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Moving Zionism to Asia: Texts and Tactics of Colonial Settlement, Formatted: Font: Bold 14. <CN>14.</> <CT>Moving Zionism to Asia: Texts and Tactics of Colonial Settlement, Formatted: Font: Bold 1917–1921</> <AU>Elizabeth F. Thompsonn</> <CO>As a historian of the modern Middle East, I welcome Derek Penslar’s effort to “plac[e] Zionism in Asia.”1 First, he argues that Zionism as practiced in West Asia (Palestine) was not true settlement- colonialism, because settlers were not citizens of the colonial power ruling the territory (Britain). Then he turns to South Asia and to cultural analysis to argue that European Zionism shared similar roots and ideological values with Indian anti-colonial nationalism. On these bases, Penslar concludes that Zionists cannot be considered fully colonialist until after they founded the state State of Israel in 1948.</> My critique focuses on two related points. The first considers the argument’s key methodological pivot, Penslar’s distinction between practice and discourse, between sociology and history, and between sensibility and structure. His structural analysis of Zionism in Palestine remains distinct from his discourse analysis of Jewish nationalist writing in Europe. This spatial separation of method introduces critical distortions to Penslar’s presentation of Zionism in Palestine. If we look at what Zionists both said and did in Palestine before 1948, we find little European anti-colonialism and an intimate alliance of settlers with the British mandatory (colonial) state. My second point addresses the problematic limits to Penslar’s move of Zionism into West Asia. Colonialism is generally understood as a relationship; —that is, the institutionalization of practices that perpetuate the subordination of one people to another in a differentiated space.2 Penslar, however, neglects the other half of the Zionists’ encounter in 513 Palestine: the indigenous peoples, including Arabic-speaking Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Any assessment of whether their encounter was colonial must take into account indigenous responses to the settlers. Redressing the historical distortion wrought by these two methodological problems requires that we study texts produced by Zionists and Arabs within the context of events in West Asia. I draw on my own research on colonialism after World War I to examine the seminal years between 1917 and 1922, when the Balfour declaration officially became international law as part the League of Nations mandate Mandate for Palestine.3 The evidence presented here suggests that we must date Zionism’s full embrace of settler- colonialism to 1917, not 1948. Not only did Zionists cooperate more fully with the British state than Penslar suggests, but the anti- colonialism he describes among intellectuals did not dominate Zionist practice within Palestine. <A>Zionism in West Asia<\> Penslar’s decision to situate Zionism in Asia was is brilliant—on more than one level. He makes the move in order to challenge Partha Chatterjee, a leading postcolonial historian of India who argued that anti-colonial movements do not owe their origins to European nationalism. Penslar argues the European Jews and Indians shared common roots in European nationalism, which ascribed their people’s subordinate status to European (Christian) dominance and the lingering influence of traditional elites, and which advocated national revival through education and political independence. On another level, Penslar’s move of Zionism into Asia is fruitful for understanding how Zionists behaved in West Asia (Palestine), especially at the time of the Jewish home’s founding at the end of World War I. Zionism resembled emergent nationalisms among Armenians, Kurds 514 and Arabs, who feared annihilation by the Ottoman military regime. By war’s end, as victorious Allies occupied the region, even ordinary Turks feared they would be wiped from the map, if not from the face of the earth. Similar fears of state-sponsored violence motivated European Jews to flee to Palestine (and in greater numbers to North America). Zionism shared the zero-sum, Darwinian spirit of other national movements in Palestine and Greater Syria.4 Penslar’s structural analysis of Zionism as colonialism, however, neglects the political and cultural processes that shaped it at the critical moment of the founding of the Jewish home. He therefore elides the fact that Jewish settlement depended vitally on the British Empire. The Jewish population had surged in Palestine to 85,000 by 1914, but then slumped to 55,000 by the time General Gen. Edmund Allenby’s troops occupied Jerusalem in December 1917. Many Jews fled persecution under martial law and hunger. Zionist leaders were forcibly expelled in early 1915. The Ottoman Military military Governorgovernor, Jemal Pasha, had learned of their intention to build a state on Ottoman territory, and deemed it treason. Among those expelled was David Ben- Gurion, the future founder of the state State of Israel in 1948. In 1915, Ben-Gurion sailed to New York City and launched a recruitment drive for a Jewish brigade in the British army. “A ray of light pierces through the abysmal darkness that shrouds our people at this critical hour,” he told a New York audience in September 1915. “The urge for redemption is searing a path for itself in the heart of the nation.” He reassured socialists that building a Jewish state was not an act of imperialism. In language that echoes other settler- colonial movements, he declared, “We do not ask for the Land of Israel for the sake of ruling over its Arabs, nor seek a market to sell Jewish goods produced in the Diaspora. It is a Homeland that we seek, where we may cast off the curse of exile, attach ourselves to the soil.” Like the 515 pioneers who settled America, he vowed, we will fight “wild nature and wilder redskins” in Palestine.5 But Jews saw no future in such a war-torn land. After campaigning in dozens of American cities, Ben-Gurion found only 100 one hundred volunteers for the brigade. Unknown to Ben-Gurion, however, a group of Zionists in Britain pursued a higher road to Palestine. At its center was Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who met the future prime ministers David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill when he invented a process for the mass production of artillery shells.6 Weizmann had already met Arthur Balfour, foreign minister in 1917. Weizmann and other Zionists convinced the Cabinet cabinet that a Zionist Palestine would serve British imperial interests. Lloyd George, an evangelical Christian, embraced the religious implication of a Jewish return to the Holy Land. He dismissed objections that Palestine’s Muslim population might oppose the idea.7 On November 2, 1917, Lord Balfour issued his famous Declarationdeclaration, promising that Britain would support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” provided that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”8 Commented [DE1]: Citation needed for this. Overnight, Zionism’s fortunes reversed. Jews around the world celebrated with parades and speeches. By month’s end, Ben-Gurion convinced a crowd of 2,000 at the Cooper Union Hall to pledge to devote their energy to building a national home in Eretz Israel. He launched another fundraising tour and found 1,500 volunteers to depart immediately for Palestine.9 “The fortunes of Zionism were transformed by World War I,” writes historian David Vital.10 Penslar Commented [DE2]: Please see the query in this note. agrees that “Clearlyclearly, without British support the Zionist project would have died in the cradle.” (93)11 516 Any evaluation of the colonial nature of Zionism in Western western Asia must account for this close link to the British state. Penslar, however, minimizes the degree to which Zionists wedded their movement to the British imperial state. He argues that Zionism lacked the “key factor” of settlement- colonialism because its settlers were not citizens of the colonizing state. In addition, he argues, Zionists wielded only “limited authority over small portions of Palestine.” (93)12 Penslar rests these claims, however, on a peculiarly narrow definition of settler- colonialism and a selective reading of the historical record. Scholars of settler- colonialism generally employ a wider definition that permits a range of relationships between settlers and their supposed—and always distant and defied—“mother” state. Editors of a leading volume on global settler colonialism argue that Zionism differed from other settler movements mainly in that it aimed from the outset to build a state—and succeeded in doing so.13 And the historical record suggests a direct link between Zionists’ success and their ties to the British imperial state. Under British sponsorship, Weizmann brought the Zionist Commission to Palestine in March 1918 to implement the Balfour Declaration’s guarantees: unobstructed immigration, Hebrew as an official language of government, and privileged access to the highest British officials. Zionists also worked closely with British officials to craft propaganda on Palestine. One British film, produced by Zionist advisor Albert Hyamson, was is titled “The British conquering Conquering Palestine for the Jews.” Other propaganda promised that the British-–Zionist alliance would bring “European science, culture and civilization to the East.”14 In 1922, the Anglo-Zionist alliance was institutionalized in international law, with the ratification of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration. Winston Churchill also promised to ensure continued immigration.15 Within a decade, the Jewish population of Palestine surpassed 100,000one hundred thousand. 517 In this context, Penslar’s claim that Zionists wielded limited authority in Palestine must be qualified. By 1922, the Yishuv was already becoming a quasi-state under the legal aegis of the British mandateMandate. It ran its own schools and social welfare system under the Histadrut, the labor federation organized by Ben- Gurion and Berl Katznelson. Ben-Gurion rose to prominence as its leader, and eventually to the political leadership of the Yishuv.
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