Library:Ten Myths about Israel

Preface

Ten Myths about Israel
Author	Ilan Pappe
Written in	2017
Publisher	Verso Books
Source	http://library.lol/main/108C6989A36D924940EB7DCE6EB07291

History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster. As the example of the Israel–Palestine conflict shows, historical disinformation, even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm. This willful misunderstanding of history can promote oppression and protect a regime of colonization and occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and distortion continue to the present and play an important part in perpetuating the conflict, leaving very little hope for the future.

Constructed fallacies about the past and the present in Israel and Palestine hinder us from understanding the origins of the conflict. Meanwhile, the constant manipulation of the relevant facts works against the interests of all those victimized by the ongoing bloodshed and violence. What is to be done?

The Zionist historical account of how the disputed land became the state of Israel is based on a cluster of myths that subtly cast doubt on the Palestinians' moral right to the land. Often, the Western mainstream media and political elites accept this set of myths as a given truth, as well as the justification for Israeli actions across the last sixty or so years. More often than not, the tacit acceptance of these myths serves as an explanation for Western governments' disinclination to interfere in any meaningful way in a conflict that has been going on since the nation's foundation.

This book challenges these myths, which appear in the public domain as indisputable truths. These statements are, to my eyes, distortions and fabrications that can—and must—be refuted through a closer examination of the historical record. The common thread that runs through this book is the juxtaposition of popular assumption and historical reality. By placing each myth side by side with the truth, each chapter exposes the weaknesses of the received wisdom through an examination of the latest historical research.

The book covers ten foundational myths, or clusters of myths, which are common and recognizable to anyone engaged in one way or another with the Israel–Palestine question. The myths and the counter arguments follow a chronological order.

The first chapter charts Palestine on the eve of the arrival of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. The myth is the depiction of Palestine as an empty, arid, almost desert-like land that was cultivated by the arriving Zionists. The counter- argument reveals a thriving pre-existing society undergoing accelerated processes of modernization and nationalization.

The myth of Palestine being a land without people has its correlate in the famous myth of the people without a land, the subject of Chapter 2. Were the Jews indeed the original inhabitants of Palestine who deserved to be supported in every way possible in their "return" to their "homeland"? The myth insists that the Jews who arrived in 1882 were the descendants of the Jews expelled by the Romans around 70 CE. The counterargument questions this genealogical connection. Quite a hefty scholarly effort has shown that the Jews of Roman Palestine remained on the land and were first converted to Christianity and then to Islam. Who these Jews were is still an open question—maybe the Khazars who converted to Judaism in the ninth century; or maybe the mixture of races across a millennium precludes any answer to such a question. More importantly, I argue in this chapter that in the pre-Zionist period the connection between the Jewish communities in the world and Palestine was religious and spiritual, not political. Associating the return of the Jews with statehood, before the emergence of Zionism, was a Christian project until the sixteenth century, and thereafter a specifically Protestant one (in particular an Anglican one).

Chapter 3 closely examines the myth that equates Zionism with Judaism (so that anti-Zionism can only be depicted as anti-Semitism). I try to refute this equation through an historical assessment of Jewish attitudes to Zionism and an analysis of the Zionist manipulation of Judaism for colonial and, later, strategic reasons.

The fourth chapter engages with the claim that there is no connection between colonialism and Zionism. The myth is that Zionism is a liberal national liberation movement while the counterargument frames it as a colonialist, indeed a settler colonial, project similar to those seen in South Africa, the Americas, and Australia. The significance of this refutation is that it reflects how we think about the Palestinian resistance to Zionism and later to Israel. If Israel is just a democracy defending itself, then Palestinian bodies such as the PLO are purely terrorist outfits. However, if their struggle is against a colonialist project then they are an anticolonialist movement, and their international image will be very different from the one Israel and its supporters try to impose on world public opinion.

Chapter 5 revisits the well-known mythologies of 1948, and in particular aims to remind readers why the claim of voluntary Palestinian flight has been successfully debunked by professional historiography. Other myths associated with the 1948 events are also discussed in this chapter.

The final historical chapter questions whether the 1967 war was forced on Israel and was therefore a "no choice" war. I claim that this was part of Israel's desire to complete the takeover of Palestine that had almost been completed in the 1948 war. The planning for the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began in 1948, and did not cease until the historical opportunity offered by a reckless Egyptian decision in June 1967. I further argue that the Israeli policies immediately after the occupation prove that Israel anticipated the war rather than accidently staggered into it.

The seventh chapter brings us into the present. Is Israel a democratic state, I ask, or is it a non-democratic entity? I make the case for the latter by examining the status of the Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied territories (who together make up almost half of the population ruled by Israel).

Chapter 8 deals with the Oslo process. After nearly a quarter of a century since the signing of the accord, we have a good perspective on the fallacies connected to the process and can ask whether it was a peace accord that failed, or a successful Israeli ploy to deepen the occupation.

A similar perspective can be now applied to the Gaza Strip and the still widely accepted myth that the misery of the people there is due to the terrorist nature of the Hamas. In the ninth chapter I choose to differ, and present another interpretation of what has happened in Gaza since the turn of the last century.

Finally, in the tenth chapter I challenge the myth that the two-states solution is the only way forward. We have been blessed with excellent activist and scholarly works critiquing this formula and offering alternative solutions. They constitute a formidable challenge to this last myth.

The book also includes a timeline as an appendix, which will help readers to further contextualize the arguments.

My hope is that, whether the reader is a newcomer to the field, or a veteran student of it, the book will be a useful tool. It is directed primarily to anyone who finds themselves in a discussion on the evergreen topic of the Israel–Palestine question. This is not a balanced book; it is yet another attempt to redress the balance of power on behalf of the colonized, occupied, and oppressed Palestinians in the land of Israel and Palestine. It would be a real bonus if advocates of Zionism or loyal supporters of Israel were also willing to engage with the arguments herein. After all, the book is written by an Israeli Jew who cares about his own society as much as he does about the Palestinian one. Refuting mythologies that sustain injustice should be of benefit to everyone living in the country or wishing to live there. It forms a basis on which all its inhabitants might enjoy the great achievements that only one privileged group currently has access to.

Moreover, the book will hopefully prove a useful tool for activists who recognize that knowledge about Palestine is as necessary as commitment to the cause. It is not a substitute for the incredible work done by many scholars over the years, whose contributions have made a book like this possible; but it is an entry point into that world of knowledge.

Students and scholars may tap into this book if they have cured themselves of the greatest malaise of the academic world in our time: the idea that commitment undermines excellence in scholarly research. The best undergraduate and postgraduate students I have had the pleasure to teach and supervise were the committed ones. This book is just one modest invitation to future scholars to leave their ivory towers and reconnect with the societies on whose behalf they conduct their research—whether they write about global warming, poverty, or Palestine, they should proudly wear their commitment on their academic sleeves. And if their universities are still not ready for this, they should be savvy enough to play the game of "unbiased, objective academic research" on these contentious issues, while fully recognizing its false pretense.

For the general public this book presents a simple version of a topic that can often seem to be extremely complicated (as indeed some of its aspects are); but it is one that can be easily explained and related to from the universal perspective of justice and human rights.

Finally, my hope is that this book will clarify some of the deep misunderstandings at the heart of the Israel–Palestine problem, in the past and in the present. As long as these distortions and inherited assumptions are not questioned, they will continue to provide an immunity shield for the present inhuman regime in the land of Palestine. By examining these assumptions in light of the latest research, we can see how far they are from the historical truth and why setting the historical record straight might have an impact on the chances for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine.

Fallacies of the Past

Palestine Was an Empty Land

The geopolitical space today called Israel or Palestine has been a recognized country since Roman times. Its status and conditions in the distant past are topics for heated debate between those who believe that sources such as the Bible have no historical value and those who regard the holy book as a historical account. The significance of the country's pre-Roman history will be treated in this book in the next few chapters. However, it seems there is a wide consensus among scholars that it was the Romans who granted the land the name "Palestina," which predated all the other similar references to the land as Palestine. During the period of Roman, and later Byzantine, rule, it was an imperial province, and its fate depended very much on the fortunes of Rome and later Constantinople.

From the mid-seventh century onwards, Palestine's history was closely linked to the Arab and Muslim worlds (with a short interval in the medieval period when it was ceded to the Crusaders). Various Muslim empires and dynasties from the north, east and south of the country aspired to control it, since it was home to the second-holiest place in the Muslim religion after Mecca and Medina. It also had other attractions of course, due to its fertility and strategic location. The cultural richness of some of these past rulers can still be seen in parts of Israel and Palestine, although local archaeology gives precedence to Roman and Jewish heritages and hence the legacy of the Mamelukes and the Seljuk, those fertile and thriving medieval Islamic dynasties, has not yet been excavated.

Even more relevant to an understanding of contemporary Israel and Palestine is the Ottoman period, commencing with their occupation of the land in 1517. The Ottomans remained there for 400 years and their legacy is still felt today in several respects. The legal system of Israel, the religious court records (the sijjil), the land registry (the tapu), and a few architectural gems all testify to the significance of the Ottomans' presence. When the Ottomans arrived, they found a society that was mostly Sunni Muslim and rural, but with small urban elites who spoke Arabic. Less than 5 percent of the population was Jewish and probably 10 to 15 percent were Christian. As Yonatan Mendel comments:

The exact percentage of Jews prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 percent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians and 15,011 (3 percent) were Jewish.

The Jewish communities around the world regarded Palestine at that time as the holy land of the Bible. Pilgrimage in Judaism does not have the same role as it does in Christianity and Islam, but nonetheless, some Jews did see it as a duty and in small numbers visited the country as pilgrims. As one of the chapters in the book will show, before the emergence of Zionism it was mainly Christians who wished, for ecclesiastical reasons, to settle Jews in Palestine more permanently.

You would not know this was Palestine in the 400 years of Ottoman rule from looking at the official website of the Israeli foreign ministry relating to the history of Palestine since the sixteenth century:

Following the Ottoman Conquest in 1517, the Land was divided into four districts, attached administratively to the province of Damascus and ruled from Istanbul. At the outset of the Ottoman era, some 1,000 Jewish families lived in the country, mainly in Jerusalem, Nablus (Schechem), Hebron, Gaza, Safed (Tzfat) and the villages of the Galilee. The community was composed of descendants of Jews who had always lived in the Land as well as immigrants from North Africa and Europe.

Orderly government, until the death (1566) of Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, brought improvements and stimulated Jewish immigration. Some newcomers settled in Jerusalem, but the majority went to Safed where, by the mid-16th century, the Jewish population had risen to about 10,000, and the town had become a thriving textile center.

Sixteenth-century Palestine, it appears, was mainly Jewish, and the commercial lifeblood of the region was concentrated in the Jewish communities in these towns. What happened next? According to the foreign ministry website:

With the gradual decline in the quality of Ottoman rule, the country suffered widespread neglect. By the end of the 18th century, much of the Land was owned by absentee landlords and leased to impoverished tenant farmers, and taxation was as crippling as it was capricious. The great forests of the Galilee and the Carmel mountain range were denuded of trees; swamp and desert encroached on agricultural land.

In this story, by 1800 Palestine had become a desert, where farmers who did not belong there somehow cultivated parched land that was not theirs. The same land appeared to be an island, with a significant Jewish population, ruled from the outside by the Ottomans and suffering from intensive imperial projects that robbed the soil of its fertility. Every passing year the land became more barren, deforestation increased, and farmland turned to desert. Promoted through an official state website this fabricated picture is unprecedented.

It is a bitter irony that in composing this narrative the authors did not rely on Israeli scholarship. Most Israeli scholars would be quite hesitant about accepting the validity of these statements or sponsoring such a narrative. Quite a few of them, such as David Grossman (the demographer not the famous author), Amnon Cohen, and Yehoushua Ben-Arieh, have indeed successfully challenged it. Their research shows that, over the centuries, Palestine, rather than being a desert, was a thriving Arab society—mostly Muslim, predominantly rural, but with vibrant urban centers.

Despite this contestation of the narrative, however, it is still propagated through the Israeli educational curriculum, as well as in the media, informed by scholars of a lesser prominence but with greater influence on the education system. Outside of Israel, in particular in the United States, the assumption that the promised land was empty, desolate, and barren before the arrival of Zionism is still alive and kicking, and is therefore worth attending to.

We need to examine the facts. The opposing historical narrative reveals a different story in which Palestine during the Ottoman period was a society like all the other Arab societies around it. It did not differ from the Eastern Mediterranean countries as a whole. Rather than encircled and isolated, the Palestinian people were readily exposed to interactions with other cultures, as part of the wider Ottoman empire. Secondly, being open to change and modernization, Palestine began to develop as a nation long before the arrival of the Zionist movement. In the hands of energetic local rulers such as Daher al-Umar (1690–1775), the towns of Haifa, Shefamr, Tiberias, and Acre were renovated and re-energized. The coastal network of ports and towns boomed through its trade connections with Europe, while the inner plains traded inland with nearby regions. The very opposite of a desert, Palestine was a flourishing part of Bilad al-Sham (the land of the north), or the Levant of its time. At the same time, a rich agricultural industry, small towns and historical cities served a population of half a million people on the eve of the Zionist arrival.

At the end of the nineteenth century this was a sizeable population, of which, as mentioned above, only a small percentage were Jewish. It is notable that this cohort were at the time resistant to the ideas promoted by the Zionist movement. Most Palestinians lived in the countryside in villages, which numbered almost 1,000. Meanwhile, a thriving urban elite made their home along the coast, on the inner plains and in the mountains.

We now have a much better understanding of how the people who lived there defined themselves on the eve of the Zionist colonization of the country. As elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, Palestinian society was introduced to the powerful defining concept of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nation. There were local and external dynamics that prompted this new mode of self-reference, as happened elsewhere in the world. Nationalist ideas were imported into the Middle East in part by American missionaries, who arrived in the early nineteenth century both with the wish to proselytize but also with a desire to spread novel notions of self-determination. As Americans they felt they represented not only Christianity but also the newest independent state on the global map. The educated elite in Palestine joined others in the Arab world in digesting these ideas and formulating an authentic national doctrine, which led them to demand more autonomy within, and eventually independence from, the Ottoman Empire.

In the mid to late nineteenth century the Ottoman intellectual and political elite adopted romantic nationalist ideas that equated Ottomanism with Turkishness. This trend contributed to the alienation of the non-Turkish subjects of Istanbul, most of them Arabs, from the Ottoman Empire. The nationalization process in Turkey itself was accompanied by secularization trends in the second half of the nineteenth century which diminished the importance of Istanbul as a religious authority and focus.

In the Arab world, secularization was also part of the process of nationalization. Not surprisingly, it was mainly minorities, such as the Christians, that embraced warmly the idea of a secular national identity based on a shared territory, language, history, and culture. In Palestine, Christians who engaged with nationalism found eager allies among the Muslim elite, leading to a mushrooming of Muslim-Christian societies all over Palestine towards the end of World War I. In the Arab world, Jews joined these kind of alliances between activists from different religions. The same would have happened in Palestine had not Zionism demanded total loyalty from the veteran Jewish community there.

A thorough and comprehensive study of how Palestinian nationalism arose before the arrival of Zionism can be found in the works of Palestinian historians such as Muhammad Muslih and Rashid Khalidi. They show clearly that both elite and non-elite sections of Palestinian society were involved in developing a national movement and sentiment before 1882. Khalidi in particular shows how patriotic feelings, local loyalties, Arabism, religious sentiments, and higher levels of education and literacy were the main constituents of the new nationalism, and how it was only later that resistance to Zionism played an additional crucial role in defining Palestinian nationalism.

Khalidi, among others, demonstrates how modernization, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the greedy European quest for territories in the Middle East contributed to the solidification of Palestinian nationalism before Zionism made its mark in Palestine with the British promise of a Jewish homeland in 1917. One of the clearest manifestations of this new self-definition was the reference in the country to Palestine as geographical and cultural entity, and later as a political one. Despite there not being a Palestinian state, the cultural location of Palestine was very clear. There was a unifying sense of belonging. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the newspaper Filastin reflected the way the people named their country. Palestinians spoke their own dialect, had their own customs and rituals, and appeared on the maps of the world as living in a country called Palestine.

During the nineteenth century, Palestine, like its neighboring regions, became more clearly defined as a geopolitical unit in the wake of administrative reforms initiated from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, the local Palestinian elite began to seek independence within a united Syria, or even a united Arab state (a bit like the United States of America). This pan-Arabist national drive was called in Arabic qawmiyya, and was popular in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world.

Following the famous, or rather infamous, Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed in 1916 between Britain and France, the two colonial powers divided the area into new nation states. As the area was divided, a new sentiment developed: a more local variant of nationalism, named in Arabic wataniyya. As a result, Palestine began to see itself as an independent Arab state. Without the appearance of Zionism on its doorstep, Palestine would probably have gone the same way as Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria and embraced a process of modernization and growth. This had, in fact, already started by 1916, as a result of Ottoman polices in the late nineteenth century. In 1872, when the Istanbul government founded the Sanjak (administrative province) of Jerusalem, they created a cohesive geopolitical space in Palestine. For a brief moment, the powers in Istanbul even toyed with the possibility of adding to the Sanjak, encompassing much of Palestine as we know it today, as well as the sub-provinces of Nablus and Acre. Had they done this, the Ottomans would have created a geographical unit, as happened in Egypt, in which a particular nationalism might have arisen even earlier.

However, even with its administrative division into north (ruled by Beirut) and south (ruled by Jerusalem), this shift raised Palestine as a whole above its previous peripheral status, when it had been divided into small regional sub-provinces. In 1918, with the onset of British rule, the north and the south divisions became one unit. In a similar way and in the same year the British established the basis for modern Iraq when they fused the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into one modern nation state. In Palestine, unlike in Iraq, familial connections and geographical boundaries (the River Litani in the north, the River Jordan in the east, the Mediterranean in the west) worked together to weld the three sub-provinces of South Beirut, Nablus, and Jerusalem into one social and cultural unit. This geopolitical space had its own major dialect and its own customs, folklore, and traditions.

By 1918, Palestine was therefore more united than in the Ottoman period, but there were to be further changes. While waiting for final international approval of Palestine's status in 1923, the British government renegotiated the borders of the land, creating a better-defined geographical space for the national movements to struggle over, and a clearer sense of belonging for the people living in it. It was now clear what Palestine was; what was not clear was who it belonged to: the native Palestinians or the new Jewish settlers? The final irony of this administrative regime was that the reshaping of the borders helped the Zionist movement to conceptualize geographically "Eretz Israel," the Land of Israel where only Jews had the right to the land and its resources.

Thus, Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernization and nationalization. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonization by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.

The Jews Were a People without a Land

The claim in the previous chapter, that Palestine was a land without people, goes hand in hand with the claim that the Jews were a people without a land.

But were the Jewish settlers a people? Recent scholarship has repeated doubts expressed many years ago about this as well. The common theme of this critical point of view is best summarized in Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People. Sand shows that the Christian world, in its own interest and at a given moment in modern history, supported the idea of the Jews as a nation that must one day return to the holy land. In this account, this return would be part of the divine scheme for the end of time, along with the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of the Messiah.

The theological and religious upheavals of the Reformation from the sixteenth century onwards produced a clear association, especially among Protestants, between the notion of the end of the millennium and the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine. Thomas Brightman, a sixteenth-century English clergyman, represented these notions when he wrote, "Shall they return to Jerusalem again? There is nothing more certain: the prophets do everywhere confirm it and beat about it." Brightman was not only hoping for a divine promise to be fulfilled; he also, like so many after him, wished the Jews either to convert to Christianity or to leave Europe all together. A hundred years later, Henry Oldenburg, a German theologian and natural philosopher, wrote: "If the occasion present itself amid changes to which human affairs are liable, [the Jews] may even raise their empire anew, and … God may elect them a second time." Charles-Joseph of Lign, an Austro-Hungarian field marshal, stated in the second half of the eighteenth century:

I believe that the Jew is not able to assimilate, and that he will constantly constitute a nation within a nation, wherever he may be. The simplest thing to do would in my opinion be returning to them their homeland, from which they were driven. As is quite apparent from this last text, there was an obvious link between these formative ideas of Zionism and a more longstanding anti-Semitism.

François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous French writer and politician, wrote around the same time that the Jews were "the legitimate masters of Judea." He influenced Napoleon Bonaparte, who hoped to elicit the help of the Jewish community in Palestine, as well as other inhabitants of the land, in his attempt to occupy the Middle East at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He promised them a "return to Palestine" and the creation of a state. Zionism, as we can see, was therefore a Christian project of colonization before it became a Jewish one.

The ominous signs of how these seemingly religious and mythical beliefs might turn into a real program of colonization and dispossession appeared in Victorian Britain as early as the 1820s. A powerful theological and imperial movement emerged that would put the return of the Jews to Palestine at the heart of a strategic plan to take over Palestine and turn it into a Christian entity. In the nineteenth century, this sentiment became ever more popular in Britain and affected the official imperial policy: "The soil of Palestine … only awaits for the return of her banished children, and the application of industry, commensurate with agricultural capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the days of Solomon." Thus wrote the Scottish peer and military commander John Lindsay. This sentiment was echoed by David Hartley, an English philosopher, who wrote: "It is probable that the Jews will be reinitiated in Palestine."

The process was not wholly successful before it received the support of the United States. Here, too, there was a history of endorsing the idea of a Jewish nation having the right to return to Palestine and build a Zion. At the same time as Protestants in Europe articulated these views, they appeared in a similar form across the Atlantic. The American president, John Adams (1735–1826), stated: "I really wish the Jews again in Judea as an independent nation." A simple history of ideas leads directly from the preaching fathers of this movement to those with the power to change the fate of Palestine. Foremost among them was Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85), a leading British politician and reformer, who campaigned actively for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His arguments for a greater British presence in Palestine were both religious and strategic.

As I will presently show, this dangerous blend of religious fervor and reformist zeal would lead from Shaftesbury's efforts in the middle of the nineteenth century to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Shaftesbury realized that it would not be enough to support the return of the Jews, and they would have to be actively assisted by Britain in their initial colonization. Such an alliance should start, he asserted, by providing material help to the Jews to travel to Ottoman Palestine. He convinced the Anglican bishopric center and cathedral in Jerusalem to provide the early funding for this project. This would probably not have happened at all had Shaftesbury not succeeded in recruiting his father in law, Britain's foreign minister and later prime minister, Lord Palmerston, to the cause. In his diary for August 1, 1838, Shaftesbury wrote:

Dined with Palmerston. After dinner left alone with him. Propounded my schemes, which seems to strike his fancy. He asked questions and readily promised to consider it [the program to help the Jews to return to Palestine and take it over]. How singular is the order of Providence. Singular, if estimated by man's ways. Palmerston had already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people, to do homage to their inheritance, and to recognize their rights without believing their destiny. It seems he will yet do more. Though the motive be kind, it is not sound. I am forced to argue politically, financially, commercially. He weeps not, like his Master, over Jerusalem, nor prays that now, at last, she may put on her beautiful garments.

As a first step, Shaftesbury persuaded Palmerston to appoint his fellow restorationist (a believer in the restoration of Palestine to the Jews) William Young as the first British vice-consul in Jerusalem. He subsequently wrote in his diary: "What a wonderful event it is! The ancient City of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations; and England is the first of the gentile kingdoms that ceases to "tread her down.'" A year later, in 1839, Shaftesbury wrote a thirty-page article for The London Quarterly Review, entitled "State and Restauration (sic) of the Jews," in which he predicted a new era for God's chosen people. He insisted that

the Jews must be encouraged to return in yet greater numbers and become once more the husbandman of Judea and Galilee … though admittedly a stiff-necked, dark hearted people, and sunk in moral degradation, obduracy, and ignorance of the Gospel, [they are] not only worthy of salvation but also vital to Christianity's hope of salvation.

Shaftesbury's gentle lobbying of Palmerston proved successful. For political reasons, more than for religious ones, Palmerston too became an advocate for Jewish restoration. Among other factors that came into play in his deliberations was the "view that the Jews could be useful in buttressing the collapsing Ottoman Empire, thus helping to accomplish the key object of British foreign policy in the area." Palmerston wrote to the British ambassador in Istanbul on August 11, 1840, concerning the mutual benefit to both the Ottomans and Britain of allowing Jews to return to Palestine. Ironically, the restoration of the Jews was seen as an important means of maintaining the status quo, and of avoiding the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston wrote:

There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine … It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine because the wealth which they would bring with them would increase the resources of the Sultan's dominions; and the Jewish people, if returning under the sanction and protection and at the invitation of the Sultan, would be a check upon any future evil designs of Mohamet Ali or his successor … I have to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the Turkish government] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.

Mohamet Ali, more popularly known as Muhammad Ali, was the governor of Egypt who ceded from the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. When Palmerston wrote this letter to his ambassador in Istanbul, it was after a decade in which the Egyptian ruler had nearly toppled the sultan himself. The idea that Jewish wealth exported to Palestine would strengthen the Ottoman Empire from potential internal and external enemies underlines how Zionism was associated with anti-Semitism, British imperialism, and theology.

A few days after Lord Palmerston sent his letter, a lead article in The Times called for a plan "to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers," claiming this was under "serious political consideration" and commending the efforts of Shaftesbury as the author of the plan, which, it argued, was "practical and statesmanlike." Lady Palmerston also supported her husband's stance. She wrote to a friend: "We have on our side the fanatical and religious elements, and you know what a following they have in this country. They are absolutely determined that Jerusalem and the whole of Palestine shall be reserved for the Jews to return to; this is their only longing to restore the Jews." Thus the Earl of Shaftesbury was described as: "The leading proponent of Christian Zionism in the nineteenth century and the first politician of stature to attempt to prepare the way for Jews to establish a homeland in Palestine."

This moment of British establishment enthusiasm for the idea of restoration should properly be described as proto-Zionism. While we should be careful about reading contemporary ideology into this nineteenth-century phenomenon, it nevertheless had all the ingredients that would turn these ideas into the future justification for erasing and denying the basic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population. There were of course churches and clergymen who did identify with the local Palestinians. Notable among them was George Francis Popham Blyth, a Church of England cleric who, along with some high church Anglican colleagues, developed strong sympathies for the Palestinians' aspirations and rights. In 1887 Blyth founded St. George College, which is today probably still one of the best high schools in East Jerusalem (attended by the children of the local elite, who would play a crucial role in Palestinian politics in the first half of the twentieth century). The power, however, was with those who supported the Jewish cause, later to become the Zionist cause.

The first British consulate in Jerusalem opened in 1838. Its brief included informally encouraging Jews to come to Palestine, promising to protect them, and in some cases attempting to convert them to Christianity. The most well-known of the early consuls was James Finn (1806–72), whose character and direct approach made it impossible to conceal the implications of this brief from the local Palestinians. He wrote openly, and was probably the first to do so, about the connection between returning the Jews to Palestine and the possible displacement of the Palestinians as a result. This connection would be at the heart of the Zionist settler colonial project in the following century.

Finn was stationed in Jerusalem between 1845 and 1863. He has been lauded by later Israeli historians for helping Jews to settle in their ancestral land, and his memoirs have been translated into Hebrew. He is not the only historical figure to have appeared in one nation's pantheon and in the rogues' gallery of another. Finn detested Islam as a whole and the notables of Jerusalem in particular. He never learned to speak Arabic and communicated via an interpreter, which did nothing to smooth his relationship with the local Palestinian population.

Finn was helped by the inauguration of the Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841, headed by Michael Solomon Alexander (a convert from Judaism), and by the inauguration of Christ Church, the first Anglican church, near Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, in 1843. Although these institutions later developed a strong affinity with the Palestinian right of self-determination, at the time they supported Finn's proto-Zionist aspirations. Finn worked more eagerly than any other European to establish a permanent Western presence in Jerusalem, organizing the purchase of lands and real estate for missionaries, commercial interests, and government bodies.

An important link connecting these early, mainly British, Christian Zionist buds with Zionism was the German Temple Pietist movement (later known as the Templers), active in Palestine from the 1860s to the outbreak of World War I. The Pietist movement grew out of the Lutheran movement in Germany that spread all over the world, including to North America (where its influence on the early settler colonialism is felt to this very day). Its interest in Palestine evolved around the 1860s. Two German clergymen, Christoph Hoffman and Georg David Hardegg, founded the Temple Society in 1861. They had strong connections to the Pietist movement in Württemberg, Germany, but developed their own ideas on how best to push forward their version of Christianity. For them, the rebuilding of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem was an essential step in the divine scheme for redemption and absolution. More importantly, they were convinced that if they themselves settled in Palestine they would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah. While not everyone in the respective churches and national organizations welcomed their particular way of translating Pietism into settler colonialism in Palestine, senior members of the Royal Prussian court and several Anglican theologians in Britain enthusiastically supported their dogma.

As the Temple movement grew in prominence, it came to be persecuted by most of the established church in Germany. But they moved their ideas on to a more practical stage and settled in Palestine—fighting with each other along the way, as well as adding new members. They founded their first colony on Mount Carmel in Haifa in 1866 and expanded into other parts of the country. The warming of the relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and the sultan at the very end of the nineteenth century further enhanced their settlement project. The Templers remained in Palestine under the British Mandate until 1948, when they were kicked out by the new Jewish state.

The Templers' colonies and methods of settlement were emulated by the early Zionists. While the German historian Alexander Scholch described the Templers' colonization efforts as "The Quiet Crusade," the early Zionist colonies established from 1882 onwards were anything but quiet. By the time the Templers settled in Palestine, Zionism had already become a notable political movement in Europe. Zionism was, in a nutshell, a movement asserting that the problems of the Jews of Europe would be solved by colonizing Palestine and creating a Jewish state there. These ideas germinated in the 1860s in several places in Europe, inspired by the Enlightenment, the 1848 "Spring of Nations," and later on by socialism. Zionism was transformed from an intellectual and cultural exercise into a political project through the visions of Theodor Herzl, in response to a particularly vile wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Russia in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and to the rise of anti-Semitic nationalism in the west of Europe (where the infamous Dreyfus trial revealed how deeply rooted anti-Semitism was in French and German society).

Through Herzl's efforts and those of like-minded Jewish leaders, Zionism became an internationally recognized movement. Independently at first, a group of Eastern European Jews developed similar notions about the solution for the Jewish question in Europe, and they did not wait for international recognition. They began to settle in Palestine in 1882, after preparing the ground by working in communes in their home countries. In the Zionist jargon they are called the First Aliyah—the first wave of Zionist immigration lasting to 1904. The second wave (1905–14) was different, since it mainly included frustrated communists and socialists who now saw Zionism not only as a solution for the Jewish problem but also as spearheading communism and socialism through collective settlement in Palestine. In both waves, however, the majority preferred to settle in Palestinian towns, with only a smaller number attempting to cultivate land they bought from Palestinians and absentee Arab landowners, at first relying on Jewish industrialists in Europe to sustain them, before seeking a more independent economic existence.

While the Zionist connection with Germany proved insignificant at the end of the day, the one with Britain became crucial. Indeed, the Zionist movement needed strong backing because the people of Palestine began to realize that this particular form of immigration did not bode well for their future in the country. Local leaders felt it would have a very negative effect on their society. One such figure was the mufti of Jerusalem, Tahir al-Hussayni II, who linked Jewish immigration into Jerusalem with a European challenge to the city's Muslim sanctity. Some of his elders had already noted that it was James Finn's idea to connect the arrival of the Jews with the restoration of Crusader glory. No wonder, then, that the mufti led the opposition to this immigration, with a special emphasis on the need to refrain from selling land to such projects. He recognized that possession of land vindicated claims of ownership, whereas immigration without settlement could be conceived as transient pilgrimage.

Thus, in many ways, the strategic imperial impulse of Britain to use the Jewish return to Palestine as a means of deepening London's involvement in the "Holy Land" coincided with the emergence of new cultural and intellectual visions of Zionism in Europe. For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine. This alliance became public knowledge with the proclamation of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917—a letter from the British foreign secretary to the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community in effect promising them full support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Thanks to the accessibility and efficient structure of the British archives, today we are blessed with many excellent scholarly works exploring the background to the declaration. Still among the best of them is an essay from 1970 by Mayer Verte, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He showed in particular how British officials asserted wrongly that Jewish members in the Bolshevik movement had similar aspirations to the Zionists, and that therefore a pro-Zionist declaration would pave the way for good relations with the new political power in Russia. More to the point was the assumption of these policy makers that such a gesture would be welcomed by the American Jews, whom the British suspected of having a great influence in Washington. There was also a mixture of millenarianism and Islamophobia: David Lloyd George, the prime minister at the time and a devout Christian, favored the return of the Jews on a religious basis, and strategically both he and his colleagues preferred a Jewish colony to a Muslim one, as they saw the Palestinians, in the Holy Land.

More recently we have had access to an even more comprehensive analysis, written in 1939, but lost for many years before it reappeared in 2013. This is the work of the British journalist, J. M. N Jeffries, Palestine: The Reality, which runs to more than 700 pages explaining what lay behind the Balfour Declaration. It reveals, through Jeffries' personal connections and his access to a wide range of no-longer-extant documents, precisely who in the British admiralty, army and government was working for the declaration and why. It appears that the pro-Zionist Christians in his story were far more enthusiastic than the Zionists themselves about the idea of British sponsorship of the colonization process in Palestine.

The bottom line of all the research hitherto conducted on the declaration is that the various decision makers in Britain saw the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as coinciding with British strategic interests in the area. Once Britain had occupied Palestine, this alliance allowed the Jews to build the infrastructure for a Jewish state under British auspices, while protected by His Majesty's Government's bayonets.

But Palestine was not easily taken. The British campaign against the Turks lasted almost the whole of 1917. It began well, with the British forces storming through the Sinai Peninsula, but they were then held up by an attritional trench war in the lines between the Gaza Strip and Bir Saba. Once this stalemate was broken, it became easier—in fact, Jerusalem surrendered without a fight. The ensuing military occupation brought all three discrete processes—the emergence of Zionism, Protestant millenarianism, and British imperialism—to Palestinian shores as a powerful fusion of ideologies that destroyed the country and its people over the next thirty years.

There are those who would like to question whether the Jews who settled in Palestine as Zionists in the aftermath of 1918 were really the descendants of the Jews who had been exiled by Rome 2,000 years ago. It began with popular doubts cast by Arthur Koestler (1905–83), who wrote The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) in which he advanced the theory that the Jewish settlers were descended from the Khazars, a Turkish nation of the Caucasus that converted to Judaism in the eighth century and was later forced to move westward. Israeli scientists have ever since tried to prove that there is a genetic connection between the Jews of Roman Palestine and those of present-day Israel. Nevertheless, the debate continues today.

More serious analysis came from biblical scholars who were not influenced by Zionism, such as Keith Whitelam, Thomas Thompson, and the Israeli scholar, Israel Finkelstein, all of whom reject the Bible as a factual account of any significance. Whitelam and Thompson also doubt the existence of anything like a nation in biblical times and, like others, criticize what they call the "invention of modern Israel" as the work of pro-Zionist Christian theologians. The latest and most updated deconstruction of this idea came in Shlomo Sand's two books, The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. I respect and appreciate this scholarly effort. Politically, however, I think it is less significant than the assumption that denies the existence of the Palestinians (although it is the complement of that assumption). People are entitled to invent themselves, as so many national movements have done in their moment of inception. But the problem becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.

In the particular case of the claims of nineteenth-century Zionism, it is not the historical accuracy of those claims that matters. What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel's insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf. Until 1967, this claim was very helpful for the state of Israel. Jews around the world, in particular in the United States, became its main supporters whenever its policies were questioned. In many respects, this is still the case in the United States today. However, even there, as well as in other Jewish communities, this clear association is nowadays challenged.

Zionism, as we shall see in the next chapter, was originally a minority opinion among Jews. In making the argument that the Jews were a nation belonging to Palestine and therefore should be helped to return to it, they had to rely on British officials and, later, military power. Jews and the world at large did not seem to be convinced that the Jews were a people without a land. Shaftesbury, Finn, Balfour, and Lloyd George liked the idea because it helped Britain gain a foothold in Palestine. This became immaterial after the British took Palestine by force and then had to decide from a new starting point whether the land was Jewish or Palestinian—a question it could never properly answer, and therefore had to leave to others to resolve after thirty years of frustrating rule.

Zionism is Judaism

In order to examine properly the assumption that Zionism is the same as Judaism, one has to begin with the historical context in which it was born. Since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, Zionism was only one, inessential, expression of Jewish cultural life. It was born out of two impulses among Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The first was a search for safety within a society that refused to integrate Jews as equals and that occasionally persecuted them, either through legislation or through riots organized or encouraged by the powers that be as a diversion from economic crises or political upheavals. The second impulse was a wish to emulate other new national movements mushrooming in Europe at the time, during what historians called the European Spring of Nations. Those Jews who sought to transform Judaism from a religion into a nation were not unique among the many ethnic and religious groups within the two crumbling empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—who wished to redefine themselves as nations.

The roots of modern-day Zionism can be found already in the eighteenth century in what was called the Jewish enlightenment movement. This was a group of writers, poets, and rabbis who revived the Hebrew language and pushed the boundaries of traditional and religious Jewish education into the more universal study of science, literature, and philosophy. Across Central and Eastern Europe, Hebrew newspapers and journals began to proliferate. Out of this group there emerged a few individuals, known in Zionist historiography as the "Harbingers of Zionism," who showed greater nationalist tendencies and associated the revival of Hebrew with nationalism in their writings. They put forward two new ideas: the redefinition of Judaism as a national movement and the need to colonize Palestine in order to return the Jews to the ancient homeland from which they had been expelled by the Romans in 70 CE. They advocated for "the return" by way of what they defined as "agricultural colonies" (in many parts of Europe Jews were not allowed to own or cultivate land, hence the fascination with starting anew as a nation of farmers, not just as free citizens).

These ideas became more popular after a brutal wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881, which transformed them into a political program propagated by a movement called "The Lovers of Zion," who dispatched a few hundred enthusiastic young Jews to build the first new colonies in Palestine in 1882. This first phase in the history of Zionism culminates with the works and actions of Theodor Herzl. Born in Pest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1860, but resident for most of his life in Vienna, Herzl began his career as a playwright interested in the status and problems of the modern Jew in his society, asserting at first that full assimilation into local society was the key to this predicament. In the 1890s he became a journalist and, according to his own version of his life, it was at this time that he realized how potent anti-Semitism was. He concluded that there was no hope for assimilation and opted instead for the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine as the best solution to what he defined as the "Jewish Problem."

As these early Zionist ideas were aired among Jewish communities in countries such as Germany and the United States, prominent rabbis and leading figures in those communities rejected the new approach. Religious leaders dismissed Zionism as a form of secularization and modernization, while secular Jews feared that the new ideas would raise questions about the Jews' loyalty to their own nation-states and would thus increase anti-Semitism. Both groups had different ideas about how to cope with the modern-day persecution of the Jews in Europe. Some believed that the further entrenchment of Jewish religion and tradition was the answer (as Islamic fundamentalists would do at the same time, when faced with European modernization), while others advocated for further assimilation into non-Jewish life.

When Zionist ideas appeared in Europe and the United States between the 1840s and the 1880s, most Jews practiced Judaism in two different ways. One involved entrenchment: living within very tight religious communities, shunning new ideas such as nationalism, and indeed regarding modernization as such as an unwelcome threat to their way of life. The other way involved living a secular life, which differed from that of the non-Jewish communities in only very minimal ways—celebrating certain holidays, frequenting the synagogue on Fridays, and probably not eating in public during the fast of the day of atonement (Yom Kippur). Gershom Scholem, who was one such Jew, recalled in his memoirs Berlin to Jerusalem how, as a member of a young Jewish group in Germany, he used to dine with his friends in the same restaurant in Berlin during Yom Kippur; on their arrival, the proprietor would inform them that "the special room for the fasting gentlemen in the restaurant was ready." Individuals and communities found themselves between these two poles of secularization on the one hand and Orthodox life on the other. But let us look more closely at the positions they adopted towards Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Jewish secularism is a slightly bizarre concept of course, as is Christian secularism or Islamic secularism. Secular Jews as described above were people with various degrees of connection to religion (very much as a secular Christian in Britain celebrates Easter and Christmas, sends his children to Church of England schools, or attends Sunday mass occasionally or frequently). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, this modern form of practicing Judaism became a powerful movement known as the Reform movement, which looked for ways of adapting religion to modern life without succumbing to its anachronistic aspects. It was particularly popular in Germany and the United States.

When the Reformists first encountered Zionism, they vehemently rejected the idea of redefining Judaism as nationalism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, their anti-Zionist stance shifted after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. In the second half of the twentieth century, the majority among them created a new Reform movement in the United States, which became one of the strongest Jewish organizations in the country (although not until 1999 did the new movement officially vow allegiance to Israel and Zionism). However, a large number of Jews left the new movement and set up the American Council of Judaism (ACJ), which reminded the world in 1993 that Zionism was still a minority view among Jews, and which remained loyal to the old Reformist notions about Zionism.

Before that schism, the Reform movement in both Germany and the United States had provided a strong and unanimous case against Zionism. In Germany, they publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and proclaimed themselves "Germans of the Mosaic faith." One of the German Reformists' early acts was to remove from their prayer rituals any references to a return to "Eretz Israel" or the rebuilding of a state there. Similarly, already in 1869, American Reformists stated in one of their first conventions

that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification.

In 1885, another Reformist conference stated: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state."

One famous leader in this respect was Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, who repudiated the idea "that Judea is the home of the Jew—an idea which 'unhomes' [sic] the Jew all over the wide earth." Another leader of the movement at the end of the nineteenth century, Isaac Mayer Wise, often ridiculed Zionist leaders such as Herzl, comparing them to charlatan alchemists claiming to contribute to science. In Vienna, the city of Herzl, Adolf Jellinek argued that Zionism would endanger the position of Jews in Europe and claimed that most of them objected to the idea. "We are at home in Europe," he declared.

Apart from the Reformers, liberal Jews at that time rejected the claim that Zionism provided the only solution for anti-Semitism. As Walter Lacquer shows us in his book, The History of Zionism, liberal Jews regarded Zionism as a fanciful movement that provided no answer to the problems of the Jews in Europe. They argued for what they called a "regeneration" of the Jews, involving a display of total loyalty to their homelands and a willingness to be fully assimilated into them as citizens. They hoped that a more liberal world might solve the problems of persecution and anti-Semitism. History showed that liberalism had saved those Jews who moved to, or lived in, the UK and the USA. Those who believed it could happen in the rest of Europe were proven wrong. But even today, with hindsight, many liberal Jews do not see Zionism as the right answer then or now.

Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism became a more recognized political force very late in the decade, thanks to the diligent work of Herzl. Herzl understood contemporary politics and wrote utopian stories, political tracts, and newspaper reports summarizing the idea that it was in Europe's interest to help build a modern Jewish state in Palestine. World leaders were not impressed; neither were the Ottomans, as the rulers of Palestine. Herzl's greatest achievement was bringing all the activists together at one conference in 1897, and from there building up two basic organizations—a world congress promoting the ideas of Zionism globally, and local Zionist outfits on the ground expanding the Jewish colonization of Palestine.

Thus, with the crystallization of Zionist ideas, the criticism of Jews opposed to Zionism also became clearer. Apart from the Reform movement, criticism came from the left, lay leaders of the various communities, and from Orthodox Jews. In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist conference was convened in Basel, a socialist Jewish movement was born in Russia: the Bund. It was both a political movement and a Jewish trade union. Bund members believed that a socialist, even a Bolshevik, revolution would be a far better solution to the problems of Jews in Europe than Zionism. They regarded the latter as a form of escapism. More importantly, when Nazism and Fascism were on the rise in Europe, Bundists felt that Zionism contributed to this brand of anti-Semitism by questioning the loyalty of Jews to their homelands. Even after the Holocaust, Bundists were convinced that Jews should seek a place in societies that cherish human and civil rights, and did not see a Jewish nation state as a panacea. This strong anti-Zionist conviction, however, slowly subsided from around the mid-1950s, and the remnants of this once-powerful movement eventually decided to support the state of Israel publicly (they even had a branch in the Jewish state).

The reaction of the Bund did not trouble Herzl as much as did the lukewarm response of the Jewish political and economic elites in places such as Britain and France. They saw Herzl either as a charlatan whose ideas were far removed from reality, or worse as someone who could undermine Jewish life in their own societies where, as in Britain, they had made immense progress in terms of emancipation and integration. The Victorian Jews were disturbed by his call for Jewish sovereignty in a foreign land with an equal status to other sovereign states in the world. For the more established sections of Central and Western European Jewry, Zionism was a provocative vision that called into question the loyalty of English, German, and French Jews to their own home nations. Thanks to their lack of support for Herzl, the Zionist movement failed to become a powerful actor before World War I. Only after Herzl's death in 1904 did other leaders of the movement—in particular Chaim Weizmann, who immigrated to Britain in the year Herzl died and became a leading scientist there, contributing to the British war effort in World War I—build a strong alliance with London that served Zionism well, as will be described later in this chapter.

The third critique on Zionism in its early days came from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. To this day, many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities vehemently oppose Zionism, although they are much smaller than they were in the late nineteenth century and some of them moved to Israel and are now part of its political system. Nonetheless, as in the past, they constitute yet another non-Zionist way of being Jewish. When Zionism made its first appearance in Europe, many traditional rabbis in fact forbade their followers from having anything to do with Zionist activists. They viewed Zionism as meddling with God's will to retain the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to end the "Exile." Instead, they had to wait for God's word on this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life. While individuals were allowed to visit and study in Palestine as pilgrims, this was not to be interpreted as permission for a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem).

Not all the leading rabbis opposed Zionism however. There was a small group of quite famous authoritative figures, such as the rabbis al-Qalay, Gutmacher, and Qalisher, who endorsed the Zionist program. They were a small minority but in hindsight they were an important group as they laid the foundation for the national religious wing of Zionism. Their religious acrobatics were quite impressive. In Israeli historiography they are called the "Fathers of the Religious Zionism." Religious Zionism is a very important movement in contemporary Israel, as the ideological home of the messianic settler movement, Gush Emunim, which colonized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1967 onwards. These rabbis not only called on Jews to leave Europe but also asserted that it was a religious duty, not just a nationalist one, for Jews to colonize Palestine through the cultivation of its land (not surprisingly the natives of the land do not feature in their writings). They claimed that such an act would not be meddling with God's will; on the contrary, it would fulfill the prophecies of the Prophets and advance the full redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah.

Most of the leading lights in Orthodox Judaism rejected this plan and interpretation. They had another axe to grind with Zionism. The new movement not only wished to colonize Palestine; it also hoped to secularize the Jewish people, to invent the "new Jew" in antithesis to the religious Orthodox Jews of Europe. This culminated in the image of a new European Jew who could no longer live in Europe, because of its anti-Semitism, but had to live as a European outside the continent. Thus, like many movements during this period, Zionism redefined itself in national terms—but it was radically different because it chose a new land for this conversion. The Orthodox Jew was ridiculed by the Zionists and was viewed as someone who could only be redeemed through hard work in Palestine. This transformation is beautifully described in Herzl's futuristic utopian novel, Altnueland, which tells the story of a German tourist expedition arriving in the Jewish state long after it had been established. Before arriving in Palestine, one of the tourists had run into a young Orthodox Jewish beggar—he comes across him again in Palestine, now secular, educated, and extremely rich and content.

The role of the Bible within Jewish life offered one further clear difference between Judaism and Zionism. In the pre-Zionist Jewish world, the Bible was not taught as a singular text that carried any political or even national connotation in the various Jewish educational centers in either Europe or the Arab world. The leading rabbis treated the political history contained in the Bible, and the idea of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, as marginal topics in their spiritual world of learning. They were much more concerned, as indeed Judaism in general was, with the holy writings focusing on the relationship between believers, and in particular on their relations with God.

From "The Lovers of Zion" in 1882 to the Zionist leaders on the eve of World War I, who appealed to Britain to support the Jewish claim for Palestine, reference to the Bible was quite common. In pursuit of their own interests, Zionist leaders fundamentally challenged the traditional biblical interpretations. The Lovers of Zion, for instance, read the Bible as the story of a Jewish nation born on the land of Palestine as an oppressed people under the yoke of a Canaanite regime. The latter exiled the Jewish people to Egypt, until they returned to the land and liberated it under Joshua's leadership. The traditional interpretation, in contrast, focuses on Abraham and his family as a group of people discovering a monotheistic god rather than a nation and a homeland. Most readers will be familiar with this conventional narrative of the Abrahamites discovering God and through trials and tribulations finding themselves in Egypt—hardly a story of an oppressed nation engaged in a liberation struggle. However, the latter was the preferred Zionist interpretation, which still holds water in Israel today.

One of the most intriguing uses of the Bible in Zionism is that practiced by the socialist wing of the movement. The fusion of socialism with Zionism began in earnest after Herzl's death in 1904, as the various socialist factions became the leading parties in the World Zionist movement and on the ground in Palestine. For the socialists, as one of them said, the Bible provided "the myth for our right over the land." It was in the Bible that they read stories about Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars, which they appropriated as describing the ancient golden era of their nation's birth. Returning to the land meant coming back to become farmers, shepherds, and kings. Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.

For many Zionist leaders, the reference in the Bible to the land of Palestine was just a means to their ends, and not the essence of Zionism. This was clear in particular in texts written by Theodor Herzl. In a famous article in The Jewish Chronicle (July 10, 1896) he based the Jewish demand for Palestine on the Bible, but expressed his wish that the future Jewish state be run according to the European political and moral philosophies of his time. Herzl was probably more secular than the group of leaders who replaced him. This prophet of the movement seriously considered alternatives to Palestine, such as Uganda, as the promised land of Zion. He also looked at other destinations in the north and south of America and in Azerbaijan. With Herzl's death in 1904, and the rise of his successors, Zionism homed in on Palestine and the Bible became even more of an asset than before as proof of a divine Jewish right to the land.

The new post-1904 fixation on Palestine as the only territory in which Zionism could be implemented was reinforced by the growing power of Christian Zionism in Britain and in Europe. Theologians who studied the Bible and evangelical archeologists who excavated "the Holy Land" welcomed the settlement of Jews as confirming their religious belief that the "Jewish return" would herald the unfolding of the divine promise for the end of time. The return of the Jews was the precursor of the return of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. The Zionist project of colonizing Palestine was well served by this esoteric religious belief. However, behind these religious visions lay classical anti-Semitic sentiments. For pushing Jewish communities in the direction of Palestine was not only a religious imperative; it also helped in the creation of a Europe without Jews. It therefore represented a double gain: getting rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time fulfilling the divine scheme in which the Second Coming was to be precipitated by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in Hell should they refuse).

From that moment onwards, the Bible became both the justification and the route map for the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Historically, the Bible served Zionism well from its inception until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It played an important role in the dominant Israeli narrative—for both domestic and external purposes—claiming that Israel is the same land as was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. "Israel" in this narrative existed until 70 CE, when the Romans demolished it and exiled its people. The religious commemoration of that date, when the second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, was a day of mourning. In Israel it has become a national day of mourning on which all leisure-industry businesses, including restaurants, are required to close from the evening before.

The principal scholarly and secular proof for this narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text). After 70 CE, according to the narrative, the land was more or less empty until the Zionist return. However, leading Zionists knew that appealing to the authority of the Bible would not be enough. Colonizing the already inhabited Palestine would require a systematic policy of settlement, dispossession, and even ethnic cleansing. To this end, portraying the dispossession of Palestine as the fulfillment of a divine Christian scheme was priceless when it came to galvanizing global Christian support behind Zionism.

As we have seen, once all other territorial options were ruled out and Zionism focused on the reclamation of Palestine, the leaders who took over from the early pioneers began to inject socialist, and even Marxist, ideology into the growing secular movement. The aim now was to establish (with the help of God) a secular, socialist, colonialist Jewish project in the Holy Land. As the colonized natives quickly learned, ultimately their fate was sealed regardless of whether the settlers brought with them the Bible, the writings of Marx, or the tracts of the European Enlightenment. All that mattered was whether, or how, you were included in the settlers' vision of the future. It is telling therefore that in the obsessive records kept by the early Zionist leaders and settlers, the natives featured as an obstacle, an alien and an enemy, regardless of who they were or of their own aspirations.

The first anti-Arab entries in those records were written while the settlers were still being hosted by the Palestinians on the way to the old colonies, or in the towns. Their complaints stemmed from their formative experiences, searching for work and a means of subsistence. This predicament seemed to affect them universally, whether they went to the old colonies or whether they tried their luck in the towns. Wherever they were, in order to survive they had to work shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or workers. Through such intimate contact even the most ignorant and defiant settlers realized that Palestine was totally an Arab country in its human landscape.

David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community during the Mandatory period and Israel's first prime minister, described the Palestinian workers and farmers as beit mihush ("an infested hotbed of pain"). Other settlers talked about the Palestinians as strangers and aliens. "The people here are stranger to us than the Russian or Polish peasant," wrote one of them, adding, "We have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here." They were surprised to find people in Palestine at all, having been told the land was empty. "I was disgusted to find out that in Hadera [an early Zionist colony built in 1882] part of the houses were occupied by Arabs," reported one settler, while another reported back to Poland that he was appalled to see many Arab men, women, and children crossing through Rishon LeZion (another colony from 1882).

Since the country was not empty, and you had to overcome the presence of the natives, it was good to have God on your side—even if you were an atheist. Both David Ben-Gurion and his close friend and colleague Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (who along with Ben-Gurion led the Zionist socialist factions in Palestine and later became the second president of Israel) used the biblical promise as the main justification for the colonization of Palestine. This remained the case for the ideologues who succeeded them in the Labor party into the mid-1970s, and up to the very shallow secular Bible-ism of the Likud party and its offshoots of recent years.

The interpretation of the Bible as the divine justification for Zionism helped the socialists to reconcile their adherence to the universal values of solidarity and equality with the colonization project of dispossession. Indeed, since colonization was the main goal of Zionism, one has to ask what kind of socialism this was. After all, in the collective memory of many, the golden period of Zionism is associated with the collectivist, egalitarian life embodied in the establishment of the Kibbutz. This form of life lasted long after Israel was founded and it attracted young people from all over the world who came to volunteer and experience communism in its purest form. Very few of them realized, or could have known, that most of the Kibbutzim were built on destroyed Palestinian villages, whose populations had been expelled in 1948. In justification, the Zionists claimed that these villages were old Jewish places mentioned in the Bible, and hence that their appropriation was not an occupation but a liberation. A special committee of "biblical archeologists" would enter a deserted village and determine what its name was in biblical times. Energetic officials of the Jewish National Fund would then establish the settlement with its newly recovered name. A similar method was used after 1967 by the then minister of labor, Yigal Alon, a secular socialist Jew, for building a new town near Hebron, since it "belonged" to the Jewish people, according to the Bible.

Some critical Israeli scholars, most notable among them Gershon Shafir and Zeev Sternhell (as the well as the American scholar Zachary Lockman), have explained how the colonial appropriation of land tainted the supposed golden era of socialist Zionism. As these historians show, socialism within Zionism, as a praxis and way of life, was always a conditional and limited version of the universal ideology. The universal values and aspirations that characterized the various ideological movements of the Western left were very early on nationalized or Zionized in Palestine. No wonder then that socialism lost its attractiveness for the next generation of settlers.

Yet religion remained an important aspect of the process even after the land had been taken from the Palestinians. In its name you could invoke and assert an ancient moral right to Palestine that challenged every other external claim to the land in those dying days of imperialism. This right also superseded the moral claims of the native population. One of the most socialist and secular colonialist projects of the twentieth century demanded exclusivity in the name of a pure divine promise. The reliance on the sacred text proved highly profitable for the Zionist settlers and extremely costly to the local population. The late and brilliant Michael Prior's last book, The Bible and Colonialism, showed how the same kinds of projects were pursued around the globe in ways that have much in common with the colonization of Palestine.

After Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the Bible continued to be used to similar ends. I have already mentioned Yigal Alon, who used the Bible to justify building a Jewish town, Qiryat Arba, on land expropriated from the people of Hebron, the nearby Palestinian town. Qiryat Arba quickly became a hotbed for people who took the Bible even more seriously as a guide to action. They selectively chose those biblical chapters and phrases that in their eyes justified the dispossession of the Palestinians. As the years of the occupation continued, so too did the regime of brutality against the dispossessed. This process of drawing political legitimization from a sacred text can lead to fanaticism with dangerous consequences. The Bible, for instance, has references to genocide: the Amalekites were killed to the last by Joshua. Today there are those, thankfully for now only a fanatical minority, who refer not only to the Palestinians as Amalekites but also to those who are not Jewish enough in their eyes.

Similar references to genocide in the name of God appear in the Jewish Haggadah for Pesach (Passover). The main tale, of the Passover Seder—where God sends Moses and the Israelites to a land inhabited by others, to possess it as they see fit—is of course not an imperative issue for the vast majority of Jews. It is a literary text, not a manual for war. However, it can be exploited by the new stream of Jewish messianic thinking, as was the case with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and, in the summer of 2015, the burning to death first of a teenager in one incident, and then of two parents and their baby in another. Israel's new minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked, entertained similar ideas, so far only for Palestinians who have died in their attempts to resist Israel: their whole family, she said, should "follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there." For the time being, this is just a warning for the future. Since 1882, as we have seen, the Bible has been used as a justification for dispossession. However, in the early years of the state of Israel, 1948–67, reference to the Bible subsided and was only employed on the right-wing margins of the Zionist movement to justify their depiction of the Palestinians as subhuman and as the eternal enemies of the Jewish people. After the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, these messianic and fundamentalist Jews, growing up in the Religious National Party, MAFDAL, seized the opportunity to transform their hallucinations into real action on the ground. They settled everywhere in the newly occupied territories, with or without the consent of the government. They created islands of Jewish life within Palestinian territory, and began to behave as if they owned all of it.

The most militant factions of Gush Emunim, the post-1967 settlement movement, took advantage of the very particular circumstances created by the Israeli rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to go wild in their license to dispossess and abuse in the name of the sacred texts. Israeli law did not apply in the occupied territories, which were ruled by military emergency regulations. However, this military legal regime did not apply to the settlers, who were in many ways immune from sanction in both legal systems. Their settling by force in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron and Jerusalem, uprooting of Palestinian olive trees, and setting fire to Palestinian fields were all justified as part of the divine duty to settle in "Eretz Israel."

But the settlers' violent interpretation of the biblical message was not confined to the occupied territories. They began to push into the heart of the mixed Arab-Jewish towns in Israel, such as Acre, Jaffa and Ramleh, in order to disturb the delicate modus vivendi that had prevailed there for years. The movement of settlers into these sensitive spots inside the pre-1967 Israeli border had the potential of undermining, in the name of the Bible, the already strained relations between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority.

The final reason offered for the Zionist reclamation of the Holy Land, as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the Holocaust. However, even if this was true, it might have been possible to find a solution that was not restricted to the biblical map and that did not dispossess the Palestinians. This position was voiced by a quite a few well-known personalities, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These commentators tried to suggest that the Palestinians should be asked to provide a safe haven for persecuted Jews alongside the native population, not in place of it. But the Zionist movement regarded such proposals as heresy.

The difference between settling alongside the native people and simply displacing them was recognized by Mahatma Gandhi when he was asked by the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, to lend his support to the Zionist project. In 1938, Buber had been asked by Ben-Gurion to put pressure on several well-known moral figures to show their public support for Zionism. They felt that approval from Gandhi, as the leader of a nonviolent national struggle against imperialism, would be especially useful, and were prepared to leverage his respect for Buber in order to get it. Gandhi's major statement on Palestine and the Jewish question appeared in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of November 11, 1938, in the middle of a major rebellion by the native Palestinians against the British government's pro-Zionist policies. Gandhi began his piece by saying that all his sympathies lay with the Jews, who as a people had been subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for centuries. But, he added,

My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

Gandhi thus questioned the very foundational logic of political Zionism, rejecting the idea of a Jewish state in the promised land by pointing out that the "Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract." Thus, Gandhi disapproved of the Zionist project for both political and religious reasons. The endorsement of that project by the British government only alienated Gandhi even further. He had no doubts about who Palestine belonged to:

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs … Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

Gandhi's response to the Palestine question contains different layers of meaning, ranging from an ethical position to political realism. What is interesting is that, while firmly believing in the inseparability of religion and politics, he consistently and vehemently rejected the cultural and religious nationalism of Zionism. A religious justification for claiming a nation state did not appeal to him in any substantial sense. Buber responded to this article by trying to justify Zionism, but Gandhi had apparently had enough and the correspondence petered out.

Indeed, the space the Zionist movement demanded for itself was not determined by the need to rescue persecuted Jews, but by the wish to take as much of Palestine as possible with as few inhabitants as was practical. Sober and secular Jewish scholars attempted to remain "scientific" in translating a hazy promise from an ancient past into a present fact. The project had been started already by the chief historian of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), and was continued intensively after the creation of the state in 1948. Its end product is represented by the quotation from the website of the Israeli foreign ministry reproduced in Chapter 1. Dinur's task in the 1930s, like that of his successors ever since, was to prove scientifically that there had been a Jewish presence in Palestine ever since Roman times.

Not that anyone doubted it. Despite the historical evidence that the Jews who lived in eighteenth-century Palestine rejected the notion of a Jewish state, as did the Orthodox Jews in the late nineteenth century, this was rejected out of hand in the twentieth century. Dinur and his colleagues used the statistic that Jews made up no more than 2 percent of the population of eighteenth-century Palestine to prove the validity of the biblical promise and of the modern Zionist demand for Palestine. This narrative has become the standard, accepted history. One of Britain's most distinguished professors of history, Sir Martin Gilbert, produced many years ago the Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, published across several editions by Cambridge University Press. The Atlas begins the history of the conflict in biblical times, taking it for granted that the territory was a Jewish kingdom to which the Jews returned after 2,000 years of exile. Its opening maps tell the whole story: the first is of biblical Palestine; the second of Palestine under the Romans; the third of Palestine during the time of the crusaders; and the fourth, of Palestine in 1882. Thus, nothing of importance happened between the medieval era and the arrival of the first Zionists. Only when foreigners are in Palestine—Romans, Crusaders, Zionists—is it worth mentioning.

Israeli educational textbooks now carry the same message of the right to the land based on a biblical promise. According to a letter sent by the education ministry in 2014 to all schools in Israel: "the Bible provides the cultural infrastructure of the state of Israel, in it our right to the land is anchored." Bible studies are now a crucial and expanded component of the curriculum—with a particular focus on the Bible as recording an ancient history that justifies the claim to the land. The biblical stories and the national lessons that can be learned from them are fused together with the study of the Holocaust and of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. There is a direct line from this 2014 letter back to the evidence given by David Ben-Gurion in 1937 to the Royal Peel Commission (the British inquiry set up to try to find a solution to the emerging conflict). In the public discussions on the future of Palestine, Ben-Gurion waved a copy of the Bible at the members of the committee, shouting: "This is our Qushan [the Ottoman land registry proof], our right to Palestine does not come from the Mandate Charter, the Bible is our Mandate Charter."

Historically, of course, it makes no sense to teach the Bible, what happened to the Jews of Europe, and the 1948 war as one historical chapter. But ideologically the three items are linked together and indoctrinated as the basic justification for the Jewish state in our time. This discussion of the role of the Bible in modern-day Israel leads us to our next question: is Zionism a colonialist movement?

Zionism is not Colonialism

The land of Palestine was not empty when the first Zionist settlers arrived there in 1882. This fact was known to the Zionist leaders even before the first Jewish settlers arrived. A delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations reported back to their colleagues: "the bride is beautiful but married to another man." Nevertheless, when they first arrived, the early settlers were surprised to encounter the locals whom they regarded as invaders and strangers. In their view, the native Palestinians had usurped their homeland. They were told by their leaders that the locals were not natives, that they had no rights to the land. Instead they were a problem that had to, and could, be resolved.

This conundrum was not unique: Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in three respects. The first is that settler colonies rely only initially and temporarily on the empire for their survival. In fact, in many cases, as in Palestine and South Africa, the settlers do not belong to the same nation as the imperial power that initially supports them. More often than not they ceded from the empire, redefining themselves as a new nation, sometimes through a liberation struggle against the very empire that supported them (as happened during the American Revolution for instance). The second difference is that settler colonialism is motivated by a desire to take over land in a foreign country, while classical colonialism covets the natural resources in its new geographical possessions. The third difference concerns the way they treat the new destination of settlement. Unlike conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. The problem was that the new "homelands" were already inhabited by other people. In response, the settler communities argued that the new land was theirs by divine or moral right, even if, in cases other than Zionism, they did not claim to have lived there thousands of years ago. In many cases, the accepted method for overcoming such obstacles was the genocide of the indigenous locals.

One of the leading scholars on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, argues that settler colonial projects were motivated by what he calls "the logic of elimination." This meant that the settlers developed the necessary moral justifications and practical means to remove the natives. As Wolfe indicates, at times this logic entailed actual genocide, at other times, ethnic cleansing or an oppressive regime that denied the natives any rights. I would add that there was another logic permeating the logic of elimination: the logic of dehumanization. As a victim yourself of persecution in Europe, you needed first to dehumanize a whole native nation or society, before being willing to do the same, or worse, to fellow humans.

As a result of these twin logics, whole nations and civilizations were wiped out by the settler colonialist movement in the Americas. Native Americans, south and north, were massacred, converted by force to Christianity, and finally confined to reservations. A similar fate awaited the aboriginals in Australia and to a lesser extent the Maoris in New Zealand. In South Africa, such processes ended with the imposition of the apartheid system upon the local people, while a more complex system was imposed on the Algerians for about a century.

Zionism is therefore not sui generis but an example of a wider process. This is important not just for how we understand the machinations of the colonial project, but also for our interpretation of the Palestinian resistance to it. If one asserts that Palestine was a land without people waiting for the people without a land, then the Palestinians are robbed of any argument for protecting themselves. All their efforts to hold onto their land become baseless violent acts against the rightful owners. As such, it is difficult to separate the discussion of Zionism as colonialism from the question of the Palestinians as a colonized native people. The two are linked together in the same analysis.

The official Israeli narrative or foundational mythology refuses to allow the Palestinians even a modicum of moral right to resist the Jewish colonization of their homeland that began in 1882. From the very beginning, Palestinian resistance was depicted as motivated by hate for Jews. It was accused of promoting a protean anti-Semitic campaign of terror that began when the first settlers arrived and continued until the creation of the state of Israel. The diaries of the early Zionists tell a different story. They are full of anecdotes revealing how the settlers were well received by the Palestinians, who offered them shelter and in many cases taught them how to cultivate the land. Only when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin. And when that resistance started, it quickly took the form of every other anticolonialist struggle.

The idea that impoverished Jews were entitled to a safe haven was not objected to by the Palestinians and those supporting them. However, this was not reciprocated by the Zionist leaders. While Palestinians offered shelter and employment to the early settlers, and did not object to working should to shoulder with them under whatever ownership, the Zionist ideologues were very clear about the need both to push the Palestinians out of the country's labor market and to sanction those settlers who were still employing Palestinians or who worked alongside them. This was the idea of avoda aravit, (Hebrew Labor), which meant mainly the need to bring an end to avoda aravit, (Arab Labor). Gershon Shafir, in his seminal work on the Second Aliyah, the second wave of Zionist immigration (1904–14), explains well how this ideology developed and was practiced. The leader of that wave, David Ben-Gurion (who became the leader of the community and then prime minister of Israel), constantly referred to Arab labor as an illness for which the only cure was Jewish labor. In his and other settlers' letters, Hebrew workers are characterized as the healthy blood that will immunize the nation from rottenness and death. Ben-Gurion also remarked that employing "Arabs" reminded him of the old Jewish story of a stupid man who resuscitated a dead lion that then devoured him.

The initial positive Palestinian reaction confused some of the settlers themselves throughout the period of British rule (1918–48). The colonialist impulse was to ignore the native population and create gated communities. However, life offered different opportunities. There is extensive evidence of coexistence and cooperation between the newly arrived Jews and the native population almost everywhere. Jewish settlers, particularly in the urban centers, could not survive without engaging, at least economically, with the Palestinians. Despite numerous attempts by the Zionist leadership to disrupt these interactions, hundreds of joint businesses were formed throughout those years, alongside trade-union cooperation and agricultural collaboration. But without political support from above this could not open the way for a different reality in Palestine.

At the same time, the Palestinian political leaders grew more hostile to such joint initiatives as the Zionist movement became more aggressive. The slow realization among the Palestinian political, social, and cultural elite that Zionism was a colonialist project strengthened the common national identity in opposition to the settlers. And eventually there was also Palestinian pressure from above to cease the cooperation and interaction. The Palestinian political movement took time to emerge, developing out of a small group, the Muslim-Christian society, in several Palestinian towns. The guiding principles of the society were primarily modern and secular, added to the twofold concerns of the Arab world at large: a pan-Arab overview wedded to a local patriotism that became ever stronger following World War II.

The first eruption of pan-Arab nationalism had occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. It brought with it the hope of transforming the Ottoman world into an independent Arab republic, a bit like the United States of America, or an Arab-Ottoman empire, like the Austro-Hungarian one. When it transpired that this impulse could not withstand the imperial interests of Britain and France, who wished to divide the Ottoman Middle East between themselves, a more local version of nationalism developed, adapting itself to the map created by the Ottoman administrative boundaries and the division of the area by the colonial powers. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the first Arab nationalist impulse is called qawmiyya, the later local version, wataniyya. The Palestinian community played a role in both. Its intellectuals were engaged with, and were members of, the various organizations and movements seeking Arab unity, independence, and self-determination. At the same time, even before Britain defined, with the help of other European powers, the geopolitical space called Palestine, there was a particular Palestinian existence manifested in the customs of people, their Arabic dialect, and shared history.

When the Zionists arrived in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, the two impulses were still at work among the Palestinian community. Many of its intellectuals and activists were dreaming of a united Arab republic. Others were taken with the idea of a Greater Syria—willing for Damascus to be the center of a new state with Palestine a part of it. When the British arrived and the international community, through the League of Nations, began discussing the future of Palestine, prominent Palestinians produced a journal called Southern Syria, and even considered establishing a party under this name. In 1919, when US president Woodrow Wilson sent an inquiry, the King-Crane Commission, to discern the wishes of the Palestinians, the committee discovered that the majority wanted the territory to be independent.

Whether they were pan-Arabists, or local patriots, or wanted to be part of Greater Syria, the Palestinians were united in their wish not to be part of a Jewish state. Their leaders objected to any political solution that would hand any part of the small country to the settler community. As they clearly declared in their negotiations with the British at the end of the 1920s, they were willing to share with those who had already arrived, but could accept no more. The collective voice of the Palestinians was crystallized in the executive body of the Palestinian National Conference that met every year for a decade, starting in 1919. This body represented the Palestinians in their negotiations with both the British government and the Zionist movement. However, before that happened, the British tried to advance an agreement of equality between the parties. In 1928, the Palestinian leadership, notwithstanding the wishes of the overall majority of their people, consented to allow the Jewish settlers equal representation in the future bodies of the state. The Zionist leadership was in favor of the idea only for as long as it suspected the Palestinians would reject it. Shared representation stood against everything Zionism was supposed to be. So, when the proposal was accepted by the Palestinian party, it was rejected by the Zionists. This led to the riots of 1929, which included the massacre of Jews in Hebron and a much higher death toll among the Palestinian community. But there were also other reasons for the wave of violence, the most serious since the beginning of the Mandate. It was triggered by the dispossession of Palestinian tenants from land owned by absentee landlords and local notables, which had been bought by the Jewish National Fund. The tenants had lived for centuries on the land but they were now forced into slums in the towns. In one such slum, northeast of Haifa, the exiled Syrian preacher, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, recruited his first followers for an Islamic holy war against the British and the Zionist movement in the early 1930s. His legacy was ensured when his name was adopted by the military wing of the Hamas movement.

After 1930, the Palestinian leadership was institutionalized in the form of the Arab Higher Committee, a body that represented all the political parties and movements in the Palestinian community. Until 1937 it continued to attempt a compromise with the British government, but by then both the Zionists and the imperialists had ceased to care what the Palestinian point of view was, and went on unilaterally to determine the future of the territory. By this time the Palestinian national movement regarded Zionism as a colonialist project that had to be defeated. Yet even in 1947, when Britain decided to refer the question to the United Nations, the Palestinians suggested, with other Arab states, a unitary state in Palestine to replace the Mandate. The UN deliberated the fate of Palestine for seven months and had to decide between two options: the one suggested by the Palestinians of a unitary state that would absorb the existing Jewish settlers but would not allow any further Zionist colonization; the other suggesting a partition of the land into an Arab state and Jewish state. The UN preferred the latter option, and hence the message to Palestinians was: you cannot share your life on the land with the settlers—all you can hope for is to salvage half of it and concede the other half to the settlers.

Thus one can depict Zionism as a settler colonial movement and the Palestinian national movement as an anticolonialist one. In this context, we can understand the behavior and policies of the leader of the community, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, before and during World War II in a different light than the narrative normally served up as historical fact. As many readers will know, one of the common allegations propagated endlessly by the Israelis is that the Palestinian leader was a Nazi sympathizer. The mufti of Jerusalem was not an angel. At a very early age he was chosen by the notables of Palestine, and by the British, to hold the most important religious position in the community. The position, which al-Husayni held throughout the Mandatory period (1922–48), brought him political power and a high social standing. He attempted to lead the community in the face of the Zionist colonization, and when in the 1930s people such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam pushed for an armed struggle he was able to steer the majority away from this violent option. Nevertheless, when he endorsed the idea of strikes, demonstrations, and other ways of trying to change British policy, he became the empire's enemy, and had to escape from Jerusalem in 1938. In the circumstances he was forced into the arms of his enemy's enemy, in this case Italy and Germany. While in political asylum in Germany for two years, he came under the influence of Nazi doctrine and confused the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. His willingness to serve as a radio commentator for the Nazis and to help recruit Muslims in the Balkans to the German war effort no doubt stains his career. But he did not act any differently from the Zionist leaders in the 1930s, who themselves sought an alliance with the Nazis against the British Empire, or from all the other anticolonialist movements who wanted rid of the Empire by way of alliances with its principal enemies.

When the war ended in 1945, the Mufti returned to his senses and tried to organize the Palestinians on the eve of the Nakbah, but he was already powerless, and the world he belonged to, that of the Arab Ottoman urban notables, was gone. If he deserves criticism, it is not for his errors concerning Zionism. It is for his lack of sympathy with the plight of the peasants in Palestine, and for his disagreements with other notables, which weakened the anticolonialist movement. Nothing he did justifies his entry in the American-Zionist project The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust being the second longest after Hitler's. Ultimately, neither his mistakes nor his achievements had much impact on the course of Palestinian history. He was absolved of being treated as a war criminal by the allies, and allowed to return to Egypt, but not Palestine, at the end of the war.

With all his faults, before he escaped from Palestine in 1938, and to a certain extent after that in exile, he led an anticolonialist liberation movement. The fact that he was Mufti—one who also believed that religion should be recruited in the struggle against a colonialist movement that coveted his homeland and threatened his people's existence—is not relevant. Anticolonialist movements such as the FLN in Algeria had a strong connection to Islam, as did many liberation movements in the Arab world struggling for independence from Italy, Britain, and France after World War II. Nor was the Mufti's commitment to violence, or that of other leaders such as al-Qassam (killed by the British in 1935 and buried near Haifa), unique in the history of anticolonialist struggles. The liberation movements in South America and Southeast Asia were not pacifist organizations, and they put their faith in the armed struggle as much as in the political process. Had the Mufti been able to return to Palestine he would have realized not only that Zionism was a successful settler colonial project, but more importantly that it was on the eve of its most crucial existential project.

By 1945, Zionism had attracted more than half a million settlers to a country whose population was about 2 million. Some came with the permission of the Mandatory government, some without. The local native population was not consulted, nor was its objection to the project of turning Palestine into a Jewish state taken into account. The settlers managed to build a state within a state—constructing all the necessary infrastructure—but they failed in two respects. They managed to buy up only 7 percent of the land, which would not suffice for a future state. They were also still a minority—one third in a country in which they wanted to be the exclusive nation.

As with all earlier settler colonial movements, the answer to these problems was the twin logic of annihilation and dehumanization. The settlers' only way of expanding their hold on the land beyond the 7 percent, and of ensuring an exclusive demographic majority, was to remove the natives from their homeland. Zionism is thus a settler colonial project, and one that has not yet been completed. Palestine is not entirely Jewish demographically, and although Israel controls all of it politically by various means, the state of Israel is still colonizing—building new colonies in the Galilee, the Negev, and the West Bank for the sake of increasing the number of Jews there—dispossessing Palestinians, and denying the right of the natives to their homeland.

Fallacies of the Present

Looking Ahead

Conclusion

In 2017, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will have lasted for fifty years. After such a long period, the term "occupation" becomes somewhat redundant and irrelevant. Two generations of Palestinians have already lived under this regime. Although they themselves will still call it occupation, what they are living through is rooted in something else much harder to defeat or change—colonization. The term colonization, as I noted in the opening chapters, is not easily applied to the present—it is more often than not associated with past events. This is why, with the help of recent and exciting research, scholars writing on Israel are more frequently using another term: settler colonialism.

Colonialism can be described as the movement of Europeans to different parts of the world, creating new "white" nations where indigenous people had once had their own kingdoms. These nations could only be created if the settlers employed two logics: the logic of elimination—getting rid by all means possible of the indigenous people, including by genocide; and the logic of dehumanization—regarding the non-Europeans as inferior and thus as not deserving the same rights as the settlers. In South Africa these twin logics led to the creation of the Apartheid system, founded officially in 1948, the same year that the Zionist movement translated the same logics into an ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine.

As this book attempts to show, from a settler colonial perspective events such as the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Oslo Process, and the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 are all part of the same Israeli strategy of taking as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. The means of achieving this goal have changed over time, and it remains uncompleted. However, it is the main fuel that feeds the fire of the conflict.

In this manner, the horrific connection between the logics of dehumanization and elimination, so apparent in the spread of European settler colonialism throughout the world, first found its way into the authoritarian states of the Middle East. It was ruthlessly manifest, among a multitude of other examples, in the destruction of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein as well as in the punitive actions carried out by the Assad regime in 2012. It was then also employed by groups opposing that regime: the worst example being the genocidal policies of the Islamic State.

This barbarization of human relations in the Middle East can only be stopped by the people of the region themselves. However, they should be aided by the outside world. Together the region should return to its not so distant past, when the guiding principle was "live and let live." No serious discussion about ending human rights abuses in the region as a whole can bypass a conversation about the 100 years of human rights abuses in Palestine. The two are intimately connected. The exceptionalism enjoyed by Israel, and before that by the Zionist movement, makes a mockery of any Western critique of human rights abuses in the Arab world. Any discussion of the abuse of the Palestinians' human rights needs to include an understanding of the inevitable outcome of settler colonial projects such as Zionism. The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the constant oppression and dispossession of the local Palestinians.

We have wasted years talking about the two-states solution as if it had any relevance to the issue described above. But we needed that time to persuade both Israeli Jews and the world at large that when you found a state—even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech industry, and a powerful military—on the basis of dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will always be questioned. Confining the question of legitimacy only to the territories Israel occupied in 1967 will never resolve the issue at the heart of the problem. Of course it will help if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, but there is a possibility that it will just monitor the region in the same way it has policed the Gaza Strip since 2006. This will not hasten an end to the conflict, it will just transform it into a conflict of a different kind.

There are deep layers of history that will need to be addressed if a genuine attempt is to be made at a resolution. After World War II, Zionism was allowed to become a colonialist project at a time when colonialism was being rejected by the civilized world because the creation of a Jewish state offered Europe, and West Germany in particular, an easy way out of the worst excesses of anti-Semitism ever seen. Israel was the first to declare its recognition of "a new Germany"—in return it received a lot of money, but also, far more importantly, a carte blanche to turn the whole of Palestine into Israel. Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence. The "deal" also failed to uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since it is intimately connected to the Israel–Palestinian question, it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question is found.

We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity …

Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not "redeemed"; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. Colonized people, even under the UN Charter, have the right to struggle for their liberation, even with an army, and the successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants. A discussion of the future, liberated from the ten myths about Israel, will hopefully not only help to bring peace to Israel and Palestine, but will also help Europe reach a proper closure on the horrors of World War II and the dark era of colonialism.

Timeline

1881	Waves of Russian pogroms lasting until 1884. The Zionist movement appears in Europe.
1882	First Aliyah (1882–1904). The foundation of Rishon LeZion, Zichron Yaacov, and Rosh Pina in Palestine.
1897	The First Zionist Congress in Basel. The establishment of the World Zionist Congress.
1898	The Second Zionist Congress.
1899	The Third Zionist Congress.
1901	The Jewish National Fund (JNF) founded.
1904	The Second Aliyah (1904–14).
1908	The Palestine Office is established (in 1929 it became the Jewish Agency).
1909	Degania, the first Kibbutz (Kvutzat Degania), is founded. The building of Tel Aviv. The Hashomer founded.
1915–16	The Hussein–McMahon correspondence.
1916	The Sykes-Picot agreement.
1917	The Balfour Declaration. Britain occupies Palestine and governs it through a military administration (until 1920).
1920	The Haganah is founded. The Histadrut is founded. The San Remo Conference grants Britain the Mandate over Palestine.
1922	Britain recognizes Transjordan as a separate political entity and Amir Abdullah as its ruler. The US Congress endorses the Balfour Declaration.
1923	The British Mandate over Palestine and Transjordan is authorized first by the League of Nations, then at the Treaty of Lausanne.
1931	The Irgun splits from the Haganah.
1936	Arab Revolt breaks out and would last until 1939.
1937	The Peel Royal Commission.
1940	"Lehi" (Stern gang) splits from the Irgun. The Village Files Project launched.
1946	The Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry.
1947	Britain announces the end of the Mandate and transfers the question of Palestine to the UN. The UN forms a special committee, UNSCOP, which recommends partition. This is approved by the United Nations' General Assembly (Resolution 181).
1948	The ethnic cleansing of Palestine: British Mandate ends, the State of Israel declared and recognized by the United States and the USSR. Israel at war with troops entering Palestine from neighboring Arab countries while completing the expulsion of half of Palestine's population, demolishing half of its villages, and emptying and destroying eleven of its twelve towns.
1949	UNGA Resolution 194 (calling for the return of the Palestinian refugees). Armistice agreements between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. Military rule is imposed on the remaining Palestinian citizens inside Israel, which will remain in place until 1966.
1950	The immigration of Jews from Arab countries begins.
1956	Israel joins Britain and France in a war against Egypt's Nasser, occupying the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The Kafr Qasim massacre.
1959	Wadi Salib riots (Mizrahi riots in Haifa protesting discrimination).
1963	The end of the Ben-Gurion era.
1967	The Six-Day War: Israel occupies the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. UNSC Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories. Israeli settlement project in the West Bank and Gaza begins.
1973	The October War: Israel occupies part of Egypt proper and retains control of the Golan Heights after a bloody conflict that took the state by surprise.
1974	UN Security Council Resolution 338 reaffirms the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination and national independence.
1976	The Land Day Protests of the Palestinians in Israel against the Judaization of the Galilee.
1977	The Likud under Menachem Begin wins the national elections after thirty years of Labor rule. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt visits Jerusalem and begins bilateral talks with Israel.
1978	Peace treaty signed between Israel and Egypt. PLO attack on Tel Aviv reciprocated by Operation "Litani"—Israel occupies part of southern Lebanon.
1981	Annexation of the Golan Heights to Israel.
1982	Sinai returned to Egypt. Operation "Peace for the Galilee" in which Israel invades Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO.
1987	The First Palestinian Intifada.
1989	Collapse of the USSR and mass migration of Jews and non-Jews from across the Eastern Bloc to Israel.
1991	First Gulf War. US convenes international conference on Palestine in Madrid.
1992	Labor returns to power and Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister for the second time.
1993	The PLO and Israel sign the Oslo Declaration of Principles in the White House.
1994	The Palestinian National Authority is formed and Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, arrives in the occupied territories to become president of the PNA. Israel and Jordan sign peace treaty.
1995	Oslo II signed (interim agreement for Palestinian control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated.
1996	Likud returns to power and the first Benjamin Netanyahu government is formed.
1999	Labor's Ehud Barak elected as prime minister.
2000	Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon. The Second Intifada erupts.
2001	Ariel Sharon, head of the Likud, elected as prime minister. Later forms his own party (Kadima) and wins the 2005 elections.
2002	The West Bank Wall project is approved; implementation begins in 2003.
2005	Sharon re-elected. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement is launched. Israel evacuates from Gaza settlements and military bases.
2006	Hamas wins the elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Israel, the Middle East Quartet (United States, Russia, United Nations, and European Union), several Western states, and the Arab states impose sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, suspending all foreign aid. The siege on Gaza begins. Second Lebanon War and Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.
2006	Ehud Olmert elected as prime minister (in February 2016 Olmert began a nineteen-month prison sentence for bribery and obstruction of justice).
2008	Gaza War—Operation "Cast Lead." The UN and human rights organizations count more than 1,400 Palestinian deaths, of which 926 were unarmed civilians. Three Israeli civilians were killed and six soldiers.
2009–13	Second Netanyahu Government.
2011	Social protest across Israel (The Tent Movement).
2012	Operation "Pillar of Cloud." Four Israeli civilians and two soldiers were killed in Palestinian rocket attacks. According to the UN, 174 Palestinians in total died, 107 of them civilians.
2013–15	Third Netanyahu Government.
2014	Operation "Protective Edge." According to the main estimates, between 2,125 and 2,310 Gazans were killed (1,492 civilians, including 551 children and 299 women), and between 10,626 and 10,895 were wounded (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled). Sixty-six Israeli soldiers, five Israeli civilians (including one child), and one Thai civilian were killed, and 469 IDF soldiers and 261 Israeli civilians were injured. Israel destroyed about 17,000 homes, and partially destroyed 30,000.
2015	Fourth Netanyahu Government.

I would like to thank my friend Marcelo Svirsky for compiling this timeline.