Liora Halperin The Local Construction s you walk past the rather unremarkable of Zionist high-rise apartment buildings of Petah. Tikvah, with its suburban population of 230,000, you’ll find a much smaller one- Memory Astory building, preserved from the late 19th century. This was the home of Avraham Shapira, one of the earliest residents and guards of Petah. Tikvah. Fourteen kilometers from Tel Aviv, Petah. Tikvah was founded as a Jewish agricultural colony in 1878 on lands purchased from an Arab landowner in the Palestinian village of Mulabbis. As other such colonies followed in the ensuing decades, Petah. Tikvah was called “Em Ha-Moshavot,” the mother of the Jewish agricultural colonies. Over time, these communities became the core symbols of what would be known as the “First ,” or first wave, of Zionist land settlement. The Shapira house, preserved today as a municipal event space, displays some of Shapira’s treasured possessions: Arab headdresses, a nargilah (water pipe), and a Bedouin sword.

The Shapira house offers an instructive example of the politics of remembering, narrating, displaying, and deploying the Jewish settlement past in / . Petah. Tikvah was founded as an effectively all-Jewish community, one that grew rapidly after World War I, and in 1937 was recognized as a city. Following the Israeli destruction of most of the Arab villages in the region during and after the 1948 war, it became a Jewish city in a region populated almost exclusively by . But the Shapira house evokes a 21 Frankel Institue Annual 2017 foundational narrative of Petah. Tikvah that suggests He became the symbol of a kind of moshava heroism a small number of exemplary Jews who knew how to rooted in a myth of positive Jewish-Arab relations, engage with their local, majority-Arab environment in part by cultivating this myth himself. In an image and, through a combination of camaraderie and from the 1930s displayed in the house, Shapira stands displays of Jewish strength, create peaceful relations. with the Bedouin sword he cherished. The same The history of the following this late 19th- sword is on display today, a bit more tarnished. century Jewish settlement period was defined by It is presented as the first item in a sequence of Jewish-Arab conflict over Jewish immigration and ever-more-modern weapons, a natively rooted, land purchase, and competing Jewish ideas about “authentic” first step in an implied trajectory toward the appropriate political response to this growing Israeli military strength. Many Zionists, particularly opposition. Within this war of ideas, Labor Zionists, on the emerging right wing, felt that such strength, who believed that “Hebrew Labor” and Jewish-Arab rather than inflaming intercommunal relations, was economic separation offered a path to coexistence, essential for creating mutual respect and peace. won the day, often by accusing places like Petah. Petah Tikvah asserted its own historic place in a Tikvah of being bourgeois and exploitative. In . narrative connecting military strength with mutual presenting itself as predating this conflict and understanding, precisely because such a role was in thereby offering a means of preventing it, Petah. doubt. After World War I, Petah Tikvah and other Tikvah’s memory makers and municipality suggest . colonies founded around the same time were their city’s prominence despite the neglect and retroactively incorporated into Zionist historiography disdain that it has faced since the early 20th century. as the First Aliyah. Nonetheless, the early moshavot Shapira was an Ashkenazi Jew from Ukraine who were tiny, founded before Herzl convened the first came to Palestine in 1880 and settled in Petah. Zionist congress in 1897 and before Tel Aviv’s Tikvah. He was the head of the Petah. Tikvah formation in 1909. They were initially unstable and guardsmen and died at the ripe old age of 95 in 1965. reliant on Jewish philanthropic support, but over

Abraham Shapira meeting with ministers of Emir Abdullah Schwadron Portrait Collection, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. [email protected] 22 Frankel Institue Annual 2017

Shapira House weapons

celebrating one of our men who became famous not only among Jews across the land but also among Arabs.”

In making these claims about early settlers’ familiarity with the landscape, leaders in the time some became urban centers and major players colonies claimed to have made a definitive break as capitalist farms, producing, with the labor of local from the Jewish diasporic existence and a return to Arabs, most of the citrus and wine in the country. their Semitic “essence.” This claim pervaded Zionist Those that did urbanize, like Petah. Tikvah, had culture and self-presentation across multiple neither the charm of the collective nor the groups. But memory makers in the moshavot added allure of Tel Aviv. a further twist: they implied that their people and Despite their symbolic marginalization, the moshavot economic structures—more capitalist, market- clung fiercely to the “firstness” that they had been driven, and reliant on cheap native Arab labor, granted in the standard chronology. They had were particularly conducive to positive Jewish-Arab regular anniversary celebrations, published local relations. Let me be clear: historians have shown histories and memoirs, and hosted public events. that few of these settlers knew Arabic and employers They promoted the stories of heroes whom they regularly abused and exploited Arab workers. believed to have exemplified the spirit of the founders. However, in presenting themselves as communities Events celebrating the past or its exemplars often that understood Arabs and acted rationally and focused on the connection of the early settlers with pragmatically in employing them in low-wage jobs, the landscape and the local population, through they claimed political relevance and demanded staging Arab-style horse races and arranging respect. The display of a series of Middle Eastern “Oriental Accompaniment,” that is, an Arab-style objects from the past was part of constructing a procession with music. In 1938, an appeal to raise particular image of that past that indirectly served funds for the publication of Shapira’s memoirs a larger political project emerging on the center suggested that he was the “renewed Jewish heroic and right of the Zionist political spectrum, one that type,” who “aroused respect among the Arab connected self-reliance with respect, military force neighbors.” A speech offered at his 70th birthday with intercommunal harmony, and quotidian celebration in 1940 proclaimed that “we are Jewish-Arab relations with the right, not the left. ●