The Trouble With Zionism
Why the Middle East Will Never Have Peace
Background
The idea of a homeland for the Jews was first formally proclaimed by Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, in a book that he published in February 1896. He believed that that the Jews in Europe would always face discrimination and hatred from the majority, and this hatred could only be ameliorated if the Jews had their own homeland. He used all the contacts he had to convince influential people to support him, even going so far as to petition the German Kaiser for his help.
In May 1901, he met the Ottoman Caliph Abdul Hamid II, offering to arrange for the complete repayment of Ottoman debt in return for allowing Jewish access to Palestine, then under Ottoman control, and considered by Herzl to be the traditional home of the Jewish people. Abdul Hamid refused this offer, telling Herzl that when his Caliphate was “one day destroyed then they (the Zionists) would be able to take Palestine without a price.”
The British subsequently offered the Zionists a homeland in East Africa, but this was ultimately rejected, and it is to Palestine that Zionist aims were thereafter targeted, at the highest levels of the British and other governments.
These efforts finally bore fruit in November 1917, when the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, issued a letter to Lord Rothschild, stating that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
However, there were two big elephants that everyone, including the Zionists themselves, completely missed. To understand this, let us shift perspective for a while, and look at the same story from a different angle — let’s call it the “brown man’s” viewpoint.
The First Elephant
Theodore Herzl, and other European Jews, may have thought of themselves as Jews first, trying to escape centuries of persecution and pogroms. But, if we play the race card for a while, then from a brown man’s perspective, they were Europeans who happened to be Jews, so they thought exactly like other Europeans of their time; namely, that the rest of the world could somehow be divided up by drawing lines on a map, and the land then allocated to this or that European power.
The problem, as we all know, was that the land of Israel was no emptier in 1900 than it had been three thousand years earlier (assuming that the events of Exodus really did occur, and if they did, then they occurred during the time of Pharaoh Ramses II). The promised land would have to be emptied first.
In this specific instance, no one — not the British, nor the European Jews — considered how the Jews were to be given a homeland in Palestine without prejudicing the rights of the people who were already living there, or why these people would graciously step aside and let foreigners from a different continent take over their land. Compounding the problem even further, the British, desperate to get Arab support against the Ottoman Empire, which was on the German side during World War I, had already promised the same piece of land to the Arabs, provided they revolted against the Ottomans (think Lawrence of Arabia).
Even the Jews believed that what they had been promised was not just the land to the west of the Jordan River (Cis-Jordan, roughly modern Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank), but also the land to the east of it, i.e. Trans-Jordan, roughly the modern-day state of Jordan.
After the end of World War I, the British tried to make the best out of all that they had promised, essentially deciding to break their promises to the Arabs in the process. The Americans, at that time still idealistic about the world, and the rights of non-Europeans, objected to this. They proposed a commission to investigate what the indigenous people of the region wanted, which must have seemed bizarre to the French and the British, who naturally rejected this proposal. Nonetheless, the Americans went ahead independently, creating a commission headed by Charles Crane and Dr. Henry King.
The resultant King-Crane Report recommended that one Arab state, which would have comprised the current modern areas of Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, be created under American mandate, and if this was not possible, under a British one. The British and the French subverted this ideal, creating a multitude of different states, with different tribal and religious groups all thrown together. This made the area, with its oil reserves, easier to control (there you have it again, this very “European” idea of drawing lines on other people’s lands).
The King-Crane Report also rejected out of hand all Zionist arguments and aspirations, which today is attributed to anti-Semitism on Charles Crane’s part. Whatever the truth of these allegations, Crane himself is reported to have said that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained” — a prophetic statement in view of what would occur later.
The Zionist movement tried to create its own facts on the ground in the period between the two world wars, buying up as much land as possible, and encouraging Jewish immigration into Palestine, which led to rising tensions with the local Arab population. The holocaust against the Jews in World War II, and the subsequent dislocations and movements of people within Europe after the war, led to an increased stream of Jewish refugees flowing into Palestine.
The British, having apparently changed their minds about a Jewish homeland, tried to contain this flow, but failed, and in the end, basically gave up and walked away, washing their hands of the problem. The matter went to the United Nations, and the principle of partitioning the land to the west of the Jordan River (i.e. partitioning Cis-Jordan) into a Jewish Israel and an Arab Palestine was formally approved in a vote of the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947.
This led to a war in 1948, which the Israelis won, gaining control of more territory than they had been allocated, leaving only the West Bank under Jordanian control, and the Gaza strip under Egyptian control. The region has since then been wracked by war and instability, with the Israeli army engaging in three wars with various Arab countries, in 1956, 1967, and 1973, and invading Lebanon twice, in 1982 and 2006, not to mention the simmering and almost continuous conflict with the Palestinians, which persists even today.
The Second Elephant
The second elephant is less obvious. When the Europeans who happened to be Jews drew a circle on a portion of the Middle East, and called it a Jewish homeland, they were — as a corollary, though they may not have realized it — effectively stating that the rest of the Middle East was not for Jews.
The problem is, there were plenty of Jews living in the Middle East, scattered from Morocco to Iran. In some areas, such as Baghdad, they were a significant minority. This Jewish population — let’s call them Arab Jews — had lived alongside Arab Muslims and Arab Christians for millennia as distinct communities, because under the Ottoman millet system, Jews as well as the various Christian sects were allowed to maintain their own civil legal systems. Culturally as well as linguistically, these were Arabs who happened to be Jews, living amongst other Arabs who happened to be Christian or Muslim.
While we cannot pretend that these communities were always living in perfect harmony with each other for all these centuries, for the most part they lived in peaceful coexistence. Certainly, there were no pogroms, no inquisitions, no forced conversions, and no humiliation rituals, of the sort that European Jews had been experiencing for centuries. Moreover, the need for the Arabs to differentiate themselves from the Ottoman Empire, as it was collapsing after World War I, further reinforced this pan-Arab identity (as opposed to the pan-Islamic identity that the Ottoman Empire had nurtured to maintain the stability of its multi-ethnic empire).
The rise of Zionism changed all that. Instead of being seen as Arabs who happened to be Jews, these Arabs came to be seen as Jews, pure and simple, by the majority, no different from the European Jews who were seen as dispossessing the people living in the land allocated to the Zionists.
Whatever one’s political persuasion is, it must be accepted that the formation of Israel created a vast human tragedy in the Middle East. The Zionist movement was primarily a European Jewish phenomenon which appeared to have completely ignored the fact that there were almost 800,000 Arab Jews living in various countries in the Middle East, just as there were Arabs — Jewish, Christian, and Muslim — living in the land that the Zionists wanted as a Jewish homeland.
Just as the formation of Pakistan resulted in a huge population transfer of Hindus and Muslims into the newly created and independent nations, so the events leading up to the formation of Israel, as well as subsequent to its formation, resulted in almost all of these Arab Jews being forced to relocate to Israel, as the frustration of the Arabs spilled over against the Arab Jews in their midst.
Like in India, communities that had stayed together in relative harmony now turned against each other, their shared cultural heritage overtaken by an emphasis on their different faiths. However, a major difference, as compared to the situation in the Middle East, was that Hindus and Muslims, no matter how different in terms of religion, were both seen as indigenous to the land.
Like beauty, Israel is in the eyes of the beholder. To the Jews, it is the Promised Land, a return to the land that their forefathers held intermittently for a period of a thousand years, two thousand years ago. To the Arabs, it is a stain that was imposed upon them and their land by Europeans, a colony that still persists even after the colonial period in world history is over.
So long as the Jews see this piece of land as their exclusive homeland, and the Palestinian Arabs see the same land as something that was taken by force from them, and to which their descendants have a right to return, the chances of peace are extremely slim. Any peace agreements, no matter how well-meaning, will just paper over a chasm that separates not just two communities, but two very different perspectives of history.
