Zionism was, from the first, a secular movement, largely opposed by the religious authorities, until after the Second World War. Weizman did not say that Israel should be as Jewish as England is Anglican, but as England is English, that is, it was no more than ethnic nationalism, intermixed, to be sure, with historical religion.
This may well be true, but it is entirely irrelevant. The existing population didn’t give a damn whether the proposal was for a State as Jewish as England was English or a State as Jewish as England is Anglican. Either way, it was for a Jewish State, and they, not being Jews by religion or ethnicity, did not want to live in a Jewish State.
Jews had an historical homeland
They did not. They drove others out when they occupied that land, and they were in turn driven out by others, who were in turn driven out by others, etc. The Jewish claim is no stronger than that of the descendents of any of the other groups that at one time or another occupied that piece of land, and it was certainly weaker than that of the actual occupants. The Jewish claim is based not on history but on religion, and as such seems much more compelling to those within the Judeo-Christian tradition than to those outside it.
It was the shock of the Dreyfuss affair that inspired Herzl. He saw that no amount of assimilation would cure the disease of "racial anti- semitism", and that if Jews would not be accepted as Frenchman, Germans, Poles, etc., then they must have a haven as Jews.
All of this is true. It is also completely irrelevant to the formulation that inspired this discussion, which is simply that the declared aim of the Jewish State gave the local population a choice between removal, submission to alien rule, and resistance, and that given the context it was inevitable that they chose the latter option. Please note, to repeat ad nauseam, that I am not trying to blame anybody or absolve anybody, but trying to establish a chain of cause and effect. However reasonable the goal of the Jewish State may have been to the Jews or to the casual observer, and however compelling the reasons behind the desire for Jewish Statehood, the truth remains that the declaration of intent to establish a Jewish State in Palestine left the local population with the option to move, submit, or resist, and that given the context the latter choice was inevitable.
In the Jewish view, the Arab population of Palestine had a couple of dozen homelands, as it were, places where they belonged and would be accepted. Indeed, at the time, the Arabs regarded Palestine as being part of Greater Syria, and therefore Palestinians had homeland centering around Damascus. No one, at the time that Israel was established, thought that there was a Palestinian people. For one thing, too many Palestinians were themselves immigrants to the area, in some cases going back a generation or two, but still, not "indigenous".
Again, irrelevant. If we are looking at the reasons why the local population resisted, talk of “homelands” is meaningless. The people who resisted weren’t thinking of homelands, they were thinking of homes: they only had one of those, and a foreign group was proposing to incorporate those homes into a state in which they would have no part. Their choice was hardly surprising. If a group of Native Americans showed up on your doorstep and told you that since this is the only place they have, and you have relations in Europe who will probably take you in, why don’t you just bugger off to Europe and give their homeland back to them, how would you feel about it? Noting, of course, that the Native American’s historical claim to America is one hell of a lot stronger than the Jewish claim to Palestine.
In any event, this discussion of whether the native population had lived there for two generations or ten, or whether they constituted a recognizable cultural entity or not, is totally irrelevant. At what point on the scale of duration of tenure, or the scale of cultural distinction, does it become acceptable to deprive an existing population of the right to self-determination?
Far from being a colonialist venture, the restoration of the territory of Judea to the Jews cured an historical enormity, that is, the expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. One of the early victims of imperialist exploitation was to have matters made right.
If we could locate the descendants of the Philistines, would you agree that we should then restore their homeland to them, rather than to those who expelled them? The notion that Palestine is the homeland of the Jews, rather than of any of the other manifold groups that have lived there, is not based on history, it is based on religious faith, not history or reason, and is thus inadmissible in discourse among nations.
Of course, the practical objection to such attempts at righting historical wrongs is that there are those not party to the original dispute, even by proxy, whose interests will be harmed, and therefore restoration would create a mare's nest of problems.
This is why, in the post-WW2 world, it has been accepted that the right of an existing population to self-determination trumps historical claims. It has to be that way, otherwise the problems become insoluble, especially when dealing with areas that have at one time or another been the “homelands” of dozens of different groups. This is particularly true when the “original dispute” (which even in this case is hardly original, since many others preceded it) occurred some thousands of years ago.
Initially, the Arabs in the area were not very hostile. Eventually, they became so, to the extent that many Arabs admired Adolf Hitler. Invoking "colonialism" is a simple- minded way of dealing with the change. It is more likely the rise of Arab nationalism, and the idea that the high point of Arab civilization (under the Caliphate) should be the model to emulate. In other words, "Palestinians" were invented as a proxy for Arab aspirations to rule the contiguous territory from the border of Iran to the end of North Africa, if not Spain itself. Remember, this was the time that the Ba'athist Party, which took its inspiration from fascism, arose. In the period immediately following the establishment of the state of Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq attempted to start a "United Arab Republic" on Ba'athist principles, although it broke down, and pan- Arabism was all the rage.
This is relevant to discussion of why the Arab states decided to attack Israel. This is not what we were discussing, though. We were looking at the starting point in the cycle of violence, the initial resistance of the Arab population to Zionist settlement. I proposed that the settler’s declared intention of establishing a Jewish State in Palestine made conflict with the local population, which did not desire to be part of a Jewish State, inevitable. I think the individuals who lived in that place when the settlers arrived, and who decided that they did not want the settlers to incorporate them into a State founded on principles alien to them, would have been quite surprised to know that over a century later, a man writing on a computer would declare that they had been “invented”, rather than born. |
