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