Those Ancient Lands

There is only one forward-looking question to ask about the excruciating horror in Gaza: How will it end? By “how,” I’m talking not just about the short-term mechanics of an enduring ceasefire, but also about the “how” of the aftermath: How do enemies become neighbours? Yet there’s another, more backward-looking question that cries out for an answer: Where and when did this conflict begin? After all, the narrative that led to Hamas’s October 7 massacre one year ago, followed by Israel’s brutal invasion, comes fitted out with a profusion of disjointed prologues and competing plot lines. The geopolitical and humanitarian challenge of envisioning what tomorrow might look like is contingent to some degree on attaining a clearer assessment of what happened yesterday.

It’s often been said that history has been weaponized by both sides in this fight. Israel’s hard right has perpetuated slurs against the Palestinian people, not least of which is the old aspersion that the Palestinians didn’t exist as any kind of cohesive social entity in the late nineteenth century, when Jewish immigration to the region began in earnest. Many outsiders considered the land arid and neglected, a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, as the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl posited in 1896. Herzl’s famous pamphlet, The Jewish State, like his subsequent addresses at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, focused on European antisemitism as the motivation behind a plan to establish a new nation-state in Argentina or Palestine; he had almost nothing to say about the inhabitants of the proposed locales (the British later offered Uganda as another option).

Herzl’s few references to Syria, as the region was then known, centred on Abdul Hamid II and the attractive deal that Jewish settlers could strike with the sultan and his officials. “The advent of Jews would bring about an improvement in the situation of the Christians in the Orient,” Herzl assured the attendees of that first congress, held in Basel, Switzerland. Very much a man of his times, he had previously opined, “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” In an 1895 diary entry, recorded during his only visit to the region, Herzl described the Palestinian population as “penniless” and predicted they could be spirited away if lured with the prospect of work elsewhere.

Whether intentionally or out of ignorance, Herzl’s characterization misrepresented the reality of nineteenth-century Syria. Egypt had invaded the area in 1831 and stayed for nearly a decade — until Ottoman and European forces reclaimed it in 1840. Through the middle of the century, Palestine’s fertile lowlands were transformed into prosperous farms as merchants in Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa exported commodities like cotton, olive oil, and sesame to European markets, according to Alexander Schölch, the West German historian and specialist in Palestinian history. A volume bringing together his scholarship, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development, was published in 1993. It shows how Palestine’s agricultural sector was so linked to global markets that the region benefited from rising cotton prices related to the demand for uniforms during the American Civil War.

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, Palestine’s population included Bedouin tribes and a large contingent of heavily taxed farmers — the fellahin — as well as traders, scholars, and other elites living in Jerusalem and regional cities like Nablus, while the Ottoman Empire extended from the Arabian Peninsula to the Balkans. Following the defeat of the Egyptians, Ottoman officials embarked on a program to assert more centralized control across the empire’s far-flung territories, a new strategy for a rickety regime known for its corruption and tolerance of ethnic and religious minorities.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Ottoman governors ousted Palestinian clan leaders, while property speculators, many based in Beirut, assembled agricultural land, forcing the fellahin to become tenant farmers. At the same time, Palestine became a destination for French, German, Greek, and English missionaries, as well as tourists eager for a taste of the Near East. This area, in other words, was attracting all sorts of unwelcome incursions from outsiders well before Jewish settlers began setting up farming “colonies”— the precursors of the kibbutzim — in the 1890s.

Schölch notes that these politically unstable years were also marked by constant skirmishes and raids by Bedouin clans against Palestinian villages and towns. However, by the 1880s, the region’s economy was profiting from increased exports to Europe. By 1882, the population of Palestine stood at about 470,000, over 80 percent of whom were Muslim, with about half living in villages, towns, and big cities. Those decades marked a period of “economic and socio-political transformation.”

In the introduction to his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, paints a fine-grained portrait of the richness of that bygone world. Living in the warren of Jerusalem’s Old City, his ancestors included scholars, legal functionaries, and politicians, among them a former mayor. In 1899, his grandfather Raghib al‑Khalidi founded a library in Jerusalem with a bequest from his mother. The building “houses more than twelve hundred manuscripts, mainly in Arabic (some in Persian and Ottoman Turkish), the oldest dating back to the early eleventh century. . . . The collection is one of the most extensive in all of Palestine that is still in the hands of its original owners.” The picture Khalidi proceeds to paint with his book bears little resemblance to the tabula rasa Herzl expected Jewish migrants to see in the Holy Land.

Plenty of misconceptions are found on the other side of this conflict as well. The most common is that Israel was established in response to the Holocaust. The Zionist nation-building project, backed by Britain and then the United States, had been well under way since the aftermath of the First World War. A second misconception is that Zionism can be regarded as a hegemonic colonial program that evolved inevitably from Herzl’s early organizing initiatives. A third is the lack of acknowledgement by many critics of Zionism of the historical context from which this movement originated.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Jewish life in Europe was changing substantially. Long relegated to ghettos and subject to severe restrictions, Jews tentatively began venturing out into Christian society. By mid-century, as liberal reformers and revolutionaries fought for universal human rights, Jews across the continent had won their emancipation, gaining access to previously restricted professions and winning the right to own property as well as participate in political activity. In many countries, this epochal change enabled Jews to begin the fraught process of social assimilation, moving beyond the insular world of the shtetl or the ghetto in pursuit of a modern life that was no longer circumscribed by religion.

Long-entrenched anti-Jewish sentiment didn’t disappear, of course. In Russia, Alexander II ordered brutal pogroms in the early 1880s, forcing thousands to flee, to either western Europe or the United States. The rising tide of hatred gained momentum in Hungary and then France thanks to highly inflammatory accusations against Jews, some of them blood libels and others, like the charges in the Dreyfus Affair, that trafficked in allegations of divided loyalties.

By the end of the nineteenth century, antisemitism — hatred rooted in dubious racial theories as opposed to classical Christian dogma — entered the fray, giving rise to a deluge of racially bigoted newsletters and the political ascent of hate-mongers like Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor from 1897 to 1910. The upshot was that despite the reforms of the 1840s and 1850s, both religious and assimilated Jews in many parts of Europe found themselves facing a violent backlash not unlike the avalanche of racism in the American South during Reconstruction.

Herzl’s vision of Zionism — a term actually coined a few years earlier by an Austrian Jew named Nathan Birnbaum — responded to this onslaught of antisemitism and to the so‑called Jewish question, which he formulated as the perennial problem of a disenfranchised minority seeking to make space for itself within a hostile society. Herzl believed the creation of a Jewish state somewhere — and not necessarily for all Jews — offered a two-for-one solution. First, Jews who wanted to leave the hatred of their countries could find a new home. Second, Christian nations could rid themselves of a source of tension that never seemed to subside.

Herzl didn’t have a monopoly on the subject — quite the opposite. The fights among the various camps were intense and often bitter. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Zionism became a kind of Rorschach test, a screen upon which polemicists, philosophers, rabbis, and others projected their aspirations. Rather than seeing Zionism as a response to antisemitism, some saw it in messianic terms that aligned with the desire, expressed during the Passover Seder, to return to the Holy Land from which the Jews had been expelled, as tradition holds, in 70 CE. “The issue at stake in this discussion is not merely the correct understanding of Zionism,” observed the rabbi and scholar Arthur Hertzberg in the introduction of The Zionist Idea, the classic 1959 anthology. “It involves the fundamental question of the total meaning of Jewish history.”

Another school saw Zionism as an antidote to the apparent spiritual degradations of assimilation or the “negation of the diaspora”— the latter a contentious stance in these debates, as the New York University historian David Engel notes in The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, from 2021. Liberal reforms in the 1850s had allowed Jews to join mainstream society, but some influential voices saw the Zionist movement as a way to reverse a drift they considered to be sounding the death knell of traditional Jewish society. Their ranks included Asher Ginsberg, a Talmudic scholar from Ukraine who advised the future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann in his negotiations with the British cabinet. Those talks led to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged the creation of a Jewish state, with the proviso that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Like Herzl, Ginsberg (later known as Ahad Ha’am) didn’t call for Jews to return en masse to Palestine; rather, he saw settlement in Palestine as a way of elevating the spirit of Judaism from its debased diasporic state.

What’s more, Zionists didn’t represent a broad swath of Jewish public opinion. In Russia, the Yiddish-speaking working class, which eventually coalesced into a party called the Bund, vigorously opposed the movement. As socialists, Bundists regarded it, with its reliance on wealthy benefactors prepared to invest in land in Palestine, as a bourgeois cause. They also hewed to a belief in doikayt or “hereness”: the aspirational idea that even though Jews had wandered for centuries, they should make the most of wherever they happened to be.

The Jewish activist and historian Simon Dubnow, who hailed from Belarus, argued in favour of “autonomism,” a constitutional arrangement (think “distinct society”) that would allow Jews to live independently in a specified area, but within the framework of a broader nation-state. The Soviet Union dabbled for a time in this notion, establishing the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Siberia. The scheme proved to be a Stalinist boondoggle, although, as the journalist Masha Gessen observes in Where the Jews Aren’t, from 2016, some vestiges remain.

While the bulk of Zionist polemicists hailed from central Europe and Russia, the movement took up a coherent geopolitical agenda only after the British joined the conversation in the 1910s, when Zionist leaders began negotiating with Whitehall. That story is not really about Judaism, however, but rather a quirk of evangelical Protestantism. “A late-nineteenth-century colonial-national movement,” Khalidi explains, “adorned itself with a biblical coat that was powerfully attractive to Bible-reading Protestants in Great Britain and the United States, blinding them to the modernity of Zionism and to its colonial nature.”

As far back as Saint Augustine, a strand of Christian dogma has held that when exiled Jews return to the Holy Land and convert to Christianity, they will be heralding the Second Coming. This idea, which informs the pro-Israeli views of American evangelicals, had all sorts of purchase with nineteenth-century English politicians and the missionary arms of Protestant churches. Schölch, in a paper about the roots of the Balfour policy, wrote that “England’s ‘Gentile Zionists’ broke into everyday politics with their notion of the ‘restoration of the Jews’ ” in the 1840s. Half a century before Herzl, England’s leaders urged Ottoman officials to welcome the settlement of Jews in Palestine, not least because they had access to capital.

The English weren’t the only European power with missionary outposts in the Near East; the French and Germans were there too, at least in part to help steady the Ottoman Empire in the face of Russian expansionism. Yet the story of England’s preoccupation with the “restoration of the Jews” seems to be a crucial precursor to the (successful) negotiations between Zionist leaders, their financial backers, and British officials leading up to the Balfour Declaration and the Treaty of Versailles two years later. It was a classic example of transactional politics, one that powerfully bound an ascendant movement to Britain’s fading empire and perhaps also marked the end of the intellectual battles about Zionism’s philosophical goals. That said, England worked both sides of the street, cultivating Arab allies in the post-Ottoman Middle East and, at certain points during the life of the British Mandate (1918–48), dialling back Jewish immigration to Palestine for tactical reasons.

The Holocaust and its aftermath — hundreds of thousands of survivors who couldn’t or wouldn’t return to their homes — accelerated the Zionists’ drive to attain statehood. The Shoah also reoriented the views of many American Jews who had previously been indifferent to the Zionist project, an understandable attitude given how good life was in the United States and how harsh conditions were in Palestine.

Khalidi’s telling of the long war on Palestine provides a critical counter-narrative to the heroic story of Israel’s own independence movement and subsequent military victories. It is a sobering account of a colonizing and colonially inspired exercise of dispossession that began before the Nakba — or catastrophe — of 1947–49 and that continues to this day with Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Yet the Zionist label, which is now shorthand for extreme Israeli aggression, has never accurately reflected the complexity of the country established in its name. The thousands of displaced persons who arrived after the Second World War were not necessarily welcomed with open arms, and many ended up leaving. Although European Jews dominated Israel’s left-leaning politics until the 1980s, these Holocaust survivors were often regarded as weak and submissive — part of a collective that failed (or so the thinking went) to resist the Nazi death machine. “Never again” in this context doesn’t mean never allowing another genocide; it means never again submitting to genocidal aggression.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of Sephardim, expelled from the Middle East and North Africa during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the later migration of Russians created deep social and political rifts. Ethiopian Jews were met with overt racism. Hard-right American settlers imported a gun-toting frontier mentality that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the ideas that animated Zionists in any earlier period, including the nineteenth-century nationalism lurking around the edges of Herzl’s thinking. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have always rejected Zionism and refused military service. So who, exactly, are these Zionists so often referred to today and what do “they” want?

There are, interestingly, strong parallels in Palestinian politics, as Khalidi documents with a kind of clear-eyed candour that doesn’t surface all that often. Among other things, he provides a close analysis of the failings of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s and the disputatious nature of Palestinian activism and governance — one that goes well beyond shallow media accounts of infighting between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Neither side seems capable of getting its story straight, but perhaps the fissures that have destabilized them in this horrific clash can serve as a reminder that binary solutions will never succeed. “While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged,” Khalidi writes, “there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other.” Ending that corrosive mutual denial, and the bloodshed flowing from it, could profitably begin with all parties agreeing to properly understand the knotted and meandering backstories that brought them here in the first place.