2

1882–1917

‘If the time comes that our people’s life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.’

Ahad haAm

LOVERS OF ZION

On the ground in Palestine, far from the corridors of power in London, Zionist-Arab tensions pre-dated the epochal events of 1917. The following year the British military administration counted a population of 512,000 Muslims, 66,000 Jews and 61,000 Christians. The Arabs were largely peasants and artisans, and, in the countryside, where Bedouin tribes still roamed, overwhelmingly illiterate. Large tracts of land were the property of absentee owners. Urban notables had played an important role in the just-departed Ottoman administration. Jerusalem, where signs of modernization were spreading beyond the walls of the Old City, was still dominated by wealthy, patrician families such as the Husseinis and Khalidis; Nablus by the Touqans and Abdel-Hadis. Jaffa, known as ‘the bride of the sea’, was the country’s gateway to the outside world, while Haifa, further north, was also undergoing rapid development. Beyond the replacement of the Turks by the British, the most significant novelty was that by 1918 some 15,000 Jewish newcomers were living in 45 rural colonies (moshavot)1 that made up the ‘new’ Zionist camp – and were quite distinct from the 50,000-strong ‘old’ Yishuv (Jewish community).

Palestine’s Arabs were well aware of their presence, and of the differences between the two groups. Jews had been part of the landscape for as long as anyone could remember. Over the previous century Ashkenazi Jews had come to study and pray, subsisting on halukah or charitable contributions in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed, where they mourned the destruction of the Temple and awaited the coming of the Messiah. Most were Russian or from other Eastern European countries. The majority had come after 1840, when the Ottomans defeated a rebellion by the Egyptian pasha Muhammad Ali. A minority were native-born Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews, whose ancestors were from Spain, North Africa, the Balkans and as far afield as Yemen and Bokhara in Central Asia. Many spoke Arabic or Ladino. Their identity was religious, not national in any sense. Most were Ottoman citizens and were referred to in Arabic as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country/natives) or yahud awlaad Arab (Jews, sons of Arabs). Relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews were largely untroubled, each community living within its own traditions under the Ottoman millet system of communal religious autonomy under the sultan in Istanbul. Inequalities existed in status and taxation but there was tolerance in mixed neighbourhoods. In Jerusalem, Ashkenazis formed a majority, speaking a Palestinian variety of Yiddish, the vernacular of the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement’ (where East European Jews were concentrated), but replete with Arabic words.2 Sephardim were culturally closer to Muslims than to Christians.³ In Jaffa, Jews made up a third of the population. In Haifa there was ‘no more friction than is commonly found amongst neighbours’.⁴

Palestine’s connections with the wider world had deepened in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to Ottoman reforms, the penetration of European capital and the expansion of trade and communications. In the years after the Crimean War (1853–56) European consulates were established in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, partly to deal with Christian pilgrims and growing missionary activity. Economic growth, driven by exports of wheat and citrus fruits, boosted the population in the coastal cities and widened the gap with the countryside. Farmers in Gaza grew barley for the breweries of Europe. It was against that background that the French Alliance Israélite Universelle, a philanthropic organization which ran Jewish schools across the Middle East, founded the Mikveh Yisrael agricultural school near Jaffa in 1870. In 1878 Ashkenazi Jews from Jerusalem’s overcrowded Old City founded the colony of Petah Tikvah on the coastal plain near Jaffa, on lands acquired from an Arab village. Their motives combined the traditional belief in the sanctity of Eretz-Yisrael with a modern emphasis on the regenerative value of a productive life ‘to produce a sentimental yearning for the agrarian life in a land whose soil was inherently fruitful’.5 Conditions were harsh and the site was abandoned and only re-established later. Its Hebrew name (‘gate of hope’) had a biblical echo. It became known as Emm haMoshavot – ‘Mother of the Colonies’.

The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.⁶ Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies:

It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.7

Oliphant, drawing on the full range of contemporary European Christian prejudices, was witness to the foundation of the colony that became known as Zichron Yaakov, in remembrance of the French Jewish philanthropist Baron James (Yaakov) de Rothschild, whose son Edmond became the benefactor of that and other new outposts. In the following few years half a dozen more settlements – Rishon LeZion and Gedera on the coastal plain, and Rosh Pina and Yesud haMaala in Galilee – were established. In theory the Zionists faced the opposition of the Ottoman authorities. But in reality the administration’s inefficiency, corruption and the advantages of foreign nationality – especially the intervention of consuls who enjoyed extraterritorial privileges under the ‘Capitulations’ system – helped overcome obstacles. Bribery – baksheesh – was universally used. ‘Turkish officials to a man are open to bribery’, wrote one settler. ‘Money is the oil that turns the wheels … and blinds everybody.’⁸ The labour of Arab fellahin was indispensable. The Jews depended on them for transport, supplies and the manure they used for their vineyards and plantations. In July 1883 Oliphant found more Romanians and a few Russian Jews in Rosh Pina working their potato patches and living in ‘perfect amity’ with their Muslim neighbours. It was ‘the most hopeful attempt at a colony’ he had seen in Palestine. Jewish farmers used the traditional Arab nail plough drawn by oxen, and grew local crops. Overall there was a ‘typical pattern of colonial plantation agriculture and the reliance on employment of a large, unskilled, seasonal Palestinian Arab labour force’, similar to the experience of European settlers in French-ruled Algeria and Tunisia.⁹ Still, Zichron Yaakov and other settlements struggled to survive and were only saved by Rothschild’s largesse.

These pioneers were shocked by the rough-and-ready ways of the Arabs they encountered. And Palestine was evidently not ‘a land without a people, for a people without a land’, in the phrase made famous by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, via the millenarian Christian Lord Shaftesbury. (Zangwill, ironically, came to support the idea of Jewish settlement in Uganda rather than Palestine.) The saying is best understood as meaning not that the country was literally empty, but rather reflecting the contemporary European nationalist, and Zionist, perception that people without a state of their own had no national identity – and certainly not a specifically Palestinian one.10 It also embodied the values of a colonial era when white Europeans assumed superiority over the indigenous population: mostly Muslim peasants who lived in what looked like indolence and squalor.¹¹ ‘“Emptiness” … did not denote, except for the most ignorant, the physical absence of the native population’, argued the Ottoman scholar Beshara Doumani. ‘Rather, it meant the absence of “civilized” people, in the same sense that the Americas and Africa were portrayed as virgin territories ready for waves of pioneers.’¹² Palestine’s new colonists ‘knew neither the country nor the language and customs of the native Arabs while their means as well as their technical preparation were absolutely insufficient’, a Jewish economist recorded a few years later. ‘In many settlements malaria was endemic and menaced the health of the colonists.’¹³ Many were horrified by the harsh conditions. ‘I was shocked by the Arab village I saw’, wrote Hemda Ben-Yehuda, who arrived from Russia in 1892. ‘Houses made of mud, without windows, housing both men and animals. Piles of garbage everywhere and half naked children … Old blind women and dirty girls sit in front of the houses working, grinding wheat as was done a thousand years ago.’¹⁴

NEIGHBOURS

The colonists encountered problems over the demarcation of boundaries with former tenants dispossessed by the sale of lands they had worked for absentee owners. Disputes were common over harvesting or grazing rights.15 In 1886 rioting erupted in Petah Tikvah after a Jewish farmer confiscated Arab-owned donkeys grazing on his land. The background was a disagreement that escalated when Arabs were asked to vacate fields to which they still claimed ownership.¹⁶ By 1889 Zichron had 1,200 Arab agricultural workers serving 200 Jews. In Rishon LeZion 40 Jewish families attracted nearly 300 Arab families to work as migrant labourers. Colonists were quick to ‘reach for the whip and beat the offender for every transgression’.¹⁷ Arab workers were available, cheap and far hardier than Jewish immigrants who had just arrived from Europe. The Arab labourer, wrote one Jewish observer, ‘is almost always a submissive servant who may be exploited without opposition and accepts lovingly the expressions of his master’s power and dominion’.¹⁸ Zionist memoirs recorded an Arab fascination with modern agricultural machinery – and laughter when the inexperienced colonists of Rishon LeZion ‘tried to coax camels into pulling carts like horses’.¹⁹

The overall numbers of settlers were still very small – just over 2,000 by 1893 – but local problems occasionally had a wider resonance. In 1890 a group of Bedouin protested to the sultan that they had been expelled from land purchased by the agent Yehoshua Hankin for the new settlement of Rehovot. ‘The farm, which was ours since the times of our fathers and grandfathers, was forcefully taken from us by the strangers who do not wish to treat us according to the accepted norms among tillers of the soil, and according to basic human norms or compassion’, they wrote.²⁰ Nearby Gedera, founded in 1884, was known for especially bad relations with its neighbours. The Arab villagers of Qatra lost their land because of debts but continued to cultivate it as tenants until the arrival of the Jewish colonists, who had bought 3,000 dunams (1 dunam = a quarter of an acre) from a Frenchman. The villagers still perceived the land as theirs, and complained to the Ottoman authorities about building work.

Arab objections took on a more overtly political character, though some failed to distinguish between the influx of Jews and generally growing European influence, whether of Christian pilgrims, the German Templer movement or others living under the protection of foreign powers as the country developed.21 Travel from Jaffa was made easier by a new highway to Jerusalem, just over thirty miles away, in the mid-1880s. The railway line between them opened in 1892. In June 1891 Arabs urged an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases – demands which were to remain constant for the next half century.²² Yet Arab notables sold land to Jews – a far less sensitive issue then than it became just a few years later. Prices rose steeply in this period, driven by land speculation and poor administration.²³ In the same year the Hebrew writer and Zionist thinker Asher Ginzburg, known by his pen-name as Ahad haAm (‘one of the people’), published a famous essay entitled ‘The Truth from Eretz Yisrael’. It contained a prescient warning:

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 Yisrael 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. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them … But, if the time comes that our people’s life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.

Ahad haAm’s article has often been quoted because it provided the first serious recognition that relations with the Arabs would be one of the Zionist project’s hardest tests. Yet there is a risk, with hindsight, of endowing his comments with more significance than they had at the time. The article was criticized when it appeared, not because of his brief comments about Arabs but rather because of his attacks on Jewish ‘charlatans’, who had been promoting the holy land as ‘a new California’ with an easy life, producing ‘a motley mixture of gold-diggers and indigent exiles’.²⁴ Arabs simply did not loom as large for the Zionists in those early years as they were to do only a decade or two later.

Unlike Ahad haAm, Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded political Zionism, knew little about the reality of life in Ottoman Palestine. His quest for a Jewish homeland began in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair in France and the shocking evidence of anti-Semitism that it revealed. In 1896 he published his classic work, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which referred to both Palestine and Argentina as countries where ‘experiments in colonisation’ had taken place. Argentina had ‘vast open spaces and [a] temperate climate’. Palestine, however, was ‘our unforgettable historic home-land’.25 The first Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, founded the Zionist Organization, whose goal was a publicly recognized, legally secured home in Palestine ‘for the Jewish people’. By then, thanks to Hovevei Tzion, there were already eighteen new colonies in the country.²⁶ It was around this time that the Ottoman authorities appointed an official committee to examine land purchases, and sales were effectively halted for the next few years.²⁷ In August 1898, at the second Zionist Congress, one delegate, Leo Motzkin, made clear that the Arab presence could not just be ignored: ‘In large stretches of land, one constantly comes across big Arab villages, and it is a well-established fact that the most fertile regions of our land are occupied by Arabs.’²⁸ Herzl himself visited the country for the first and only time two months later, at the same time as Kaiser Wilhelm, but his diaries contained not one reference to Arabs.

In 1899 Herzl received an impassioned message that was passed on to him via the chief rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn. It was from Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, the former mayor of Jerusalem. Khalidi acknowledged the historic rights of the Jews in Palestine but said they should look for an uninhabited land elsewhere. ‘In the name of God’, Khalidi implored, ‘let Palestine be left alone.’²⁹ Herzl replied to Khalidi that Zionism had no intention of harming the interests of the Arab population; on the contrary, the country’s non-Jews would only be enriched by Jewish wealth (an argument that was widely employed in these years, though it never convinced the other side).

Do you believe that an Arab who has a house or land in Palestine whose value is three or four thousand francs will greatly regret seeing the price of his land rise five or tenfold? For that is necessarily what will happen as the Jews come; and this is what must be explained to the inhabitants of the country. They will acquire excellent brothers, just as the Sultan will acquire loyal and good subjects, who will cause the region, their historic fatherland, to flourish.30

Herzl’s view was at least consistent: in his 1902 novel Altneuland (Old New Land), Jaffa in particular – the first sight of the country for anyone arriving by sea – was described in unflattering terms:

Though nobly situated on the blue Mediterranean, the town was in a state of extreme decay … The alleys were dirty, neglected, full of vile odours. Everywhere misery in bright Oriental rags. Poor Turks, dirty Arabs, timid Jews lounged about – indolent, beggarly, hopeless. A peculiar, tomblike odour of mould caught one’s breath.³¹

Herzl’s fictional Arabs were for the most part nameless, one exception being the token Rashid Bey, who speaks for the natives and praises the benefits brought by the Jewish pioneers.³²

UNSEEN QUESTION?

Zionist progress was slow but Arab hostility was becoming harder to ignore by the turn of the century. The eviction of peasants from land purchased in Galilee by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), founded in 1901, led to attacks on Jewish surveyors. An Arab official in Tiberias ignored the orders of his Turkish superior in Beirut and opposed the transaction, against a background of mounting Arab opposition to the Ottoman authorities.³³ By 1904, some 5,500 settlers were living in 25 agricultural colonies in 3 blocs: in eastern Upper Galilee, south of Haifa and south-east of Jaffa. That year the authorities forbade the sale of land to foreign Jews, a more direct method of control than the old practice of registering transactions in the name of Ottoman Jewish citizens, like those who helped the barons Rothschild and de Hirsch (the founder of the JCA).³⁴ Oliphant had encountered one of them on his memorable visit to Zamarin. Still, in Zionist speeches and discussions, ‘the Arabs, their presence and their settlement in Palestine are belittled and nullified, as if they did not exist’, one Jewish intellectual complained in 1905. ‘The Arabs … were viewed as one more of the many misfortunes present in Palestine, like the Ottoman authorities, the climate, difficulties of adjustment – no greater or smaller than other troubles the settlers had to grapple with.’35 The theft of Jewish agricultural produce or livestock by Arabs was a common complaint.

In 1907, in an article in HaShiloah, one of the earliest modern Hebrew-language publications, the Odessa-born educationalist Yitzhak Epstein returned to, and sharpened, the point that had been made by Ahad haAm in 1891. Epstein belonged to the Hovevei Tzion. He had witnessed the purchase of the lands of Ras al-Zawiya and al-Metulla (known in Hebrew as Rosh Pina and Metullah) from absentee landlords several years earlier, and he remembered the anger of the dispossessed farmers from the Druze sect. ‘The lament of Arab women … still rings in my ears’, he wrote. ‘The men rode on donkeys and the women followed them weeping bitterly, and the valley was filled with their lamentation. As they went they stopped to kiss the stones and the earth.’ Epstein – ahead of his time – warned that relations with the Arabs were the ‘unseen question’ that the Zionist movement had failed to address. Only by taking care not to dispossess Arab farmers and generally sharing the benefits of Zionist progress could their enmity be avoided. But his argument attracted little response.³⁶

The year Epstein’s warning was published, an Ottoman official complained about the growing presence of ‘foreign Jews’ in Jaffa where immigrants disembarked, often shocked by their raucous reception. ‘You must tell the passengers not to be impatient, not to be in a hurry to get off the ship, and not to be overawed by the shouts and cries of the Arab sailors’, a Zionist official urged a colleague who arranged steamship voyages from Odessa. ‘Teach the travellers to Palestine the importance of the words “Shwaia, shwaia” (slowly, slowly) and tell them that if they say this to the Arabs suddenly appearing on the ship, they will calm down a bit and not shout “Yalla, Yalla!” (hurry, hurry) – a cry that has something contemptuous about it.’³⁷ In March 1908 fighting broke out in the port city between young Muslims and Jews, the violence blamed by the British consul on resentment of the Jewish population.³⁸ The growth of prostitution and alcohol consumption caused serious problems. Arabs, warned a Jewish writer, ‘regard all the “Muscovite” women as cheap and promiscuous’, and behave with ‘a sexual vulgarity that they would never dare to do in the case of Sephardi women, and still less, of German or English Christian women’.39 In 1909 an Ottoman deputy demanded that the port be closed to Jewish immigrants.⁴⁰

In April 1909 a new Jewish residential quarter, called first Ahuzat Bayit (‘Homestead’) and then Tel Aviv, was founded on sand dunes to the north of Jaffa. Its Hebrew name, inspired by Herzl’s Altneuland, signified renewal, combining the old (Tel: ‘hill or mound marking the remains of an ancient site’) with awakening (Aviv: ‘spring’). This European-style ‘garden city’ with wide tree-lined boulevards and modern buildings was a world away from the cramped, noisy and insanitary streets of Jaffa. It ‘embodied almost in pure form the Zionist utopia of inventing a new culture and a new identity from whole cloth’, in the words of a modern Israeli scholar. ‘Opposed both to the Jewish shtetls of eastern Europe and to the Arab towns and villages around it, it perfectly encoded the double Zionist rejection of the Diaspora and the native culture – forgetfulness and separation.’⁴¹ In Haifa the small Jewish community began to move out of the downtown area and up on to the slopes of Mount Carmel, marking the start of segregation from the Arab population.⁴² Another new neighbourhood was named Herzliya, in homage to the father of Zionism, who had died in 1904.

The overall immigration and colonization effort began to be better co-ordinated from 1908, the momentous year of the Young Turk revolution in Istanbul which saw the overthrow of the Sultan’s autocratic power. The Zionist Organization set up its first premises in Palestine, in Jaffa, to supplement the Zionist office in Istanbul which ran the movement’s activities throughout the Ottoman lands. Under the leadership of the German Zionist official and sociologist Arthur Rup-pin, the Palestine Office focused on the purchase of ‘every available tract of land’. Progress was impressive, thought a young Englishman who visited Palestine to do archaeological research on the Crusaders. ‘The sooner the Jews farm it all the better’, T. E. Lawrence wrote in 1909. ‘Their colonies are bright spots in a desert.’⁴³ Incidents in which Jewish settlers were attacked and their farms and livestock pillaged increased markedly that year, but these were seen as a ‘natural’ Arab tendency to plunder whenever possible, rather than as a sign of political or nationalist opposition.44

The Arabic (and Hebrew) press had been granted new freedoms under the more liberal Ottoman constitution of the previous year and this encouraged an escalation of attacks on the fledgling Zionist enterprise, as well as the cultivation of a more distinctly Palestinian identity: that was emblazoned in the name of the Filastin newspaper, established in Jaffa in 1911.⁴⁵ Al-Asmai, also based in Jaffa, and al-Karmil in Haifa were both owned by Greek Orthodox Arabs whom Zionists identified as more hostile to them than the majority Muslim community. In 1910 al-Karmil published translated extracts from Herzl’s The Jewish State and some of the resolutions of the 1911 Zionist Congress. Al-Karmil’s editor, Najib Nassar, wrote a pamphlet about the aims of Zionism, warning that its goal was not just immigration but to take over Palestine, and he exhorted his fellow Arabs not to sell land to the newcomers.⁴⁶ Arabic newspaper comment on Zionism, in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, increased markedly around the turn of the decade, many papers elsewhere reprinting pieces that first appeared in Filastin.⁴⁷ In March 1910 Abdullah Mukhlis described in the Damascus-based journal al-Muqtabas how Haifa’s new Atid (‘future’) soap factory was employing only Jewish workers, and that Jews (then about one-fifth of the city’s population) were starting to interact exclusively with members of their own community. ‘Establishing a Jewish state after thousands of years of decline … we [the Arabs] fear that the new settler will expel the indigenous and we will have to leave our country en masse. We shall then be looking back over our shoulder and mourn our land as did the Muslims of Andalusia.’ Mukhlis expressed the hope that Jews would remain part of Ottoman society and abandon their separatist ways. ‘Palestine may be endangered’, he wrote with remarkable prescience. ‘In a few decades it might witness a struggle for survival.’⁴⁸

Not all Jews were unaware of these concerns. Sephardi public figures of the old Yishuv were also alarmed by Zionist aspirations. ‘If I was a Muslim Turkish deputy, I would take the first opportunity to agitate for restrictive measures against Jewish activity in Palestine’, Eliahu Antebi argued in 1908.49 Nissim Malul, the Safed-born son of a Tunisian family, was one of a group of like-minded Jews who urged Zionists to embrace Arab rather than European culture. Another was Shimon Moyal, who was born in Jaffa to Moroccan parents, and who wrote a pioneering Arabic account of the Talmud – the commentary on Jewish laws – in 1909. Both expressed concern about the opposition to Zionism in the increasingly assertive Arabic newspapers. In 1911 Ruppin’s Palestine Office set up a bureau to monitor the papers and Malul was employed to translate the material into Hebrew and German – an early example of Zionist efforts to ‘know the enemy’ – and also to publish articles on Zionism in Arabic. Otherwise, though, this group had little influence.⁵⁰

Arab–Jewish co-operation was still possible in this period of accelerating change. David Yellin, a Jerusalem city councillor (the native-born son of an East European father and a Baghdadi mother) and an enthusiastic Zionist, was given a letter of introduction by the Arab mayor Salim al-Husseini, on the eve of a trip to Europe to study municipal services.⁵¹ Yellin argued that Jewish immigration would benefit the Ottoman Empire, the same reasoning Zionists were to use to promote their cause when Britain ruled the country a few years later. Ruhi al-Khalidi, a prominent intellectual and member of another leading Arab family, held several meetings with the Jewish philologist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was busy reviving the Hebrew language and basing many of its neologisms on Arabic words⁵² – though Khalidi also became alarmed about the scale of Zionist ambitions. Patrician Sephardi Jewish families like the Antebis and Eliachars maintained cordial relations with their Muslim and Christian counterparts.

‘NOT AN EMPTY LAND’

Events in Palestine began to reverberate further afield. Shukri al-Asali, the Ottoman governor of Nazareth, publicly opposed the decision of the absentee Beirut landowner Elias Sursuq to sell the al-Fuleh lands, part of the fertile Marj Ibn Amr valley between Haifa and Jenin, to the Jewish National Fund, which had been established with Herzl’s support at the fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901. The Jews, claimed Asali, had come to Palestine ‘solely to expel the poor Arab peasants from their land and to set up their own government’.53 In a petition sent to the sultan in Istanbul, the purchasers were referred to as ‘Zionists’ – one of the first times the term was recorded in this context. In the autumn of 1911 this led to angry debates in the Ottoman parliament which were widely reported in the Arabic press. Asali refused to comply with the eviction order but the fellahin were expelled anyway, paving the way for the establishment of the Jewish settlement of Merhavia. The land transfer was legal, but it deprived the tenant farmers of their livelihood – a frightening novelty of Jewish land purchases.⁵⁴ It was increasingly clear that controlling land was the central purpose of the Zionists. ‘There are some simple truisms about Palestine, which, though obvious, require a long time to become common property’, wrote Dr Elias Auerbach of Haifa in a Zionist anthology published in German and English in 1911. ‘The first of these truisms is that Palestine is not an empty land. The second is that the land takes its character from the predominant element in its population … Palestine is an Arabic land. To make it a Jewish land the Jews must become the principal element in the population.’⁵⁵ Parts of the book were translated into Arabic in Filastin. In June 1913 the paper led a campaign against the sale of state lands in Beisan to the Jews. It included telegrams sent by local leaders to the sultan and the vali (governor) of Beirut.⁵⁶

Arabs noticed the contradiction between Zionist words and deeds. In 1914 Nahum Sokolow, now secretary-general of the Zionist Congress, told the Cairo daily al-Muqattam that Jews were coming to Palestine not as foreign colonizers but as people ‘returning’ to their homeland, and expressed the hope that they would draw closer to the Arabs. Haqqi Bey al-Azm, leader of the new Decentralization Party, seeking autonomy for the Ottoman provinces, was not convinced. ‘Quite the contrary,’ he responded,

we see the Jews excluding themselves completely from the Arabs in language, school, commerce, customs, in their entire economic life. They cut themselves off in the same way from the indigenous government, whose protection they enjoy, so that the population considers them a foreign race. This is the reason for the grievance of the Arabs of Syria and Palestine against Jewish immigration.57

Undeterred, Zionists continued to emphasize the benefits that would accrue to the Arabs from an expanding Jewish presence, and used this line especially when addressing foreign audiences. ‘The more our settlements grow in number and area, the greater will be the number of Arab labourers who will be able to find in them remunerative employment’, one economist argued.⁵⁸ But Arab concerns deepened as it became clear that the newest settlers wanted to avoid their neighbours as much as possible rather than offer them work. And calls to replace Arab labourers by Jews, even at a higher cost to employers, increased after the start of what is known in Zionist parlance as the second aliya (literally ‘ascent’ or ‘wave of immigration’) in 1904. This wave of arrivals included members of socialist movements from Russia who had lived through the pogroms. David Gruen, born in Plonsk in Poland, who Hebraized his name to Ben-Gurion, was one of them. He arrived in Jaffa in 1906, aged nineteen, and made his way to Petah Tikvah – the ‘mother of the colonies’. Later he described his dismay at life in the ‘old’ colonies of the first aliya. ‘The first settlers became middlemen and shopkeepers who traffic in the hopes of their people, selling the aspirations of their youth for a pittance’, he wrote. ‘They introduced the idol of exile into the temple of national rebirth, and creation of the homeland was desecrated by alien work’ – meaning Arab labour.⁵⁹ Ben-Gurion would subsequently welcome Arab ‘hatred’ because it forced reluctant Jewish farmers to take on more expensive Jewish workers and advance Zionist aspirations.⁶⁰ The first co-operative settlement, Degania, was established at Umm Juni, where the river Jordan flows into Lake Tiberias, in 1910.

In the same spirit, a group of Russian Jews from the Marxist Poalei Zion movement formed a society called HaShomer (The Watchman or Guard). Its goal was to replace Arab settlement guards, who were ‘notorious for their collaboration with pilferers or thieves’.⁶¹ Part of the problem settlers had was an utter lack of familiarity with the Arabic language, culture and customs. These radical youngsters became the standard bearers of a tough frontier ethos, emulating the natives and acquiring an aura of wild romanticism – part Cossack, part Bedouin. The slogan of HaShomer – ‘in blood and fire Judaea fell; in blood and fire Judaea shall arise’ – gave eloquent expression to its militant, irredentist spirit. Zionist writers were soon hailing a new breed of Jew who was ‘at home in the saddle and a fair marksman, fluent in Arabic and crowned with the distinctive headgear of the countryside, as proof of the capacity of Eastern European Jews to take root in the land of their fathers’.62 Not for the last time, the dictates of security were to have important implications for Zionist-Arab relations. In July 1913, following an incident involving Arabs from Zarnuqa and Jews from the neighbouring colony of Rehovot, the ‘Palestinian cowboys’ of HaShomer were accused of beating Arab workers and intimidating Jewish farmers to stop employing them. The guards were said to have endangered lives ‘for the sake of a bunch of grapes’.⁶³ Other ‘unpleasant’ acts were omitted from the official history of the organization and later memoirs.⁶⁴ Earlier that year a well-attended sports event in Rehovot impressed an Arab observer with speeches in Hebrew, displays of Zionist flags and horse-racing in which both men and women participated, most of them wearing Bedouin clothing so ‘you would have thought they were Arabian warriors on horseback’.⁶⁵

SURVIVING HATRED

Statistical evidence underlines the rising human cost of the confrontation, though it was on a small scale. In the twenty-seven years between 1882 and 1909, thirteen Jews were killed by Arabs, but only two of them for apparently ‘national’ reasons. In the Jaffa riots of 1908, Jews were attacked during Purim celebrations and one Arab was stabbed to death. In 1909 alone four Jews were killed for ‘nationalist’ motives, and between 1909 and 1913 twelve Jewish guards were killed. In 1911, after Arab sharecroppers were evicted from the land Arthur Ruppin had purchased from the Sursuq family near al-Fuleh, an Arab villager was killed in an altercation with Jewish workers from newly established Merhavia and three Jews were gaoled by the Ottoman authorities.⁶⁶ Violence, however, was still rare. And most Jewish immigrants lived in towns: between 1905 and 1913, 36 per cent of them wanted to settle in Jaffa, 38 per cent in Jerusalem and Hebron, and just 16 per cent in the agricultural colonies – whose novelty meant they attracted disproportionate attention.67 Still, the ‘blind spot’ of Zionism was getting harder to avoid. The ‘hidden question’ was creating open conflict.⁶⁸

Arab hostility was also having an effect on Jewish opinion. In 1913 the influential Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner attacked as ‘idealistic’ and ‘immoral’ calls for Arab–Jewish co-operation, and made clear what he believed had to be done:

In this small land there reside … no less than six hundred thousand Arabs, who despite their backwardness and lack of culture are masters of the land, in fact and in full knowledge of the fact; and we have perforce come here to enter among them and live with them. There is already hatred between us – so it must be and will continue to be. They are stronger than us in every possible way and could crush us underfoot. But we Jews are accustomed to being the weak among the strong and we must therefore be ready for the consequences of the hatred and must employ all the scant means at our disposal in order to survive here.⁶⁹

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, continued to speak in public of the prospects for co-operation with the Arabs but in private he expressed alarm about the growth of their national movement, the weakening of central authority in Constantinople (Istanbul) and an ‘intensive propaganda campaign … against selling lands to “Zionists”, the enemies of Turkey and the usurpers of Palestine’. He predicted: ‘We shall soon face a serious enemy and it won’t be enough to pay just money for the land.’⁷⁰ Moshe Smilansky, one of the founders of Rehovot, admitted in 1914 that Zionists had paid too little attention to Arabs, and while he hoped that compromise could be reached, he harboured no illusions. ‘We should not forget that we are dealing with a semi-savage people, with extremely primitive concepts’, he wrote. ‘This is their nature: if they sense that you are strong they will yield to you and repress their hatred; if they sense that you are weak, they will dominate you. They equate gentleness with impotence.’⁷¹

By the first years of the twentieth century, the trajectory for Jewish separatism in Palestine was firmly set. Arthur Ruppin told the 1913 Zionist Congress in Vienna – which was closely followed in Palestine’s now flourishing Arabic newspapers – that it was vital to concentrate on settling Jews at a few points to ‘achieve … the creation of a Jewish milieu and of a closed Jewish economy in which producers, consumers and middlemen shall all be Jewish’. Ruppin complained too that Jews in Jaffa were less willing to display national solidarity because they lived in mixed neighbourhoods with Arabs.72 On the eve of the First World War Arab critics of Zionism were well aware of these arguments, though they often exaggerated the numbers of Jews in the country and the amount of land they had purchased.⁷³ Khalil al-Sakakini, an influential Jerusalemite, confided in his diary in February 1914:

What I despise is this principle which [the Zionist] movement has set up, which is that it should subjugate another [national movement] to make itself strong, and that it should kill an entire nation so that it might live because this is as if it is trying to steal its independence and to take it by deceit out of the hand of destiny. This independence, which is acquired by cash, whereby the opportunity of other nations’ lethargy, weakness and indolence is exploited, is indeed a feeble independence, founded on sand. What will the Jews do if the national feeling of the Arab nation is aroused; how will they be able to stand up to [the Arabs]?⁷⁴

Filastin echoed these fears a few months later, and made a clear distinction between Jews and Zionists:

Ten years ago the Jews were living as Ottoman brothers loved by all the Ottoman races … living in the same quarters, their children going to the same schools. The Zionists put an end to all that and prevented any intermingling with the indigenous population. They boycotted the Arabic language and the Arab merchants, and declared their intention of taking over the country from its inhabitants.⁷⁵

But the Jews at least, for the moment, felt confident enough of the way ahead. Aaron Aaronsohn, born in Romania but raised in Zichron Yaakov (the largest Jewish employer of Arab workers), boasted of their achievements as the Allied victory over the Ottoman Empire finally neared in 1917: ‘We have strictly avoided Arab infiltration in our villages and we are glad of it. From national, cultural, educational, technical and … hygienic points of view the policy has to be strictly adhered to.’76 The Balfour Declaration and Britain’s conquest of Palestine offered the Zionists dazzling new opportunities in their promised land.