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2 Zionist Israel and Its Enemies 2 Zionist Israel and its Enemies Tranquility, harmony, peace, prosperity and happiness are hardly the attributes that spring to mind when it comes to Israel’s political reality. So what or who is it that stands in the way of the Zionist vision? How does Israel define its opponents and how does it act towards them? From its very beginning, Jewish nationalism has had to grapple with the fact that the territory which it cast as the “land of the forefathers” was already settled by another collective; one that was granted no room at all in the Zionist vision. Instead, over time the “Arabs of Eretz Israel,” as the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are referred to in Zionist jargon, turned out to be the true Achilles’ heel of Zionist Israel. The so-called “Arab question” has been progressively shifting into the main focus of the Zionist movement since the beginning of the Zionist-motivated settlement of Palestine in the late nine- teenth century.1 So in what manner did the Yishuv – the Jewish-Zionist community in Pal- estine prior to the founding of the state – treat the “Arabs of Eretz Israel”? What political stance toward the Palestinian collective did they deem to be most instru- mental for their Zionist goals? The Zionist discourse in the Yishuv concerning this point was characterized by a wide gulf between the objective demographical situ- ation as it existed up to the state’s establishment, and the political goal of a state with a Jewish majority as it was championed by most Zionist parties. With the establishment of the state and following the disastrous demograph- ical and political consequences of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948 – which resulted in the Palestinian Catastrophe (Nakba in Arabic) as well as the seizure of 78% of the territory of Palestine/Eretz Israel – the Arab question was eventually also extended to the neighboring Arab states. As five Arab armies intervened in the battle over Palestine in May of 1948 with the goal of thwarting the establish- ment of a Jewish state in the interests of the Palestinians, the local Palestine ques- tion turned into a regional conflict. Then the Six-Day War of 1967 led to Israel seizing Palestinian territories, among other things, and marked a turning point in the conflicts’ history. From the Israeli point of view, the Arab question, which had pertained to the entire region, now went back to being a local “Palestinian question,” strictly limited to the occupied territories. 1 Gorny 1986. DOI 10.1515/ 9783110498806-003, © 2017 Tamar Amar-Dahl, published by De Gruyter Olden- bourg. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. The Perception of the Orient by “Modern Western Israel” 19 The Perception of the Orient by “Modern Western Israel” Although the ideological roots of Zionism lie in Europe and its nationalistic and colonialist tradition, its actual realization took place in the Orient. The question of the relationship between the Arab-Palestinian and the Jewish collective is closely entwined with the tradition-steeped intellectual issues of the relations between Orient and Occident, Islam and Christianity. According to the historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, the orientalism thesis developed by the Palestinian-American lit- erary scholar Edward W. Said (1935–2003) is indispensable for understanding the modern discourse of and about the Jewish people. One of Raz-Krakotzkin’s own studies on the Zionist discourse is based on this insight. In the “secularization” of the Jewish discourse as an aspect of the nationalization of Jewish life, he discerns a distancing from the old, religiously motivated Christian-Jewish polemics and, ensuing from there, a reformulation of the modern Jewish discourse in orientalist terms.2 What Said had defined as orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts con- cerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on.‏3 Said points out the historical rivalry between the two big religions, wherein a centuries-old image of Islam and the Arabs as “fanatical, violent, lecherous, irra- tional” is reinforced. Another aspect of this perception was the Western desire to exert political control over the Orient. Said speaks of a “polemical character of the knowledge about Islam and the Arabs, which developed in colonial times and led to what I refer to as Orientalism, a form of knowledge in which the study of the Other is strongly connected to the control and dominance of Europe and the West in general over the Islamic world.”4 In Raz-Krakotzkin’s view, the Zionist discourse was based on an orientalist conception from its very outset. He explains this by the historic process of Jewish nationalization: 2 Raz-Krakotzkin 2005: 162–163. 3 Said 1978/2009: 11. 4 Said and Barsamian 2003/2006: 111. 20 2 Zionist Israel and its Enemies Despite the Zionist rejection of ‘assimilationist trends,’ it can be read as an extreme expres- sion of the desire to assimilate the Jews into the Western narrative of enlightenment and redemption. [...] Generally, Zionist thought, in spite of very important differences from assimilationist ideologies, did not challenge the dichotomy between Europe and the Orient; rather, it was based on the desire to assimilate into the West. […] Zionists developed a range of attitudes toward the Orient and toward the Arabs, from romantic desire to a total denial; but all of them remained within the framework of orientalist dichotomy, and served to create the ‘new Jew,’ whom Zionism wished to define as a new European, and not an oriental.5 Consequently, an orientalist element is firmly established within the Zionist dis- course. The “negation of exile” contained in itself the impulse of negating the “exile Jew,” as he was understood in orientalist terms. According to this percep- tion, the negation of the diaspora involved the abrogation of everything that was considered “oriental” by the Jews, whilst at the same time expressing the wish of the Jews to return into Western history: “The act of immigration was perceived as the transformation and regeneration of the Jew; that is, the overcoming of ori- ental elements.”6 Zionism as it has been asserted in Israel is orientated towards the West, fully distancing itself from its immediate environment. The Zionist per- ceives the Orient as “the other” to such an extent that Zionist Israel feels almost eerily out of place in the region. Zionist Thinkers and the “Arab Question” When pondering the question of territory in The Jewish State, Herzl barely gave any consideration to the population living in Palestine, or to how they may react to this Jewish-European colonization. Instead, his focus was on the dominant powers that needed to be coerced into giving Palestine to the Jews. While Herzl offered the Ottoman sultan “financial services” for the settlement of his empire’s financial matters, he proposed the following return service to the West: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”7 What is so remarkable about this often quoted sentence, and also the further remarks concerning a “return service” being offered by the Jews, is that Herzl does not actually specify what or who he is referring to when he uses the expres- sion “barbarism.” He reverts to “Asia” and “barbarism” as a contrastive pairing to 5 Raz-Krakotzkin 2005: 166. 6 Ibid. 166–167. 7 Herzl 1896/1997: 41; https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/herzl2.html. Zionist Thinkers and the “Arab Question” 21 “Europe” and “culture,” but does not outline the “great other.” It remains utterly faceless. And although there is further mention of a “guard of honor around the holy sites of Christianity” in Palestine to be warranted by the Jews, the other great religion of the Muslims from which Christianity and its sites are to be protected does not make an appearance here, with no mention of terms such as “Islam,” “Arabs,” or even “Orient.”8 In the utopian novel The Old New Land (Altneuland, 1902), in which Herzl sketched his ideas of the new Jewish society in Eretz Israel, the author does ded- icate several pages to the Arabs who are already living in that region. But the main viewing direction of these passages remains fixated on the firm belief in the positive effects that a Jewish settlement would have on the development of the country, and thus presents a fixed conception that the Jewish presence would elevate the living standard of the Arab population. As such, Herzl thought that they would be grateful to Zionism. The novel is written from the perspective of the Jews as Europeans or European modernizers, bringing culture and progress to the underdeveloped terra incognita that was still lingering in a state of barbarism. It is the very notion of a “Europe in the Orient” that is the focal point of The Old New Land. As Herzl perceived it, the integration of Arab Palestinians into the new society depended on their ability to adapt to Western civilization.9 Likewise, Herzl’s fellow campaigner Max Nordau (1849– 1923) advocated the concept of the Jewish nation as a part of Western civilization. Retorting to Achad Ha’am’s criticism of The Old New Land, which was aimed at the fact there were no Jewish but rather just European elements in Herzl’s new society, Nordau offered the following argument: “The Old New Land is indeed supposed to be a European unit in the Orient.
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