The Palestine-Israeli Conflict

A Beginner's Guide

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Dawoud El-Alami

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780747019
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

An updated edition of this best-selling introduction to the conflict.

With coverage of all the recent events, the new edition of this best-selling book gives a thorough and accessible account of the history behind the Palestine-Israeli conflict, its roots, and the possibilities for the future. New material outlines recent developments, while an updated conclusion consists of a direct debate between the two authors, which raises many issues, yet offers real solutions to which future peace talks may aspire.

1

The Zionist movement

Religious and spiritual Zionism

For thousands of years Jews anticipated the coming of the Messiah who would bring about a final in-gathering of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. This was to be a divinely predetermined miraculous event which would inaugurate the messianic age. However, in the early nineteenth century within religious Orthodox circles there emerged a new trend, the advocacy of an active approach to Jewish messianism. A number of Jewish writers maintained that, rather than adopt a passive attitude towards the problem of redemption, the Jewish nation must engage in the creation of a homeland in anticipation of the advent of the Messiah.

Pre-eminent among such religious Zionists was Yehuda hai Alkalai, born in 1798 in Sarajevo to Rabbi Sholomo Alkalai, the spiritual leader of the local Jewish community. During his youth Yehuda lived in Palestine, where he was influenced by kabbalistic thought. In 1825 he served as a rabbi in Semlin in Serbia; in 1834 he published a booklet entitled Shema Yisrael in which he advocated the establishment of Jewish colonies in Palestine, a view at variance with the traditional Jewish belief that the Messiah would come through an act of divine deliverance.

When in 1840 the Jews of Damascus were charged with the blood libel (killing a child and using its blood in an act of ritual), Alkalai became convinced that the Jewish people could be secure only in their own land. Henceforth he published a series of books and pamphlets explaining his plan of self-redemption. In Minhat Yehuda, for example, he argued on the basis of the Hebrew scriptures that the Messiah will not miraculously materialize; rather, he will be preceded by various preparatory events. In this light the Holy Land needs to be populated by Jewry in preparation for messianic deliverance.1 For Alkalai, redemption is not simply a divine affair – it is also a human concern requiring labour and persistence.

This demystification of traditional messianic eschatology extends to Alkalai’s advocacy of Hebrew as a language of communication. Traditionally, Hebrew was viewed as a sacred language; it was not to be profaned by daily use. Alkalai, however, recognized the practical importance of having a single language for ordinary life in Palestine. It would be a mistake, he believed, to think that God will send an angel to teach his people all seventy languages. Instead the Jewish people must ensure that Hebrew is studied so that it can be used for ordinary life.2

How can this process of redemption be accomplished? Alkalai stressed the importance of convening an assembly of those dedicated to the realization of this goal. Thus he asserted that the redemption must begin with efforts by Jews themselves. They must organize, choose leaders and leave the countries in which they reside. Since no community can exist without a governing body, the first step in this process of resettlement must be the appointment of elders of each district to oversee the affairs of the community.3

Another early pioneer of religious Zionism was Zwi Hirsch Kalischer, the rabbi of Toun in the province of Posen, in Poland. An early defender of Orthodoxy against the advances made by Reform Judaism, he championed the commandments in prescribing faith in the Messiah and devotion to the Holy Land. In 1836 he expressed his commitment to Jewish settlement in Palestine in a letter to the head of the Berlin branch of the Rothschild family. The beginning of redemption, he maintained, will come through natural causes by human effort to gather the scattered of Israel into the Holy Land.4

Such a conviction did not actively engage Kalischer until 1860 when a society was organized in Frankfurt on the Oder to encourage Jewish settlement in Palestine. After joining this group, he published a Zionist work, Derishat Zion (Seeking Zion), which appeared in 1862. The redemption of Israel, he argued, will not take place miraculously. Instead, the redemption of Israel will take place slowly through awakening support from philanthropists and gaining the consent of other nations to the gathering of the Jewish people into the Holy Land.5

For Kalischer practical steps must be taken to fulfil this dream of resettlement. What is required is that an organization be created to encourage emigration, and to purchase and cultivate farms and vineyards. Such a programme would be a ray of deliverance to those who were languishing in Palestine suffering poverty and famine; this situation would be utterly changed if those able to contribute to this effort were inspired by the vision of a Jewish homeland. An advantage of this scheme would be to bring to fruition those religious commandments that attach to working the soil of the Holy Land. But beyond all this, Kalischer was convinced that Jewish farming would be a spur to messianic redemption.

Following in the footsteps of such religious Zionists as Alkalai and Kalischer, Abraham Isaac Kook formulated a vision of messianic redemption integrating the creation of a Jewish state. Born in Greiva, Latvia, in 1865, Kook received a traditional Jewish education and in 1895 became rabbi of Bausk. In 1904 he emigrated to Palestine, eventually becoming the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi after the British Mandate. Unlike secularists who advocated practical efforts to secure a Jewish state, Kook embarked on the task of reinterpreting the Jewish religious tradition to transform religious messianic anticipation into the basis for collaboration with the aspirations of modern Zionism.

According to Kook, the centrality of Israel is a fundamental dimension of Jewish life and a crucial element of Jewish religious consciousness. Yet the fervent belief in messianic deliverance has not been accompanied by an active policy of resettlement. This disjunction between religious aspirations for the return from exile and the desire of most Jews to live in the diaspora highlights the confusion in Jewish thinking about the role of Israel in Jewish life. There is thus a contradiction between the messianic belief in a return to Zion and the accommodating attitude to exile of most Jews throughout history.

For Kook, this contradiction at the heart of Jewish existence must be confronted and resolved. Kook maintained that a Jewish person in the diaspora is able to observe all commandments of the Law and live as a devout Jew. Yet, because he lives outside the Jewish homeland, an essential dimension of Jewishness is missing from his life. Life in the diaspora involves one in unholiness whereas by settling in Palestine it is possible to live a spiritually unsullied life. Return to Zion is thus imperative for an authentic existence.6 For Kook, attachment to the land must serve as the foundation of Jewish life in the modern world. Although the secular pioneers who came to Palestine were motivated by ideological convictions alien to traditional Judaism, their actions are paradoxically part of God’s plan of redemption. In the cosmic scheme of the divine will, seemingly atheistic and secular actions are absorbed into the unfolding of God’s plan for his chosen people. Therefore these pioneers unintentionally contributed to the advent of the Messiah.7

Like Alkalai and Kalischer and Kook, Asher Zvi Ginsberg (later known as Ahad Ha-Am) was concerned with the spiritual redemption of the Jewish people, although his thought is devoid of traditional Jewish ideas of messianic redemption. Born in Skvira in the Russian Ukraine on 18 August 1856, he received a traditional Jewish education. In 1868 his family moved to an estate that his wealthy father leased; there he studied the works of medieval Jewish philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. Later he studied French and German literature and philosophy. After attempting unsuccessfully to continue his study in various European capitals, he moved to Odessa in 1886, where he began to publish articles concerning contemporary Jewish life.

His first essay, Wrong Way, set the stage for his role within the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement. In this work he advocated a return to Zion, but remained critical of a number of aspects of the movement’s platform. In a later essay, The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem, he discussed the notion of a Jewish settlement. According to Ahad Ha-Am, even if a Jewish state existed in Palestine, not all Jews would be able to settle there. What would be the result if only a small section of the world Jewish population emigrated? Ahad Ha-Am argued that the economic problems facing Eastern European Jewry would not be solved for those who remained behind. The Jewish state could only contribute to cultural and spiritual regeneration.

The central dilemma faced by Zionism is how the spiritual perplexities of Jews in the diaspora could be resolved by the creation of a Jewish homeland. For Ahad Ha-Am, Zionism is able to solve the problems of Western Jewry more readily than to ameliorate the condition of Jews in Eastern Europe. Jews in the West are separated from Jewish culture and simultaneously alienated from the society in which they reside. The existence of a Jewish state would enable them to solve the problems of national identity, compensating them for their lack of integration into the culture of the country in which they live.8 This ideal can cure the Jews in the West of their social unease, their sense of inferiority in lands where they are aliens. Ahad Ha-Am was thus insistent that the Jewish state be infused with Jewish values, and not simply be a homeland for the Jewish people. It must embody the religious and cultural ideals of the Jewish past.

Although Ahad Ha-Am’s vision of the return to the Jews’ ancestral homeland was not filled with messianic longing, his idealization of the spiritual, religious and cultural dimensions of Judaism and their embodiment of a Jewish state was rooted in Jewish messianism. For Ahad Ha-Am, it would not be a divinely appointed Messiah who would bring about the realization of God’s kingdom on earth. Rather this would be the task of the Jewish people themselves. Through the creation of a Jewish state, the spiritual values of the faith are to materialize in the Holy Land.

Secular Zionism

In contrast with such figures as Alkalai, Kalischer, Kook and Ahad Ha-Am, modern secular Zionists have been preoccupied with the problem of anti-Semitism rather than religious and spiritual values. Modern secular Zionism begins with the writings of Moses Hess. Born in Bonn, Germany, Hess settled in Paris, where he was active in socialist circles. From 1842 to 1843 he served as the Paris correspondent of the Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Karl Marx. In 1862 he published Rome and Jerusalem, a systematic defence of Jewish nationalism. In this work, he argued that anti-Jewish sentiment is unavoidable. Progressive Jews think they can escape from Judeophobia by recoiling from any Jewish national expression, yet the hatred of Jews is inescapable.

For Hess, Jews will always remain strangers among the nations: nothing can alter this state of affairs. The only solution to the problem of Jew hatred is for the Jewish people to come to terms with their national identity. According to Hess, the restoration of Jewish nationalism will not deprive the world of the benefits promoted by Jewish reformers who wish to dissociate themselves from the particularistic dimensions of the Jewish heritage. On the contrary, the values of universalism will be championed by various aspects of Judaism’s national character. What is required today, Hess asserted, is for Jewry to regenerate the Jewish nation and to keep alive the hope for the political rebirth of the Jewish people.9

For Hess, a Jewish renaissance is possible once national life reasserts itself in the Holy Land. In the past the creative energies of the people deserted Israel when Jews became ashamed of their nationality. But the holy spirit, he argued, will again animate Jewry once the nation awakens to a new life. The only question remaining is how it might be possible to stimulate the patriotic sentiments of modern Jewry as well as to liberate the Jewish masses by means of this revived national loyalty. This is a formidable challenge, yet Hess maintained that it must be tackled. Although he recognized that there could not be a total emigration of world Jewry to Palestine, Hess believed that the existence of a Jewish state would act as a spiritual centre for the Jewish people and all of humanity.

The Russian pogroms had a profound impact on another early Zionist, Leon Pinsker, driving him from an espousal of the ideas of the Enlightenment to the determination to create a Jewish homeland. Born in TomoaszF3w in Russian Poland in 1821, Pinsker attended a Russian high school, studied law in Odessa and later received a medical degree from the University of Moscow. Upon returning to Odessa, he was appointed to the staff of the local city hospital. After 1860, he contributed to Jewish weekly papers and was active in the Society for the Spread of Culture among the Jews of Russia. However, when Jews were massacred in the pogroms of 1881, he left the Society, convinced that a more radical remedy was required to solve the plight of Russian Jewry.

In 1882 he published Autoemancipation, in which he argued that the Jewish problem is as unresolved in the modern world as it was in former times. In essence, this dilemma concerns the unassimilable character of Jewish identity in countries where Jews are in the minority. In such cases there is no basis for mutual respect between Jews and non-Jews. Among the nations of the world, Pinsker argued, the Jews are like a nation long since dead. The fear of the Jewish ghost has been a typical reaction throughout the centuries, and has paved the way for current Judeophobia. This prejudice has through the years become rooted and naturalized among all peoples of the world.

Such Jew hatred has generated various charges against the Jewish people: throughout history Jews have been accused of crucifying Jesus, drinking the blood of Christians, poisoning wells, exacting usury and exploiting peasants. Such accusations are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the fourth edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Chronology
• Maps
• A Jewish perspective
• 1. The Zionist movement
• 2. Beyond the First World War
• 3. The Jewish state
• 4. The Six-Day War and its aftermath
• 5. The road to peace
• 6. Before and after September 11
• 7. Renewed aggression
• A Palestinian perspective: Dawoud El-Alami
• 8. The origins of modern Palestine
• 9. Palestinians, Jews and the British
• 10. Towards the establishment of a Jewish state
• 11. Arabs and Jews
• 12. Towards liberation
• 13. The wall
• 14. The legacy of the old guard
• Debate
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index