Jerusalem. The City of God. What better setting for a cosmic drama?
It is difficult to get one’s bearings in this city. Time is variable here. The past and the present—two autonomous threads—are, in Jerusalem, so tightly entwined that they cannot be parsed. The only constant is space: tangible, eternal space. Take away the kabob stands and the gleaming, glass-walled visitor center and this is still the city carved out by Herod two thousand years ago.
History has not been kind to the man called Herod the Great. Best known for his slaughter of Bethlehem’s children in a vain search for the infant Jesus—an implausible event attributed to him solely by the Gospel of Matthew, for which there exists not a single corroborating source in any of the other chronicles or histories of the time—Herod is often depicted as a barbarous and licentious half-Jew (his mother was Arab); a greedy libertine more Roman than Jewish; a rapacious bull of a man who seized power through sheer, unbridled sycophancy.
Yet, despite his reputation, it was Herod who built the markets and theaters, the palaces and ports, the gymnasia, amphitheaters, and baths that made the city of Jerusalem one of the cosmopolitan jewels of the ancient world. “Ten measures of beauty hath God bestowed upon the world,” the Talmud says; “nine of these fall to the lot of Jerusalem.”
Herod’s greatest achievement was the restoration and expansion of the Temple of Jerusalem, which he had raised atop Mount Moriah—the highest point in the city—and embellished with wide Roman colonnades made of white Jerusalem stone. This was Jerusalem’s second temple. The first temple, built by Israel’s King Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. This second temple, built some seventy years later, would be sacked by Rome in 70 C.E., a mere fifty years after Herod finished renovating it, as punishment for a revolt led by a group of wild-eyed revolutionaries called the Zealots.
Today, all that remains of Herod’s Temple is a single wall at the western base of Mount Moriah: the Wailing Wall, it is sometimes called, the Kotel. There is nothing special about the wall itself, save for its colossal size. It remains unadorned, unembellished, even unkempt—tufts of thick green caper bushes creep through the cracks and crevices in the ancient stones. But since the destruction of the Second Temple, this wall is now held to be a symbol of God’s divine presence in Jerusalem. The Jews who come here with their prayers, who embrace and kiss the stones, are performing more than a religious rite. They are making a political statement. Just as this wall has stood on this ground for thousands of years as witness to the birth of the Jewish nation, so now does it signal that nation’s return and permanent presence in the Holy City. The Jews can no more be uprooted from Jerusalem than this mammoth wall can be disinterred from the earth.
On the day I visited the Temple, a large group of cadets from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had gathered at the Wailing Wall for prayers. It was a remarkable sight: fresh-faced adolescents of different races and ethnicities, dressed in matching olive-green uniforms, dancing arm in arm with bearded old men clad in black—everyone swaying back and forth together like flickering flames.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder: a pale Orthodox girl, maybe twenty years old.
“Are you Jewish?” she asked. She was wearing a plain white headscarf.
“No,” I replied. “But I get that a lot.”
She wasn’t disappointed. If anything, her eyes shone brighter. She was a college student from Minneapolis who had taken a week off of school to volunteer for a foundation dedicated, she said, to furthering the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. As we stood together at the wall, she spoke excitedly about its eternal significance to the Jewish people, handing me booklets and fliers and small souvenir trinkets. She had to make me understand. Every fiber of her being vibrated with the need to make me feel what she felt when she stood at this place.
“Let’s go to the top,” I suggested. “To the Temple Mount.”
She recoiled at the thought. Although Orthodox Jews pray daily for the restoration of the Temple, most Orthodox rabbis are adamant that, until the Messiah returns, it is forbidden for a Jew to set foot on the Temple Mount (the platform atop Mount Moriah upon which the Temple was built), lest one accidentally trespass upon the Holy of Holies. A sign posted at the Temple entrance by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate reads: Entrance to the area of the Temple Mount is forbidden to Jews owing to the sacredness of the place. Few but the most observant Jews take the warning seriously.
“You go up,” she said. “I’ll wait for you down here.”
She pointed me to a line of camera-toting tourists waiting to climb a steep wooden ramp that led up to the Temple Mount. Heavily armed Israeli soldiers guarded the walkway. I had been in line for only a few minutes when one of them pointed at me.
“You,” he barked. “You cannot enter. Not with your backpack.”
“Everyone here has a backpack.”
“The Muslims will not let you on the Mount with a backpack. There is no choice in the matter.”
“But I am Muslim.”
“There is no choice in the matter.”
Although Israeli security forces maintain legal jurisdiction over the whole of the Old City, the Temple Mount itself remains under the control of Jerusalem’s Muslim authorities (known as the Waqf). Over the years, this delicate balance has been repeatedly tested, most recently in 2000, when the former Likud party prime minister, Ariel Sharon, while locked in a tough parliamentary contest with the current Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, for control of the party, staged a highly provocative visit to the Temple Mount, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli soldiers and police dressed in riot gear. (Sharon is a deeply loathed figure in Palestine for his role in the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.) Standing in front of the Wailing Wall, surrounded by armed guards, Sharon declared, “The Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands. It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit the Temple Mount.”
Rumors quickly spread throughout the Old City that the Jews were attempting to seize the Temple Mount. A crowd of angry Palestinians rushed to the site and began pelting Jewish worshipers with rocks. The Israeli police responded with tear gas; more than thirty people were injured—both Palestinians and Israelis. The incident ignited what came to be known as the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada.* It also helped Sharon defeat Netanyahu in the parliamentary elections.
Not wanting to be separated from my backpack, I withdrew from the line of tourists and scrambled around the Wailing Wall, past the Jewish and Armenian quarters of the Old City, through the Via Dolorosa in the Christian Quarter, and over to the cramped and overcrowded Muslim Quarter, where gates lead directly up to the Dome of the Rock, the annular, porcelain-walled sanctuary that now sits almost exactly where the Temple of Jerusalem once stood. Built some thirteen centuries ago, the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. The mosque atop the Temple Mount (which Palestinians refer to as Haram al-Sharif) is called al-Aqsa; it is positioned on the southeast corner of the Mount. The Dome of the Rock was originally intended to be an alternative pilgrimage site to Mecca, a way to draw the Muslim faithful to Jerusalem. Although it is said to house the rock on which the Prophet Muhammad stood before ascending to heaven during his Night Journey, or Miraj, to this day the Dome remains, like the Wailing Wall, as much a political site as a religious one—a symbol of the permanent Muslim presence in the Holy City. Images of its glittering gold cupola can be found in every Palestinian household. A picture of the Dome hangs behind the desk of the Palestinian president and head of Fatah. Its silhouette, flanked by two swords, is emblazoned on the seal of Hamas.
Access to this side of the Temple Mount is strictly controlled by the Waqf, who refuse to allow Christians or Jews to congregate in large groups on the site, so worried are they that this prized slab of real estate will be pried away from them. This is not paranoia. Razing the Dome of the Rock in order to build the Third Temple on its ruins has been a goal of more than a few Jewish and Christian radical groups. In 1969, a Christian from Australia sneaked onto the Temple Mount and set fire to the silver-topped al-Aqsa mosque. In 1982, an Israeli soldier stormed into the same mosque brandishing an army-issued M-16 rifle and began shooting worshipers at random. One particularly tenacious radical, Yoel Lerner, has been convicted three times of trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock; at each of his trials, Lerner has openly called for the overthrow of Israel’s secular government and its replacement with a Jewish theocracy.
Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to destroy the Dome of the Rock took place in 1984. A Palestinian guard, making his rounds in the early morning, noticed that the gate to the platform had been pried open. He immediately alerted Israeli security forces, who rushed to the site. The intruders were already gone, having scattered at the first hint of trouble. But what they left behind sent shudders throughout the country. Littered around the Dome were hundreds of pounds of explosives, dozens of army-issued grenades, boxes of dynamite, ropes, ladders, knapsacks.
After a two-month investigation, three men were arrested, all of them from the Lifta Valley, a Mediterranean village near Jerusalem, a place of placid springs and terraced gardens. Dubbed “The Lifta Gang” by the Israeli media, the men confessed to being members of a Jewish underground group, some of whom had banded together to destroy the Dome of the Rock and seize control of the Temple Mount with the ultimate aim of rebuilding the Temple, thus preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah.
Had the plan succeeded, it would likely have led to a bloodbath. Of course, that was the point. The Lifta Gang wanted to launch a final confrontation that would sweep up every Jew, Christian, and Muslim in a cosmic battle. When confronted at their trial with the possibility of the Jewish deaths that would have resulted from their actions, the members were unmoved. Revolutions require sacrifices.
Inching my way through the back alleys of the Muslim Quarter, I arrived at the rickety green gates leading to the Dome of the Rock. Two machine-gun toting kids dressed in military fatigues sat at the entrance, eying me cautiously.
“Stop,” one of them said in Arabic.
“I only want to pray,” I said.
“Are you Muslim?” asked one. “Show me,” said the other, before I could respond. I had no idea what he could mean.
“The Fatiha,” the other said, suddenly inspired. “Give us the Fatiha.”
I rattled off, in my best Arabic, the opening words of the Qur’an: “In the name of God the Merciful, the Benevolent. All praise to God, the Lord of the Worlds….”
“Okay. Okay.” The first guard interrupted, this time in English. “Now you give us five dollars.”
“Five dollars for what?”
“For watching your backpack, of course. The Jews will not let you take it up there.”
So it goes, for decades, for centuries. If a nation is a historical narrative written in the myths and memories of a united people, and the state that narrative’s cover and binding, the cosmic war between Israel and Palestine is what happens when two competing national narratives—neither of which can be fully harnessed by the state—vie for the same sacred, eternal space.
The story of the state of Israel usually starts like this:
Paris, 1894. A cleaning lady was making her rounds inside the fortified German Embassy in the heart of the French capital when she discovered a suspicious piece of paper in the wastebasket of the German military attaché, Major Max von Schwartzkoppen. The paper was a bordereau—an official memorandum—handwritten in French and addressed to Schwartzkoppen.
“Having no indication that you wish to see me,” the memo read, “I am nevertheless forwarding to you, Sir, several interesting items of information.”
What followed was a catalog of secret military documents that would be made available to the German major should he wish to have them, including information on French artillery formations and “a note on the hydraulic brake of the 120mm cannon,” a new weapon in the French armament.
The memo was unsigned; it was only a promise to make the secret files available for the major at his convenience. However, at the bottom of the page there followed a brief yet incriminating adieu: “I am off to maneuvers.”
The cleaning lady understood at once what she held in her hand. “I am off to maneuvers.” That could mean only one thing: someone in the army was offering to provide military secrets to the Germans. This was treason! She immediately handed the memo over to French intelligence, which wasted no time in accusing a low-ranking general staff officer, a Jew from Alsace named Alfred Dreyfus, with high treason.
There was no evidence for the charge, save for a dubious expert testimony linking Dreyfus’s handwriting to that of the memo. But no evidence was needed. When the charges against Dreyfus were first made public, the head of French intelligence, hearing that Dreyfus was a Jew, summed up the widespread anti-Semitism of the army, and indeed of much of France. “I should have realized,” he said.
There was a trial, but it was a farce. Much of the evidence against Dreyfus was forged, and flagrantly so, by the head of army intelligence, Colonel Hubert Henry. The only other evidence necessary for conviction flowed through Dreyfus’s veins. He was not French, after all; he was a Jew.
A French court-martial stacked with loyal monarchists and fervent nationalists convicted Dreyfus in a closed and secret session; he was not allowed to see the evidence against him. Despite his repeated protestations, Dreyfus was sentenced to a life of solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, the infamous penal colony just off the coast of French Guiana.
It is no accident that the rise of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe coincided with the rise of nationalism. Nationalism, you will recall, presupposes a measure of ethnic or cultural homogeneity within a nation-state—something to bind a population together under a single collective identity. But the Jews represented a conspicuously alien culture that, despite centuries of living and thriving in every corner of Europe, had, in the minds of many, yet to sufficiently assimilate into European society (at least not enough to have disappeared altogether). The secret trial and false conviction of Alfred Dreyfus was a human tragedy. But the affair also raised much broader issues of national identity among the French. The right-wing newspaper editor Édouard Drumont captured the sentiment of many French nationalists when he declared that Dreyfus’s betrayal was the inexorable destiny of his race. The Jews were a nation within a nation; it was inconceivable to think that their loyalties would be to France.
“Out of France, Jews!” Drumont demanded in his widely read periodical La Libre Parole. “France for the French!”
Drumont, a fuming, portly, irascible man with a wiry beard that splayed across his chest, is often regarded as the father of modern anti-Semitism in Europe. His book La France juive (Jewish France), which provided a disturbing account of the Jewish presence in France, sold a million copies and went through more than one hundred editions in French before being translated for the rest of Europe. Drumont’s bigoted argument about “the problem of the Jew in Europe” was, at the time, an outgrowth of the very idea of nationalism, which, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm writes, “by definition excludes from its purview all who do not belong to its own ‘nation,’ i.e., the vast majority of the human race.”
The arduous task of constructing a collective identity, especially one based on something so nebulous as cultural homogeneity, often requires an adversary, an Other, against which to define oneself. Throughout much of Europe, the Jew served as “the negative pole of the nationalist movements,” writes Michel Winock in his history of anti-Semitism in France. According to Winock, the Jew became the “revealer” of European national identity, the out-group that gave shape to the in-group. What did it mean to be French or German or Dutch at a time when those identities were only just beginning to be nationalistically defined? It meant not being a Jew.
Not everyone in France followed Drumont’s lead, of course. A slew of officers, politicians, judges, lawyers, and intellectuals—most famously the writer Émile Zola, whose celebrated manifesto “J’accuse!,” published on the front page of the Paris daily L’Aurore, remains a testament to his intellectual heroism—came out in defense of the innocent Dreyfus. Their relentless drive for the truth ultimately set Dreyfus free, though only after he had served five brutal years on Devil’s Island. Still, nationalism requires unity, and unity, wrote Ernest Renan, “is always effected by means of brutality.” The Dreyfus affair set European nationalism on a course that would ultimately lead to the rise of Nazism and the slaughter of more than six million Jews.
Half a century before that abominable event, however, a number of leading Jewish intellectuals had already come to the realization that assimilation into European culture was futile. They believed they would never share in the imaginary cultural homogeneity being constructed in the burgeoning nation-states of Europe and thus would never find a home on the continent. Drumont was right, some of them thought. The Jews were a nation within a nation. Only by extricating themselves from Europe and establishing their own nation-state could they be truly free of persecution.
It was a fanciful idea, to be sure. Jewish cultural unity was, for a people living in dozens of different countries, difficult to imagine; how on earth would national unity be devised? And, perhaps more problematically, where on earth? The idea of a Jewish nation-state would likely have remained just that had it not been for one of those spectacular historical coincidences. On the day that Dreyfus was taken away to Devil’s Island, as he was dragged onto the streets and publicly stripped of his rank to a wild chorus of “Death to the Jews!” “Death to the Judas!,” there was, among that rancorous crowd, a young Viennese journalist and amateur playwright who had traveled to Paris to cover the event. His name was Theodor Herzl.
The germ of the idea that blossomed into the state of Israel was actually planted twelve years prior to the Dreyfus affair, in a pamphlet published in Germany by a Polish physician named Leon Pinsker. Titled “Auto-Emancipation,” the pamphlet launched Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), a Jewish settler movement and precursor of the nationalist philosophy that would later be known simply as Zionism.
As Pinsker saw it, the “hoary problem” of the Jews—the fact that they could “neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation”—was summed up by two fundamental truths: the Jews were dispersed in various countries throughout the world, and in each of those countries, they constituted a persecuted minority. (Pinsker termed this persecution “Judeophobia,” recognizing, correctly, the ethnocentric confusion caused by the word “anti-Semitism,” since Arabs are also Semites.) Pinsker’s solution to this twofold problem was to develop a distinctly Jewish version of nationalism to compete with the surging nationalisms of Europe. That would be no easy task. Pinsker understood that the world’s Jews lacked the essential attributes that foster nationalism: a common language, cultural or ethnic homogeneity, consanguinity, and what Pinsker called “cohesion in space.” This last point was instrumental. A national identity could never emerge while the Jews were scattered across the globe. “The Jewish people,” Pinsker wrote, “has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; no center of focus or gravity, no government of its own, no official representation. They are at home everywhere, but are nowhere at home.”
The only solution was for the Jews to leave their home countries and gather as one nation inside a new, territorially bounded “fatherland.” But even Pinsker recognized the glitch in his proposition: “What land will grant us permission to settle a nation within its borders?” he asked.
Fourteen years later, Theodor Herzl thought he had the answer. Herzl was a student at the University of Vienna when “Auto-Emancipation” was published. Vienna at the time had no shortage of young, nationalistically minded Jewish intellectuals. A schoolmate of Herzl, Nathan Birnbaum, had founded an organization of Jewish nationalists called Kadima (Forward); its purpose was to promote a sense of national unity among the Jews of Europe. It was Birnbaum who coined the word “Zionism” in 1890, but it would be Herzl’s earthshaking manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in 1896, that would give the idea substance.
Unlike Birnbaum, Herzl was a thoroughly assimilated, thoroughly secular Jew, fluent in neither Hebrew nor Yiddish (at the time the most commonly spoken language among European Jews) and with no abiding interest in Jewish culture or religion. But he had been utterly transformed by the Dreyfus affair. Witnessing that murderous horde clamoring for an innocent man’s blood had convinced him that there was no future for the Jews in Europe; they would have to build a state of their own. Though much has been made about his willingness in later years to compromise on the location of a future Jewish state, there was never any serious doubt—not for Herzl, nor for Birnbaum, nor for the Zionist Congress they together helped found in order to realize their nationalist aspirations—that it would have to be constructed upon the coastal plains and bare valleys of Palestine. Zion is, after all, the biblical name of Jerusalem. “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic homeland,” Herzl wrote in The Jewish State.
The problem was that a significant population of indigenous Arabs had already been living in Palestine for centuries. A sizable number of Palestinian Jews also lived side by side with the Arabs, but the overwhelming majority of the population was Arab: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Not only was the land already settled and under the suzerainty of the Ottoman caliph, who, as one might imagine, was not receptive to the idea of turning it over to Europe’s Jews, but Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, was as sacred to the Arabs as it was to the Jews. When Vienna’s rabbis sent a fact-finding mission to determine the feasibility of Herzl’s idea, the mission sent back a cable reading “The Bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”
For Herzl, the solution was self-evident, if a bit problematic. “We must expropriate gently the private property,” he wrote in his diary in June 1895, “[and] spirit the penniless population across the border.” As the Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, given that “the vast majority of Palestine’s Arabs at the turn of the century were ‘poor,’ Herzl can only have meant some form of massive transfer of most of the population.”
That is precisely what Herzl meant. The calculus was inescapable. The Zionist ideal could be realized only through the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the only way the population of such a state could have a Jewish majority was to remove its non-Jewish inhabitants. The argument was made more succinctly by the true architect of the Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion. “The Arabs will have to go,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his son in 1937. The Zionists, it seems, had learned a constructive lesson from European nationalism: unity is always effected by means of brutality.
The Jewish nationalists of the early twentieth century faced a formidable task. How were they to unite a dispersed people of French, German, Iraqi, Russian, Polish, and Romanian descent—separated from one another by miles and by conventions—under a single national identity? That knotty question ultimately tore Birnbaum and Herzl apart. For Birnbaum, Jewish national identity could be based only on cultural unity, perhaps through the use of a common language such as Yiddish. Herzl, who did not speak Yiddish, maintained a broad, somewhat undefined notion of political unity based on a sense of historical memory and territorial integrity. In other words, gather the people together, put a border around them, and a nation-state will arise.
Yet doesn’t being a Jew have at least partly to do with a connection to the faith, practice, and religious institutions of Judaism? Early Zionists such as Achad Ha’am thought so. Ha’am started out as a supporter of Pinsker’s Hovevei Zion movement but later developed a more explicitly religious definition of Jewish unity that was severely critical of the secular Zionism propounded by Herzl, a man who once described the Jewish religion as “superstition and fanaticism.” Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews, for whom Jerusalem was a place of pilgrimage and the locus of messianic aspirations, shuddered at the idea that religious duty to the city should be translated into political sovereignty over it. As far as they were concerned, the Law of Torah was absolutely clear on this point: only the Messiah could reestablish the state of Israel, and only at the end of time. Then there was the rather large contingent of theocratic Jews, who, in contrast to the Orthodox, supported the creation of a Jewish state, but only if it were constructed as a religious state and based on Jewish law. These so-called Religious Zionists, conspicuously absent from the first meeting of the World Zionist Congress, which met in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, ultimately formed their own religious parties, which to this day remain opposed to the secular nationalism upon which Israel was founded.
Even after the horrors of the Holocaust gave weight to the Zionist argument that assimilation into Europe was impossible, there were still a great many who would not be convinced that the Jewish nation could be—or for that matter should be—contained within a state. What would gather such an ethnically diverse, culturally heterogeneous, religiously disparate, linguistically dissimilar community together under a single, secular, nationalist umbrella?
For Jewish nationalism to survive in Palestine, it needed the “negative pole” spoken of by Michel Winock—the Other against which to define itself as a culturally cohesive, ethnically homogeneous, and nationally united community. With regard to the Jews already beginning to settle in Palestine, that Other quickly took the form of the land’s native inhabitants. What did it mean to be a Jewish nationalist in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century? It meant not being an Arab.
As in Europe, which had to purge “the nation within” in order to fully enable a national identity based on cultural homogeneity, the Zionists carved out a physical space for themselves inside Palestine, then gradually expelled from that space those who could claim no share of Jewish cultural, religious, ethnic, or linguistic heritage. In this way, they fashioned a national identity for a people who had not imagined any such thing in almost two millennia. “With the evacuation of the Arab community from the valleys we achieve, for the first time in our history, a real Jewish state,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary. “As with a magic wand, all the difficulties and defects that preoccupied us until now in our settlement enterprise [will vanish].”
A carefully constructed narrative began to form among the Zionist leaders: Yes, there was a large Arab population already living in Palestine. But they were not Palestinian. They were not a distinct people, a tribe, a nation. They could not be considered a national entity. They were part of the global “Arab nation” and thus held no claim to the land on which they lived. As Israel’s “Iron Lady,” Golda Meir, explained, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Hence the Zionist slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
It is true that a firm national consciousness did not exist among the Arabs of Palestine, any more than it did among Palestine’s Jews—at least not before the Zionists arrived in droves. At the time nationalism was a distinctly European and secular phenomenon. Although there were upper-class Arab intellectuals and landed elites who considered themselves “Palestinian”—that is, living in a region called Palestine, distinct from a territory called Syria, inside an empire dominated by Turks—the majority of Palestine’s Arab Muslim population had, up to that point in time, considered itself subjects of the Ottoman caliph. (Palestine’s Christians, however, had a much more developed sense of themselves as Palestinian nationals, and in fact the most vigorous arguments against Zionism came from Christian Arabs.)
Still, the stirrings of Arab nationalism could be felt in hundreds of secret literary societies that had cropped up all over the Ottoman Empire around the same time as Herzl and Birnbaum were meeting in Vienna. The members of these societies sought to carve out a distinctly Arab (and distinctly secular) identity in opposition to Turkish cultural hegemony by reclaiming Arabic as the official language in majority-Arab regions (language being an effective means of fostering national unity). These Arab nationalists were emboldened by the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, in which a coalition of military students, young army officers, and Turkish nationalists staged a coup against the Ottoman caliph, Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a series of constitutional reforms throughout the empire. The reforms did not amount to much, and, in fact, the revolution itself seemed only to have precipitated the demise of the “Sick Man of Europe,” as Europeans had dubbed the Ottoman Empire. But the incident convinced Arabs that emancipation from Ottoman control was possible.
That sentiment was nourished during the First World War, when the British promised full independence for much of the Arab world in return for siding with the Allies against the Ottomans. Independence never materialized, of course; the vanquished Ottoman lands were divvied up among the European powers as spoils of war. When the Second World War erupted, the Europeans again guaranteed the Arabs independence, this time in exchange for help fighting Adolf Hitler. That promise, too, was broken. But those unmet promises, along with the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923, ignited a wave of national consciousness across the Arab world. And although, in countries such as Egypt and Syria, Arab nationalism remained at that point a somewhat shapeless conviction based chiefly on a sense of common culture and shared language, in Palestine, the presence of half a million newly arrived Jewish immigrants made constructing a national identity a much simpler endeavor.
The unintended consequence of Zionism was that it shifted the consciousness of Palestine’s Arabs away from the larger pan-Arab exercises in nationalism taking place elsewhere and toward a more finely honed Palestinian identity. Zionism provided Palestinians with their own distinct national narrative. It allowed for a firmer sense of national cohesion than that which existed in most other parts of the Arab world. It created a collective identity based on resistance to occupation—by the Jews as well as by the British. In short, Zionism became for the Arabs in Palestine that much-needed “negative pole.” What did it mean to be Palestinian? It meant not being a Jew.
What happened next has been so exhaustively documented and debated that it has ceased being history and has slipped instead into the shadowy realm of historical myth. In 1917, British troops marched into Jerusalem and found themselves in the midst of a civil war between competing claims of nationalism. At first Britain was amenable to the idea of a Jewish state. The Zionist argument that, in the hands of the Jews, Palestine would be “an outpost of culture against barbarism,” to quote Herzl—and incidentally a tool with which to further British colonialism in the region—was irresistible. As Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary and the namesake of the Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the state of Israel, claimed, “The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the … Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
When at the end of World War II Britain no longer had the will or the means to maintain control over an increasingly riotous, bitterly divided population, the problem of Palestine was handed over to the newly formed United Nations, which split the country in two. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of two separate and distinct states, each containing its own ethnically and religiously homogeneous “nation.”
The Palestinians rejected Resolution 181 outright. The geography of the partition was, according to the Arab Higher Committee representing Palestinian demands, “absurd, impracticable, and unjust.” The resolution established a serpentine border. It gave the Jews, who at the time owned 7 percent of the land and made up less than a third of the population, 56 percent of the country, seven eighths of the citrus groves, most of the arable fields, and a majority of the Mediterranean ports. Some 80 percent of the land that would be the future state of Israel was still private property owned by Arabs.
A great many Zionists also rejected the partition plan, according to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, “as it fell short of the full-blown Zionist aspiration for a state comprising the whole of Palestine and Jerusalem”—what was being referred to as Eretz Yisrael, or “biblical Israel.” Menachem Begin—at the time the head of an underground paramilitary organization called the Irgun, later to become prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner—summed up the sentiments of many Jewish nationalists when he proclaimed, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Yisrael will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for ever.”
Cooler heads among the Zionists prevailed. Ben-Gurion, ever the pragmatist, recognized the historic opportunity for international legitimacy and accepted U.N. Resolution 181 as, if nothing else, a good start. A decade earlier, when partition had first been discussed among the Zionist leaders, Ben-Gurion had argued, “I am certain we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual understanding with our Arab neighbors or in another way. Erect a Jewish state at once, even if it’s not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.”
With the impasse seemingly irresolvable, Europe ravaged by two wars, the United States cocksure and concentrating on the Soviet Union, and the Arab states bungling toward independence, the Zionists unilaterally declared statehood. On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel was born.
The next day, the Arabs declared war.
Six decades have passed since the war Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians lament as al-Nakba, “the Catastrophe.” Sixty years, five wars, and countless deaths later, the miraculous state of Israel lives on, having taken on all enemies, both internal and external, and, in crushing them, secured an enduring home for the Jewish nation in the middle of the ever-mutable map of the Middle East. Today, Israel is as prosperous and as secure as it has ever been. Its economy is flourishing. Its military is by far the most powerful in the region. It has the best universities and the most educated population in the Middle East. It is a refuge for Jews around the world. More than that, it is a testament to the strength, resilience, and ingenuity of the Jewish people in the face of near-total annihilation.
The state of Palestine, however, is a fading dream. Of the ten million Palestinians in the world, half live as refugees. Any real hope for a unified state has buckled under the weight of the ongoing civil war between Hamas and Fatah, between competing claims of secular and religious nationalism. Today, Gaza is one of the poorest, most densely packed regions on earth, while nearly half of the West Bank is under Israeli control.
To truly appreciate the way in which the two competing national narratives of Israel and Palestine have played out over the last sixty years, stand not in Old Jerusalem, at the majestic Wailing Wall, but in East Jerusalem, at the separation wall built by Israel as a defensive measure to keep Israelis and Palestinians apart. This grotesque barrier of concrete, barbed wire, electric fencing, sniper towers, checkpoints, and barricades will, when completed, be four times as long and in some areas twice as high as the Berlin Wall. The wall has already devoured 140,000 acres of Palestinian land in Jerusalem alone. Ultimately, it will encircle 40 to 50 percent of the West Bank, making the idea of creating a contiguous Palestinian state almost risible. The wall bisects major urban districts, creates ghettos where there were once thriving Palestinian towns, separates farmers from their crops, divides families from their loved ones, and cuts off Palestinians from schools, hospitals, and places of work.
The Israeli government insists that the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian terrorists out of Israel and, more urgently, to protect hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers living in more than fifty settlements dotting the Occupied Territories. No doubt suicide attacks in Jerusalem have declined dramatically since construction of the wall began. Yet the great irony is that today, Israel’s most profound existential threat comes not from Arab armies or Palestinian militants but from this very wall, or at least from what it represents, not just to Palestinians but to Muslims, Christians, and Jews around the world for whom a territorial conflict between two nation-states has become a contest over the favor of God—a cosmic war that no wall, no matter how long or how high, can contain.
Two years before Mohammed Siddique Khan, the soft-spoken second-generation Pakistani-Briton from West Yorkshire, led three of his friends on a suicide mission that would end in the murder of more than fifty of his fellow British citizens on July 7, 2005, he stood at this wall, at one of its five hundred or so security checkpoints. In all of the material published about the so-called 7/7 bombers, all of the documents and studies and conferences meant to discover what could have led to the radicalization of those four seemingly benign British youths, Khan’s trip to Israel is rarely, if ever, mentioned. But there can be little doubt that it was the decisive moment in his young life—the pivot in his journey from husband and father and, by all accounts, well-adjusted, well-integrated, well-educated youth worker to radical Jihadist bent on mass murder.
Khan’s trip occurred as a last-minute detour on his way back to Britain, after he had completed the Hajj pilgrimage with his wife and a couple of close friends. As they crossed into Palestinian territory, Khan witnessed with his own eyes the unbearable weight of degradation carried by a people in no control of their own lives, in no control even of their movements.
As the story was told to me by one of his companions, Khan had passed through the crossing, his British passport a ticket to the front of the line. There he saw an old Palestinian man, a native of this dry patch of land, being manhandled by a nervous young soldier—an Israeli probably no older than the pimply immigration officer who had pulled me aside as I deplaned in Tel Aviv. A second soldier, sweating and timorous and just as young as the first, held a rifle barrel against the old man’s chest. There had been attacks at this crossing in the past: Israelis had died; Jews had died.
The old man lowered his head. He was used to this. He did not speak as the soldier rummaged through his belongings. Khan stood by, also saying nothing. But the old man’s shame burned hot in his cheeks.
Mohammed Siddique Khan was not an Arab. He had not traveled extensively through the Arab world, nor, according to his friends, had he shown much interest in doing so. He had never expressed excessive solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians; this was his first visit to the region. Before this trip, he had not even been considered especially devout.
But in that fateful moment, his identity was altered. He was no longer British. He was no longer Pakistani. His sense of self could not be contained by either nationalist designation. He was simply a Muslim: a member of a fractured, imaginary “nation” locked in an eternal cosmic war with a Jewish “nation” just as imaginary and just as fractured.
On the way back to Beeston, the drab, isolated inner heart of southern Leeds where Khan and his fellow 7/7 bombers lived, the mild-mannered youth worker shocked his companions by suddenly proclaiming his new identity and, with it, his murderous intention.
“They kill us,” he cried out, “so we must kill them!”
His companions were confused. What did he mean? they wondered. Who is us? Who are them?
Two years later, Khan cleared up any confusion in a video testimony left behind before he performed his heinous act: “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world,” he accused the British nation-state—his nation-state. “And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.”
We have all heard these words, or words like them, before. They are common in so-called suicide videos, the visual testimonies Jihadists often leave behind before embarking on their murderous mission. As a transnational social movement, one of Jihadism’s greatest challenges is to link together all the disparate identities of its members—regardless of their race, culture, ethnicity, or nationality—under a single collective identity. The easiest way to do this is through what the sociologist William Gamson calls “injustice framing”: identify a situation as unjust; assign blame for the injustice; propose a solution for dealing with the injustice and those responsible for it; and then, most important, connect that injustice to a larger frame of meaning so as to communicate a uniform message that will resonate with as much of the population as possible.
Successful framing has the power to translate vague feelings of anger and resentment into tangible, easy-to-define grievances. It can also connect local and global grievances that may have little or nothing to do with one another under a “master frame” that allows a movement’s leaders to encompass the wider interests and diverse aspirations of their members.
These so-called “frame alignment techniques” allow social movements like Jihadism to more easily create in-groups and out-groups. They help identify and, more important, vilify the enemy. They can even assist movement leaders in marking neutral bystanders as either sympathetic or antagonistic to the movement’s cause, all with the aim of compelling people to join the movement and do something about their grievances. In short, framing helps members of a social movement make the difficult transition from collective identity to collective action. And by far the easiest form of collective action is violence, especially organized and ritualized violence, which can transform complex, multipronged conflicts for which blame may be difficult to apportion into simple, black-and-white ones for which blame is easy to assign: them.
There remains today no more potent symbol of injustice in the Muslim imagination than the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Particularly in the Arab world, it is hard to find a primary or secondary school where schoolchildren do not learn about the daily misery of boys and girls their own age who, due to circumstances that may be beyond anyone’s control but that nonetheless cry out for culpability, do not share in the most basic rights and privileges that they themselves enjoy. In universities, the plight of the Palestinians is as essential a chapter in the study of Arab history as the Civil War is in American history. In some ways, Palestine has become the sole source of pan-Islamic identity in the Muslim world, the universal symbol that, in the absence of a Caliphate, unites all Muslims, regardless of race, nationality, class, or piety, into a single ummah—a single community. On a recent trip to Iran, I was struck by a pair of giant paintings emblazoned across a highway overpass. The first depicted the now-famous image, broadcast to the world by the BBC in 2000, of a Palestinian man, Jamil ad-Durra, crouched behind a concrete block, trying in vain to shield his small son from a torrent of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers standing nearby, the image frozen in the instant before the boy was shot dead in his father’s arms. The second depicted an even more famous photo: a masked, black-clad Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib, standing barefoot on a box, his arms outstretched as though he were crucified, wires extending from his fingers like electric tendrils.
Under the first painting it read, YESTERDAY PALESTINE; under the second, TODAY IRAQ.
Yet, as undeniably dreadful as the plight of the Palestinians may be, for the Jihadists, Palestine is a mere abstraction, a symbol whose sole purpose is to draw Muslims to their cause. It is not the Palestinian struggle for statehood that animates most Jihadists. As a global ideology, Jihadism is totally detached from such nationalist concerns. Jihadist fighters do not travel to Palestine to fight alongside the militants of Hamas (they would not be welcome if they did). Jihadist ideologues have not formulated any specific plans to address the Palestinian situation, save pushing Israel into the sea (a silly and, as even the Jihadists themselves admit, hopeless notion). It is true that Jihadist leaders such as bin Laden and Zawahiri frequently rail against Israel and the United States for allowing the Palestinians to suffer under Israeli occupation. But such complaints, though legitimate, must be read as part of a much broader catalog of Jihadist grievances, some of which are so random, so mind-bogglingly unfocused, that they should be recognized less as grievances per se than as popular causes to rally around. There are, for instance, protests about the United States’ unwillingness to sign on to the International Criminal Court and anger at America’s role in global warming. (“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases,” Osama bin Laden writes, “more than any other country. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”) There is bin Laden’s inexplicable tirade against America’s campaign finance laws, which, as he argues, “favor the rich and wealthy, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.” The Jihadists have even launched protests against the widely acknowledged election fraud that took place during the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
These are not real grievances for the Jihadists. (It does not bear mentioning that bin Laden is probably not concerned with campaign finance reform in the United States.) These are, rather, a means of weaving local and global resentments into as wide a net as possible, one that can be spread across borders and boundaries—over all the walls, actual or metaphorical, that divide the ummah into states, nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, classes, even genders—to form a single master narrative, a single collective identity; to convince Muslims that their grievances, whatever they may be, are no different from the grievances of the Palestinians, or the Chechens, or the Kashmiris; to portray the conflicts between Muslims and the Western world as part of a cosmic battle between the forces of Truth and Falsehood, Belief and Unbelief, Good and Evil that all Muslims, Jews, and Christians—three faith communities with long and deeply ingrained traditions of cosmic warfare—must join.
“We are at war,” Mohammed Saddique Khan concluded in his suicide video, calmly and with the unburdened conscience of a man whose every consideration rests on a cosmic plane. “And I am a soldier.”
* The first intifada occurred in 1987.