1. There is controversy among linguists on whether modern, “revived” Hebrew is or is not a new language. See Ghil‘ad Zuckerman, Yisra’elit Safah Yafah [Israeli—A Beautiful Language] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008).
2. I was re-fascinated by these years later when I read Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
3. John Kifner, “Israel’s New Violent Tactic Takes Toll on Both Sides,” New York Times, January 22, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/22/world/israel-s-new-violent-tactic-takes-toll-on-both-sides.html. For a denial (issued three years later), see “Rabin Denies Giving Orders to Break Bones of Palestinians,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 6, 1990 (“Troops were ordered to storm the rioters ‘beating them with fists and batons, not to punish them but to hurt them and force them to cease their assault,’ Rabin said”), https://www.jta.org/archive/rabin-denies-giving-orders-to-break-bones-of-palestinians.
4. The term was popularized by Max Weber, who had borrowed it from Friedrich Schiller. See Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment, and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” Max Weber Studies 1, no. 1 (November 2000): 11.
5. This helps explain why Walter Benjamin, the literary theorist and Marxist philosopher, was so enamored of messianism, as was (in a different way) his Zionist friend and counterpart, the towering scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem. Each was following one of the two paths of the displacement of historical Jewish messianism, the one Marxist, the other Zionist.
6. See Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
7. Frank Giles, “Who Can Blame Israel,” Sunday Times, June 15, 1969, 12:
FRANK GILES: Do you think the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, is an important new factor in the Middle East?
GOLDA MEIR: Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the first world war and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.
8. He continued:
Only those sand fields or stone mountains that would require the investment of hard labour and great expense to make them good for planting remain uncultivated and that’s because the Arabs do not like working too much in the present for a distant future. Therefore, it is very difficult to find good land for cattle. And not only peasants, but also rich landowners, are not selling good land so easily … We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisra’el are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal—the same as in Europe.
Ahad Ha‘am, “Truth from the Land of Israel,” Hamelitz, June 19–30, 1891, https://benyehuda.org/read/1153. A translation of the entire essay can be found in Alan Dowty, “Much Ado About Little: Ahad Ha’am’s ‘Truth from Eretz Yisrael,’ Zionism, and the Arabs,” Israel Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 154–81.
9. Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015).
10. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021).
11. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63. See also the updated edition, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
12. Benny Morris, “My Military Jail-Time in Israel,” Quillette, October 5, 2020, https://quillette.com/2020/10/05/my-military-jail-time-in-israel/.
13. Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).
14. Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” Haaretz, January 9, 2004. Part I: https://web.archive.org/web/20080515210330/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986&contrassID=2; Part II: https://web.archive.org/web/20080607060238/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380984.
15. Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest.”
16. This line of comparison has recently begun to receive serious historical engagement. See Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).