Well, it's clear that the Zionists cannot be cleared of the "crime" of Zionism
If you wish to call it that you may. I certainly didn’t. I said only that Zionism made violent confrontation with the local population inevitable. Herzl himself wrote something very similar: “An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues until the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless based on assured supremacy.”
trying to build a Jewish state in the land of Israel
I hesitate to point out the obvious, but at the time in question it wasn’t the land of Israel, and hadn’t been for many a century.
Now there was a pre-existing population, but not much of one, as the place was so mismanaged under the late Ottoman empire that no one could make a living there. The 24,000 Jews that you cite, if we accept it (and Ottoman censuses seem to inspire nothing but arguments, particularly when it comes to counting non-Muslims) was probably close to 10% of the population at the time.
Figures I’ve read suggest more like 5%, but as you say, any figures cited by any side are probably suspect, and the chances are that nobody really knows how many Jews were there, or for that matter how many non-Jews. What is well known is the character of that community. The Jewish community of those days was composed mainly of deeply religious individuals, many of them elderly immigrants, who built their lives around their religious observances. They did not to seek to acquire property and hadn’t the slightest inclination toward achieving political sovereignty. The only thing they had in common with the immigrants, in fact, was that they both practiced the same religion. To say that the local community was familiar with Jews because there had always been a Jewish community there is sophistry of the highest order: the immigrants may have been Jewish, but they were totally unlike the existing Jewish community.
As I have mentioned, the Arab population rose something like five-fold between 1880 and 1947, which speaks to a large Arab immigration, brought on by Zionist development and (much improved) colonial government.
Improved government was probably a factor. I think you would find, with impartial study, that Zionist development had a very minimal positive impact on the lives of the Arabs. One of the most fundamental principles of the settlers was the “purity of Hebrew labour”: Jewish land was to be worked only by Jews, and Jews were expected to hire only Jewish laborers and to patronize only Jewish businesses. This principle was sometimes taken to the point of absurdity. A memorial forest was planted at Ben Shemen in 1909, dedicated to Herzl’s memory; when settlers learned that the planting had been done by Arab laborers, they dug up all the trees and replanted them. Of course the principle was not always possible to observe: sometimes Arabs were the only laborers available and they were often the only ones around who knew how to do the work: many of the settlers came from urban areas in Europe and knew little about farming or building. Neither of these conditions lasted long, of course, and as immigration increased Jewish employment of Arab labor and Jewish patronage of Arab business became very minimal indeed.
Factoring this development in, it probably wouldn't have mattered if Palestine had been quite empty at the start of Zionism, because it would acquired an Arab population anyway.
It might not have mattered, but this formulation is entirely hypothetical, since it was not in fact empty.
The Arabs ran riots and pogroms at intervals, without ever organizing their society into any organizations that would have actually supported claims to self-determination, which was not even an idea that most of the Arabs of Palestine had before WWII since they had been ruled by the Turks for 400 years and still considered themselves part of Syria. What political organization they achieved was under the Mufti, who consolidated his power by assassinating his opponents. The sorry state of Arab governance that resulted from this was not "inherent in Zionism".
Why do you insist on talking about political organization, the state of Arab governance, formal claims to self-determination, and such concepts? None have any bearing on the point I am trying to make.
Let me start with some simple and painfully obvious realities.
Large scale immigration into a populated area causes social tension between the newcomers and the previous residents. This, as Herzl says, is inevitable. The causes of this tension are not necessarily the consequence of any direct economic or political impact of the immigration. Humans are pack animals and they are inherently territorial; the “us and them” mentality is never far from the surface. These qualities are closest to the surface in agricultural societies where communities are small and composed largely of closely related family groups.
So we have a large scale immigration of a largely urban population into an unsophisticated agricultural region. This creates tension and hostility. This is not a factor of any particular economic or political conditions, it’s simply human nature.
Then we have exacerbating factors. The newcomers possessed the support of entities with far more money than any locals had. They were thus able to buy up large tracts of land, often displacing tenants in the process. They also openly stated their intention to gain sovereignty over the entire area. Again, this would naturally increase the tension between newcomers and immigrants. It could hardly do anything else. Again, this is not a question of political organization or the state of governance or pan-Arab ideology, it’s a simple question of the way people are.
Possibly the single greatest exacerbating factor would have been simple personal relations. Ahad Ha’am, a man known in his day as “the conscience of Zionism”, wrote a detailed explanation in 1891 of how immigrants should treat the natives, and then added:
“Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the opposite! Servants they were in the land of their exile. Suddenly they find themselves in a state of freedom without limits… and the sudden transformation has produced in them the inclination to despotism that always occurs when the servant becomes the master! They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unscrupulously deprive them of their rights, insult them without cause, and even boast of such deeds, and none opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination”
You will doubtless find Ha’am’s testimony unacceptable, because it is not in accord with what you wish to believe. I think it’s probably true, simply because it is in accordance with the cultural and social milieu from which the settlers came, and it is consistent with the behaviour of European settlers in less developed areas all over the world.
As I’ve said before, the settlers came from Europe in the heyday of imperialism. They were racists and they were imperialists and they were utterly convinced of their own inherent superiority. This is not an accusation; there can be no blame affixed to these realities. They felt this way because in those days everybody in Europe felt that way; those were the standard beliefs of the age and those beliefs shaped the nature of relations between individual Europeans and the individual residents of the places they colonized.
This is a factor often overlooked in scholarly analysis of interactions between Europeans and the people in places where the Europeans settled. Many a scholar has looked at economic development, infrastructure, and education, and concluded that colonial presences were beneficial. When you listen to the voices of the colonized, they are more likely to talk about direct personal relations. When the Vietnamese protested against French rule, they were less likely to talk of railways and cane plantations, economic exploitation or political dominion, than of the tendency of the French, when agitated, to slap the nearest “Annamite” in the face. We can, if we will, gloss these objections over with talk of “shame-based” or “pride-based” cultures, but how would any of us feel if we were on the receiving end?
The ingredient that brought the inherent tension to the tinderbox level was, of course, the large scale evictions of peasant tenants and their subsequent migrations to towns and cities. Now, as I’ve said many a time before, I realize that this was legal and in fact quite rational. It did, however, have consequences, namely the accumulation of large numbers of landless and disoriented peasants in the cities.
Given this combination, along with the occasional flareups that had already happened, the type of disorganized violence that started in 1921 so likely that it can readily be said to have been inevitable. No ideology or political organization was necessary. Of course demagogues arose to exploit the situation. If you create a situation ripe for demagoguery, a demagogue will arise to exploit them. That’s like saying that rivers rise in the rain. Trying to blame the subsequent violence exclusively on the demagogue, without assigning due credit to the situation that created the demagogue, is quite ridiculous.
The various Commissions of Inquiry sent by the British Government to investigate the causes of the violence spent extended periods of time in research and conducted hundreds of interviews. At the end of it all they reached certain conclusions. You reject those conclusions out of hand, because they aren’t the ones you want to hear. Hardly the act of a rational observer, but hardly unexpected either. People who hold strong partisan political views are, when confronted by evidence incompatible with those views, more likely to ignore the evidence than to question their views. Human nature, really. One might almost call it inevitable….. |
