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CHAPTER 1

The Mythological-Historical Origins of the Israeli State

An Overview

In Israel, even more than in any other society, the past, present, and future are intermingled; collective memory is considered objective history, and history is a powerful weapon, used both in domestic struggles and external conflict. On the domestic terrain, the past is used in order to determine who is entitled to full membership in the collectivity and according to what criteria, the type of laws and regime, and the desired borders of the state. Different pasts and their interpretations are also a central component in the construction of conflicting identities and identity politics.

In the foreign sphere, and to some degree the domestic, the distant past, in the form of ancient or recently invented and cultivated Jewish myths, archeology, and history, is used and abused to grant legitimacy to the very existence of the Jewish polity in the region. The ultimate weapon of the Jewish claim against the recently reconstructed Palestinian people, in their battle over the land, is the simple axiom “We were here from time immemorial,” suggesting that the Palestinians are at best newcomers. As a direct response to this meta-historical argument, the Palestinians invented their own “time immemorial,” alluding to their Canaanite roots, preceding the Jewish tribes who conquered the land according to the biblical description. This weird argument about “who preceded whom” is a daily and routine issue within the ongoing Israeli-Arab cultural dimension of the conflict.

Without knowledge of this complex of mythology, collective memory and history, and historical facts constructed and reinterpreted from context to context (or what Yael Zerubavel calls meta-narratives), the “Israeli story” is completely incomprehensible.

FROM BIBLICAL PALESTINE TO ISLAMIC CONQUEST

Hebrew mythology tells us that thirty years before the destruction of Troy, about 1200 B.C., the Israelite tribes, led by Joshua, conquered part of the Land of Canaan. Through conquest, the ancient Israelis annihilated most of the inhabitants of the country and established the territorial base for a semi-monotheistic religion and civilization, as well as a regional empire. No wonder that the Book of Joshua became central to the Israeli secular civil religion and later to the national religious movement's theology. This empire was then supposedly built up during the reigns of King David and King Solomon, following the collapse of the Assyrian world power in 1075 B.C.¹

This nascent Jewish civilization was based on, among other symbols, a mythology surrounding the “patriarchs” Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the prophet Moses; even today, Jews still consider themselves descendants of one common father. Recently, there have been many “scientific” efforts to “prove” genetically the continuity of the Jewish people. Moses is believed to have codified the “laws of Yahweh” into the texts known as the Bible during the exodus from slavery in Egypt and before Joshua's conquest of Canaan. According to these myths, however, Yahweh had even earlier designated Canaan to the first patriarch, Abraham, as the “Promised Land.” This land later became known as “Palestine,” named after the Philistines, who supposedly settled the coastal plain of the country in 1190 B.C., and were annihilated by King David in a series of bitter battles. These semi-historical and semi-mythological occurrences, which occurred 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, are still used and abused in the “historiography” of the present struggle over the land of Palestine.

In 587 B.C., the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem, the capital of Judea, and deported a considerable part of the Judean population—mainly the elite and artisans—to Babylon. The dream of the Judeans there was to return to “Zion” (a synonym both for Jerusalem and for the “Land of Israel”), which they were finally able to do when Cyrus of Persia gained control over the ancient Middle East, and in 550 B.C., the Temple of Yahweh, which Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed, was rebuilt. The Judean polity rose again when struggles between rival candidates for the Jerusalem priesthood and attempts to Hellenize the religious cult led, in 168 B.C., to a peasant revolt against the Jerusalemite elite and their Seleucid Hellenistic patrons. The military leader of the revolt, Judah the Maccabee, turned it into a guerrilla civil war, which was eventually won. His family took over the Jerusalem priesthood and, in alliance with the Roman Empire, conquered large territories, converting their populations to Judaism. Quarrels among the Maccabean dynasty subsequently led Rome to crown Herod as king of Judea. The story of the Maccabean revolt was absorbed into ethno religious mythology as part of the struggle for the purification of idolatrous cults from the Jewish religion and the restoration of the “true faith,” and it is commemorated today by the Hanukkah holiday.

After a series of Judean rebellions against the region's Hellenistic and Roman rulers, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. In A.D. 135, following another rebellion, the Jewish elite were again exiled, effectively destroying the Jewish polity, and the province was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Romans. It was subsequently known as “Palestine,” a title officially adopted in the twentieth century by the British colonial state, and, later, by the local Arab population as their own ethno-national identity.

Two constitutive myths of Zionism are connected to this period—the fall of Masada and the failure of the Bar-Kochba rebellion against the Roman Empire. Masada was a fortress in the Judean desert built by Herod the Great (73-74 B.C.). During the great Jewish revolt of A.D. 66-73 against the Romans, a group of Jewish rebels took over the fortress. During the siege of the city, an extremist sect called the Sicarii, who had waged internal terror against other Jews, were driven out of Jerusalem. The Sicarii fled to Masada, where they assailed the Jewish villages in the vicinity for food and support. Having burned Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Romans went on to besiege Masada in A.D. 73. After a siege lasting four to eight months, the 960 Jews at Masada committed suicide in order to avoid being enslaved by the Romans.² Despite the highly ambiguous story (including questions about the very identity of the Sicarii, their doubtful involvement in the battle against the Romans, the act of suicide or mass murder), Zionist myth makers, hungry for epic narratives, reconstructed the Masada events as a story of Jewish heroism and a Jewish “fight for freedom.”

A second revolt against the Roman Empire in A.D. 131-35, led by a strongman and false messiah called Bar-Kochba,³ and supported by a zealous religious figure, Rabbi Akiba, ended in catastrophe and the elimination of the organized Jewish community from the country. Bar-Kochba and Rabbi Akiba were elevated by the Zionist mythology to the degree of saints and national heroes.⁴

During these turbulent times, many Jewish religious sects appeared and disappeared in Judea. This history of turbulence in the Jewish world, and of Hellenistic and Roman religious oppression, included the crucifixion of Jesus (around A.D. 29-33) and St. Paul's trial in Rome (A.D. 60). After Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai established a new center in the town of Yavneh (A.D. 70), Judaism itself underwent a major transformation, which defined it in the first place as a religion, as opposed to the earlier proto-nationalist emphasis. Over the next 130 years, Rabbi Judah (“the Prince”) and his successors developed the Mishna, a codification of Jewish religious law in the Diaspora that spread through the Greco-Roman world. Like the previous “culture of return,” the Mishna was also based on the premise that the Jews would eventually return to their homeland, but at the same time it also laid the foundations for rabbinical Judaism by providing for the possibility of an ethno-religious Jewish existence without political-territorial foundations. At this time, too, Christianity separated itself from Judaism and spread among the Roman underclass and slave populations. By A.D. 391, Christianity had survived countless persecutions to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.

Several hundred years later, in the deserts of Arabia, a new culture and religion, Islam, came into being when mythic Muhammad defeated the city of Mecca at the battle of Badr (A.D. 630) and made it the center of the new religion, with himself as prophet. His successors, the caliphs Ab Bakr and ‘Umar, conquered the Fertile Crescent and the Middle East (A.D. 630-43). Arabized and Islamized, Palestine now became ]und Filastin, the military district of Palestine, which included parts of Africa, eventually reaching as far as Spain.

Beginning in 1099, the Crusaders, under the leadership of European Christian kings, succeeded for a relatively short time in conquering the Holy Land and establishing the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1187, Saladin, a legendary Kurdish-born general and the founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, started to take the Holy Land back for the Muslims by defeating the Crusaders at the battle of Hittin.

Saladin has since become a contemporary Palestinian hero, symbolizing the Arab hope for liberation of Palestine after a lengthy period of colonization and the establishment of the Jewish-Zionist state. For their part, the Zionists also drew a lesson from the demise of the Latin kingdom. By identifying the major “mistake” of the Christian settlers—their failure to maintain their cultural, technological, and military links with their countries of origin and their openness to the local Levantine culture—the Zionists hope to avoid it.

THE SEEDS OF ZIONISM IN EUROPE

About 150 years before the triumph of Zionism, traditional Jewish communities in western Europe slowly began to be dismantled. The political and social emancipation granted to Jewish citizens by several European states following the French and American revolutions produced a small but very influential Jewish cultural enlightenment movement, the Has kala, which was highly ambivalent about Jewish religion and ethnicity. More important results of the political emancipation included large waves of secularization, both in conjunction with and separate from attempts at complete assimilation of the Jews into local non-Jewish society. In addition, emigration increased from eastern Europe to North America and to a lesser degree to South America.⁵ The countereffect of these processes was the appearance of Jewish Orthodoxy, which attempted to rebuild and redraw the boundaries of the religious community by imposing stricter social control on its members and overseeing their daily lives.

The ideological and lifestyle opportunities and options presented to Jews by the brave new world of sociopolitical emancipation and intercontinental mobility were immense. Even nationalism opened up new horizons for Jews, who could now choose to adopt a new collective identity and become loyal solely to their French, German, Dutch, or English citizenship. Alternatively, they could choose to divide themselves between private and public spheres, between religion and nationalism, and to be Jewish by religion at home and German, say, by nationality in public. In the context of European nationalisms, Zionism had no place. Other ideas also captured imaginations. A radical transformation of the entire world order, based on socialist, communist, or some other universalistic ideology, would also, it was thought, include personal or collective salvation for Jews. Later, the historian Simon Dubnow fused nationalism, internationalism, and secular Jewishness into a non-Zionist cultural nationalism.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were about 2.5 to 3 million Jews in the world. By the end of the century, their number had grown to close to 13 million—one of the most unprecedented demographic increases known to history. About four-fifths of the world's Jews lived in eastern Europe, including the “Pale of Settlement,” a frontier zone of the Russian Empire designated by the government in 1794 as permitted territory for Jewish settlement. Here Jewish semi-autonomous communal life flourished in the absence of the newly created Western dichotomies between religion and secularism, private and public spheres, citizens' rights and oppression and persecution. During this period, the Jews rapidly transformed themselves from a semi-rural population into an urbanized people, socially organized around the almost exclusively Jewish ghetto, or shtetl, in which local leadership was able to exercise control over the members and boundaries of the community.

In 1881-82, a wave of pogroms directed at Jews broke out along the western frontier of the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Romanian government reduced many of the rights accorded to its Jewish subjects. Many of the Jews affected by these events immigrated to America, while a much smaller percentage established associations to prepare for their return to what Jews had always considered their utopian fatherland and patrimony—Palestine/Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), the Holy Land. The best known of these movements was a small group of high school students in Krakow known as the Bilu association, which was supported by a larger organization called the Lovers of Zion, established in Katowice (Silesia) in 1884. Envoys were sent to buy land in Palestine and to establish agricultural colonies there. A striking similarity exists between this group's motives and those of the first Protestant immigrants to North America, as seen in the mixture of articulated religious convictions strengthened by a history of persecution. This movement founded colonies such as Zichron Yaakov, Hadera, Gadera, and Mish-mar Hayarden. In addition, and unrelated to the Bilu movement, an agricultural school (Mikve Israel) was founded in 1870 for Jewish students by a French-Jewish philanthropist organization, the Alliance Israélite universelle, and an agricultural settlement was set up by Orthodox Jews who had left Jerusalem in 1878. Later, in Zionist historiography, this immigration came to be considered the “first wave” of Zionist immigration and as such was linked to other, subsequent “waves,” despite the fact that it was not politically driven and that the newcomers did not possess a coherent ideological vision.

All the lands on which these colonies were established were purchased from major landowners, and, in many cases, the Arab peasants who had previously leased the land, and often considered it to be their own property, were driven away. The Jewish colonists tried to be self-sufficient, but economic necessity soon forced them to employ hired labor. In many cases, the seasonal and permanent laborers they employed were the Arab peasants previously expelled from the same lands. This caused friction between the colonists and the local population and even led to attacks on colonial settlements, such as that by Bedouin tribal warriors on Petach Tikva. A circumstance that allowed for these frictions was the general weakness of the Ottoman Empire and the poor state of law and order outside urban areas and military garrisons. One response of the Jewish colonists was to adapt to the common pattern of cooperation at the time and hire protection from local Arab strongmen and chiefs.

On several occasions, the Ottoman authorities tried to bar Jewish immigration and impede the transfer of land to foreign ownership, as evidenced by a law to this effect promulgated in 1893. Support from the local Sephardi Jewish community, who all held Ottoman citizenship, and bribes to Turkish officials cleared many of these obstacles, but not all the Ottoman clerks were corruptible. A Tiberias district officer, Amin Arsalan, bitterly opposed the registration of extensive Jewish land purchases, because he saw it as part of the Arab “denationalization” of the district. This episode ended when, following Jewish intervention in Istanbul, Arsalan was fired. From 1892 onward, Arab notables sporadically resisted Jewish colonization. In Jerusalem, for example, they petitioned the Ottoman government, demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases. In general, however, they never posed much trouble for Jewish immigration, mainly because the scope of immigration was very small and never amounted to a real threat to the interests of local notables. On the contrary, their lands actually rose in value.

THE BIRTH OF THE ZIONIST IDEA

In 1894, an assimilated Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was found guilty of treason by a French military court and sentenced to degradation and deportation for life (he was subsequently fully exonerated in 1906, reinstated as a major, and decorated with the Legion of Honor). The Dreyfus Affair, which was exposed by Émile Zola's article “J'accuse” in 1898, shocked the Jewish world, especially Western assimilated Jews. It seemed to provide evidence that even a completely assimilated Jew with a brilliant military career in an enlightened and free country such as France could not escape the clutches of anti-Semitism. Among the journalists covering the trial was Theodor Herzl, a young correspondent representing the famous Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. According to Zionist myth, the Dreyfus Affair was the trigger to Herzl's search for a solution to the “Jewish Problem.” Herzl, born in a Budapest ghetto in 1860, was, like Dreyfus, a completely assimilated Jew who had never been particularly concerned by his ethnic origins. He held a doctorate in law, but was preoccupied with writing theatrical plays and newspaper articles. The Dreyfus trial and subsequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism changed his life.

Herzl's first thought was a collective and honorable conversion of world Jewry to Christianity. His second was to find a place in the world for an ingathering of Jews and establish an independent Jewish state. Inasmuch as he was a completely secular product of the late European colonial world, he envisaged this state in political, social, and economic terms. Among other places, he considered Argentina, with its abundance of free land, natural resources, and good climate. Later, he also considered the British protectorate of Uganda in East Africa, which was politically convenient. Initially, he thought Palestine inappropriate owing to its lack of resources and harsh climate. However, as Herzl grew closer to his fellow Jews, he discovered the sentimental and symbolic appeal of Jerusalem and Eretz Israel, which most Jews continued to regard as their fatherland.

At the time, most Jews still believed in a miraculous messianic return to the Holy Land at the apocalyptic “end of days.” The strength of messianic belief had been evidenced in 1665, when a self-appointed messiah named Shabbtai Zvi made his appearance. Backed by a noted scholar of Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), Abraham Nathan Ben Elisha Haim Ashkenazi, Shabbtai Zvi managed to provoke mass hysteria among hundreds of thousands of Jews, from the territories of the Ottoman Empire to Poland and eastern and western Europe, by proclaiming the Day of Redemption to be June 18, 1666. Despite the opposition of several rabbis, Jews were ready to march as a mighty army and restore the godly kingdom of David on earth. Eventually, the Ottomans interpreted the millenarian movement as a rebellion and put the “messiah” in jail, where he converted to Islam. The affair was an enormous disaster and has remained traumatic in Jewish collective memory. Nonetheless, the hope for the coming of the messiah has never ceased. In 1755, Jacob Frank, a Polish cloth dealer, declared himself to be the reincarnation of Shabbtai Zvi and the messiah. More recently, a similar phenomenon broke out among the followers of the late Brooklyn Hassidic Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. The supposed redemption is linked with a miraculous inclusion of Greater Israel (i.e., the territories occupied in the 1967 war) into the Israeli state and the transformation of Jewish Israeli society into a holy, moral community (see chapter 3).

Despite Orthodox Jewry's denunciation of him as a new Shabbatean, Theodor Herzl was a practical politician. He concentrated his efforts in three main directions. First and foremost, he raised financial support for the establishment of a national loan fund from great Jewish bankers and philanthropists such as Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschild family. Second, but no less important, he garnered political support and recognition by the great world powers of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national commonwealth in Palestine. Third, he organized the spread of Jewish associations and individuals who shared Zionist views into a viable political and social movement. In 1896, Herzl published his manifesto Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”—Herzl was fully aware of the implications of not calling it “The Jewish State”). In this, Herzl argued that assimilation was not a cure, but rather a disease of the Jews. The Jewish people needed to reestablish their own patrimony, with well-to-do western European Jews financing the proletarian Jews threatened by pogroms in eastern Europe. Herzl's preferred regime, in this utopian pamphlet, was modeled on the enlightened and liberal Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and, if not at a monarchy, he aimed at least at an aristocratic republic. In the state of the Jews, everyone would be equal before the law, free in his faith or disbelief, and enjoy mild social security rights, regardless of his nationality. This pamphlet was followed in 1902 by the utopian novel Altneuland (“Old-New Country”), in which several Arab characters enjoy full rights of citizenship, indicating that, contrary to the usual assertions, Herzl was well aware that the Holy Land was not “empty.”

Herzl called delegations from all European Jewish communities to attend a convention at Basel in 1897 in order to establish the World Zionist Organization (WZO). This convention, which became known as the First Zionist Congress, adopted a program for “the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, to be secured by public law.” In his diary, Herzl wrote, “in Basel I founded the Jewish state.” Today, Herzl has become a Zionist icon, and his memory is used and abused on festive occasions to give Zionism respectability as a liberal, humanistic movement.

The most important tools created by the new organization were a bank, established in 1899, and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), established in 1901, whose aim was to raise funds for the purchase of land in Palestine and later to subsidize settlers and settlements. The land acquired by the JNF was considered inalienable “Jewish public” land, never to be sold to or cultivated by non-Jews. Until 1948, the JNF was the major orchestrator of the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine, converting money into “nationalized territory.”

The term “Zionism” was coined to label the Jewish national movement, whose declared aim was the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine, and the return of stateless and persecuted Jews to the political stage of history. “Zion,” a biblical term for Jerusalem, as well as for the entire Holy Land, refers to the ancient patrimony of the Jews, which, according to Jewish mythology, was “promised” by Yahweh to Abraham and his descendants, the Children of Israel.

In order to attain this goal, it was necessary to establish a systematic and efficient immigration and colonization movement, which was supposed to accomplish the mass transfer of European Jewish populations to Palestine and create an immigrant settler society—all without the firm political and military support and vested interests of a colonial power. Until 1948, these tasks were carried out under the military and political umbrella of the British colonial superpower. Colonial authority was beginning to fade in Palestine, however, and Zionism was something of an anachronism in the context of worldwide postcolonial political culture. What were the Zionists' goals in Palestine, and how were they implemented against the will of local and foreign Arab leaders and peoples,⁶ as well as in the face of strong Jewish opposition? The struggle with the former of these two oppositions is now known as the “Jewish-Arab conflict.” The narrative and history of this conflict, its context, and its symbols date back to the beginning of human civilization. The Jewish immigrants and settlers in Palestine never regarded themselves as colonists, or their movement as a part of the world colonial system; rather, they saw themselves as a people “returning to their homeland” after two thousand years of forced exile. From the point of view of the local Arab population, however, the Jews were strangers, Europeans, whites, and representatives of alien powers and foreign cultures. The Jews were confident that their historical and religious “rights” entitled them to purchase the land, and later to conquer it by the sword. Like other colonizers, they were convinced that their presence signaled material, social, and cultural progress and the liberation of the native inhabitants from ignorance. The Arab inhabitants of the area, and of the entire region, saw the Jews as a source of corruption of their moral, traditional society and as agents of the Western colonial world order. Thus, while the Zionists considered their “return” to be a solution to the “Jewish problem,” the Arabs saw themselves as victims, paying the price for injustices committed by European Christianity.

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF A STATE—THE SECOND AND THIRD WAVES

The newly created Zionist organization would have been an empty shell without Jews ready to emigrate to Palestine, instead of to North America, the preferred destination for most of the Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Immigration to Palestine demanded placing the almost utopian goal of the creation of a new society, culture, and polity from the ground up above more immediate and concrete personal interests. Of the Jews emigrating from Russia between 1904 and 1914, only a small fraction (about 40,000) went to Palestine. This influx was especially high after the failure of the 1905 Russian rebellion.

In contrast to the “first aliya” (ascension or pilgrimage) of relatively wealthy, family-oriented, apolitical immigrants, the “second wave” consisted of young, secular, educated singles, who were highly ideologized and politicized. They felt that in order to create a viable economic infrastructure, a local Jewish labor market was needed. To this end, they originated the principle of “pure Jewish labor.” Their success led to an ethnically and nationally segregated labor market in Palestine, with the Jewish half safely protected from competition from the cheaper labor of Arab peasants (fellaheen).7

Socialist and communist ideas combined with nationalist goals to formulate the Zionist strategy for establishment of an exclusively Jewish communal society that would later become the basis for a state. To further this goal, part of the Zionist community in Palestine set up a quasi-military security organization, Hashomer (“The Guard”), to take over responsibility for the defense of the Jewish colonies from local Arab strongmen. This organization is considered to be the basis of later Jewish military and militaristic organizations, and some of its major figures were later incorporated into Zionist mythology.

This second wave of immigrants, reinforced in 1919-23 by a third wave with a similar sociopolitical profile, not only created sharper distinctions between Arabs and Jews, but also introduced an overt power dynamic into the relationship, and for the first time explicitly stated the goal of establishment of a separate Jewish polity. The term “state,” however, was not used or even mentioned for many years by most of the local leaders of the newly established Jewish polity, as they did not want to be too explicit about their intentions vis-à-vis the local inhabitants or the British colonial regime. Later, the “Revisionist” party, established in 1925 and led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, split from the Zionist movement and demanded a more aggressive and overtly Zionist policy of establishing a Jewish state in the territorial framework of Greater Palestine (including Transjordan, which had been outside of Palestine's borders since 1922).

The immigrants of the second and third waves thought of themselves as “practical Zionists” and believed that the way to gain control over the land was not through politics and diplomacy, such as by securing a charter from a great power (as Herzl and later Jabotinsky demanded), but rather through work, immigration, land purchases, and the establishment of new settlements as territorial faits accomplis. Their slogan “One more dunum [of purchased land],⁸ one more goat” became the cornerstone of the Zionist strategy of a gradual and incremental process of institution-, state-, and society-building. Supported by funds from the World Zionist Organization, the socialist immigrants created new patterns of social institutions (such as the kibbutz, or agrarian communal settlement). Their labor union became a large-scale economic entrepreneur, establishing health care funds, schools, a bank, a publishing house, newspapers and periodicals, and canteens for laborers and the unemployed. They also took responsibility for the security of the whole Jewish community in Palestine.⁹ Most important, they created a centralized institutional structure that gained hegemonic rule over the entire immigrant settler community (see chapters 2 and 3).

THE ZIONIST COLONIZERS IN PALESTINE

World War I, and the subsequent transformation of the world order, altered the fate of Palestine. With the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and following previous British-French understanding, the League of Nations put Palestine under British colonial rule in July 1922. This “mandate” made the British responsible for creating the political, administrative, and political conditions to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home and the development of self-governing institutions, and also to safeguard the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion” (article 2 of the Charter). The mandatory charter also granted official representational status of the Jewish community in Palestine to the Zionist organizations and their local branch, the Jewish Agency.

The most dramatic event had, however, occurred several years earlier, on November 2, 1917, when the British government issued the well-known Balfour Declaration (named for Arthur Balfour, then foreign secretary), which stated that “His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this objective. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The earlier version of the declaration, favored by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, included the words “reconstruction of Palestine as a Jewish State.” Some sources argue that the declaration was redrafted under pressure from Edwin Montague, a Jewish minister in the British cabinet, who was concerned that a declaration supporting a Jewish state would redefine the Jews as a separate nation, threaten their recently achieved rights of citizenship in Europe, and even fuel anti-Semitism.

British commitment to the Jewish people resulted from a mixture of traditional religious feelings toward the “People of the Bible,” British imperial interests vis-à-vis French aspirations in the region, and the expectation that Jewish immigrants would play the white settlers' role in the territory. Zionist leaders spoke in terms of three to five million Jews arriving in Palestine and transforming the small Jewish minority there into a firm majority. The Balfour Declaration was the first major triumph of Zionist diplomacy and the first real threat to the Arabs of Palestine. As such, it provided the impetus for a countrywide protest movement and the establishment of local political institutions, such as the Muslim-Christian Association, various nationalist clubs, and, later, the Arab Executive Committee, the first central Palestinian national authority.

The second Zionist triumph was the appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel, a declared Jewish Zionist, to the office of high commissioner on July 20, 1920. The Jews celebrated his arrival in Jerusalem in terms equivalent to the coming of the messiah, a king, or a descendant of David's dynasty. Samuel, however, put British interests first. He and the local British administration understood that the Zionists could not supply the several million Jewish immigrant settlers that they had promised. Postwar Jewish immigration (the third “wave”) to Palestine hardly succeeded in drawing 40,000 people in its first four years. Moreover, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the stabilization of the Soviet regime in 1922, one of the major reservoirs of potential Jewish immigration was almost completely cut off. The majority of eastern European Jews still able to migrate chose the North American option over the Zionist vision as long as U.S. immigration policy allowed them to do so.

The British understood that the demographic and ethnic composition of Palestine would not change in the near future, and that they would have to deal with Arab unrest if they did not alter their pro-Zionist policy and take Palestinian Arab interests into consideration. With this in mind, Samuel initiated the establishment of a Supreme Muslim Council to fill the vacuum left by the demise of Islamic Ottoman rule. He appointed a young militant Palestinian, Amin al-Husseini, a member of a prominent Jerusalem family, as president of the council and later to the position of Mufti (Muslim priest) of Jerusalem—the highest Islamic authority of the country. Al-Husseini combined his religious position with nationalistic and anti-Zionist rhetoric to become the most prominent leader among the local Arabs and one of the creators of the emerging Palestinian collective identity. In Zionist demonology, “the Mufti” is a central figure even today, especially after his flight from Palestine and alliance with Nazi Germany.

OPPOSITION TO BRITISH RULE

The era of British colonial rule is considered the formative period of both the Jewish Zionist and Palestinian Arab polities. The colonial government functioned as a minimalistic state, providing basic services for its subjects: law and order, justice (courts), an educational system, basic social and health care systems, a financial and monetary system, and an infrastructure (such as roads, railroads, electricity, ports, and postal and broadcasting services). Moreover, on the symbolic level, the colonial state made an additional and crucial contribution by constituting “Palestine” as a geographic, economic, social, and political entity distinct from the surrounding lands and peoples.

The Zionists were fully aware of the implications of the colonial state building effort, and made the control of this process their highest priority. They feared that the “natural development” of the decolonization process and continuing Jewish demographic inferiority would lead to transference of control over the country to the majority Arab population of Palestine. This forced the Zionists to withdraw from the mandatory state and to establish their own parallel autonomous institutions, including a quasi-underground, paramilitary organization—the Haganah (“Defense” in Hebrew). It is characteristic that in its first stage, the Haganah was a sectarian “army,” affiliated with and under the command of the labor movement and its highly centralized labor union, the Histadrut. Only following the Arab revolt in 1936 was control over the Haganah passed to the Jewish Agency, in response to its need for funding from the entire community. Zionist historiography considers the present Israeli military force a direct continuation of the Haganah militia.

The British authorities were well aware of the Haganah's existence, and, with the exception of a short period after World War II when the Haganah launched operations against the British administration, a tacit agreement allowed for its maintenance in exchange for keeping a low profile, self-imposed restraint, and agreement essentially to act as backup to the British military and police forces. From time to time, for example, during the last stage of the Arab rebellion of 1938-39 and several times during World War II, the British military even cooperated with the Jewish militia.

THE INTERCOMMUNAL WAR

The Haganah replaced Hashomer, which had dissolved as a result of its sectarian and exclusive tendencies. The Haganah held a more universal concept of recruitment, which was extended to all eligible members of the Jewish community, and envisioned itself as the nucleus of a future Jewish armed force. From the Zionist point of view, the Haganah was not only the basis for a future Jewish military but also met the immediate defense needs of Jewish settlements and protected Jews in the face of countrywide Arab violence. The British colonial state was supposed to provide security for the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities, but the local British security forces were not large enough to cover the entire country. The Haganah aimed to use local recruits from every Jewish settlement or neighborhood to provide security until the British police or military could arrive. Jews were trained in the use of weapons, taught how to coordinate regional and even countrywide resistance, including moving members, weapons, and ammunition from place to place, and to retaliate if necessary against Arab (and later British) targets. Apart from its security function, the Haganah also played an important role in maintaining the predominance of the socialist segment of the Jewish community.

The importance of the Haganah became apparent in the early days of the British period. In February 1920, a small Jewish settlement, Tel-Hai, located in the northern area of the country, was attacked by Bedouin tribes as part of the rebellion against French rule in Syria led by Faisal I, who had declared himself king of Greater Syria, including Palestine. Tel-Hai was located in a no-man's-land between the British and French-controlled areas that had great political importance for both the British and the Zionists in determining the northern boundaries of Palestine. The isolated settlers, led by Joseph Trumpeldor, a former Jewish officer in the Russian military, asked permission to withdraw. The Zionist leadership refused and instead tried to send them reinforcements. The settlement fell, and most of the settlers, including Trumpeldor, were killed, becoming the first national heroes and martyrs in Zionist mythology (see chapter 3). The “Tel-Hai Affair” had almost nothing to do with Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine, but it served to emphasize the need for a strong Jewish military and to reinforce the view that the Arabs could be met only with force.

From time to time, the Palestinian Arabs reacted with violence to the perceived Jewish threat and in accordance with their own aspirations. The first major outbreak occurred in the wake of the enthusiasm surrounding King Faisal's temporary success in Syria and rumors that the British had agreed to support not only his regime there but also his rule over Palestine. After the festival of Nabi Musa (established as a national holiday on April 5, 1920) at the supposed tomb of Moses, Muslims attacked the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem. Before the British could intervene, five Jews and four Arabs had been killed, and about two hundred Jews and thirty Arabs had been wounded. On May Day, 1921, the declaration of a “Soviet Palestine” in Tel Aviv by Jewish socialists and communists attracted Arabs from Jaffa. In the riots that developed, forty-five Jews and fourteen Arabs were killed, and about two hundred were wounded. Shortly afterward, during the 1921 Nabi Musa celebrations, Arabs attacked several Jewish settlements, killing forty-eight Jews. In the resulting British intervention, forty-eight Arabs were also killed.

The most emotional issue for both sides has been and remains the status of the Western (Wailing) Wall. The Wall is considered by Jews to be the last remnant of the Temple, the most sanctified space of ancient Israel and, even for secular Jews, a symbol linking the modern Jewish nation with the land. For Muslims, the wall is the outer rim of Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Islamic world, where, according to Islamic legend, the Prophet Muhammad tethered his horse during his Night Journey. On Haram al-Sharif, the Jewish Temple Mount, Muslims built the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century. Religious Jews, as well as several nationalist groups, believe that Jewish redemption will be accompanied by the rebuilding of the Temple on the site of the mosque. Fear of destruction of the holy mosque was, and remains, a major concern for local Muslim Arabs and the entire Muslim world. This anxiety adds an additional religious dimension to the Jewish-Arab conflict.

On Friday, August 23, 1929, rumors spread among the Muslims that the Jews were planning to attack Haram al-Sharif. Large crowds went out to defend the holy place and attacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, as well as Jewish quarters in the ancient cities of Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron. In Hebron, there was a massacre of Jews, and the ancient Jewish community had to be completely evacuated. Jews retaliated by killing seven Muslims in a Jaffa mosque. The irony was that most of those who suffered in the 1929 riots were Orthodox Jews who had preceded the Zionist immigrations and opposed them, rejecting the whole Zionist enterprise as Shabbateanism. After a week-long delay, British troops suppressed the riots, but not before 133 Jews and 116 Arabs had been killed. When a Jewish settler entered the Ibrahami Mosque (“The Tomb of the Patriarchs”) in Hebron on February 25, 1994, and in a desperate attempt to halt the Oslo Accords massacred about 30 Palestinian worshippers in the middle of the Ramadan fast, certain elements in the Jewish population considered it vengeance for the 1929 massacre. Such massacres (as well as those in Deir Yassin and Kafr Qassim) sharpened for each side the demonic character of the other in the interethnic conflict and were considered final “evidence” of their “real intentions.”¹⁰

THE ARAB REVOLTS

Restrictions on immigration to the United States in the mid 1920s and the rise of Nazism in Europe had an immediate impact on both Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine. Between 1932 and 1944, about 265,000 new Jewish immigrants arrived in the country. This was a new type of Jewish immigration. Most of the newcomers were from Poland and Germany, and they were mainly well-to-do families of the educated Jewish bourgeoisie. They had a major impact on the local economy, shifting the orientation of the Jewish community from rural to urban. New Jewish neighborhoods and towns appeared, and relatively large and technologically advanced industrial enterprises were established in a short period of time. By the mid 1930s, the Jewish population exceeded one quarter of the total population of Palestine and had taken on the look of a completely viable, self-sufficient, and self-confident society. The Jews spoke their own language, a revitalized and modernized ancient biblical Hebrew, and built up a new national social identity, which emphasized the differences between them and Diaspora Jewry.

The strengthening of the Zionist Jewish community and the emergence of a local Jewish nationalism had a twofold effect on Palestinian Arabs. First, their own collective identity became more salient and clear-cut: the “Palestinian” appeared as a counterclaim to Zionism, arguing for the unalienable right of the local Arab population to rule all the territory of the mandatory state. The second effect of the rapidly growing Jewish entity upon the Palestinians was a feeling of immediate threat and an urgent need to confront the Jews before they grew into a powerful community with allies among the imperialist powers, and before they came to represent world Judaism's claim to full control over the territory. By this time about 5 percent of the total land (but about 10 percent of cultivable land) had been bought by Jews (see table 1). These lands included Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee), the country's main reservoir, and the most fertile parts of the great valleys and coastal plain, constituting a continuum of “Jewish territory.”

In 1936, the Palestinian Arabs revolted with fury against British colonial rule, the Jewish settlers, strangers, and their own leadership, middle and upper classes, and townsmen. The first stage of the rebellion was a 175-day strike, during which the Arabs tried to paralyze the country's economy, transport, and transportation. Most Arab workers and merchandise disappeared from the markets. Bus, truck, and cab drivers turned off their engines, the railroad ground to a virtual halt, and the main port at Jaffa was shut down. What remained of traffic on the roads—that of the British and Jews—became the target of rebel attacks, forcing all vehicles to move in convoy. The British and the Jews were taken by surprise. The British arrested and exiled the Arab leadership, which until this very day has not been allowed to return to the country. Only after the Oslo Accords had been implemented, and autonomy for most of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories (first in Gaza and Jericho in 1995) was granted, were some of the Palestinian leadership repatriated.

By 1936, however, the Jewish economy was strong enough, not only to survive the Arab boycott and economic warfare, but even to prosper by using the opportunity to strengthen and diversify its production. Arab laborers were replaced by new Jewish immigrants, and a new Jewish port, a longtime demand of the Jewish community, was established by the British authorities in Tel Aviv—now a rapidly growing city alongside Jaffa. Vegetables, chickens, and dairy products, which had previously been an almost exclusively Arab domain, were replaced in the markets by Jewish-supplied products.

The Palestinian general strike ended with the appointment of a Royal Committee of Inquiry, known as the Peel Commission. Several inquiries had been made by different British commissions since the establishment of British rule over Palestine, particularly after riots. Most found Jewish land purchases and immigration to be the major reason for Arab unrest.

TABLE 1

JEWISH POPULATION AND ESTIMATED LAND OWNERSHIP IN PALESTINE (1880-1947)

After each report was published, new regulations and laws were issued to restrict the purchase of land and to limit immigration to the “absorption capacity” of the country (usually quantified by the rate of unemployment).

This time, however, the Peel Commission went further, recommending partition of the territory between the Arabs and Jews and the establishment of a Jewish state, an Arab state (linked with Transjordan), and an international enclave—a corridor between Jaffa and Jerusalem that included Bethlehem. Both the Arabs and the Jews rejected the partition proposal. Since then the idea of partition as the basis of a solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict has often reappeared in one form or another. The most recent agreements to grant autonomy to the Palestinian people in (a still disputed) part of the country as an interim stage toward what will probably be a tiny state with limited sovereignty, supervised and controlled by the Israeli state, is yet another manifestation of the partition solution.

After the publication of the Peel Commission report, the Arab revolt was resumed by rebellious peasant groups (or “gangs,” as the British and Jews called them) with even more violence. It was a cruel war against all “foreigners”—Jews, British, and all those not perceived as in line with the rebels, including Arab collaborators or suspected collaborators with the British and the Zionists. For a while, the British authorities lost control over most of the country, and parts of it were declared “liberated” by Palestinian rebels. The Jews sank their resources into defending their settlements, neighborhoods, and the roads connecting them. For their part, the British flooded the country with troops drawn from all parts of the empire and turned the 1939 revolt into a bloodbath. Most of the Palestinian leaders fled (including Hajj Amin al-Husseini) or were exiled or jailed. Some of the upper and middle class fled to Beirut and Alexandria. Palestinian Arabs have marked this as a glorious point in their history, one of the biggest anti-colonial revolts of the time. The social outcome of the revolt was, however, disastrous for the Palestinians. The dismantlement of several generations of leadership and the dispersal of a large segment of the middle and educated classes are still felt today.

After the brutal suppression of the revolt, the British made diplomatic efforts to reach a Jewish-Arab agreement involving the other Arab states (e.g., the St. James Conference in February 1939). In fact, the British withdrew from the basic orientation outlined in the Balfour Declaration and issued a White Paper on May 17, 1939, in which they redefined the mandatory obligation to guarantee an independent Palestine, ruled by the Arab majority of its population. Severe restrictions were imposed on Jewish immigration and land purchases. The British knew, however, that the Jews would remain loyal to Britain in the coming conflict with Nazi Germany, and the White Paper was aimed at securing Arab support in the war effort.

PALESTINE AND WORLD WAR II

During World War II, the Jewish-Arab conflict reached an almost complete stalemate. During the first part of the war, the country was turned into a large military base for British and Allied troops, contributing to the economic rehabilitation of both communities after the catastrophic years of the Arab revolt. Each community knew that the war was an interim period before the decisive struggle over control of the land resumed. During the war, President Roosevelt promised self-determination for all people, and the Arabs and Jews each understood this promise in terms of their own claims and aspirations.

During the war, however, Jewish claims became much more vigorous as a result of the dreadful years of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis and their collaborators managed systematically to exterminate about six million European and North African Jews. In the postbellum years, the international community felt a strong obligation to compensate the Jewish people for the horrors of the Nazi genocide, and for the fact that the Allies had done little to avoid or reduce the extermination of the Jews. The Palestinians meanwhile resented having to pay for crimes committed by Europeans.

As a result of the war, both sides were forced to reconsider their basic positions. Feeling vulnerable, the Palestinian Arabs turned to the patronage of the Arab countries, which had just established the Arab League. For their part, the Zionists changed from a British to an American orientation. As early as May 1942, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community of Palestine since 1933, convened a meeting of Zionists in the United States to urge that after the war “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth [code for “state”] integrated in the structure of the new [postwar] democratic world.” This declaration, commonly known as the “Biltmore [Hotel] Declaration,” also called for the financial and political mobilization of American Jewry on behalf of the Zionist cause.

In the meantime anti-British Jewish resistance increased. Alongside the semi-official Jewish militia, the Haganah, two additional underground organizations had gradually developed. The National Military Organization (known by its Hebrew acronym EZEL, or “Irgun”), which was affiliated with the Zionist Revisionist party, was established in 1931. The “Israel Freedom Fighters” (the LEHI, or “Stern Gang”), which espoused a more radical orientation, split from EZEL in 1940. Between 1944 and 1947, these two radical organizations conducted a full-scale guerrilla war against British and Arab targets, including the use of terror tactics aimed at individuals. For a short period, they cooperated with the Haganah. For the most part, however, the Haganah actively operated against these two underground groups, perceiving the intra-Jewish fight as a prelude to the upcoming battle for political dominance in the soon to be established Jewish state.

When World War II ended, and the British colonial state in Palestine terminated its mandate, the question remained of who would rule Palestine—the Arab majority or the Jewish minority. A third option was partition. A fourth option, a binational state, was completely rejected by all parties.¹¹

A JEWISH STATE IS DECLARED

On April 30, 1946, the report of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry was published. It called for immediate permission for the entry of 100,000 Jewish refugees and the suspension of the severe restrictions on buying land imposed by the 1939 White Paper. In long-range terms, the committee envisaged a binational state based on vague political mechanisms, presumed to ensure that neither the Jews nor the Arabs could dominate the other population. On the day the committee's conclusions were published, U.S. President Harry Truman declared his support for the issuing of 100,000 certificates of immigration to Jewish immigrants to Palestine and the lifting of land purchase restrictions, but without committing himself to the other parts of the recommendations. This was the first direct American involvement in the Palestinian conflict. The fact is that the Americans were concerned with the fate of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the point that they were willing to change American immigration laws and permit increased entrance to the United States.

A year later, the United Nations nominated another committee to investigate the Palestinian problem and offer recommendations to the General Assembly. The majority of the committee called for an end to the mandate and the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state (with Jerusalem as an international city). These recommendations served as the basis for the November 29, 1947, partition decision adopted by the UN General Assembly (Resolution 181). The Zionist Organization accepted the resolution, regarding it as the realization of the Zionist vision of the establishment of an independent Jewish state in part of “the Land of Israel.” The Palestinian Arabs rejected the resolution, considering it an unacceptable transfer of their lands to European immigrants and settlers. The entire Arab and Islamic world supported them. With the UN decision, the British prepared to leave the territory, in expectation of chaos.

The Jews proclaimed an independent state on May 14,1948 (the Fifth of Iyyar in the Jewish calendar), the day that the mandate was terminated, and established this date as Israel's Independence Day (see chapter 3), a historical counterpoint to the Holocaust. A day later, troops of several Arab states (mainly Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq) began their invasion of Palestine, with the aim of nullifying the partition resolution and the establishment of the Jewish state and rescuing their Palestinian brethren. Yet, even before this point, from December 1947 to May 1948, a bitter intercommunal war had broken out between the Palestinian Arab community and the Jewish community. Jews still made up only about 30 percent of the population, but because they were a self and politically selected immigrant population, they had about a 1.5 to 1 advantage over the Palestinian population in the decisive age group of 20 to 45-year-old men.

THE WAR OF 1948

The first stage of the intercommunal war was marked by the initiative and relative superiority of local Palestinian forces, reinforced by volunteers, mainly from Syria and Egypt. Some of these volunteers were absorbed into the Arab League-sponsored “Arab Liberation Army.” The Arab forces attacked Jewish traffic between the settlements and struck at some Jewish urban centers. Through January 1948, about 400 Jews were killed. Jewish convoys seeking to reinforce and supply the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and some of the rural and urban settlements (Yihiam, Hartuv, the Etzion Bloc, and even Jerusalem) were destroyed. From April on, however, Jewish forces regained the initiative. On April 8, the most charismatic and promising of the Palestinian military commanders, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, was killed in the battle for the road to Jewish Jerusalem. On April 18 and 22, Jewish military forces overran the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa and Tiberias. The most decisive event was the capture of the center of Palestinian society—the proud city of Jaffa—on May 13. In fact, the entire intercommunal war can be seen as the battle between Jewish Tel Aviv and the older city of Jaffa. It was almost self-evident that if Tel Aviv should fall, the entire Jewish will would collapse, and if Jaffa surrendered, the modern and urban part of Palestinian society would disappear.

The Jewish military forces operated according to the so-called Plan D, whose major aim was to ensure control over the territories designated by the United Nations for the Jewish state and over free movement between Jewish settlements on the roads controlled by Arab villages. The plan also took into consideration the inability of the Jews to spread their forces among hundreds of Arab villages, the logical consequence of which was the destruction of almost all conquered Arab villages and the banishment of their inhabitants beyond the borders of the presumed Jewish state. The conquered Arab villages were often found empty, or half empty, because Arabs had fled after hearing news and rumors of Jewish atrocities (such as the massacre of about 125 villagers of Deir Yassin on April 9). Once Arabs had left the country, they were not permitted to return. Thus, a de facto ethnic cleansing was carried out. At the end of the 1948 war, the number of Palestinian refugees was estimated to be between seven and nine hundred thousand.¹² Most of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods had been destroyed or were repopulated by veteran or newly immigrated Jews. Refugee camps were established in all of the surrounding Arab lands, slowly creating a Palestinian exile, or ghurba. In Palestinian historiography, the events of 1947 and 1948 came to be called al-Nakba, the Catastrophe (or even Holocaust). Palestinian society ceased to exist for many years as a distinct social, economic, and political entity. The Jews called this war the War of Independence.

In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the remaining local Arab community was mostly rural, located in the central mountain area—in what later became known as the West Bank (of the Jordan River) or “Judea and Samaria.” The next and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, excluding the 1982 war in Lebanon, were conducted without the independent participation of the Palestinians. In fact, tacit agreements existed between Israel and several Arab countries, especially the Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan, based on mutual interest, to “de-Palestinianize” the Palestinians. Transjordan's King Abdullah ibn Hussein wanted to incorporate the remaining territory and Arab population of Palestine into his country and to present himself as the inheritor of the Arab Palestinian state never established following the UN resolution. Both countries inherited substantial portions of the territories of Arab Palestine. Whereas the Jewish state was to have received only 5,000 square kilometers under the 1937 partition plan, and 14,000 square kilometers under the UN partition proposal, 21,000 square kilometers fell under the state of Israel's control after the signature of all the armistice agreements in 1949. In the narrow and overpopulated Gaza Strip, which remained under Egyptian control, Amin al-Husseini launched a failed attempt to establish an independent Palestinian government.

The war of 1948 was a relatively costly one for Jewish Israelis in terms of casualties, with about 1 percent of the total Jewish civilian and military population killed. Military units from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen took part in the war, but the best trained and equipped Arab military force, the Transjordanian Arab Legion, hardly participated. When it did, Transjordan's role was mainly passive, with the defensive aim of preventing Jewish occupation of important regions designated by the partition resolution as Arab or international. Only the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the Etzion Bloc, the sole Jewish enclave in the central mountain area, were captured by the Arab Legion. The relative passivity of the Arab Legion in the war of 1948 reinforced the tacit agreement between Abdullah and the Zionist leadership to share the territory of Arab Palestine.

After several initial successes, the relatively small and poorly equipped Arab forces were defeated on the northern front (in an offensive lasting from November 9 to July 19). In October, the newly created Israeli army conquered the Negev desert, driving southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and gained an outlet to the Dead Sea, an area that contains the country's largest concentrations of potassium and uranium. Several generals tried to persuade Ben-Gurion to conquer the whole of Palestine (as was done in 1967); however, he resisted, arguing that the world would not allow Israel to hold on to such an excessive amount of territorial gain. In addition, he argued that with the remaining Arab territory, the country would include “too many Arabs.” Indeed, when the Israelis took over the Sinai Peninsula, they were forced to withdraw, mainly as the result of U.S. pressure. Between January and July 1949, on the island of Rhodes, armistice negotiations were conducted and concluded between Israel and all its immediate Arab neighbors.

THE ISRAELI STATE AND PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM: THE EARLY YEARS

Already during the war of 1948, the Israeli state opened its gates to Jewish immigration. One of the most important laws passed by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, was the Law of Return (see chapter 6), which almost indiscriminately allowed every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel without restriction (see chapter 3). This law was considered the true embodiment of Zionism—the creation of a Jewish nation-state that would be a terre d'asile for any Jew in the world, whether persecuted or not. By 1954, the Jewish population of Israel more than tripled, reaching approximately two million. Jewish refugees flooded the country from Europe, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Often Jewish emigration from these countries was sparked by pogroms and other oppressive actions taken against Jews as the result of frustration engendered by the Arab defeat in Palestine.

On the other side of the demographic coin, the Palestinians were segmented into four major groupings:

1 In Israel, there remained approximately 150,000 Palestinians, who received Israeli citizenship and, at least formally, equal rights as a recognized minority.

2 On the West Bank, the Palestinians received Jordanian citizenship. This group was divided into two major classes—the original population of the region, living in villages and towns such as Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem, and the refugees who settled in the camps. Segments of these groups eventually moved to the East Bank of the Jordan, and part of them, mainly the old notable families, were absorbed into the Jordanian ruling oligarchy, merchant class, and newly established civil service. In all cases, they were kept far away from the most important power focus of the country, the military, which remained intact as representative of the Bedouin warrior class.

3 In the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians received neither citizenship nor any other type of citizens' rights and lived in camps alongside the original inhabitants of Gaza's coastal area.

4 Other Palestinians were dispersed among other Arab and non-Arab countries. During the 1950s and 1960s, a major Palestinian center developed in the oil-rich desert emirate of Kuwait, which welcomed skilled and educated young Palestinians, who contributed to its development.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, reinforced by the developing Cold War, took on an international dimension once the surrounding Arab states were drawn in. As a condition for recognition of the Jewish state, the Arab states demanded that Israel withdraw to the 1947 partition-resolution border (which they had previously rejected), and that all Palestinian refugees be returned to their homes. Perceiving these demands as another attempt to annihilate the Jewish state, the Israelis rejected them outright. Israel argued that the Arab countries should absorb the refugees, just as the Jews had absorbed their own refugee brethren. In the meantime, a petite guerre developed along the armistice lines. Palestinian infiltrators from the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank harassed the new border settlements, trying to reappropriate property or just to take revenge by killing Israelis. The Israeli government developed a retaliation policy against the host Arab countries, arguing that they should take responsibility for the infiltrations and killings.

In the years after the war, part of the Arab world was riven by internal turmoil and a series of coups d'etat; while, at the same time, the world witnessed the rise of a pan-Arab ideology, whose spokesman was the young Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Pan-Arabism urged the unification of the Arab world and its transformation into a military, political, economic, and cultural world power in collaboration with Nehru's India and Tito's Yugoslavia. Pan-Arabism viewed its place to be in the “neutral third world,” which was supposed to emerge as a balancing power between the Western and Eastern blocs. Within this ideological framework, the problem of Palestine was marginalized, its solution being postponed until all the Arab states were united. A group of young Palestinian intellectuals and students, key members of which attended Cairo University and belonged to its student union, challenged this approach. Yasser Arafat, a young engineering student, was elected chairman of this group, which later became the kernel of the Fatah organization.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the “Palestine First” approach, in opposition to Pan-Arabism, was still a weak and persecuted voice in the Arab world. In semi-underground periodicals such as Filastinuna (Our Palestine), edited by Khalil al-Wazir (better known as “Abu Jihad”) and published in Lebanon, a new Palestinian strategy and identity were developing. The liberation of Palestine was perceived as a precondition for Arab unity, to be implemented by the Palestinians themselves through “armed struggle.” The new Palestinian political thinking was deeply influenced by the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions, and figures such as Che Guevara, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and Jomo Kenyatta became heroes of the new revolutionary movement. Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and similar works were translated into Arabic and became standard textbooks in some Palestinian refugee camps.

During the late 1950s, many Palestinian associations, organizations, and groups were established, among them al-Fatah, headed by Yasser Arafat (since 1959) and the Arab Nationalist Movement, which developed into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, headed by Dr. George Habash. In January 1964, the first Arab summit in Cairo issued a general statement on the need to organize the Palestinian people and enable them to play a role in the liberation of their country and achieve “self-determination.” In May of the same year, following the declaration, the veteran diplomat Ahmad Shukayri succeeded in convening the first Palestinian National Council (the PNC), which adopted the Palestinian National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). While the convention, which was held in East Jerusalem, was attended by delegations from the entire Palestinian community in exile and the territories occupied by the Jordanians and the Egyptians, it was still dominated by representatives of the old notable families. The PLO's charter adopted a very radical position vis-à-vis the right of the Jewish polity to exist in the Middle East. In January 1965, al-Fatah launched its “armed struggle” for the liberation of Palestine by trying to blow up the main Israeli water pipeline.

THE END OF THE “ALL OR NOTHING” STRATEGY

In 1937, testifying before the Royal Commission, the Palestinian leader Jamal al-Husseini observed, “Every Jew's entrance into Palestine means an Arab leaving Palestine.” This summarized perceptions on both sides of the conflict as a zero-sum game, in which any social, political, material, or cultural gain on the part of one side meant an equivalent loss for the other side. The central resources in the conflict were land and people—both tangible, measurable, and easily quantifiable. From the outset, ideological, religious, and primordial cleavages were secondary issues, and they only entered into the conflict at a later point. The conflict was also total, because it touched every member of both communities, who were all potential victims of and recruits for battle. This totalization of the conflict referred to the immediate relationship between the immigrant Jewish settlers and the native population, and to the intercommunal conflict taking place in the Middle Eastern arena.

In other cases of conflict between immigrant settlers and local populations of settled land, different patterns developed:

 In North America, Australia, and New Zealand, settlers brought exclusive orientations and enough power to destroy the local social fabric and political structures and to largely annihilate the indigenous population.

 In Central and South America, settlers brought some inclusive orientations, gradually absorbing the local population and being absorbed by them (mainly through intermarriage). Thus, in the newly formed nations, the descendants of settlers formed the upper and ruling classes, while the descendants of the indigenous population constituted the lower classes.

 In South Africa, Rhodesia, Algeria, Palestine, and Ireland, settler and indigenous communities developed simultaneously, keeping their social, religious, and racial boundaries intact. In most of these cases, the settlers developed highly advanced and viable societies. However, they were not strong enough to secure hegemonic rule over the overwhelming indigenous majority. French Algeria and Rhodesia disappeared. South Africa is currently in the midst of a unique experiment of transformation into a multiracial state, governed by a black majority. The Irish problem still remains unresolved, and traditional Balkan ethnic clashes have been rekindled by the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation. Israel has arrived at the conclusion that a territorially small, relatively homogeneous Jewish state will be more secure and defendable than a larger state that includes a large minority of Palestinians who do not want to be ruled by Jews. The Palestinians seem to have arrived at a similar conclusion: that accepting a smaller but autonomous—and later independent— entity is better than bargaining for “all or nothing.”

SETTING AND SETTLING BOUNDARIES

Popular Palestinian historiography usually links the change in the fate of the Palestinian people to the establishment of the PLO and the institutionalization of “armed struggle” against Israeli targets and interests. These events are described as the birth of a new generation of Palestinians—the generation of revolution (as opposed to the generation of the Catastrophe). However, no Palestinian political or guerrilla organization could have had as great an influence on the reappearance of the Palestinian problem on the world agenda as the consequences of the 1967 war. After 1967, “original Palestine” reappeared, this time under total Jewish control. Moreover, three of the abovementioned Palestinian communities found themselves living under a common (Jewish) political system. Palestinian status under “Arab control”—in Jordan and Egypt— had been ambiguous. These Palestinians could not openly declare themselves to be oppressed (by an alien force), even if that was the reality; and, they could not develop or rebuild a separate identity. They were considered “part and parcel of the Arab world,” or were thought of as “Jordanians,” whether they accepted that identity or not. Only under the control of their enemy—the Jewish Zionist state—could they “re-Palestinianize” themselves and build a separate identity and communal institutions.

For Israel, conquering the entire territory of mandatory Palestine, as well as the Sinai Peninsula (prior to its return to Egypt as the first part of the deal for “peace in exchange for territory”) and the Syrian (Golan) Heights, was an opportunity to revitalize its character as an immigrant settler society. New lands were opened up for Jewish settlement, especially the core territories of the ancient Jewish kingdoms of David and Solomon, an essential component of Jewish mythic consciousness. The capture of many holy places of the Jewish religion, which had been controlled by the Jordanians until 1967, served to strengthen religious and messianic sentiments, chauvinistic orientations, and the settlement drive within Jewish Israeli society. The scope, the ease, and the speed of the 1967 victory were perceived as a sign of divine grace and the supremacy of the Jewish presence in the region. Only the fear of the demographic effects of incorporating a massive and rapidly growing Arab population within the Jewish state prevented the full de jure annexation of the occupied territories. On the one hand, the captured territories were defined as strategically vital for the future defense of Israel (see chapter 7), while on the other, they were considered exchangeable for peace. The first stage of the Arab response after the war was formulated at the Khartoum Summit as the “Three No's”—no reconciliation (sulh), no recognition, and no negotiation with Israel.

Al-Fatah and other Palestinian political and guerrilla organizations tried to initiate popular resistance and guerrilla warfare within the occupied territories, but with limited success. Increasing numbers of Palestinian workers began to search for work inside Israel, and within about sixteen years, they became the major source of labor in areas such as construction, agriculture, sanitation, and other blue-collar jobs. Israeli products also inundated the Palestinian consumer market. Even the all-encompassing Arab economic boycott of Israeli products was bypassed by disguising Israeli products as Arab and exporting them to the Arab states by way of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The economic dependence on Israel of the population of the occupied territories was established in the post-1967 period and has continued to deepen.

In the post-1967 period, two informal models were simultaneously employed by the Israelis. One was the so-called “[Yigal] Allon Plan,” which envisioned reshaping Israel's boundaries by establishing frontier settlements on sparsely populated lands in the Jordan Valley. The other model reasoned that the Jewish presence must be strengthened in densely populated Palestinian areas in order to avoid any future possibility of giving up part of the Holy Land. This strategy implied that Jewish settlements could not be “uprooted,” and that the land on which they were built would became part of the eternal inheritance of the Jewish collectivity. This latter assumption was shown to be completely baseless following the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, in which it was agreed that the exchange of territories for peace was a valid principle.

With the change of government in 1977, and the victory of the right-wing Likud party, the territories of the Sinai Peninsula were returned to Egypt. At the same time, however, colonization of the core territories of the biblical “Land of Israel”—the West Bank (renamed “Judea and Samaria”)—was made a top priority on the national agenda. The major engine behind this colonization effort was the development of a settler sociopolitical religious movement called Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) and its settlement branch, Ammana. The rise of Gush Emunim was one ramification of the mass protest movement born from growing discontent in the aftermath of the 1973 war, a war in which Israel was strategically surprised by a coordinated attack of Syrian and Egyptian troops, which inflicted heavy causalities. The 1973 war called into question Israeli military superiority in the region and reemphasized the Israeli state's vulnerability.

Different Israeli political groups deduced different “lessons” from the 1973 war (see also chapter 3). From one angle, the logical conclusion of the war was the necessity of peace and readiness to pay territorial prices for such peace (this line of logic is best represented by the “Peace Now” movement). Holding three million Palestinians without any citizens' rights was considered morally evil and dangerous for the ethnic composition and security of the Jewish nation-state. The conclusions and interpretations of the situation from the other end of the political spectrum were that there is no chance of a Jewish polity being accepted in the region, and that only its military and political might, including control of as much territory as possible, can ensure its very existence.

By 2000, about 180,000 Jews, spread over 140 settlements, had colonized the West Bank and Gaza Strip, totaling about 12 percent of the total population of these areas. Sixty-five percent of these Jews lived in several large town settlements, and most residents were employed inside the Israeli border (or the 1949 ceasefire “Green Line”). All in all, this colonization drive did not achieve its basic aim of building such a massive Jewish presence in the occupied territories that any possibility of withdrawal would be impossible. This failure seems to stem from the fact that, unlike the early Zionist colonization efforts, this time around, the effort did not enjoy broad consensus among the Jewish citizens of Israel. There was, however, enough Jewish settlement to threaten control of limited land and water resources.

Making a rather rough division of the settler population, we can say that they are of two types. About half are ideologically or religiously committed to settle the “Land of Israel,” producing a territorial and political fait accompli. The other half are Israeli Jews in search of cheaper housing and a higher quality of life (the settlements are heavily subsidized by the government). Although the settlement process was not carried out under the umbrella of a nationwide ideological consensus and was, in fact, the subject of grave controversy within the Jewish polity, causing a major societal and political cleavage between so-called hawks and doves, no settlements would have been established had the Israeli state not considered these territories a frontier zone. The former of the two groups believes that Israel must adopt an active, “strong” policy toward the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. This includes the annexation de facto or even de jure of the lands of Greater Israel, as justified by security, nationalist, and religious concerns. A minority of the hawks has even advocated the partial or total expulsion of Arabs from the “Land of Israel.” In the opposing camp are those Israelis with “dovish” orientations, who believe that a peaceful solution between Arabs and Jews is still possible in the region (see chapter 7). The preconditions for peace and reconciliation, they argue, are a much “softer” and less aggressive policy on the part of the Israeli state, as well as a readiness to exchange land and dismantle settlements in return for peace.

THE INTIFADA AND THE OSLO ACCORDS

Up to the present, the main controversy within the Jewish polity has centered on the question, “Has the state of Jewish colonization of the occupied territories reached the ‘point of no return'?” Several years of mass immigration, at first from the Soviet Union and later from the former Soviet republics, have brought about one million immigrants, increasing the number of Jewish citizens in the state by about 20 percent (see chapter 5).

On December 9, 1987, a general popular uprising broke out in the Gaza Strip and spread to the West Bank. A unified leadership of the uprising formed inside the occupied territories, with its directives ratified by the “outside” leadership of the PLO. The Israelis were helpless and unable to repress the rebellion, which was carried out by young men and women throwing stones at Israeli troops. The Israelis reacted by using excessive force, breaking bones and giving beatings, shooting live ammunition and later rubber bullets, imposing curfews and other collective punishments, demolishing houses, and holding thousands in administrative detention and prison. As a symbolic act, the 19th session of the PNC declared an independent Palestinian state in November 1988.

The Palestinian popular uprising was complemented by escalation of guerrilla activities inside Israel, including the stabbing of civilians and the use of firearms to target private and public transportation. The cost/ benefit equation of the “colonial situation” began to change, with the costs becoming obviously higher for the Israeli state. The ultranationalist Likud government did not provide any real answers to this new situation, with the exception of increasing its aggressive rhetoric, which simply widened the gap between the ideology of “Greater Israel” and the reality of a feeling of precarious personal security among the Israeli people.

Another major concern of the Israeli public and its leadership was that, despite its formidable military strength, the state's power was continually subject to attrition and slow deterioration as a direct result of its “policing” functions in the occupied territories. As the Palestinian popular uprising continued to exact a toll for direct Israeli control of the Palestinian population, the costs for the Israeli military system grew, and gains for the Israeli economy decreased. Many Israeli military units drastically cut their basic and advanced training; and, even worse, the mentality of the Israeli military as a whole changed from that of an elite corps able to conduct extensive, blitzkrieg-style, large-scale wars to that of an internal security force. An additional burden on the Israeli military was the protection of small, sparsely populated Jewish settlements dispersed among a dense Palestinian population. In short, the Israeli military learned the limitations of military power !vis-à-vis an active civilian resistance consisting mainly of stone-throwing children and youth.

In the 1992 Israeli elections, the Labor party returned to power, promising to solve internal security problems by granting autonomy to the Palestinians, as agreed in the Camp David Accords. The ability of Israeli political culture to adopt, with relatively little major domestic resistance, an accord with the Palestinians under the leadership of the PLO (with which contact had only shortly before been legally off limits to any Israeli) should be considered a major historical upheaval. This is even more dramatic when we consider that this agreement means, not only acceptance of the PLO and its demands for legitimacy, but a far-reaching change in the status quo on the ground. The first stage of this is acceptance of Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza and Jericho areas, and then probably in most of the West Bank. This includes a major relocation of Israeli troops as a kind of “disengagement” between the two collectivities.

How are the “Declaration of Principles” and the Cairo Agreement of May 5, 1994 (the basis for the “Gaza and Jericho First Plan”), and their de facto implementation, possible from the Israeli point of view? Will September 13, 1993, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Principles by the Israeli prime minister and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, be a significant turning point in the hundred years of Jewish-Arab conflict? Is this a movement toward genuine reconciliation or just another piece of paper? We shall evidently have to wait a few years more for the answers.

Despite its “revolutionary character,” this new policy is well rooted in the power-oriented Israeli culture. From the beginning of Yitzhak Rabin's Labor party's return to power, a rigid policy toward the Palestinians was demonstrated through the mass deportation of Islamic activists, extension of curfews on the Palestinian population, and closure of the territories. Rabin's macho image had been previously well established when as minister of defense he formulated a “bone-breaking policy” in response to the Intifada. He is thus well identified with the power oriented culture.¹³ As an aside, the previous rightist and “patriotic” Likud administration, despite its rhetoric, is more strongly identified with the “weak” components of Israeli political culture, because most of its political moves have been “anxiety-arousing” tactics, in contrast with the “activist” and security-oriented components of Labor's message.

Thus, a power-oriented analysis of the situation leads to the conclusion that indirect control of the Palestinians is a better and cheaper strategy than direct control, especially of a completely ungovernable area such as the Gaza Strip. The transfer of local rule to a Palestinian authority that would take over police and security services was the logical conclusion to be drawn by the power-oriented Israeli culture. In any case, Palestinian “autonomy,” or, in the alternative scenario, a sovereign state divided territorially between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and compressed between Jordan and Israel, would be more of a strategic asset than a threat.

The PLO and its leadership have already made a few essential moves in this direction. The first of these moves was the 12th PNC (July 1974) resolution “establishing a Palestinian national authority in any area liberated from Israel”—the so-called “mini-state option.” The second move was made when, in 1988, in Geneva, Yasser Arafat denounced terrorism and declared, on behalf of the PLO, recognition of the rights of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security, including the states of Palestine, Israel, and their neighbors. These were abstract declarations, however, without any concrete policy and institutional applications, and they aroused strident antagonism from other Palestinian factions. Even so, the entire process of accepting the Israeli offer and its implications was a revolutionary move for the PLO.

None of this is to say that the PLO's leadership, represented at the time by al-Fatah and encouraged by part of the local leadership in the occupied territories, was unaware of Israeli motives and the unfavorableness of the terms from the PLO's point of view, nor of the danger of becoming, not only a weaker partner to the Israelis, but their soldiers of misfortune as well. Their Palestinian and Arab rivals continue to remind them of these facts all the time. The misfortune is that both Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were labeled traitors by parts of their own constituencies. Indeed, after the political mistake of supporting the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, only a weakened al-Fatah leader, threatened by a growing Islamic movement within the occupied territories, could be coerced into accepting almost near-capitulation terms in order to survive. On the other hand, the deal proposed by the Israelis was better than any other previously proposed to the Palestinians by their enemies. Most important, however, the inner dynamics of the process will most probably lead to the formation of an independent Palestinian state.

From the opposite perspective, the Oslo Accords are perceived as a psychological, cultural, and political acceptance of the legitimate existence of a Jewish state in the region. This should be appreciated as the second biggest Zionist achievement, right after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent war victory that completed the first stage of Jewish state-building efforts.

Nevertheless, for the majority of Israeli Jews, regardless of the different evaluations of these agreements and the Israeli leadership's motives for agreeing to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, the Accords and their implementation were a political earthquake. The explicit recognition that Palestinians as a people have collective rights over what is known as “The Land of Israel” and the likely establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state were not by any stretch of the imagination commonly acceptable ideas, even though they have long been promoted by certain elite groups. For a while, it seemed that the majority of Israeli Jews hesitantly supported rapprochement with the Palestinians. In addition, the major source of parliamentary opposition, the secular right-wing Likud party, was unable to suggest a convincing alternative policy to withdrawal from major Palestinian urban centers and refugee camps, which since the 1987 Palestinian uprising had become a major burden on the Israeli armed forces, state, and society. The only strong and salient opposition during most of the period was provided by nationalist and Orthodox religious supporters of the settler population and by the settlers themselves. Major resistance and demonstrations against the “peace process” were organized by some extraparliamentary groups, while the majority of the population stood on the sidelines, expressing high ambivalence toward the government and its policy and adopting a position of “wait and see.”

Thus, in a relatively short period of time, Rabin's government tried to impose major change within Israeli political culture. By passing responsibility for control of the majority of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to the PNA, the government established a political fait accompli without touching any Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Any attempt to dismantle settlements was considered likely to trigger large-scale popular resistance, if not civil war. Vast resources were invested in bypass roads in order to minimize friction between Palestinians and settlers, and PNA collaboration with Israeli security forces was supposed to prevent attacks against targets within Israel and against the Jewish settlers.

Fundamentalist religious groups argued that Rabin's policy was disastrous, and that his government could not legitimately give up parts of the Jewish “holy land” because it was a minority government, formed with the unprecedented support of two non-Zionist Arab parties (see chapter 4). Secularist right-wing parties did nothing to distance themselves from these arguments, in the expectation that they would penetrate the electorate's consciousness and aid them politically.

From the beginning, Rabin's coalition expected the support of three “Jewish” parties—Labor, Meretz, and the traditionalist Mizrahi Shas party. However, shortly after establishment of the coalition, the Shas party abandoned ship,¹⁴ and Rabin's coalition remained a minority government, supported by Arab parties, whose seats added to those of Labor and Meretz amounted to 61 of the 120 parliamentary seats. For the first time, an Israeli government depended on Arab parties for support, something hitherto considered unthinkable in the ethnocentric discourse of Israeli political culture. The government itself appeared uncomfortable with this situation.

On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a young Jewish religious nationalist, who took the rhetoric about the “non-Jewish” government and its “traitorous policy” to its logical conclusion. In the months before the murder, a vocal campaign led by religious groups had included influential rabbis cursing the government and Rabin personally and discussing his culpability under halachic law¹⁵ and the necessity of sentencing him to death. Rabin's assassination provoked deep shock among the majority of the Israel public. People, mainly secular youth, kindling candles and singing songs of mourning and protest, suddenly filled squares and streets, especially in the metropolitan areas. The leitmotif was “How were we [the secularist peace seekers] able to let them [the religious fundamentalists] kill Rabin?” “Where were we during the right-wing demonstrations that depicted Rabin as a traitor?!” For a moment, it appeared that a new kind of civil and secular society was in the making, built around a new secular saint or martyr, Rabin. The mass media amplified the feeling that the murder had crystallized a new generation with a central collective experience and spiritual revelation, resembling that of the “JFK generation” in the United States.

Indeed, the assassination caused the secular right-wing opposition considerable embarrassment and temporarily silenced even the most vociferous and aggressive religious opposition to the peace process.¹⁶ For a short time, the murder had an intense political boomerang effect, with a prevailing expectation that “Rabin's legacy” had completely conquered public opinion, to the tune of a continued mandate for the Labor government. This evaluation, along with the desire to receive popular approval for his leadership, and to establish a stronger government coalition without depending on Arab parties, led Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, to advance the election date by five months. Converting the moral indignation caused by the assassination into political gains proved to be an impossible dream. The assassination served to sharpen social identities and boundaries, but did not legitimize change. On the contrary, as one camp sharpened its boundaries and mobilized its supporters, the political dynamic led to a countermobilization of the rival camp. In fact, as the election campaign began, people slowly returned to their pre-assassination stances. If any change occurred in the 1996 election, it appeared within the two major political blocs, and not between them, as occurred in the 1999 elections.

From the perspective of the “civil” elite, the four years under Labor-Meretz rule were characterized by an accelerated process of “normalization,” “secularization,” and “civilianization” of Israeli politics and society. This “normalization” process included the attempt at historical conciliation with the Palestinians and the strengthening of Israel's political and economic position in the Middle East, as well as a series of internal reforms. The basic perception was that the quality of Israel's internal regime was strongly connected with “normalization” of its external status and vice versa. The Knesset continued to adopt a series of citizens' rights and “human dignity” laws, and the Supreme Court sped up what Justice Aharon Barak called the “constitutional revolution” by rendering several liberal and “enlightened” decisions.¹⁷ From the perspective of the religious, traditional, or simply conservative segments of the Jewish population, these four years were perceived as the years of “de-Judification” or “Hellenization” of the state. The Israeli state and society's basic “Jewish” identity became, alongside the Palestinian problem, the hottest public issue, bringing the whole society to the brink of a culture war. The religious-nationalistic conservative streams felt threatened by “decadent Westernized and Americanized” culture, which they feared would take over “Jewish society” and transform Israel into “just another nation.” They saw the 1996 election as the last chance “to save” the Jewish state from destruction and mobilized all their human and material resources to win it.

The basic problem of the Israeli control system, the existence of about five million Jews and close to four million Palestinians within the territory of “Greater Israel,” explains its policy deadlock.¹⁸ In the long run, if Israel wants to maintain its basic character as a “Jewish state,” whatever that means, it will be forced to make painful territorial and political concessions. This will have a drastic impact not only on Israel's internal social fabric and culture but on its regional and international position. The results of the February 2001 election for the premiership can be interpreted as a strong backlash on the part of a considerable portion of the Jewish electorate against what were seen as far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians (but with which the latter themselves were nonetheless quite rightly not content). When asked to accept what were perceived as unacceptable losses, albeit mainly symbolic ones, both sides showed themselves to be not yet culturally ripe for reconciliation.

1. On the Old Testament as mythology, see Thompson, Mythic Past.

2. The suicide story is told by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus Flavius. Nachman Ben-Yehuda convincingly argues in his book The Masada Myth that the supposed group suicide was, in fact, mass murder. A small number of men, he claims, actually slaughtered all the others, including children and women. For a more comprehensive analysis of the Zionist meta-narrative, see Zerubavel, Recovered Roots.

3. Bar-Kochba, or “Son of the Star,” as his followers called him, was also called Bar Koziba, or “The Liar,” by his opponents.

4. Only during the 1980s was an attempt made to equate this rebellion with the insane politics that led to national disaster. See Harkabi, Bar Kokhba Syndrome.

5. Among the 65 million Europeans who migrated to the New World between 1800 and 1850, there were more than 4 million Jews, or 6 percent of the total, compared with their 1.5 percent representation in the total population of Europe. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, about 20 percent of European Jewry migrated to the Americas.

6. See Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians.

7. Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

8. A dunum is a Turkish measure of land commonly used in the Middle East. An acre is equal to about 4.5 dunums.

9. Horowitz and Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity.

10. For an excellent overview of the political ingredients in the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, see Morris, Righteous Victims.

11. Small groups within the Jewish community, such as Brit—Shalom, Ichud, and later Mapam, the left-wing Zionist-Socialist party, supported the idea in the late 1930s and 1940s. The vast majority, however, rejected it. The main disseminators of binationalism were intellectuals at the Hebrew University such as Martin Buber and Yehuda Leib Magnes. They met with very hostile reactions by the majority of their compatriots.

12. See Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.

13. Some talked in this context about the “banalization of brutality” in Israeli culture. See Lissak, “Intifada and Israeli Society.”

14. The Shas party left Rabin's government partly because of the personal problems of its charismatic young leader Arieh Deri, who was charged with corruption, and partly for political reasons. The party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is regarded as a moderate on issues regarding the Jewish—Arab conflict, but most of the party's supporters are hard-liners.

15. Jewish law in Israel is applied to the sphere of private laws, such as marriage, divorce, burial, and the determination of Jewish ethnic nationality, but not to the public, political sphere (see chapter 6). This is one of the many compromises the Israeli state has made between its basic civil and primordial orientations.

16. Typically, on the right, the shock was expressed by wonder over “how a Jew could kill a Jewish prime minister” and less over the general implications of an assassination for the political system and culture.

17. The “constitutional revolution” in fact began at the end o the Likud government, despite the general public perception that associates it with Labor-Meretz rule.

18. See Kimmerling, “Boundaries and Frontiers of the Israeli Control System.”