human rights and the Jewish character of the future Jewish state. In regard to the Arab question and the focus of Zionism as whole, Ben-Gurion's orientation became “practical rather than ideological” (17). For both of these Labor Zionist leaders, the realization of the state was their primary goal. Consequently, the character of the state and their personal ideologies became secondary, and thus their commitments to justice and equality were scrapped for political expedience.

While the dichotomy between the Eastern and Western schools ostensibly disappeared, in actuality it simply shifted. The geographic origins of Zionist leaders came to be irrelevant, but the rift in outlooks towards Zionism could still be split into separate schools with separate views on how to treat and deal with the Arabs. The spiritual school, the successor of the Eastern school, was most concerned with the Jewish character and essence of the society being built, not with the politics and institutions of a state. This school continued to see and treat Palestinian Arabs as human being and fight for their fair treatment. A famous champion of this school was Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, who advocated a bi-national state before 1948 and who fought passionately for Arab equality in Israel after its birth. The political school of Zionism, the successor of the Western school, has been discussed already. It was embodied by Ben-Gurion, who saw the Jewish character of the Yishuv as secondary to political goals, and found itself largely unconcerned with the human rights of Arabs.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it was the ideological nature of Ben-Gurion's political Zionism that let to Arab mistreatment, not the inevitable conflicts over land and labor. In 1918, Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal, the respective representatives of Zionism and the Arab world, agreed that the Levant could benefit from cooperation between Jews and Arabs. The Jews could immigrate en masse to Palestine so long as they did not encroach on the “ownership rights of Arab peasantry,” and in return for receiving a chunk of land, they would assist in “forwarding their [the Arabs'] economic development” (Caplan 143-46). For the most part, the Yishuv did acquire its land through relatively peaceful means, and this practice could have continued after 1948. But after Israel was born, Ben-Gurion and his government decided that the accumulation of land to Jews was more important than human rights, earlier promises to Arab leaders and the UN, and the Jewish value of human equality that they made central in their Declaration of Independence. It was the triumph of an ideology obsessed with land control on the one hand and unconcerned with the human dignity of Arabs on the other that led to the mistreatment of Israel's Arab citizens through the imposition of martial law and an elaborate campaign of land confiscation.