Op-ed: If both Jews and Palestinian Arabs start their historical narrative with beginning of Zionism, Jews have deeper moral claim to Land of Israel.
Lawrence J. Epstein, YNET NEWS
Beginning the story of Jewish nationalism with the forerunners of the Zionist movement or the First Aliyah or the arrival of Herzl already grants Palestinian Arabs their greatest moral argument.
This is so because if the Jewish nationalist starting point is, say, 1890, then there were already large numbers of Arabs living in the Land of Israel. The exact numbers aren’t known, but the standard demographic estimate is that there were probably close to 500,000 Muslims and Christians who were living in the land by 1890, with ten times more Muslims than the 43,000 Jews. It is those numbers that seem to present Zionism’s founding with a moral problem.
Of course, the Zionists were completely and presciently correct about the principal moral reasons why a state for the Jews was needed. There was a deadly “racial” hatred of the Jews charging through history and aiming right at them. The Zionists were frighteningly correct in their assessment of the dangers the Jews faced. Not only was hatred of the Jews loose in the world, but soon there would be no escape from it. After the 1924 immigration act in the United States, there would be no remaining haven for Jews in trouble. That was less than a decade before the rise of Hitler. Herzl was in a race against Hitler, although neither of them knew it.
And the Zionists were also correct about non-ultra-Orthodox Jewry being lured away from Jewish traditions by the charms of assimilation. The Zionists knew there needed to be a Jewish nation to provide those who weren’t ultra-Orthodox Jews with a place to live a completely Jewish modern life. It was this spiritual need as well that provided Zionists with a moral foundation for their difficult and bold enterprise.
But with all the accuracy of their vision of the Jewish future, with all the urgency they could muster, with all the historical and emotional connections to their ancient land to propel them, the Zionists encountered what at least some believed to be a moral roadblock standing in the Zionist’s path to foundational justification: the Arabs already living in the land. There have been, in Zionist history, other moral challenges such as the Palestinian Arab refugees, the status of the West Bank after 1967, and various Israeli policies towards the minority Arab population. These are separate moral issues, however, from the moral question at Zionism’s birth, about whether Zionism itself was a morally legitimate movement.
It is that basic question that needs to be answered.
The fellahin living in the land in 1890, the peasants, the agricultural workers, the farmers, were there before the new Zionist movement. They eventually charged the Zionists with usurping Muslim land, the very land on which the Muslims had lived for a thousand years. The Christian Restorationsists claimed that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land, but they were wrong. The fellahin may not have owned the land, but they worked on it, and they lived there, at the very least temporarily.
However, this standard historical story lacks the appropriate political perspective. Jewish nationalism culminates in Zionism but does not begin with it. Zionism was a specific political movement, the first successful manifestation of what was a long effort by Jews to restore their national status. The story of Jewish nationalism doesn’t commence with its successful outcome but with its genuine beginning. That beginning occurred right after the fall of the Second Commonwealth. The Bar Kokhba revolt, which lasted from 132 to 136 CE, was the Jews’ third and final rebellion against Roman rule. After the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and this final revolt, the Jewish state was no more. Half a million Jews had been killed. Some Jews were able to stay, so it is inaccurate to claim that the land was ever emptied of Jews.
Conflict with Jewish nationalism
It is from this moment that Jewish hopes for a restored kingdom began. This is the true beginning of Jewish nationalism. Although devastated by Roman murder and destruction, the Jews maintained a majority or plurality of the population in the Land of Israel for half a millennium. The Jews lost their majority in the seventh century to Muslims who conquered the land. That moment requires greater scrutiny.
The Arabs’ conflict with Jewish nationalism doesn’t begin with the emergence of Zionism, but in 637 when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem. Seen from that historical distance, we can look at the fellahin there at the beginning of Zionism in a new way.
Perhaps the fellahin were the descendants of Muslims who conquered the land, or people who lived in the land who were converted to Islam. But in any case, the Muslim attachment to the land is associated with a violent attack on the Jews. It was the Muslims who took the land by force. It is they who established the rules of the game that no matter how long the Jews had lived on the land, no matter if they had been the majority for well more than a thousand years, that land and those Jews were still subject to be conquered.
Having established those rules, the modern Palestinian Arabs couldn’t then morally complain if the Jews wished to reclaim the land, even by force. However, the Jews were not doing it by force the way the Muslims did. The Jews did it by building homes, reclaiming swamps, and by employing Arab labor. They didn’t conquer the land. They moved back to their old neighborhood and were willing to live beside their new neighbors. If the Arabs living there in 1890 were the descendants of the Muslim invaders, they had less of a moral claim to the land than the Jews and they had no moral basis to deny the Jewish return. Indeed, it should be noted that whoever the Palestinians are descended from, the moral case for Zionists is secure precisely because the Muslims forcibly conquered the land. The Zionists held the moral high ground.
Zionists typically begin their historical narrative with their own success. That is understandably emotionally attractive. The Palestinian Arabs also start with the beginning of Zionism because that beginning gives them their strongest moral claim to be the legitimate inhabitants of the land. If both started the story of the land at the right moment, the Jews have the deeper moral claim to the land. Combined with their efforts to save Jews, some of whom were endangered physically and some spiritually, the Zionist moral claim to the Land of Israel is airtight.
Lawrence J. Epstein served as an advisor on the Middle East for two members of the United States Congress
EVENTUALLY there would be large numbers of Arabs. But that was in response to Jewish reclamation & development.
With the coming of the chalutzim, the flow of Arab traffic reversed dramatically: “Palestine changed from a country of Arab emigration to one of Arab immigration.” [Irving Howe & Carl Gershman, Israel, the Arabs & the Middle East (Quadrangle Press, NY, 1972), p. 178]
The phenomenon was confirmed in the 1937 Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (the “Peel Report”).
Within 7 years after its founding, Rishohn L’Tziyohn, for example, and its 40 families, had attracted over 400 Arab families: which settled themselves around the community itself. Numerous Arab villages came to be, following much the same pattern, often with numbers in the same 10-to-1 ratio. Cuinet recorded that in Western Palestine (from River to Sea) the 1882 “settled” Muslim population of 141,000 had grown, by 1895, to more than 252,000: an increase of 111,000, or nearly 80% within a 13-year period. [Cuinet, op cit.]
Moreover, Zionist advances in medicine & medical technology, in public health and sanitation, in engineering & agriculture reduced Arab infant mortality in Western Palestine by over 50% — and increased Palestinian Arab longevity by more than 20 yrs. And within just a few generations, Arab numbers west of the River virtually exploded: the years between 1893 & 1947 showing overall increases exceeding 400% — with the steepest gains in precisely those areas where Jewish settlement was heaviest, and Jewish development most intensive.
In detailed studies of economic conditions in Western Palestine, the economist-historian Prof. Fred Gottheil found that during the first 10 yrs of the Palestine Mandate, the Arab population increased by 216% in Haifa, 134% in Jaffa and 90% in Jerusalem, while Arab increases (where they increased at all) were far more modest — 42% in Nablus, 40% in Jenin, 32% in Bethlehem — in precisely those towns & areas where Jewish development was not pursued.
[Fred M. Gottheil, “Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel, 1922-1931,” from Michael Curtis, Joseph Neyer, Chaim Waxman & Allen Pollock, eds., The Palestinians: People, History, Politics (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1975), p. 38]
Not in 1890.
And anybody making such claims is going to have to explain how, if so, the Arabs managed to acquire an immunity to what travelers for centuries had called “Jerusalem Fever,” the equal opportunity killer of man & beast, and non-respecter of age, station, rank, ethnicity, gender, faith and nationality:
— malaria. (When they do, they should be sure & notify the Guinness people, as there’s sure to be a reward for the info; and they’ll have earned it.)
The French geographer, Vital Cuinet, had noted in his exhaustive, meticulous study of the region, roughly 15 years after the chalutzim (pioneering Jews) began the first of their serious land reclamation efforts in the final decades of the 19th century, that barely one-tenth of the land was under cultivation. Yes, you did read that right — it’s not a typo: one-tenth, even as late as 1895.
After the place had sustained 13 centuries of abuse & neglect, you were expecting, what—“a land flowing with milk and honey”? — “pastures of plenty”? the Garden of Eden? — the Elysian Fields?
Try scorching deserts, malarial swamps, eroded hillsides, empty watercourses, etc. How could one-tenth of the land sustain half a million people?
Robt St John offers a snapshot of the land that confronted the chalutzim of the Jordan River Valley:
And this is to say nothing of the massive sand dunes generated by that erosion, sand dunes which blocked the mouths of rivers — and the steaming bogs that said blockage created — swamplands whose most successful & thriving, non-vegetative lifeform, under the circumstances, was the anopheles mosquito: carrier of malaria.
[Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine, Géographie Administrative, Statistique, Descriptive et Raisonnée (E. Leroux, Paris, 1896), 583-84; Robt St John, Roll Jordan Roll: The Story of a River and Its People (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1965), 369-70].
There certainly was NOT 500,000 Muslims in the Palestinian Territory of the Ottoman Empire prior to 1890!!! THE LAND WAS BARREN AND CONSISTED MOSTLY OF DESERTS AND SWAMPS UNTIL THE JEWS CAME AND RECLAIMED THE LAND!!! The vast majority of the Arabs in the Palestine Mandate (which the British were given specifically to give the Jews a homeland) came in AFTER the Zionists and British offered a better standard of living than anywhere else in the Middle East. The Arabs did NOT EVER refer to themselves as “Palestinians”; only the Jews referred to themselves by that name. BTW, there were many times in the 19th century when the census showed MORE JEWS THAN ARABS in the territory, especially in Jerusalem!! For the record, there were absolutely no “Palestinians” living in the “West Bank” prior to 1948! For one thing, there was no “West Bank” then. (Go ahead and try and find it on any map.) Jordan renamed Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, and part of Jerusalem the “West Bank” when it occupied the land in 1948 and ethnically cleansed the land of all Jews until Israel won the land back from Jordan – NOT THE “PALESTINIANS”!! For the record, not once in the 19 years that Jordan controlled that land was there any suggestion of using that land for a separate Palestinian state!!
For the legal case for Zionism under international law, see SSRN.com/abstract=2385304
See especially note 41
“Which OTHER country is even REMOTELY wasting time with such questions ??
Are the Americans losing sleep? The Chinese? The Russians???”
My thoughts exactly, Phoenix.
Here’s a quote from Karl E. Meyer’s and Shareen Blair, Brysac’s ‘Kingmakers’:
“It is certainly true that Israel’s war for independence uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose plight thereafter has been a bitter reproach to Israel. Yet it is also a sad fact that almost all the world’s nations have been born in sin, and not one–certainly not the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Australia, Canada, Turkey or any African country–has been innocent of dispossession. It is another of the world’s lamentable truths: nationhood is rooted in rites of violence we all prefer to forget.”
But only Israel’s fight for nationhood was precipitated by the Holocaust. And today Israel’s existence in the Middle East is very much defined by those enemies who are zealously working to eliminate that existence.
Viiit Said:
Did all of those who conquered the land (illegal occupiers even if they stayed), went back to where they came from?
Majority of today’s Muslim occupying the Land are not descendants of the original conquerors from the 7th century.
Most are descendants of recent economical migrants from less than 1.5 century ago.
“Moral high ground”
“The moral case of Zionism”
I am sick TO DEATH with all this BS morality!
It is exasperating to read all these elegantly presented arguments.. All to no avail.
Is the writer (and others) aware at all what is the effect of all his polished words???
Is he trying to change the mind of the rest of the world? Their mind is made up for 2000 years and the results speak for themselves.
Which OTHER country is even REMOTELY wasting time with such questions ??
Are the Americans losing sleep? The Chinese? The Russians???
The Jews (shy guy would describe it best) MUST put into their head that in a zero sum game such as this, it is either/or . No kumbaya.
Unlike the musloids, the Jews are not bloodthirsty and would not proceed to actually kill the muslim population but at the very least, they CAN and SHOULD remove them unceremoniously from the land .
What unfortunately, they do not realize, is that this would be the KINDEST solution for all.
After it is done, Mr. Epstein could go back to the keyboard make a few corrections and publish another article.