An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict

(Updated: September 2002)

Background

To resolve what was called the "Jewish question" - i.e., the reciprocal challenges of Gentile repulsion or anti-Semitism and Gentile attraction or assimilation - the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth century to create an overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state in Palestine. (1) Once the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine through Great Britain's issuance of the Balfour Declaration, (2) the main obstacle to realizing its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on the eve of Zionist colonization, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish but Muslim and Christian Arab. (3)

Across the mainstream Zionist spectrum, it was understood from the outset that Palestine's indigenous Arab population would not acquiesce in its dispossession. "Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine," Zeev Sternhell observes. "If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking…. [I]n general both sides understood each other well and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs." Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) contemptuously dismissed the "illusive hopes" of those who spoke about a "'mutual misunderstanding' between us and the Arabs, about 'common interests' [and] about 'the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples.'" "There is no example in history," David Ben-Gurion declared, succinctly framing the core problem, "that a nation opens the gates of its country, not because of necessity…but because the nation which wants to come in has explained its desire to it." (4)


"The tragedy of Zionism," Walter Laqueur wrote in his standard history, "was that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map." This is not quite right. Rather it was no longer politically tenable to create such spaces: extermination had ceased to be an option of conquest. (5) Basically the Zionist movement could only choose between two strategic options to achieve its goal: what Benny Morris has labeled "the way of South Africa" - "the establishment of an apartheid state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority" - or the "the way of transfer" - "you could create a homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish majority by moving or transferring all or most of the Arabs out." (6)

Round One - "The way of transfer"

In the first round of conquest, the Zionist movement set its sights on "the way of transfer." For all the public rhetoric about wanting to "live with the Arabs in conditions of unity and mutual honor and together with them to turn the common homeland into a flourishing land" (Twelfth Zionist Congress, 1921), the Zionists from early on were in fact bent on expelling them. "The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings," Tom Segev reports. "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence…. With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer - or its morality." The key was to get the timing right. Ben-Gurion, reflecting on the expulsion option in the late 1930s, wrote: "What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out - a whole world is lost." (7)

The goal of "disappearing" the indigenous Arab population points to a virtual truism buried beneath a mountain of apologetic Zionist literature: what spurred Palestinians' opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism in the sense of an irrational hatred of Jews but rather the prospect - very real - of their expulsion. "The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession," Morris reasonably concludes, "was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism." Likewise, in his magisterial study of Palestinian nationalism, Yehoshua Porath suggests that the "major factor nourishing" Arab anti-Semitism "was not hatred for the Jews as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine." He goes on to argue that, although Arabs initially differentiated between Jews and Zionists, it was "inevitable" that opposition to Zionist settlement would turn into a loathing of all Jews: "As immigration increased, so did the Jewish community's identification with the Zionist movement…. The non-Zionist and anti-Zionist factors became an insignificant minority, and a large measure of sophistication was required to make the older distinction. It was unreasonable to hope that the wider Arab population, and the riotous mob which was part of it, would maintain this distinction." (8)

From its incipient stirrings in the late nineteenth century through the watershed revolt in the 1930s, Palestinian resistance consistently focused on the twin juggernauts of Zionist conquest: Jewish settlers and Jewish settlements. (9) Apologetic Zionist writers like Anita Shapira juxtapose benign Jewish settlement against recourse to force. (10) In fact, settlement was force. "From the outset, Zionism sought to employ force in order to realize national aspirations," Yosef Gorny observes. "This force consisted primarily of the collective ability to rebuild a national home in Palestine." Through settlement the Zionist movement aimed - in Ben-Gurion's words - "to establish a great Jewish fact in this country" that was irreversible. (emphasis in original) (11) Moreover, settlement and armed force were in reality seamlessly interwoven as Zionist settlers sought "the ideal and perfect fusion between the plow and rifle." Moshe Dayan later memorialized that "We are a generation of settlers, and without the combat helmet and the barrel of a gun, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house." (12) The Zionist movement inferred behind Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement a generic (and genetic) anti-Semitism - Jewish settlers "being murdered," as Ben-Gurion put it, "simply because they were Jews" - in order to conceal from the outside world and itself the rational and legitimate grievances of the indigenous population. (13) In the ensuing bloodshed the kith and kin of Zionist martyrs would, like relatives of Palestinian martyrs today, wax proud at these national sacrifices. "I am gratified," the father of a Jewish casualty eulogized, "that I was a living witness to such a historical event." (14)

It bears critical notice for what comes later that, from the interwar through early postwar years, Western public opinion was not altogether averse to population transfer as an expedient (albeit extreme) for resolving ethnic conflicts. French socialists and Europe's Jewish press supported in the mid-1930s the transfer of Jews to Madagascar to solve Poland's "Jewish problem." (15) The main forced transfer before World War II was effected between Turkey and Greece. Sanctioned by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and approved and supervised by the League of Nations, this brutal displacement of more than 1.5 million people eventually came to be seen by much of official Europe as an auspicious precedent. The British cited it in the late 1930s as a model for resolving the conflict in Palestine. The right-wing Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, taking heart from Nazi demographic experiments in conquered territories (about 1.5 million Poles and Jews were expelled and hundreds of thousands of Germans resettled in their place), exclaimed: "The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler - as odious as he is to us - has given this idea a good name in the world." During the war the Soviet Union also carried out bloody deportations of recalcitrant minorities such as the Volga Germans, Chechen-Ingush and Tatars. Labor Zionists pointed to the "positive experience" of the Greek-Turkish and Soviet expulsions in support of the transfer idea. Recalling the "success" (Churchill) of the Greek-Turkish compulsory transfer, the Allies at the Potsdam Conference (1945) authorized the expulsion of some 13 million Germans from Central and Eastern Europe (around 2 million perished in the course of this horrendous uprooting). Even the left-wing British Labor Party advocated in its 1944 platform that the "Arabs be encouraged to move out" of Palestine, as did the humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell, to make way for Zionist settlement. (16)

In fact many in the enlightened West came to view displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine as an inexorable concomitant of civilization's advance. The identification of Americans with Zionism came easily since the "social order of the Yishuv [Jewish community in Palestine] was built on the ethos of a frontier society, in which a pioneering-settlement model set the tone." To account for the "almost complete disregard of the Arab case" by Americans, a prominent British Labor MP, Richard Crossman, explained in the mid-1940s: "Zionism after all is merely the attempt by the European Jew to build his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress." Contrasting the "slovenly" Arabs with enterprising Jewish settlers who had "set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East," Crossman himself professed in the name of "social progress" support for Zionism. The left-liberal U.S. presidential candidate in 1948, Henry Wallace, compared the Zionist struggle in Palestine with "the fight the American colonies carried on in 1776. Just as the British stirred up the Iroquois to fight the colonists, so today they are stirring up the Arabs." (17)

Come 1948, the Zionist movement exploited the "revolutionary times" of the first Arab-Israeli war - much like the Serbs did in Kosovo during the NATO attack - to expel more than 80 percent of the indigenous population (750,000 Palestinians), and thereby achieve its goal of an overwhelmingly Jewish state, if not yet in the whole of Palestine. (18) Berl Katznelson, known as the "conscience" of the Labor Zionist movement, had maintained that "there has never been a colonizing enterprise as typified by justice and honesty toward others as our work here in Eretz Israel." In his multivolume paean to the American settlers' dispossession of the native population, The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt likewise concluded that "no other conquering nation has ever treated savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States." The recipients of this benefaction would presumably have a different story to tell. (19)

Notes

1. See Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (New York: 1995) pp. 7-12. (hereafter: I&R) The envisioned Jewish state would tolerate an Arab minority of no more than 15 percent (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York: 1987), p. 104).

2. For the crucial political repercussions on the Zionist movement of its reliance on Great Britain, see I&R, pp. 16-20.

3. See I&R, chapter 2.

4. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: 1998), pp. 43-4. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: 1999), p. 91 (Shertok). Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: 1979), p. 143 (Ben-Gurion). For further discussion and documentation, see I&R, pp. 98-110.

5. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: 1976), p. 597 (for discussion, see I&R, p. 198, note 13). Outright annexation of conquered territory had also ceased to be a political option - which crucially accounts for Great Britain's decision to issue the Balfour Declaration (see Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine (New Brunswick, NJ: 1992), esp. pp. 175, 188-9, 288).

6. Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948," in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine (Cambridge: 2001), pp. 39-40.

7. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (Frank Cass: 1974), p. 147 (Congress). Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: 2001), pp.404-5; cf. pp. 403, 406-7, 508. Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus," p. 42 (Ben-Gurion); for timing, see also Shabtei Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (Oxford: 1985), p. 35. For further discussion and documentation of Zionist expulsion plans, see I&R, pp. 16, 103-4, and esp. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 139-44, 168-9.

8. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 37. Porath, Emergence, pp. 59, 62.

9. Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism (Berkeley: 1976), p. 40. Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion (London: 1970), pp. 91-2, 165-6, 297.

10. See I&R, chap. 4.

11. Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948 (Oxford: 1987), p. 176; for detailed analysis of Gorny's study, see I&R, chap. 1. Teveth, Ben-Gurion, p. 155.

12. Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: 1998), p. 89 ("fusion") (cf. p. 62). Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (New York: 1998), p. 312 (Dayan). For discussion, see I&R, p. 106.

13. David Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders (New York: 1973), p. 3. (For Ben-Gurion's private recognition of the real motives behind Arab attacks, see I&R, pp. 108, 110.) Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (New York: 2000), pp. 49-53, 62-3.

14. Segev, One Palestine, p. 182.

15. Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I (New York: 1997), p. 219. On
related resettlement schemes, see Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (London: 1985), pp. 236, 249-51, and Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews (New York: 1989), pp. 59-61.

16. For population transfers from interwar through postwar period, see Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (New York: 1946), and Postwar Population Transfers in Europe, 1945-1955 (Philadelphia: 1962), Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam (London: 1977), Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: 1996), Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred (Cambridge: 2001). Segev, One Palestine, pp. 406-7 (Jabotinsky) (see also Gorny, Zionism, pp. 270-1). See I&R, p. 103 for "positive experience." Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington: 1992), pp. 157-61 (Labor Party). Bertrand Russell, "The Role of the Jewish State in Helping to Create a Better World" (1943), reprinted in Zionism (1981).

17. Sasson Sofer, Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy (Cambridge: 1998), p. 367 ("social order"). Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission (London: 1947), pp. 33, 152, 167. Kenneth Ray Bain, The March to Zion (London: 1979), p. 35 (Wallace) (cf. pp. 34-6 for Americans' identification of Zionist settlement with American West). For a detailed comparison between Zionist and American conquests, see I&R, pp. 89-98, and esp. Norman Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine (Minn.: 1996), pp.104-21. (hereafter: R&F)

18. See I&R, chap. 3; for further evidence supporting the argument in this chapter, see Laila Parsons, "The Druze and the birth of Israel," in Rogan and Shlaim, War, chap. 3, and Ben-Eliezer, Making, pp. 170-81. For comparisons recently evoked by mainstream Israelis with the Serb expulsion, see Finkelstein, Holocaust, pp. 70-1.

19. Sternhell, Founding Myths, p. 173 (Katznelson; for Katznelson's effective support of forced transfer, see p. 176). Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: 1889), vol. 4, p. 54.

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