I never said that Zionism wasn't about creating a Jewish state. I was objecting to this "violence is inherent in Zionism" formulation, a formulation that neatly absolves everyone but the Jews for any choices they have made.
The Zionist enterprise was the only colonial "conquest" on record where the "colonists" bought their land, at inflated prices, from landlords only to happy to sell it to them.
They also were not trying to drive off the natives, but to outnumber them, which proved difficult due to the large amount of Arab immigration. The Muslim population of Palestinian rose approximately five-fold between 1880 and 1947; this is hardly driving off.
If a group of foreigners showed up in your neighborhood, bought some rental units, evicted the long-term tenants and loudly proclaimed their intention take over the entire area, and make it theirs, to be run by them according to their own culture and their own rules, wouldn’t you resist?
First of all, Jews were hardly foreigners to the neighborhood. There have been Jews in Israel for thousands of years. In fact, if the Zionists had been pure Europeans, it would probably have been more acceptable to the Arabs. This was a worse case -- dhimmis were getting out of their place and trying to run the neighborhood for themselves. As Bernard Lewis has noted, being beaten by "Franks" (Europeans) is bad enough; being ruled by a contempible gang of Jews was unendurable.
Second, about resisting foreigners. I would hardly start with bombs, especially if the foreigners were law-abiding and bringing jobs. I would start by talking, a concept perfectly foreign to the Mufti, whose proposals all assumed that nobody but himself had any interests at all. There were many attempts to reach a compromise, such as the Peel Commission of 1937, but the Mufti made sure none of them got anywhere.
Of course the people doing the resisting were uneducated, disorganized, and unsophisticated, so the resistance was violent and chaotic.
Part of the reason that the Arabs of Palestine (before WWII, the term "Palestinian" referred to the Zionists) were so disorganized was that the Mufti assassinated all leading men that he could not control. This made sure that he alone controlled the Arabs of Palestine, and his tool was ignorant village fighters. The men who should have been setting up the institutions of a future Palestinian state - newspapers, colleges, social welfare institutions - were either dead or keeping their heads down. When war approached, they skedaddled, leaving the fighting to the Mufti's men and five Arab armies. Again, you say, they are Arabs, what else can anyone expect? |
