“No one can deny the gravity of the Jews’ situation. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to crowd them out of business also. ‘No dealing with Jews!’”[1]
“There was a bewildering and horrifying resurgence of the old dark European hatred for the Jews, even integrated, secular Jews.”[2]
by John Ellis
Assigning a reporter as a foreign correspondent is important. How the news is covered plays a large role in shaping society, and how the news in foreign lands is reported back to the homeland holds a persuasive sway over public opinion which, in turn, can play a determinative role in foreign policy.[3] But the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse had no way of knowing that their decision to send reporter Theodor Herzl to Paris would play an outsized role in shaping world history.
The lawyer turned reporter arrived in Paris in time to observe and report on the Dreyfus Affair up close. In the late 19th century, the racially motivated arrest, trial, and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young artillery officer in the French army and, more importantly, a Jew, roiled French society, stoking anti-Semitism. Dreyfus was accused of authoring a recently discovered letter revealing French military secrets that was addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché at the German embassy in Paris. His arrest was driven by the antisemitic grumblings of the right-wing French press that had become a painful thorn in the side of General Mercier, the French Minister of War. Growing desperate to disprove the accusations that under his watch the French military was being overrun by unpatriotic Jews, Mercier ignored the gaping holes and outright deceit in the charges against Capt. Dreyfus. He had been handed a Jewish scapegoat, after all, by the head of French intelligence Colonel Jean Sandherr, whose burning anti-Semitism drove him to push obviously faulty conclusions. For the accused’s part, as historian Frederick Brown put it, “To Alfred Dreyfus, for whom religious feeling mattered less than the love of country, no insult could have been more heinous than the charge of treason.”[4]
As a proponent of assimilation at the time, Theodor Herzl was directly confronted with the limits of Jewish assimilation by the Dreyfus Affair. That a hyper-patriotic, secular Jew like Alfred Dreyfus found himself the victim of anti-Semitism made clear to Herzl the depths of European anti-Semitism. He concluded “that anti-Semitism was an incurable gentile pathology.”[5]
In 1896, two years after Dreyfus’ arrest, Herzl published A Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question. Completely converted from assimilation, Theodor Herzl, who is universally considered the father of political Zionism, was determined to lead his people to establish their own nation-state. Pointing my readers back to the quote at the top of this article, Herzl realized that the growing climate of nationalism combined with a coarse racist Darwinism rendered Jews increasingly unwelcome across Europe. He succinctly summed up the problem with the challenge, “I shall now put the Jewish Question in the curtest possible form: Are we to ‘get out’ now? And if so, to what place?”[6]
But his newly found and highly influential Zionism didn’t erupt onto the world without notable previous tremors. Zionism had an earlier genesis.
After the Romans leveled Jerusalem and dispersed her Jewish inhabitants throughout the Empire in 70 A.D., the city began a long history of oscillating between being a sparsely populated village of peasants eking out an existence among ancient ruins, a tourism goldmine for Muslim caliphates, and the crown jewel of the European Christians’ triumphs in the Crusades, not always in that order. Dependent on the whims of outsiders, the city’s fortunes rose and fell. Prior to the Crusades, the apogee of a Christian interest in Jerusalem came from Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena. During her celebrated visit to Jerusalem, her efforts led to the discovery of the cave believed (to this day) to have been Jesus’ tomb. She also, “discovered three wooden crosses, a wooden plaque that read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,’ and the actual nails.”[7] As noted historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore joked, “No archaeologist has ever approached her success.”[8]
Much of the interest in Jerusalem during the first seventeen centuries after the Jewish diaspora paid little mind to the fortunes or desires of Jews. Owing to anti-Semitism and classism, Jews were looked on as minor players in the region, if considered at all. However, foreshadowing events lying six-hundred years in the future, a brief oasis of Jewish perspective appeared with the arrival of Rabbi Moses ben Nachman to the Holy City in the late 13th century. Banished from Spain for adroitly and effectively defending Barcelona’s Jews against charges of blasphemy, Rabbi ben Nachman arrived in Jerusalem after a long pilgrimage and commented, “I left my family, I forsook my home, my sons and daughters. I left my soul with the sweet dear children whom I’ve brought up on my knee. But the loss of all else is compensated for by the joy of a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem! I wept bitterly but I found joy in my tears.” Believing “that Jews should not just mourn Jerusalem but return, settle and rebuild before the coming of the Messiah,” Rabbi ben Nachman can correctly be described as the founder of religious Zionism.[9]
Zionism lay dormant, though, for several centuries. As the 18th century closed, an unlikely candidate for Jewish repatriation appeared on the historical stage and reignited the goal to transform Jerusalem and Palestine into a Jewish realm once again: Napolean Bonaparte.
Occasionally history holds moments of symmetrical parallelism that would be beautiful if they weren’t so devastatingly consequential for so many people. One such symmetrical parallel happened nearly 500 years apart on the walls of Acre, a fortress-city perched where the Mediterranean’s eastern most waves touch the Levant[10] (about 70 miles north of Tel Aviv). During the siege of Acre in 1291, Mamluks drove the British and French out of Acre, finally bringing the Crusaders’ “accomplishments” to an ignominious end. A little over 500 years later, in 1799, French forces led by Napolean attempted to take the city from the Ottomans. This time, though, instead of fighting Muslim forces alongside the French, British warships bombarded the French troops bivouacked on the beach, bringing Napoleon’s dream of replicating Alexander the Great’s accomplishments to an ignominious end.
Napolean’s turn eastward served two purposes: A strategic move to expand the French empire, building up resources of people (future soldiers) and material goods, before taking on the dangerous Channel crossing necessary to finally and fully confront and (presumably) conquer England. It also fed Napolean’s ravenous existential need to be counted alongside Alexander the Great. For historians, it’s somewhat of a chicken and egg question. Did his military strategy serve his personal ambition, or did his desire for an eternal legacy inform his military strategy? Regardless, Napolean realized that conquering the Levant was the key to unlocking the Ottoman Empire and her riches.
To bolster his chances for success, Napolean issued a proclamation in 1799 addressed to “the rightful heirs of Palestine” urging them to join his cause in pushing the Ottoman Empire out of the Holy Land. His proclamation promised Jews mastery over Palestine and pledged French support to help them develop and hold the land. Whether Napolean genuinely cared or not about the fortunes of Jews when he issued the proclamation is lost to history.[11] His future career suggests that he held Jews in low esteem and wasn’t particularly committed to helping them pursue their interests.[12] What is known is that he was the first national leader (soon-to-be) of a Western country to push for the reestablishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine. The purity of his motives can only be speculated about, because the British helped the Ottoman Empire force Napoleon to abandon his plans and return to France.
This raises the question of why England was concerned enough about helping the Ottoman Empire hold off the French to dedicate so many precious military resources to the area? And what does this have to do with Zionism?
Catherine the Great and Russia initially prompted England to turn her imperialistic gaze towards the Levant. Desperate for a warm-water port, Russia had long desired the land bordering the Baltic Sea. To accomplish this, Catherine the Great invaded the Crimea after the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russian in 1768. Her engagement in the series of wars known as the Russo-Turkish Wars resulted in the Russian annexation of Ukraine and the establishment of the port city of Odesa on the site of the Turkish village of Khadjibey, accomplishing what Peter the Great had tried yet failed to do.
All of this caught England’s attention because the Western world was beginning to realize that the lands hugging the eastern Mediterranean Sea were vital to controlling access to the riches of the Far East. As England surrendered most of her colonies in America, the Empire had already found a better, more profitable replacement in India. Whichever European power could turn the eastern Mediterranean into their own private lake held the wealth of much of the world in their hands. It’s important to keep in mind that the successes of the Zionist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century only happened because it served England’s imperialistic interests. And this is an important point that unfortunately frames the entire discussion of Zionism: “Political efforts on behalf of the Jews were never exerted except as by-product of other nations’ quarrels.”[13] Turning readers’ attention ahead to the Balfour Declaration, the great 20th century Zionist leader and first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann made the argument to Prime Minister Lloyd George that, “Palestine is a natural continuation of Egypt and the barrier separating the Suez Canal from … the Black Sea.”[14] The Balfour Declaration was an extension of British foreign policy stretching back to the latter half of the 18th century that viewed Palestine as an increasingly important strategic strip of land. Zionism, for many English politicians, diplomats, and foreign policy experts, became one of England’s most important levers in exerting control over the region, helping ensure a hegemony affectionately described as the empire on which the sun never sets.
Zionism, though, was a multi-directional movement that was frequently at odds with itself. Never monolithic, 19th and 20th century Zionism can be divided into three parts: Christian Zionism, political Zionism, and cultural Zionism. For the sake of space, I can’t detail each movement within the larger whole. Instead, I’ll be focusing on the eventual winner, so to speak: the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl and his disciples. It is helpful, however, to see how the other two Zionist movements aided political Zionism, either directly as an ally or indirectly as an antagonist.
Christian Zionism made its initial splash through the efforts of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury. A “deeply religious man who based his life on literal acceptance of the Bible”[15], Lord Shaftsbury devoted much of his energy to reestablishing the Jewish people in Palestine. His motivation came from an eschatology that viewed the Jews as “simply the instrument through which Biblical prophecy could be fulfilled.”[16] For him, the return of the Jewish people to their homeland was the key to ushering in the Second Coming of Jesus. In 1840, he published a plan in The Times detailing a political path for the repatriation of Jews in Palestine under the auspices and protection of the English government. Lord Shaftsbury’s plan was introduced into an England that was in the midst of an evangelical revival and, hence, was warmly received among evangelicals. As Barbara Tuchman explains, “whenever Christians returned to the authority of the Old Testament they found it prophesying the return of its people to Jerusalem and felt themselves duty-bound to assist the prophecy.”[17]
If I were writing a different article, I’d push back on Tuchman’s seemingly universal claim about Christians’ response to the Old Testament, but her point, unfortunately, largely stands.[18] Lord Shaftesbury’s Christian Zionism also corresponded chronologically and theologically with the rise of John Darby’s dispensationalism in England. Shortly after, Darby’s new hermeneutic spread like wildfire in America, aiding in the rise of Christian Zionism in this country.
It’s hard to argue with Tuchman’s assessment that “[Evangelicals] were interested in giving to the Jews the gift of Christianity, which the Jews did not want; civil emancipation, which the Jews did want, they constantly opposed.”[19] The Christian Zionism of evangelicals was largely a patronizing Zionism with hard to ignore traces of an anti-Semitism that reduces Jews to a prophetic cheat code inducing Jesus to come back while ignoring Jewish cultural and political objectives and nuances.[20] That being noted, Christian Zionism did play an important supporting role in the eventual establishment of the modern nation-state of Israel. Foreshadowing coming conflicts under the British Mandate, political Zionists publicly underplayed their all-in Jewish nationalist goals and assumed a posture of deference to the patronizing wishes of evangelicals. The political Zionists of the late-19th and 20th centuries capitalized on evangelical interest in Zionism by prying open the purses and political will of an important sector of the population in both America and England. But accumulating that money and influence would’ve been for naught if Zionists had been unable to convince their fellow Jews to abandon the lands of their birth and immigrate to Palestine.
As a movement, political Zionism’s initial obstacle was convincing their fellow Jews that assimilation was unworkable and that they should be seeking their own nation-state instead. Assimilationists had done a good job of inculcating local patriotism in Jews across Europe. “As of 1913, the last date for which there were figures, only about one percent of the world’s Jews had signified their adherence to Zionism.”[21] Getting their fellow Jews to view themselves as not just a distinct religion but also a distinct nation was the first hurdle. The political Zionists didn’t have to pull their arguments out of thin air, though.
While Theodor Herzl is considered the founder of political Zionism, other European Jews had already been making the argument that world Jewry was a distinct people group in need of their own country. Contradicting the assimilationists who believed that Jews should embrace the customs and identity of the nations of their birth and residence, men like Leon Pinsker and Moses Hess introduced compelling arguments to their fellow Jews living in Europe.
Effectively spelling out the problem, Leon Pinsker (1821-1891) realized that “The Jews are in the unhappy condition of such a [sick] patient. We must discuss this important point with all possible precision. We must prove that the misfortunes of the Jews are due, above all, to their lack of desire for national independence; and that this desire must be awakened and maintained in time if they do not wish to be subjected forever to disgraceful existence – in a word, we must prove that they must become a nation.”[22]
Adding to the argument, the great proto-political Zionist Moses Hess (1812-1875) pointed out that “The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race.”[23] Understanding that “the European nations have always considered the existence of the Jews in their midst as an anomaly. We shall always remain a stranger among the nations”[24], Hess argued that “The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its integrity, in spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type has conserved its purity through centuries.”[25]
During the Diaspora, “The Jews lost their country, but somehow retained their sense of nationality in exile.”[26] And the Western nations’ failure to grant the Jews equal rights was tantamount to acknowledging their existence as a distinct people and nation. The proto-Zionists were acutely aware of this and laid the important foundation for Herzl, whose disciples pushed to fruition the prophecy of Hess that, “Among the nations believed to be dead and which, when they become conscious of their historic mission, will struggle for their national rights, is also Israel – the nation which for two thousand years had defied the storms of time, and in spite of having been tossed by the currents of history to every part of the globe, has always cast yearning glances toward Jerusalem and is still directing its gaze thither.”[27] Lifting his poetic voice even higher, Hess added, “We are on the eve of the Sabbath of History and should prepare for our last mission through a thorough understanding of our historical religion.”[28]
As early as 1861, proto-Zionist calls to conclude the “third exile” with a return to Palestine were taking shape. During that year, Rabbi Hirsh Kalisher published a series of brochures calling for the formation of a Jewish organization that would facilitate, “Jews from all parts of the world, and especially from Russia, Poland, and Germany, [to] be brought over by the Society and be settled in Palestine.”[29] Rabbi Kalisher’s plan for how this return from exile should unfold reads like an earlier version of Herzl’s plan laid out in A Jewish State. The political Zionists wisely learned and borrowed from their predecessors.
As the political Zionist movement gained its footing, various groups of Orthodox Jews “fought against the Zionist movement, which they viewed as an outright heresy, because it broke the three vows which the Almighty had imposed upon the Jews before they were exiled: not to rebel against the Gentiles among whom they lived; not to attempt to seize the Holy Land by force; and not to attempt to hasten the End of Days.”[30] But the various groups of Orthodox Jews’ fight would ultimately prove to be in vain because Europe’s growing anti-Semitism was making the political Zionist’s argument for them.
“In the latter nineteenth century, two factors caused a number of European Jews to start a movement to recreate a Jewish homeland and to do it by efforts of human rather than divine will.”[31] Louis D. Brandeis’[32] biographer Melvin Urofsky goes on to express how the deepening violence directed against Jews, especially in Russia, as well as the growing forces of nationalism served as fuel for the nascent Zionist movement. One particularly violent episode of anti-Semitism that loomed large in the minds of Jews took place in Kishinev, a city in Russia, over the course of several days in April 1903.
Pavel Krushevan, editor of the local newspaper Bessarabets, mounted highly bigoted printed attacks on Jews living in Kishinev. The anti-Semitic writings held the city’s Jews responsible, without evidence it should be noted, for the mysterious death of a Christian boy. Krushevan also concocted a Zionist plot that he blamed for the death of a Christian woman in a Jewish hospital. His editorials enraged the locals, and on April 19 and 20 a violent pogrom was enacted. “According to official statistics, 49 Jews lost their lives. More than 500 people were injured; among them 100 were seriously injured and 30 permanently crippled. Many women were raped. Some 800 houses were looted and destroyed and 600 businesses and shops were vandalized. The material damage amounted to 2,332,890 rubles (about $1.2 million in 1903 dollars) and about 2,000 families were left homeless.”[33] While Krushevan’s writings played an outsized role in the pogrom, “All the available evidence points to the fact that the pogrom was aided and directed by agents of the Ministry of the Interior and high Russian officials.”[34] To add insult to grave injury, the city’s elite attended a lavish party, complete with military bands performing, in the Royal Gardens and People’s Park while Jews were being slaughtered, tortured, and driven out of their homes.
As pogroms in Eastern Europe became more frequent, and while anti-Semitism grew in Western Europe, the political Zionists seized the opportunity and took a giant step forward in the implementation of their goals. At the First Zionist Congress held in Basle (Basel), Switzerland in 1897, Herzl officially created the World Zionist Organization (WZO). At that First Congress, the WZO published a brief statement outlining their objectives. Because of its brevity and historical importance, it’s worth quoting The Basle Program in its entirety:
“Zionism strives for the establishment of a publicly and legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people. For the attainment of this aim the Congress considers the following means: 1. The appropriate promotion of colonization with Jewish agriculturists, artisans and tradesmen. 2. The organization and gathering of all Jews through suitable local and general institutions, according to the laws of the various countries. 3. The promotion of Jewish national feeling and consciousness. 4. Preparatory steps for the attainment of such Government consent as is necessary in order to achieve the aim of Zionism.”[35]
The phrase “legally secured home” was ambiguous by design. One of the Basle Program’s authors Max Nordau confessed twenty-three years later that, “I did my best to persuade the advocates of the Jewish State in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would express all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land.”[36] Following in the footsteps of his mentor Theodor Herzl, Nordau realized that masking their true intentions was essential if their movement was to continue moving forward unabated. One person who saw through the WZO’s linguistic shell game was Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi, Mayor of Jerusalem, who laid bare political Zionism’s full objective and the coming consequences if political Zionism moved forward with their plan to end the third exile via the resettlement of Jews in Palestine.
In 1882, a group of Jewish families “established Rishon-le-Zion (‘First in Zion’) on the sand dunes south of Jaffa to begin reclamation of the ancient homeland.”[37] Earlier attempts at Jewish settlements had failed, but the success of Rishon-le-Zion opened the floodgates of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, at least from the worried perspective of the Palestinian peasants as well as their Ottoman rulers. “By 1900 there were twenty-two Jewish rural settlements widely dispersed throughout Palestine on 76,000 acres, with a total Jewish rural population of 5,210 managing 705 farms.”[38] This first wave of Jewish immigrants is known as the first Aliyah.
The growing Jewish immigration to Palestine didn’t go unnoticed by worried locals. “Palestinians became alarmed in the 1880s with the rise in Europe of Zionism. … To the Palestinians, the immigrants were Europeans and, therefore, foreigners. What most alarmed the Palestinians was the Zionist claim of a historical right to Palestine on the grounds that their ancestors had lived there two millennia before. Moreover, the Jews seemed to have enough money with which they were able to buy Palestinian land.”[39] The Mayor of Jerusalem was taking note, too.
In a letter addressed to Zadok Khan,[40] Chief Rabbi of France, Yusuf al-Khalidi closed with the plea, “In the name of God, leave Palestine in peace.” Written and sent in 1899, the letter acknowledged the Jewish right to a homeland. Yusuf al-Khalidi even went so far as to acknowledge the Jewish birthright to Palestine. He confessed, “who could contest the rights of thet Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!” As his ancestor Rashid Khalidi wrote, though, “This sentence is sometimes cited, in isolation from the rest of the letter, to represent Yusuf Diya’s enthusiastic acceptance of the entire Zionist program in Palestine.”[41] But the Mayor of Jerusalem’s letter continued, expressing concern over the fate of the current inhabitants. “[H]e warned that if the Zionists persisted in their ambitions, they would face a popular uprising which even the Turks, however well disposed towards them, would not be able to put down. They should therefore look for a homeland elsewhere.”[42] In brief, Yusuf al-Khalidi attempted to point out the obvious that Palestine was already settled. Creating a Jewish state there would inevitably require the displacement – economically, politically, and even physically – of the current residents. The Mayor of Jerusalem correctly predicted a violent future for the region if Zionism followed through on their insistence to reclaim Palestine.
Zadok Khan played his part well and showed the letter to Theodor Herzl, the letter’s true recipient. In his reply to Yusuf al-Khalidi, Herzl insisted that the Palestinians had nothing to worry about, writing, “the Jews have no belligerent Power behind them, neither are they themselves of a warlike nature. They are a completely peaceful element, and very content if they are left in peace. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing to fear from their immigration.”[43]
Included in his letter was the colonizer’s justification that colonization would benefit the Palestinians while ensuring the Mayor of Jerusalem that the Zionists had no intention of sending the current inhabitants of Palestine away. Herzl wrote, “But who would think of sending the [Palestinians] away? It is their well-being, their individual wealth which we will increase by bringing our own.”[44] Except Herzl was lying.
Exposing his own bigotries, Herzl believed that European Jews would serve as the “representatives of Western civilization” in the “plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient known as Palestine.”[45] In an excerpt from his diary in 1895, he revealed, “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”[46] Most telling, standing in direct contradiction to what he wrote to Yusuf al-Khalidi, Theodor Herzl approached the Ottoman Empire with a proposal for a charter for the establishment of Jewish-Ottoman Colonization Association. “Article Three of the draft charter would have granted the Jews the right to deport the native population.”[47] The exact opposite of what Herzl promised to Yusuf al-Khalidi in his reply.
At no point did the WZO led by Theodor Herzl intend to share the land with the Palestinians. As I’ll demonstrate in future articles, this was the modus operandi of the subsequent generations of Zionists and the founders of the modern nation-state of Israel. The Palestinians had no place in the Zionist objectives. However, there was one stream of Zionism – cultural Zionism – that attempted to act as the moral compass for the movement.
As early as 1891, Ahad Aham (Ha-‘Am), the leader of cultural Zionism, challenged the xenophobia of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Believing that Zionism, and the world, was best served by a gracious approach that refused political dominance, Ahad Aham became the moral center of the movement. Because of the anti-Semitism suffered by Jews throughout history, Ahad Aham believed that Jews had a moral responsibility to aid in the flourishing of all others. Sadly, from his perspective, the opposite was happening. “[Zionists] treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unscrupulously deprive them of their rights, [and] insult them without cause.”[48] This “hostility and cruelty” increased during the Second Aliyah which began in 1904.
“During this Second Aliyah … the Jews founded a new city, Tel Aviv. On the even of World War I, when the Second Aliyah came to an end, about 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine. … In 1914 Jews represented perhaps one-ninth of the Palestinian population.”[49] Proving Yusuf al-Khalidi a true prophet, “Friction arose between them and those who regarded them as interlopers, newcomers, strangers, regardless of the Old Testament.”[50] That “friction,” which grew to outright episodic violence, was fueled by the WZO’s bigoted policies put in place for the conducting of the Second Aliyah.
One of the facts lost to history, at least seemingly within evangelical and conservative circles in America, is that many of the initial Zionist immigrants to Palestine were Russian socialists fleeing the Czar’s pogroms. As leading Israeli historian Tom Segev contends, “Zionism was a movement founded in Europe, inspired by its culture, and embedded in its history. Zionism’s nationalism, romanticism, liberalism, and socialism all came from that continent. In this sense, the history of the Zionist presence in Palestine belongs to European history.”[51] While they were “deeply committed to the communal ideal … Their socialism did not extend to their non-Jewish fellow-men.”[52] The kibbutzim they founded were entrenched in Marxist ideology, but also included prohibitions against employing Arabs. Jewish immigrants from the First Aliyah concluded “that ‘these Russian Jewish labourers together with the principle of exclusive Jewish Hebrew labour’ constituted a ‘major factor in arousing the hostility of the Palestinian Arabs.’”[53] During the Second Aliyah, the Zionist leaders mandated the decision “to boycott Arab labour.”[54]
I’ll explore this in more detail in later articles/chapters, but a fact often overlooked is the nature of Muslim culture at the time. Within that culture, the land was considered to belong to the people. To be sure, the Ottoman Empire ran roughshod over that and “leased” the land to wealthy Arabs. But the Palestinian peasants understood the land to be theirs. For generations, they lived on the land, worked the land, and loved the land, sowing into it deep communal roots. However, backed by the deep pockets of wealthy benefactors in America and England, the Zionists began purchasing the most fertile Palestinian land from the usually absentee Arab “owners.” Foreshadowing the Nakba, the Jewish settlers would then evict the Palestinians who had lived on and worked that land for generations. As World War I grew closer, the Palestinian peasants watched as their land and ability to provide for their families shrank due to the actions and policies of the Zionists. “Zionism had produced what had not previously existed, an organized Palestinian Arab opinion, which learned rapidly to use letters of protest, petitions and the language of self-determination.”[55] Long before the British Mandate, the stage was being set for the coming explosion of violence.
[1] Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question, 13.
[2] Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003), 411.
[3] I’m thinking of democracies in which the populace has a say in who gets elected.
[4] Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars In the Age of Dreyfus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 178.
[5] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence In the Middle East 3rd ed. (New York: Nation Books, 2003), 136.
[6] Herzl, A Jewish State, 13.
[7] Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 154.
[8] Montefiore, Jerusalem, 154.
[9] Montefiore, Jerusalem, 290.
[10] The Levant refers to the land that encompasses the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Colloquially, the Levant refers to the setting of the events in the Bible.
[11] It’s highly unlikely that he cared about establishing a Jewish state apart from how it served his own military goals. Not really a believer in anything but himself, Napoleon viewed religion as a tool. Judaism was an attractive tool for him at the time, and that’s likely the only way he viewed it. And once he no longer needed the tool, he discarded it.
[12] This is a man, after all, who passed a “Decree on Jews and Usury” on May 30, 1806. The decree lobbed the accusation of “unjust greed” at the Jewish people while stating that they lack “the sentiments of civic morality.” Two years later he passed what is know as “The Infamous Decree” in which he placed harsh restrictions on Jews. To be fair, he reneged on that decree a few months later, but still.
[13] Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: Ballantine Books, 1956), 164.
[14] MacMillan, Paris 1919, 416.
[15] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 177.
[16] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 178.
[17] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 179.
[18] I’m not a dispensationalist, and so my response to events, both past and present, in Palestine and Israel isn’t weighed down by the eschatological baggage carried by many (most) white evangelicals in America.
[19] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 189.
[20] They also seem blissfully unaware that the modern nation of Israel was founded as a socialist country with many of its founders being Eastern European Marxists.
[21] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: A Holt Paperback, 1989), 294.
[22] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People By a Russian Jew, 5.
[23] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 26.
[24] Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 33.
[25] Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 26.
[26] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 12.
[27] Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 13.
[28] Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 19.
[29] Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 78.
[30] Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986), 257.
[31] Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 402.
[32] Brandeis was the first Jew to serve as a United States Supreme Court Justice. He was also the leader of the Zionist movement in America.
[33] Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 149.
[34] Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann, 149.
[35] “The Basle Programme”, included in From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), 89.
[36] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 140.
[37] Tuchman, Bible and Sword, 277.
[38] Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann, 46.
[39] Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 7.
[40] Try as I might, I cannot find a full English translation of the letter. I do have a copy in Arabic, but I can’t read Arabic. Multiple secondary sources cite and extensively quote the letter. While I wish I had access to the primary source, I rely on secondary sources for the contents of Yusef al-Khalidi’s letter to Zadok Khan.
[41] Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Picador, 2020), 5.
[42] Hirst, The Gun and the The Olive Branch, 135.
[43] “Letter from Dr. Theodor Herzl to M. Youssuf Zia Al-Khalidi”, included in From Haven to Conquest, 91-91
[44] “Letter from Dr. Theodor Herzel to M. Youssuf Zia Al-Khaldid, From Haven to Conquest, 92.
[45] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 137.
[46] Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 88-89.
[47] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 139.
[48] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 144.
[49] Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israel Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 12.
[50] Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, 12.
[51] Tom Segev, A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 24.
[52] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 146.
[53] Hirst, The Gun and The Olive Branch, 147.
[54] Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 2007), 44.
[55] MacMillan, Paris 1919, 424.
Practically Known Theology 
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