PART II. DOMINATION

Joshua 24:13, in The New American Bible, Revised Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 255.

2. FEELING GOOD ABOUT FEELING BAD

This chapter was updated in September 2016.

0.     For Bentwich’s trip to Jaffa, his acquaintance with Herzl, and the report for the First Zionist Congress, see Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013), pp. 3–4, 10.

0.     For background on Bentwich, see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 3. For the motives of Herzl and most early Zionists, see Shapira, Israel, pp. 16–23; see also Laurel Plapp, Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 28–29. For Bentwich’s worries, see Shavit, pp. 5–10.

0.     For the 6,500 Jews in Palestine at the end of the eighteenth century, see Shapira, Israel, p. 27. Others have written that the number was approximately two thousand lower or higher. For an estimate of the Jewish population that “did not exceed 5,000–6,000 in 1800” and “consisted of mainly Sephardi Jews,” see Ruth Kark and Joseph B. Glass, “The Jews in Eretz-Israel/Palestine: From Traditional Peripherality to Modern Centrality,” Israel Affairs 5, no. 4 (June 1999): 73–107. For a historical table on the proportion of “Orientals and Sephardim” in the world and Palestine, which states that the number of Jews in 1800 was 8,000, of whom 60 percent were “Orientals and Sephardim,” see Sammy Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 281. For the Jewish share of Palestine’s population at the time of Bentwich’s visit, see Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 10, 20, 24; Sergio DellaPergola, “Demographic Trends in Israel and Palestine: Prospects and Policy Implications,” p. 11; Smooha, p. 281; In Vigilant Brotherhood: The American Jewish Committee’s Relationship to Palestine and Israel (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1964), p. 6. In 1882, according to numerous Zionist sources, the Jewish population of Palestine was 24,000 (of whom 15,300 were Ottoman citizens) out of a total of 468,089 Ottoman citizens (not including foreigners), making up 5 percent of the total; in 1890, according to Zionist sources, it was 43,000 (of whom 17,991 were Ottoman citizens) out of a total of 532,000, making up 8 percent; in 1895, according to Zionist sources, it was 47,000 out of a total of 569,000, making up 8 percent. These figures are almost certainly inflated: they assume a number of noncitizen Jews in Palestine that is greater than the total number of foreigners (of any religion) registered by the Ottomans. The demographer and historian Justin McCarthy writes, “In 1893, the only year for which such data are available, the Ottomans registered 5,457 resident foreign nationals in the Jerusalem Sanjak and 2,742 in the entire Beirut Vilayet [that is, all of Palestine, plus three territorial units outside it—the sanjaks of Latakia, Tripoli, and Beirut]. Obviously all the enumerated foreigners were not Jews in Palestine, but even if they had been it would have added only 8,199 Jews to the 1893 figure [of 19,257 Jewish Ottoman citizens in Palestine], bringing the total number of Jews (Ottoman subjects plus foreigners) in Palestine to 28,000.” If one assumes a Jewish population of 27,456 in 1893 (19,257 citizens and 8,199 noncitizens, including those outside Palestine, in the Beirut Vilayet), Jews made up 5 percent of the 543,477 total population that year (535,278 Ottoman citizens and 8,199 noncitizens). If one assumes arbitrarily that half of the 2,742 foreigners in the Beirut Vilayet lived in the north (outside Palestine) and half in the south (inside it), then there were 6,828 foreigners in Palestine (1,371 in the Beirut Vilayet and 5,457 in the Jerusalem Sanjak). Assuming all of them were Jews, the Jewish share of the population would have been under 5 percent: 26,085 Jews (19,257 citizens and 6,828 noncitizens) out of a total population of 542,106 (535,278 Ottoman citizens and 6,828 noncitizens). McCarthy estimates that by 1914 the total number of Jews in Palestine was 56,754 (of whom 38,754 were Ottoman citizens) out of a total of 722,143 Ottoman citizens, making up just under 8 percent (and even lower if one were to include noncitizens who were not Jews). Both McCarthy and Zionist sources put the number of Jews in Palestine in 1918 at approximately 60,000, though they differ on the size of the total population, creating estimates of the share of Jews ranging from 8 percent (McCarthy) to 9 percent (Rabinovich and Reinharz). McCarthy, p. 37; Rabinovich and Reinharz, eds., Israel in the Middle East, pp. 571–72. According to Smooha (p. 281), by 1895, the majority of Jews in Palestine were Ashkenazi.

0.     For Bentwich’s alleged failure to see the Arabs surrounding him, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 10–13.

0.     For Shavit’s argument on the necessity of Zionism for Jewish survival, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 5–6. For the Kishinev pogrom, see Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 72. On the 35,000–40,000 Jews who immigrated to Palestine during the Second Aliya (1904–1914) and the far greater number (1.2 million) who went to the United States at this time, see Shapira, Israel, pp. 12, 42; Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. 74–75. On the secularism and idealism of those who went to Palestine then, see Shapira, Israel, pp. 42–62.

0.     For the share of Jews in Palestine (27 percent) at the end of 1935, a year in which nearly 62,000 Jews emigrated there, see Roger Owen and Şevket Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 249; McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, p. 35. For the quoted article by the leader of Rehovot’s orange growers, see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 62.

0.     For the number killed during the Arab Revolt, see Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman, and Khalil Shikaki, Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 21. For other estimates of the number of Arab deaths, ranging from 3,000 to 6,000, see Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009): pp. 314–54; Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 157. For Shavit on the end of Zionism’s utopian phase and the realization that conflict was unavoidable, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 52–53, 73–76.

0.     For the Jewish share of the population in 1947 (just under 32 percent), see Sergio DellaPergola, “Demographic Trends in Israel and Palestine: Prospects and Policy Implications,” p. 11. The previous year, in 1946, the figure was just under 30 percent. Rabinovich and Reinharz, eds., Israel in the Middle East, pp. 571–72. For the amount of land owned by Jews, see chapter 1, section iii, n. 81. On the number of casualties on each side, those for early April 1948—875 Jews and 967 Arabs—are known from official British figures, while the numbers by mid-May 1948 are not as clear. For an estimate of 2,000 Jewish deaths by mid-May 1948 (out of a total of 6,000 killed during the war), see Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 35. For an estimate of 4,000 Palestinian deaths by mid-May 1948, see figures by the Palestinian historian ‘Arif al-‘Arif cited in Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 23. For the British figures, see David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Israeli and Arab Strategy and Diplomacy (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 100. For estimates of the number of Palestinian refugees at this time, which vary from 250,000 to 350,000, see the following: for “over a quarter of a million,” see United Nations, “Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the Secretary-General of the United Nations,” May 15, 1948, http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=S/745; for 300,000, see Shapira, Israel, p. 162; for 350,000, see Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 131. Benny Morris estimates there were 250,000–300,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in what he calls the “second wave” of the Palestinian exodus, from April to June 1948, and states that some 200 Palestinian villages and towns had been conquered by the time of the Arab invasion in mid-May 1948. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, pp. 262, 34.

0.     For details of the attack on Lydda, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 107–8, 113–14, 125; for the number killed and Rabin’s order (“must be expelled quickly”), see Shavit, p. 108. For a rebuttal to Shavit’s account of the murders and expulsions at Lydda, disputing that a massacre had taken place, see Martin Kramer, “What Happened at Lydda,” Mosaic Magazine, July 1, 2014. For a response to Kramer—“Lydda was simultaneously the biggest massacre and biggest expulsion of the 1948 war.… [the] disproportion speaks massacre, not ‘battle’”—see Benny Morris, “Zionism’s ‘Black Boxes,’” Mosaic Magazine, July 13, 2014.

0.   For Shavit on “cleansing,” see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 110. For the Shavit quotes (“Lydda could not be” and “I’ll stand by the damned”), see Shavit, pp. 108, 131.

0.   For the Holocaust going unmentioned, the marginalization of Middle-Eastern Jewish culture, the forgetting of Palestinian refugees, the erasure of history, the replacement of Arab town names with Hebrew ones, and the demolition of Palestinian villages and building of Israeli ones, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 150–51, 160–62.

0.   For the doubling of the Jewish population, see Shapira, Israel, p. 208; Shavit, Promised Land, p. 148. For Shavit on Israel as an egalitarian and democratic state in these years, see Shavit, pp. 151, 355. For the flourishing of science and agriculture and the building of the nuclear reactor, see Shavit, pp. 149–51, 188–93.

0.   For Shavit’s realization that “the promise of peace was unfounded,” see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 253–54. For Shavit on the narrow base and dilettantish, “adolescent” leadership of the Israeli left, see Shavit, p. 244. For Shavit on peace as a “plaint against the Right and the settlers,” see Shavit, p. 253. For Shavit on the peace camp’s misleading focus on 1967 as a way of distracting from and denying 1948, its ignoring “Arab political culture,” its delusions about the nature of the conflict, see Shavit, pp. 245, 254, 265–66. For Shavit on Palestinian citizens of Israel wanting to change the Jewish character of the state, see Shavit, pp. 313–24. For Shavit on the 1948 problem having no solution (in his shorthand, all of the Palestinian population centers that were taken over by Israel in 1948 are invoked when he mentions the name of one of two towns, Lydda and Hulda, which are used interchangeably), see Shavit, pp. 265, 267.

0.   Ibid., p. 205.

0.   Ibid., p. 253. On camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by police, see Shapira, Israel, p. 225. On DDT, see Shavit, Promised Land, pp. 157, 280, 286. For Shavit’s quote (“had no Arabs”), see Shavit, p. 252.

0.   For Shavit congratulating himself for having “dared touch the fire,” see his December 2, 2013, talk at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnA-kDX9BY8, accessed August 23, 2016. A similar quote can be found in video of his November 19, 2013, speaking event at the 92nd Street Y in New York: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeDxRFeNs_o, accessed August 23, 2016.

0.   For Shavit’s use of the Holocaust (he describes the concentration camps of the Holocaust as “Zionism’s ultimate arguments,” implying that the movement’s justification before the Second World War is primarily retroactive), see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 394.

0.   Likewise, Shavit assumes but does not attempt to defend the notion of Jewish proprietary rights to Palestine by virtue of hereditary links to ancient residents. The historian Anita Shapira could as well have been referring to Shavit when she wrote of early Zionists that “the continuity of rights in the past and the future was not subject to questioning.” (When Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, was asked by a British commission by what right the Jews claimed ownership of Palestine, he is said to have replied, “Memory is right.”) Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 41; for the Weizmann quote, see Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 37. Highly influential Zionist figures, such as the journalist Micha Josef Berdyczewski, did, however, question the historical right: “The country is not ours,” Berdyczewski wrote, “inasmuch as for a thousand years it was forsaken by us, and other peoples conquered it in blood, saturating its soil. Thus, doubt speaks in our hearts, on occasion, adding another burden for us to carry.” Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 45–46.

0.   On the centrality of religious ideas, traditions, and texts in early Zionism, see Shapira, Israel, p. 15; Shapira, Land and Power, p. 41. The idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and redeem the world, Shapira writes, coincided with a rise in Christian missionary activity in Palestine and seems to have originated among a group of evangelical English Protestants in the 1840s. The Jewish left bitterly opposed the idea because it was based on religion, while Jewish conservatives, like much of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox community today, considered it sacrilegious interference with God’s plan. For the Shapira quote (“seminal text”), see Shapira, Israel, p. 58. In Land and Power (p. 28), Shapira writes that “the Bible was the battlefield on which the struggle over the nature of the new national ethos was waged.” For the piety of Eastern European Jews as the reason the Zionist movement chose Palestine over other territories, see Shapira, Israel, pp. 22–23; Shapira, Land and Power, p. 9.

0.   Estimates of the number of Jews who entered Palestine during the First Aliya vary widely, but most sources share in common the assertion that the majority of immigrants did not stay. For an estimate of 60,000, of whom between half and 70 percent left the country, see Shapira, Israel, p. 33. For an estimate of 30,000 immigrants, of whom only half remained in Palestine, see Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida and Hani Zubida, “Patterns of Immigration and Absorption,” Israel Studies: An Anthology, 2012, p. 5, available at: http://www.israel-studies.com/anth_pdf/Zubida.pdf. For an estimate of 20,000–30,000 immigrants who entered Palestine, see Robert Bachi, The Population of Israel (Jerusalem: Scientific Translations International), p. 79, available at: http://www.cicred.org/Eng/Publications/pdf/c-c26.pdf.

   For an argument that even Bachi’s lower estimate of 20,000 is too high and doesn’t account for the large number of immigrants who left Palestine, see McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, pp. 20, 23. In the Second Aliya (1904–1914), according to Shapira (p. 33), “some 40,000 immigrants came to Palestine, and more than 60 percent of them eventually left, with some estimates putting that figure even higher.” See also Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. 74–75. For Shavit’s quote (“the national moral leader”), see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 43. For Ahad Ha’am’s views, see Shapira, Israel, pp. 21–22.

0.   For Shavit on Palestine’s emptiness (echoing the old Zionist slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land”), see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 12. For the Zionist slogan, which was common at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, see Shapira, Land and Power, p. 42. For the Ahad Ha’am quote, see Ahad Ha’am, “A Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” translated by Hilla Dayan, in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. (New York: Grove Press, 2003), pp. 15–16.

0.   For text of Epstein’s lecture, see Yitzhak Epstein, “The Hidden Question,” Qumsiyeh.org, accessed August 21, 2016, http://qumsiyeh.org/yitzhakepstein/. In Land and Power, Anita Shapira quotes Hillel Zeitlin, a member of the territorialist camp: “What all the Palestinians [he means the Zionists of Zion] forget, mistakenly or maliciously, is that Palestine belongs to others, and it is totally settled.… For what reason and why would they give you Palestine … at the same time that they themselves want to be the lords of the land, who are the ones who are settled there and till the land and who wish to rule over it?” The Zionists of Zion, Shapira writes, “answered these pointed questions by the reply that if Palestine were not given to them, they would take it by force.” Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 46–47.

0.   For Shavit’s quote (“absolute, universal justice that cannot be refuted”), see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 52. For Sharett’s quote (“not a single Arab”), see Shapira, Land and Power, p. 227. For the Ben Gurion quote (“we are the aggressors”), see Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 676.

0.   For Shavit’s quote (“unjust colonial movement”), see Shavit, Promised Land, p. 31. For the promotion of Jewish labor, the efforts to close the economy to Arab workers, the Arab petitions against Jewish immigration, and the urban lifestyle chosen by most immigrants, see Shapira, Land and Power, p. 220; Shapira, Israel, pp. 96, 106–7, 145, 147. For Shapira’s quote (“Despite all the preaching”), see Shapira, Israel, p. 112.