The state of Israel founded itself on a secular ideology, Zionism.
Zionism, as Ilan Pappe explains in Ten Myths About Israel, was a secular ideology born out of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-1800s. It sought to redefine the religion of Judaism into a national movement at a time when new national movements were mushrooming in Europe.
Importantly, Zionism was also driven by a search for safety by Jews long persecuted in Europe. The solution: colonise the land of Palestine to return the Jews to where they had been expelled by the Romans in AD 70.
Zionism benefited from a few factors that gave it such prominence as to become the foundational ideology of the state of Israel in 1948.
Its objective of colonising the land of Palestine coincided with the British strategic imperial impulse to deepen involvement in the “Holy Land”, thus receiving the British government’s support. That was no small matter as Britain was the imperial power of the world at the time.
That support resulted in the infamous Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people.
As Rashid Khalidi points out in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the soft, deceptive diplomatic language used in the declaration did not even mention explicitly the then 94% Arab Palestinian majority, referring only to them as “non-Jewish”. This tendency to erase and ‘unrecognise’ the indigenous Palestinians continues to this day.
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Ominously, the declaration promised only “civil and religious rights” to the native population but no political or national rights. The die was thus cast – unjustly and inequitably – and we continue to see the consequences today.
Britain’s imperial role in the genesis of the Israel-Palestine conflict is highly significant. After World War One, Britain was assigned a ‘mandate’ over Palestine and its charter incorporated wholesale, the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
As Pappe observes in Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the British Mandate thus embraced “Britain’s promise to the Zionist movement to secure a ‘homeland’ for the Jews in Palestine”.
Zionism’s quest to colonise a land also fit into the practice of the day – go forth and colonise if you are of a dominant European power. The idea of Zionist Jews settling in and colonising the land of Palestine thus seemed all of a piece.
Importantly too, as Pappe explains in Ten Myths About Israel, Zionism coincided with the view of significant groups of European Christians and Jews that the colonisation of Palestine was an act of return and redemption – part of a divine scheme for the return, resurrection and second coming of the Messiah.
The Zionist project also found alignment with Europe’s own long history of antisemitism and ideas of transferring Jews from Europe to Palestine.
In fact, Pappe also points to the role of an element of Islamophobia in David Lloyd George’s preference for a Jewish colony in the Holy Land instead of a Muslim one. This was how George, the UK’s Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, saw the Palestinians.
Add to that, the matter of Europe’s own need to compensate its Jews for the Nazi Holocaust (a genocide of white Europeans in the heart of Europe), and we have a powerful confluence of factors. These have led to the ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine at the expense of native Palestinians. All because of a genocide of Jews in the Holocaust in Europe, which the native Palestinians had nothing to do with.
Zionist myths
One of the main props to justify the colonisation of Palestine is the myth, strengthened by repetition, that Palestine was effectively empty before the arrival of the Zionist settlers (who thus came and “made the desert bloom”). Related to this was the idea that Palestinians simply did not exist.
This was patently untrue. In fact, Pappe describes how the Zionist leaders knew it was not empty even before the first Zionist settlers arrived in 1882. An early delegation sent to Palestine reported back (in rather patriarchal terms) that “the bride is beautiful but married to another man”. In fact, there was already a Palestinian existence “manifested in the customs of the people, their Arabic dialect, and shared history”. There were already a few hundred thousand Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians before the first wave of Zionist Jewish migration beginning in 1882.
In his Hundred Years’ War, Rashid Khalidi speaks of his family library in Jerusalem. (Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a bookshop on Nantucket Island with a copy of Rashid’s book under his arm. To what avail – a dubious question, unfortunately.)
The Khalidi Library in the Old City of Jerusalem was founded in 1899 by Rashid’s grandfather, with a bequest from Rashid’s grandfather’s mother. Private libraries were, evidently, a practice among the city’s oldest families. The library housed thousands of manuscripts, books and papers.
Clearly, Palestine was neither empty nor thinly inhabited by a backward people who had to await the arrival of Zionist settlers to “make the desert bloom”.
And yet, the rallying slogan of Zionism was “A land without a people for a people without a land”. This was a false statement that helped underpin the idea of “Eretz Israel” (“Land of Israel”). Given this falsehood, one would ask if it shouldn’t instead be ‘Ersatz Israel’ (substitute or artificial version of Israel)?
Pappe’s The Idea of Israel relates an interesting story of how Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was prepared to manufacture ‘truths’ out of expediency. In 1937, he asked a leading Zionist historian of the time to produce research to prove continuous Jewish occupation of the region from AD 70 (the time of the Roman exile) to 1882, when the first Zionists arrived.
Ben-Gurion, the then leader of the Jewish community, needed the report before the arrival in two weeks of the Britain’s Peel Commission, which was charged with finding a solution to the conflict already brewing in Palestine.
The Zionist historian said he could, but he would need about a decade to do so.
Ben-Gurion told him, “You do not understand. The Peel Commission is coming in two weeks’ time. Reach your conclusion by then, and afterwards you can have a whole decade to prove it!”
Through the vagaries of history, people move from place to place. And when, for whatever reason, a people should come to re-inhabit a place where they were, it cannot be right for that to be done by the appropriation, killing and forceful displacement of other people who have also or subsequently inhabited it.
Especially not if the appropriating group are a people such as the Jews who have suffered their own long history of persecution and expulsion, and thus know what that is like.
Especially not if in the tradition of that people (Judaism), there are powerful tenets exhorting justice, compassion and humanity – which cruel acts of killing and forceful displacement would surely transgress.
Such contradictions only ‘make sense’ when we remember that Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, is not Judaism. (Thus, being critical of Zionism is not being antisemitic, as Zionism does not define Jewishness.)
This is the third in a series of four articles. Look up the other three articles here.
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
