In the wake of the Second World War, partition on the basis of ethnic cleansing has been the favored solution to perceived problems of ethnic conflict. South Africa’s one- state response to apartheid was the exception, cutting against the grain of Allied logic in postwar Europe and the partitions of Cyprus, the Indian subcontinent, and Sudan.
South Africa offers an especially illumining comparison when considering the case of Israel /Palestine. The South African moment challenged the assumption that cultural difference must translate into political difference, cultural identity into political identity. By contrast, the purpose of Zionism is precisely to make this translation: to make the experience of being Jewish—historically a matter of religious practice, upbringing, and lineage— into an experience of nationhood and to tie this nation to a state. A central tenet of political modernity as it emerged from Europe is that the state exists to protect and further the interests of the nation; in Israel, the state exists to protect and further the interests the Jewish nation, which constitutes Israel’s permanent majority identity.
Zionism arguably is the most perfected expression of European political modernity in a colonial context. Zionism is both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions. Nationalism made the European Jew an impossible presence in Europe, yet, steeped in the same ideology that denied them dignity and equality in Europe, Zionists decided that Jews’ only option was a state of their own, so they went elsewhere to build it. When they did, they became the oppressor, for in the nation- state, one can be only the oppressor or the oppressed, the majority or the minority, the nation or the other.
Throughout its history, Zionism has struggled to come to terms with its colonial self. The Israeli state, since its founding, has professed to be neutral with respect to difference of religion, ethnicity, and nation, claiming to guarantee the civil rights of everyone in the state territory. As a secular, democratic state based in the rule of law, Israel enjoins itself to protect all citizens equally. These are, after all, inheritances of the European state model Israel’s founders self- consciously emulated. Yet Israel is also a Jewish state, which, in practice, means that it is neither democratic nor secular nor protective of the equal rights of its inhabitants. Non- Jewish citizens in Israel are second- class citizens in law, officially denied state services and marked for dispossession.
That is what it is to be a non- Jew in the Jewish national homeland. Tzipi Livni, a prominent Israeli liberal politician, puts it this way: “I would like to see the State of Israel be a home for Arab Israelis, but it cannot be their national home.” Israel proper, excluding the West Bank and Gaza, is indeed home to Palestinians, almost 2 million of them. But because Israel is not their national home, they do not exercise sovereignty in it. Law assures that they lack the ability to influence state action or petition the state to secure their interests. While any Jew is automatically a citizen of Israel, non- Jews with longstanding ties to the land face huge hurdles to obtaining citizenship.
While the state, in league with quasi- public institutions such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, assures that Jews have access to land on which to build and farm, non- Jews have had their land confiscated, are barred from developing their cities, and are routine victims of home demolitions carried out by the Israeli security apparatus. Palestinian Israelis are surveilled by Israeli security agents in their schools and communities, barred from participating in the armed forces, and barred from collecting numerous state benefits that accrue to such service. Palestinian Israelis can vote and run for once, but on highly constrained terms. Merely expressing the desire for equal rights can result in prohibition from running, and anyone in once who questions Israel’s favoritism toward Jews can be removed from their position.
Israel’s laws respect the ongoing pursuit of Zionization, whereby the state is made and remade to serve the Jewish nation to the exclusion of others But Zionization is more than a matter of law. As a nation- state project, it also involves the collapse of state and society into a single entity. To be a Zionist is not just to believe that Israel should be the Jewish national home; it is to equate the Jewish people with the state of Israel. From this perspective, protecting the rights of Jews the world over to practice their religion (or choose not to), own and make use of property, and generally follow their aspirations in freedom and security requires the existence of a state that is itself Jewish.
Preserving Jewish society means preserving the Jewish state. This is the subject of the first section of the chapter. As in other nation- states, the fostering of the nation is both a legal and social endeavor, for the protected society does not simply exist in nature. It must be created in the image of the nation, which means that its diversity must be eliminated. Non- Jews must be expunged and nonconformist Jews made to conform, so that all people there respect the Jewish ideal imagined by the national majority. I call this process Judaization and describe it in section two.
The expunging of non- Jews has taken the form of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, segregation, fragmentation, apartheid, and denial of identity. During the 1948 war of in dependence, Jewish soldiers actively drove out non- Jewish Palestinians from their communities. Some 750,000 were exiled, and tens of thousands of others were displaced internally. All lost their lands and homes, which were “redeemed” by their new Jewish owners. Meanwhile, those non- Jewish Palestinians who remained in Israel were concentrated into zones of military occupation for two decades. In the years since, their towns and homes have been declared illegal, so that they have no recourse when the state confiscates or destroys them. Palestinian citizens of Israel are framed as an internal enemy. Their legal deprivation and immiseration are intended to complete the task begun in 1948.
If Israel is to be a state for Jews only, it must answer the question of who is a Jew. Its answer cannot avoid fattening the diversity of world Jewry into the Jewry sanctioned by the nation. This is the other side of Judaization: eliminating not only non- Jews but also unacceptable forms of Jewishness. The acceptable form is associated with Ashkenazim, who trace their lineage to Yiddish- speaking parts of Europe. Ashkenazim were the founders of the state, who embraced the role of civilizers who bring other Jews into line with the national ideal. In particular, Ashkenazim have sought to civilize Mizrahim,Arab Jews. Arab Jews present a special challenge to Zionism, for Zionism presumes that Arab and Jewish identity are both incompatible and indelibly hostile toward one another— otherwise there would be no need of a Jewish state in historic Palestine. What happens, then, when the Arab is also a Jew? What happens is that the Arab Jew becomes the object of modernity’s civilizing mission. Mizrahim have been de-Arabized through the suppression of the Arabic language and associated culture in Israel. Over time, Mizrahim have responded to Judaization almost exactly as intended, as many have embraced a strand of hard- core religious Judaism devoted to the expansion of Israel through settlement. Colonized by Ashkenazim, they have outdone their civilizer, dispensing with his secularism and emerging as the tip of Israel’s spear.
The collapse of state and society and attendant projects of Zionization and Judaization were not historical necessities. Jewish people can and do live in freedom and security in states having no Jewish character, states where they are able to exercise sovereignty by taking elective roles in democratic politics. Recognizing this, large numbers of Jews have left Israel for non- Zionist states that do not uphold Jewish privilege. Indeed, there could have been Jewish society in Palestine without a Jewish state. There was Jewish society in Palestine in the absence of a Jewish state—in the absence even of an effort to build such a state. This is where the chapter begins, with the Jews who lived in Ottoman Palestine and migrated to it in order to live out their spiritual undertaking in the Holy Land.
Jews who made pilgrimage to Palestine were not settlers. They were immigrants. They chose to become members of a preexisting local political community, not to establish their own. This is the key to distinguishing Zionism from earlier Jewish presence in Palestine. Immigrants are unarmed; settlers come armed with both weapons and a nationalist agenda. Immigrants come in search of a homeland, not a state; for settlers, there can be no homeland without a state. For the immigrant, the homeland can be shared; for the settler, the state must be a nation- state, a preserve of the nation in which all others are at most tolerated guests.
We must keep this settler- immigrant distinction at the heart of our thinking, for doing otherwise perpetuates two serious intellectual errors. The first error claims that religion was irrelevant to Zionism, a claim predicated on drawing sharp distinctions between enduring religious Jewish presence in Palestine and more recent secular presence. Another error, the flipside of the first, essentializes Zionists as Jews, rendering opposition to their project antisemitic. The first error makes Zionism and Zionization incoherent; the second makes it seem as though the conflict in Israel / Palestine is between Jews and those who hate them, rather than between settlers and the community they dispossessed.
It is not the case that religion was irrelevant to Zionists. Although Israel’s Zionist founders were frequently atheists, and although their desire for a nation- state was inspired by modernity rather than millenarianism, their notion of the political community was fundamentally religious. They imagined an ingathering of Jews in the biblical Eretz Israel— the land of Israel. This biblical narrative has repercussions for the settler- native dynamic. In Israel, the non- Jew ceases to be a genuine native, no matter how long she and her ancestors have been in the territory. The genuine native is instead the Jew who left the homeland or was forced out of it, even if millennia ago. In the Zionist worldview, Palestinians are Canaanites who never left home; they are squatters, not natives. With the return of the native, the squatter must get out of the way to make room.
It is thus not the immigration of Jews to Palestine that unleashed an antagonistic dialectic between Jews and non- Jews there but rather the presumption among Jews that they had exclusive rights to the land. Before there was a state Zionists established a Jewish national identity in Palestine buttressed by exclusively Jewish institutions, setting of tensions with locals. After the establishment of the state, that antagonism deepened in the course of Israel’s further settlement. Zionists saw the UN agreement to partition the homeland as creating a temporary disconnect between Eretz Israel and the State of Israel, a disconnect to be overcome through further taking of territory and through the Judaization of the society within all the territory claimed by Israel.
Section three of the chapter turns to a par ticular element of Judaization and Zionization: the de- Arabizing of the Mizrahim and their instrumentalization for the purposes of settlement. Mizrahim have today become essential to the military machine and civil administration in the Occupied Territories. I show how official Zionism’s effort to Judaize Mizrahim both undermined Zionism’s secular heritage— thereby giving sanction to extremist religious tendencies in both the Mizrahi and other communities— and heightened the sense of a Palestinian national consciousness by injecting religiosity into settlement and injecting settlers into the Occupied Territories.
The post-1967 occupation brought Israeli Jews into close contact with Palestinians. At the same time, Palestinians in Israel were gaining new opportunities to participate in Israel’s civic life. Victory in 1967 and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank increased Israel’s confidence, fostering greater openness to the integration of Palestinian citizens. After two decades of captivity under a military regime, Israeli Palestinians began to struggle for individual equality. When they joined with occupied Palestinians in the First and Second Intifadas, this struggle gave way to an effort for group recognition: Palestinian nationhood. This marked a shift in the Palestinian liberation movement. Instead of armed struggle, the First and Second Intifadas and subsequent Palestinian mobilization in Israel and the Occupied Territories has been geared primarily toward political change. The goal has been to undo the Jewish state and replace it with a “state of all its citizens.”
The chapter closes with a discussion of possible futures they point to. The possibility of a two- state solution ended with the Oslo Accords of the mid- 1990s, at which representatives of the Palestinians gave away sovereignty over their desired future state to Israel. This resulted in growing interest in a range of one- state possibilities, including binationalism, an idea that predates the formation of the state.
Instead of these ideas, I point to de- Zionization, which would sever the state from the nation. The heart of de- Zionization is the realization of Israel as a state for all its citizens. I look to the South African moment as a model for de- Zionization. In South Africa, racial identities were depoliticized so that there would no longer be a permanent national majority alongside a permanent minority. De- Zionization would involve the depoliticization of Jewish and Palestinian identity, so that Israel may be a rights- protecting democracy rather than the servant of a permanent national majority. This eventuality, should it ever come, is not close. Israeli settlers retain the initiative in their effort to maintain the permanent national majority. For now, change in Israel depends on the slow work of changing perspectives and building associations in line with these—an epistemic revolution, in which Jewish Israelis rethink their political identity as historical rather than natural.
Zionization: The Making of a Settler State
At the core of political Zionism is the effort to build not just a Jewish religious community in the Holy Land but a Jewish state. This is an essential distinction, whose erasure gets to the heart of the matter: the conflation of society with state is the foundation of the nation- state and its program of rule by the permanent national majority. The nation- state is a state whose laws determine which residents are included in the national majority and whose laws and institutions prioritize the interests of that majority. The nation- state may call itself a democracy, as Israel does, but the majority is not actually determined through political contestation. Rather, the majority is defined pre- politically, as it is the nation itself.
In Israel the contours of the national majority are simultaneously obvious and elusive. On the one hand, the national majority are Jews. On the other hand, who is a Jew? Is a Jew any person who professes to hold beliefs and undertake practices that conform with Jewish theology and religious law (halacha)? Is “Jew” an ethnic label, %t according to lineage and culture? Does it define a political grouping, which coheres around a history of exile in the Diaspora? Implicit in these questions is a further question: Who decides— state institutions applying civil laws or rabbis applying halacha? A Jewish society, as opposed to a Jewish state, does not have to worry about these questions, for it is not in the business of making citizens or distributing public benefits. The Jewish character of a society comes from the identification and practices of its members. The Jewish character of a state comes from its laws and its policies, and it is here that the questions, ambiguities, and contradictions mount.
Israel, as a state, is practically founded on these ambiguities and contradictions. Israel is a sovereign state with no defined borders. It claims to be guided by universalistic legal principles and the rule of law, but it has no constitution, and its laws are explicitly discriminatory. It is neither a secular state nor a theocracy. It is a home to all Jews, yet its Jews are arranged hierarchically. Ashkenazim constitute the “civilized” political and economic elite, while others— Sephardim, the descendants of Iberian Jews; Ethiopian Jews; emigres from the former Soviet Union; and Mizrahim, or Arab Jews— are cast down. The Zionizing project began in the early twentieth century, several decades before the founding of the state of Israel. It was a combined effort of European Jews, largely secular, and a powerful patron: the British Empire. These Jews did not choose to settle in Palestine because doing so fulfilled a spiritual yearning for the Holy Land. Other Jews did feel this yearning, and so immigrated to Palestine in order to found and join religious communities that coexisted with non- Jewish communities.
Political Zionists, by contrast, came to Palestine to build a state. They did so because the Jewish question made life in Europe untenable, and because, as converts to political modernity, they understood that the only solution to the problem of their minoritization in Europe’s nation-states was a nation state of their own, elsewhere.
Three Aliyot
The first wave of organized Jewish immigration to Palestine began in 1882. According to Baruch Kimmerling, the aim of the mi grants was to establish “religious moral communities in the ‘Land of Israel’ and to ‘worship the Lord’ while working the land.” They described their relocation to Palestine as aliyah (pl. aliyot), a term referring to pilgrimage to the Temple of the Israelites. These “very devout, modern Orthodox Jews,” many from Russia and Romania,
were “relatively wealthy, family- oriented, apolitical.” Most made sure that they came with three professionals: “a rabbi, a ritual circumciser, and an agronomist.” Even before building houses and establishing farms, “they erected a synagogue and a ritual bath (mikvah) for the community.”
The immigrants of the first aliyah blended into a multireligious society comprising Muslims, Christians, and the Jews of what is known as the Old Yishuv. These communities built their lives first under Ottoman authority and then British. The best estimate of the population of Palestine on the eve of British colonization, just before the First World War is about 720,000. Between 60,000 and 85,000 of these were Jewish. Respecting their spiritual commitment to the region, the great majority lived in the four “holy cities” of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, with 25,000 to 30,000 & in Jerusalem alone.
For Jews motivated by religious feeling, Palestine was a home, but it did not have to be their home. They were prepared to share it with others and leave political leadership to the empires of the day. Living under the rule of the Ottomans and the British was an acceptable option, as long as they had the freedom to practice their faith. Their successors, the second aliyah, saw matters differently. For them, aliyah referred not to pilgrimage but to “the realm of citizenship and national identity.”The members of the second aliyah were “driven by a commitment more political than religious.” They tended to be younger and less family oriented. They were driven “secular nationalist-socialist” ideals, which contrasted with “the religious Judaism of their parents’ generation.”
The second aliyah began after the turn of the century and reached its peak between 1899 and 1923. These dates are not incidental: they mark the first years of British rule in Palestine. Before the First World War, Jewish nationalists had made overtures to the Ottoman sultan but were rebuked. During and after the war, they found an ally in British imperialism. European powers looked to patronize embryonic national movements in the non- Western world, at least when it suited their strategic interests. The British saw the Zionist movement as a vehicle for destabilizing Ottoman power in the Middle East, the better to swoop in and grab possessions there. It was in the same spirit that the British cultivated the 1926 revolt against Ottoman rule by Sharif Husayn Ibn ‘Ali, the hereditary ruler of Mecca. Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, promised Husayn that Britain would support Arab in dependence, even as the British and French were generating separate plans for the territory promised to the Arabs, per the Sykes-Picot
Agreement reached earlier that year. Likewise, the British claimed to be the protectors of the Druze in Palestine, another group they hoped to turn against Ottoman rule.
Britain’s alignment was with political, not religious, Zionism. (From here, I shall use “Zionism” as a shorthand for “political Zionism,” as it is the latter that, for all intents and purposes, has taken the reins in Palestine since the second aliyah.) This alignment was expressed most influentially in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” With the Balfour Declaration, the British cast their lot not with Ottoman imperial subjects generally but with Jews in Palestine specifically. “Nothing shall be done which shall prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine,” the declaration read, pointedly referencing Palestinian Muslims and Christians as a “non- Jewish” residue and limiting their legitimate rights to those “civil and religious”— not political.
In the wake of the declaration, Britain supported the Zionist project with zeal. In 1918 the government encouraged the Zionist Commission, led by Chaim Weizmann, to travel to Palestine and lay the groundwork for establishing a Jewish national home. Among other things, the commission recommended establishing a militia to protect Jewish settlers, to which the British agreed. In July 1920 the British government appointed Sir Robert Samuel, a declared Zionist, high commissioner of Palestine. In 1922 the Balfour Declaration became the basis of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which recognized British authority over the territory. The language of the Mandate indicated that British authorities would cooperate with Zionists in achieving “the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine” and pledged that the mandatory administration “ shall facilitate Jewish immigration . . . and shall encourage . . . close settlement by Jews on the land.”8
Britain implemented three critical measures to secure these ends.9 First, it enacted the Immigration Ordinance, which aimed to encourage Jewish immigration. Second, it enacted the Land Ordinance, which favored Jewish acquisition of land while limiting Arab property holding. Finally, Jewish- owned companies were granted “concessions” over state and natural resources in Palestine. “ These measures supported a sharp increase in the Jewish population of Mandate Palestine, from less than #0& percent in 1920 to nearly 20 percent in 1922 and close to 33 percent in #947.” The ordinances held until the Arab Revolt of #936–#939, after which the British placed restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisition.
The second aliyah created specifically Jewish institutions, which grew in capability under British protection. Their “separatist mode of pure settlement stood on two legs”: the Jewish National Fund, which looked to “redeem” land by placing it in Jewish hands, and the Histadrut, an agricultural workers’ union open only to Jews. The under lying principle was the valorization of “pure Jewish labor,” meaning the creation of a nationally— racially—segregated labor market that would insulate Jewish workers from competition with Arab peasants, whose labor came cheaper. (Around that same time, Boers in South Africa were creating a similarly segregated labor market to insulate whites from cheaper black labor.) The same Zionists were responsible for huge growth in the kibbutzim, the exclusively Jewish communal agricultural settlements. In time Histadrut became an all-encompassing labor union with its own health care funds, schools, bank,
publishing house, newspapers and periodicals, and even canteens for laborers and for the unemployed. All of these developments were for the exclusive benefit of Jews, the better to promote settlers’ nationalist goals.
As the number of Jewish settlements increased, conflicts with Arabs arose. The issue was not that Arabs felt animus toward Jews or saw Jews as invaders in what was properly an Arab territory. As Rashid Khalidi has shown in his study of the origins of Palestinian nationalism, struggles between Arab peasants and Jewish settlers long preceded those between the Palestinian nationalist intelligentsia and the settler movement.#3 What Palestinian Arabs resented were Jews who sought to exercise sovereignty, through their exclusive national institutions and, relatedly, through their policies with respect to land. Unlike previous landlords, who had been content to gather rent from tenants who worked the soil, Jewish settlers cleared out the tenants and took direct possession. This generated grievances, for the Arab peasants did not recognize eviction as among the rights of a landlord. The first serious clashes, leading to the death of two Arabs and two Jews in April 1909, led to the formation of the first Jewish militia in Palestine.#4 Jewish militias reveled in a cult of militarism and self- sacrifice. One of the later militia groups, Lehi, summed up this zeal under the slogan “only death will release us from the ranks.”#5
If the second aliyah created the foundations of a separate nationhood, the third (1923–30) began in earnest the project of joining nation to state. Whereas earlier Zionists such as Weizmann had counted on the British and other international players to one day ensure a Jewish state, third aliyah took up that project on its own on the basis of yet more Jewish immigration, labor, and
militancy. One of the key institutions of this period was the Jewish Agency, founded in #929 under the aegis of the World Zionist Organization, which aggressively pursued settlement by encouraging Jewish immigration and establishing towns to house the settlers.
Perhaps the agency’s most able and inspiring leader was David Ben- Gurion. Under Ben- Gurion’s leadership, the agency built a proto- state; its structures and its people would go on to found the state and serve as its functionaries. Ben- Gurion himself declared Israel’s independence and became its first prime minister. Ben- Gurion was the front person for the largest Zionist tendency in Israel during the second aliyah: labor Zionism. Labor Zionism was baked into the Jewish Agency, Histadrut, and other Jewish national institutions that became pillars of the state. Labor Zionists developed one of Israel’s formative contradictions— the notion of a hypernationalist, Jewish, and collectivist state that somehow was also committed to universal liberty. As Ben- Gurion put it in 1935, I belong to the Zionist wing that believes in the necessity of power and maximum, unconditional national authority. National authority over labor, national authority over property, even national authority over life— under conditions of human liberty and the value of human life. Everything must be subjected to the authority of the nation. This national authority is called socialism and my comrades and I are ready to accept national authority. . . . This is the goal of the Jewish state in which the Jewish people will control the interests of the individual.
What labor Zionists would not openly admit was that socialism, “conditions of human liberty and the value of human life” were for Jews alone. Other Zionists were less coy. Revisionist Zionism, under the leadership of Vladimir Jabotinsky, was consciously nonsocialist and nonliberal, placing
Zionism squarely within the traditions of modern secular racism and settler colonialism. In 1925 Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party (Hatzohar) with the goal of building an apartheid state. Eu ro pean race theory was at the center of his platform. As he wrote in the #9#3 essay “On Race”:
It does not matter whether ‘pure’ races exist or not; what matters is that ethnic communities are distinguished from each other by their racial appearance, and it is in this sense that the term ‘race’ acquires a most definite and scientific meaning. . . . A nation’s substance, the alpha and omega of the uniqueness of its character— this is embodied in the specific physical quality, in the component of its racial composition.
Jabotinsky liked to say the quiet part out loud. For example, he overtly compared the Zionist enterprise in Palestine to the white settler quest in colonial Kenya, in the context of demanding that the British Mandatory government respect his right to organize his settler militia, Irgun. “We said [to the government]: ‘Remember that we have children and wives; legalize our self-defense as you are doing in Kenya.’ In Kenya until recently every European was obliged to train for the Settlers Defense Force. Why should the Jews in Palestine be forced to prepare for self- defense underhand, as though committing a legal offense?”
Jabotinsky further admitted that natives could not possibly reconcile themselves to the settler political project, and that this project would be carried out through violence.
Any native people— it’s all the same whether they are civilized or savage— view their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not even a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. . . . Culturally they are 500&years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. . . . They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. . . . Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force in de pen dent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.
Zionist “colonization,” Jabontinsky concluded, “is self- explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can be only one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs, that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.”
Jabotinsky was hardly alone in recognizing that settlement was a necessarily violent enterprise. Labor Zionists recognized this, too, even as Ben- Gurion spoke of the value of human life. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general who joined Ben- Gurion’s Mapai Party served as one of his cabinet ministers, explained that to be a settler was to be armed.
“We are a generation of settlers, yet without a helmet or a gun barrel we will be unable to plant a tree or build a house. Let us not be afraid to perceive the enmity that consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs around us. Let us not avert our gaze, for it will weaken our hands. This is the fate of our generation. The only choice we have is to be armed, strong and resolute or else our sword will fall from our hands and the thread of our lives will be severed”
The nakedly political and nationalist objectives of the third aliyah accelerated the development of Palestinian nationalism. Clashes became unavoidable, and matters came to a head in the mid-1930s. The Arab Revolt of 1936– 1939 began with a six- month- long general strike. Khalidi describes it as “the longest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps
the longest ever.” In September 1937, strikes gave way to armed revolt. According to the British military commander in Palestine, “British forces lost control of much of the countryside to armed bands and were briefly forced to withdraw from several of the major cities.” Civil administration was, “for all practical purposes, non- existent.” The revolt was suppressed, but not before sowing seeds of doubts in British imperial circles. “The British began to question their long- standing commitment to Zionism,” Khalidi writes.
In the wake of the violence, Britain’s Peel Commission recommended that the land be partitioned, precipitating yet more Arab revolt as well as settler resentment. Among Zionists, it was becoming clear that the British conception of a Jewish national home entailed sharing the holy land, which was not at all what settlers had in mind. They came to see theirs as one of “two rival nationalisms” in Palestine, as Isaac Deutscher put it; they felt sandwiched between the colonial power on one side and natives on the other. In this they were much like English and other European settlers in North America and Boers in South Africa. They understood themselves as a beleaguered group, challenging against the yoke and itching for the nation- state that was their due.
The Second World War provided the chance Zionists were waiting for. As British troops were removed to Europe, the field was left to settler militias, who gained in strength. By December 1947, they were powerful enough to begin driving Arabs from the land. The strength of the settlers respected both ideology and numbers. A self- selected and politically committed group, the settler population was organized from the outset as a fighting machine. And while it constituted only about a third of the total population of Palestine in the late #940s, it “had about a #.5 to # advantage over the Palestinian population in the decisive age group of 20 to 45- year- old men.”22 The result is known in con temporary Palestinian discourse as Naqba— the Catastrophe. As Lila Abu- Lughod and Ahmad&H. Sa’di put it, “A society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently.”23
Immigrants or Settlers?
Standard Israeli accounts of Jewish migration to Palestine blur the distinction between the immigrant and the settler by pretending that the Yishuv has always been Zionist. This narrative involves two conflations. First, it conflates the first aliyah with the Old Yishuv. Second, the narrative conflates the spiritual goals of the first aliyah with the po liti cal goals of the second and
third. The Old Yishuv was native, the first aliyah were immigrants, and the second and third were settlers.
The likes of Jabotinsky, Ben- Gurion, and Dayan were blind to the difference between themselves and non- settler Jewish immigrants. They assumed that to be a Jewish immigrant in Palestine was to be a Zionist. Unlike the Jews of the first aliyah, they did not consider the possibility that a political community in the territory of Palestine could accommodate non- Zionist Jews. Nor did it seem possible that a Jew in Palestine could be anything but a Zionist.
It was on the basis of such thinking that the Holocaust emerged as a critical opportunity to consolidate the Zionist effort. In the wake of the Holocaust, it might have been enough simply to protect Jews—to ensure that refugees would have homes, be cared for, and enjoy rights. But for Zionists, it was not enough to save and preserve Jewish lives: there had to be a Jewish state, and Holocaust survivors could provide the numerical superiority necessary to realize it. Thus Zionists targeted European Jews in crisis for immigration to Palestine, even though these Jews may have preferred to go elsewhere. Zionists worked hard to prevent postwar Jewish immigration to places other than Palestine, in particular by undercutting US e!orts to coordinate a joint Western plan to establish quotas for the admission of refugees to Eur pean countries. Zionists argued that Palestine had to be a sanctuary for the Jews, and Europeans, at least, were only too happy to comply with this demand. Doing so meant that the crime of genocide would be paid for by Palestinian Arabs— people far away, who bore no responsibility. In the words of the philosopher Gil Anidjar, Europe, with the aid and encouragement of Zionists, “exported” the Jewish question to Palestine. European refugees accounted for more than half of the Jewish population in Palestine in 1948.
The notion of a Jewish state would have been unusual to these refugees. To accept this vision demanded a radical shift in Jewish imagination of the self. Jews who survived the Holocaust were part of a globally disbursed spiritual community fashioned by exile. They had already refused the idea that theirs was a secular nationality attached to a homeland, for this idea had been introduced in Europe in the late nineteenth century by Theodor Herzl and other founders of the Zionist movement.
It is widely accepted among Zionists that the Jewish state was necessitated by the Holocaust, yet this claim makes sense only if we accept settler rather than immigrant logic. While the immigrant joins an existing society, the settler is unable to differentiate society from state. From the standpoint of an immigrant— and, indeed, a native— Palestine could have been a refuge for Holocaust survivors in the absence of Zionism; there could have been a Jewish society, a Jewish population, there, without a Jewish state. As the Palestinian- Israeli legal theorist Raef Zreik puts it, “Despite the persuasiveness of necessity, however, Palestinian liberals could [argue] . . . there is a difference between saving the life of Jews and having a Jewish state.”
There was a strand of pre-#948 Zionism that thought in a way compatible with this Palestinian liberalism. This was reformist Zionism.27 This tendency is strongly identi%ed with German Jewish intellectuals, among them some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century: Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Simon, and Hannah Arendt. Magnes was the founding chancellor of Hebrew University, established in #925. The following year he and others established a small organ ization called Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) calling for “the establishment of a binational state in Palestine, based on equal rights and partnership of Jews and Arabs.” These reformists were unquestionably Zionist, in the sense that they thought of Jews as having a distinctive political identity. But they opposed the idea that the state of the Jewish nation would also be a Jewish state. It would be, instead, binational— both Jewish and Arab. Such a concept was unthinkable to the labor and revisionist Zionists who built the state.
The (restrained) idealism of Brit Shalom crashed on the shoals of demographic reality. They could not persuade fellow nationalists that Jews, who were only 20 percent of the population of Palestine when Brit Shalom was founded, would be able to assure their interests in a binational state. What was to prevent them being overrun by Arabs? Brit Shalom tried to argue that Jews would become the majority, but that was a tough sell under conditions of equality. As we have seen, other Zionists realized that becoming a majority would require force that Brit Shalom was unwilling to use.
The reformists were therefore politically paralyzed, unable to define a way forward. But while they had little impact in practice, their thought remains a rich source of reflection. In one sense, it can be seen as a more promising Zionism that has been lost. But from another angle, reformist Zionism only crystallizes the problems inherent in nationalism. Even Brit Shalom was unable to think of the Jew as an immigrant. Why were the second and third aliyot, to say nothing of post- Holocaust Jews, unable to consider the idea that Jews could be immigrants rather than settlers? That they could live in a state that was not a national home? No one contemplated the state without a nation. After the first aliya, the Jewish immigrant to Palestine was definitely dead, replaced with the settler.
Jews as Natives: Citizenship and the Law of Return
In the Zionist vision, it is not only essential that there be a Jewish home, but it must also be in Israel, a place where Jews can be “returning natives.” “Unlike colonial powers,” the Israeli legal scholar Ruth Gavison writes, “the Jews were a people in exile, foreigners wherever they went; they were everywhere a minority, and in some places persecuted relentlessly; and they had never possessed national sovereignty over any land but the land of Israel.” This formulation is true as far as it goes— Israeli Jews may be considered returning natives, even if their return comes after two millennia. But if Jews are returning natives, Palestinians are natives who never left, who can trace their link to the land for the same two millennia, if not longer.
When thinking of Jews as returning natives, the most illuminating parallel is with the freed Africans in the United States who left to establish a home and sovereignty in Liberia. Like Jews in Palestine, they claimed to be returning. Like Zionists who sought to create a Jewish state in the national home, they refused to share the national home with the natives who had never left. Both returning groups, Africans and Jews, combined the historical discourse of the returning native with a civilizational discourse that valorized the period of exile (diaspora) as a time that had civilized the native who left—so that the returning native could civilize both the land and the native who had stayed behind.
Jewish indigeneity in Israel is embodied in the Law of Return, which the Knesset passed unanimously in 1950. Under the Law of Return, any Jew is entitled to citizenship upon entering the territory. The person in question need never have set foot there previously; he is effectively native from birth by virtue of being a Jew. In contrast, a Palestinian Arab, even one born in Israel of ancestors who never left the territory, is not considered indigenous. To be counted as citizens, Arabs have to meet legal requirements set out in the Entry into Israel Law of 1952. According to the law, they must have been residents of Mandate Palestine and registered as such by March 1952. They must also have been in Israel during the first years of statehood— that is, they must have been residents “in Israel, or in an area which became Israeli territory after the establishment of the state, from the day of the establishment of the state to the day of the coming into force of this law, or entered Israel lawfully during that period.”
Not surprisingly, many were not registered. These Arabs, though residents in the territory that became Israel, were later called “pre sent absentees,” a category that sealed their fate: the state expropriated their property, particularly their land. Their status passed on to their children. These pre sent absentees, or internal refugees, constituted about 20 percent of the Arab population in post-1948 Israel. They finally were granted citizenship in 1980. Even among those who were registered, many could not prove continuous presence for four years. Only 40 percent of Palestinians remaining in Israel were granted citizenship immediately in 1951. The purpose of withholding citizenship, clearly, was to encourage these Arabs to leave Israel voluntarily. As with American Indians given US citizenship in the 1920s, Palestinians could not acquire citizenship by descent; they could only do so by naturalization.
In a 1950 statement to the Knesset, Ben- Gurion laid out the rationale underlying the Law of Return and other laws governing Israeli nationality:
“The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law placed before you have a mutual relation and a common ideological source which stems from the historical uniqueness of the state of Israel. . . . This is not a Jewish state merely because Jews are the majority of its population, it is a state for Jews everywhere, and for every Jew who wants it. . . .The Law of Return . . . embodies a central purpose of our state, the purpose of the ingathering of the exiles. This law states that it is not this state which grants Jews from abroad the right to settle in it, but that this right is inherent by virtue of one’s being a Jew, if one wishes to settle in the country.
In the state of Israel Jews do not have privileges denied to non-Jewish citizens. The state of Israel is based on the full equality of rights and duties of all its citizens. This principle too is stated in the Declaration of Independence: ‘The state of Israel will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of religion, race or sex.’ But it is not the state which grants the Diaspora Jews the right to return. This right preceded the state of Israel, and it was this right which built the state of Israel”.
As the speech drew to a close, Ben- Gurion put a fine point on the philosophy underlying the law. “The Law of Return has nothing to do with immigration laws,” he said. “It is the law of perpetuity of Jewish history.”
The Law of Return, and the Jewish nativity it presumes, became the key to large- scale Jewish immigration following the establishment of the state of Israel. In particular, it facilitated the immigration of non- European Jews. The immigration of Ashkenazi Jews proved disappointing before the end of the Second World War. So Zionists turned to Arab Jews as a “reservoir” for immigration in the early 1940s. Later, Israel officially classified this group as Mizrahim. Prominent Arab Jewish scholars such as Ella Shohat and Yehouda Shenhav now define the Mizrahim as Jews from Islamic countries, and not just as Arab Jews.34
Shenhav recounts Ben- Gurion’s remarks to a meeting of experts and Jewish leaders in 1942, outlining a plan to bring a million Jews to Palestine, mainly from Muslim countries: “Our Zionist policy must now pay special attention to the Jewish population groups in the Arab countries,” Ben- Gurion said.
“If there are Diasporas that it is our obligation to eliminate with the greatest possible urgency by bringing these Jews to the homeland, it is the Arab diasporas: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and North Africa as well as the Jews of Persia and Turkey. What European Jewry is now experiencing obliges us to be especially anxious about the fate of the diasporas in the Middle East. Those Jewish groups are the hostages of Zionism. . . . the paths of immigration from Europe are desolate now. . . . It is a mark of great failure by Zionism that we have not yet eliminated the Yemen exile [i.e., the diaspora]. If we do not eliminate the Iraq exile by Zionist means, there is a danger that it will be eliminated by Hitlerite means”.
The notion that these Jews were unsafe in Arab lands involved a degree of invention. Historically, Mizrahim testified both to the pluralism of their predominantly Muslim societies of origin and to the rich legacy in those socie ties of Jewish cultural and religious life. Under Ottoman rule, they had been considered dhimmi, a protected minority, and had $ourished no less than other groups. In the 1920s, after Ottoman rule, Jews continued to occupy high state positions in Iraq and Egypt. Jews in the Arab diaspora were much better off than those in the Eu ro pean, as suggested by the Zionist appeal to relocate Iraqi Jews. That appeal followed the farhud, a pogrom in June 1941. That was indeed a tragic, bloody affair in which “160 Jews and an unknown number of Muslims were murdered.” But it also was “the only event of its kind in the history of Iraqi Jewry.” There was little possibility of Iraqi Jews being subject to “Hiterlite means,” either. Shenhav, himself an Iraqi Jew, points out that the farhud “was confined exclusively to Baghdad and did not spread to other cities,” and while the perpetrators were Iraqi, the British, who were then invading Baghdad, enabled the pogrom through inaction. “Pro- Nazi prime minister Rashid Ali al- Kilani had $ed the country” before the British arrived. “For reasons that are unclear,” Shenhav writes, “the British
delayed their entry into the city by 48 hours,” the period during which the pogrom began. It proceeded for two days, during which, “according to some testimonies, [the British] made no effort to calm the surging passions in the city and prevent the clash between Jews and Muslims.”35 None of this is to suggest that Arab Iraqis were not responsible for killing Jews in Baghdad, but the notion that Iraqi Jews were on the precipice of elimination by Nazis is very much overblown. At worst they would be subject to British colonial control, as Ben- Gurion and his fellow Jews in Palestine were at the time.
In any case, some 700,000 Mizrahim, mostly from former Ottoman territories, immigrated to Israel between the years 1948 and 1951, doubling its Jewish population. The Mizrahim left Yemen in 1949, Iraq in 1950–1951, and Egypt in 1956. In 2006 the Mizrahim were said to comprise “some 45 percent” of the Israeli population and a majority of Israeli Jews.
The final large wave of immigration enabled by the Law of Return came in the late 1980s, as Jews poured out of the collapsing Soviet Union. To corral them, the Israeli government used a tried- and- true tactic: closing off avenues of immigration by pressing the United States to deny Soviet Jewish emigrants refugee status on grounds that they had the right to immigrate to Israel. Laurence Silberstein describes how the Israelis pushed the Joint Distribution Committee and the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigration Aid Society, two refugee- resettlement organizations that worked with the US State Department, “to cease helping Soviet Jewish immigrants in Europe so as to force them to emigrate to Israel.”37 Rather than expand the range of choices for Jews in the Diaspora, the Zionist leadership made the Law of Return into a narrow door, a compulsion to move to Israel. Annual immigration reached its peak in 1990, as 199,516 people, mostly Eastern European Jews, moved in. Between 1948 and 2011, the Law of Return, in concert with the Jewish Agency and other Zionist entities, facilitated the immigration of more than 3 million
Jews to Israel.
The presence in Israel of diverse cohorts of Jews has caused considerable internal tensions. There are longstanding frictions between Ashkenazim, who constitute the elite, and the Mizrahim, Sephardim, and Ethiopians. Although Mizrahim constitute the majority of Israeli Jews, their influence in politics historically was minimized. As I discuss later in this chapter, this has changed since 1967. Whereas Mizrahim were initially the despised targets of a civilizing mission that aimed to rid them of their Arabness—in a speech to senior army officers, Prime Minister Ben- Gurion spoke of Mizrahim with undisguised contempt, stating, “A good many of the immigrants are illiterate and show no signs of Jewish or human culture”— today they have proved their worth to the state by becoming the tip of the spear of the settlement movement in the Occupied Territories. Even so, Mizrahim continue to constitute a kind of underclass, subject to racist stereotyping and saddled with lower incomes and educational achievement than Ashkenazim. Today their facility with Arabic makes them useful, but in the past the state tried to prevent them speaking it or practicing other elements of Arabic culture. Such tensions lay bare the critical importance of the politicization of Jewish identity, which serves to unify otherwise- disparate peoples under the same nationalist outlook.
Jewish Democracy: Productive Contradictions
When we observe the Israeli government enthusiastically importing Jews, and then despising and civilizing them, we have a window into one of many productive contradictions inherent in Jewish statehood. A Jewish state committed to the protection of a Jewish national home can hardly reject Jews who wish to live there. Yet this is what the Israeli government did when it forced Mizrahim to become Jews in the manner of the official Judaism preferred by the state. The contradiction— welcoming Jews while loathing them, protecting Jews while eliminating their culture— turned out to be productive in that Mizrahim were perfectly placed to lead the Israeli settler incursion into the West Bank.
Another founding contradiction of Israel is that between secularity and theocracy. This conflict has been baked into the Zionist movement since early days. The initial po liti cal program of the World Zionist Organization, formulated at the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, pledged “to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine” through “the organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions.” 40 But it had little to say about the nature of those institutions. Ever since, Zionists have tussled over whether the Jewish national structure of Palestine and then Israel would have a secular or religious cast.
The terms of a formal compromise were worked out between Ben- Gurion, representing the proto- state, and a delegation of Orthodox Jews. They met on the eve of the June 1947 UN convention that drew up the partition plan. The parties decided that a future state would be committed to enforcing the sabbath as the legal day of rest and that in every state kitchen intended for Jews, the food would be kosher. It was also agreed that religious schools would have full autonomy and that halacha would have jurisdiction over matters of personal status: there would be no civil marriage or divorce in Israel, and religious courts would have the sole authority to decide on these matters. Furthermore, the new state would incorporate Jewish symbols into
its official iconography. At the same time, it was agreed that halacha would not provide the constitution of the Jewish state. The agreement gave two reasons for this decision: first, the UN would not accept the establishment of a fully theocratic state; second, it was necessary to ensure equal rights for non- Jewish citizens, which, in practice, has not occurred.
As the historian Tom Segev puts it, the agreement was made “in order to prevent the house of Israel from splitting asunder.” Yet the terms of the compromise became the focus of ongoing controversy, as Israel has struggled to make sense of its peculiar position. Basic questions repeatedly emerge. Should the government have the authority to enact statutes that contradict laws contained in the Torah? Should government release secular Jews from obligations under Jewish law? After all, it releases observant Jews from state requirements. For instance, men enrolled in a yeshiva can be exempted from serving in the armed forces. Issues of family law have been a particular struggle, with the Israeli Supreme Court carving out loopholes to enable civil marriages, outside the rabbinic orders, and civil courts enforcing rabbinic courts’ judgments with respect to divorces, even on pain of imprisoning recalcitrant husbands.
The bottom line is that Israel remains a quasi- religious state pledged to uphold an official Judaism. Like the tension between Ashkenazim and others, that between religious and secular Jews is kept in check by an overarching fissure: that between the colonizer calling itself indigenous and the subject population of Palestinian Arabs. And, likewise, the tug- of- war between secularism and official religion can be productive. Theology undergirds the state project; there would be no point to Israel’s existence were it not a Jewish state. And the state harnesses the religious zeal of Mizrahim and Orthodox to continue expanding. Yet by maintaining formal secularism, Israel retains rhetorical cover for its constant claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” and is able to bring onboard a wider range of Jews, both as “returnees” and as supporters in the Diaspora.
Israel’s quasi- religious character enables yet another productive contradiction: its failure, despite being a sovereign state, to draw fixed boundaries that define the outer limits of its territory. That decision is biblically sanctioned, for reasons discussed below, but was taken for reasons of realpolitik. Drawing borders at the founding would have meant accepting restrictions on Israel’s expansion. And by refusing to do so, the state perpetuated settler consciousness, for it left open the possibility of endless further colonization.
Segev quotes a conversation between Ben- Gurion and Pinhas Rosen, who was to become Israel’s first minister of justice, amid the drafting of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Rosen: There is the question of the borders, and it cannot be ignored.
Ben- Gurion: Anything is pos si ble. If we decide here that there is to be no mention of borders, then we won’t mention them. Nothing is a priori.
Rosen: It is not a priori, but it is a legal issue.
Ben- Gurion: The law is what ever the people determine it to be.
Meir Vilner, the leader of the Communist Party in the new state and a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, proposed that Palestinian Arabs also be granted a right to an in dependent state, but his proposal was also defeated over territorial issues. To assert a Palestinian right to self- determination would mean accepting the borders offered by the UN plan.
Ben- Gurion could find support for his position in no small part because Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, is a space loosely conceived in holy texts. Indeed, it can stretch to accommodate whatever Israeli power can encircle. Baruch Kimmerling explains:
The ideal of Eretz Israel is construed in terms of the biblical ‘promise’ of Yahweh to Moses, the legendary founding father of the nation, as running ‘from the Euphrates River to the River of Egypt’ (probably meaning a small river in the eastern part of the Sinai Peninsula but there are broader interpretations). Today, the boundaries of colonial British Palestine are the reference point. More pragmatically, however, the boundaries move according to political and military ability to hold them. As one central rabbinical figure, Rabbi Abraham Shapiro, put it, ‘Everywhere the [Israel Defense Forces are] pre sent is the Land of Israel; any place outside IDF rule is the land of the gentiles.’
This biblical inheritance conceivably extends across the globe. The “posterity” of the Israelites referred to in Genesis includes all Arabs— Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—as they are the descendants of Ishmael, who was the son of Abraham by his concubine Hagar.
Beyond the unwillingness to set borders, the settler society is further buttressed by the absence of a constitution, which would place limits on the activities of the state in the name of the nation. Properly, a state professing to protect equal rights should have some such limits, so that the political majority cannot use its power to deprive political opponents of rights. This choice, too, respects Israel’s expansive ambitions as a quasi- religious state claiming to be the homeland of a widespread international community. Meir David Levinstein— whose party, the United Religious Front, collected under one roof Israel’s early religious parties— set out the argument against a constitution. “Only the written Bible and the Traditional Annotations have sovereign authority in Jewish life,” he explained. “Therefore there is no room for any man- made constitution in Israel. . . . Israel’s Bible is Israel’s constitution.” Not only that, but the Knesset was in no position to make a constitution, because it did not represent all the Jews: “What is the moral authority of the inhabitants of our state, who constitute only 7 percent of our nation, and what is the authority of this Knesset, elected by 5 percent of our nation, to legislate a constitution for the fatherland and the entire nation?” he asked. To establish a constitution would be costly from the standpoint of settlement, he argued. “A secular constitution will profoundly damage our state’s glory in the diaspora. It will dampen the enthusiasm for the state and reduce the will to immigrate.” Israel today has an evolving set of basic laws, but opposition to a constitution won out.
In many ways, it is a refusal to answer hard questions about what Israel is— whether it is secular or theocratic, where its geographic boundaries are, whether or not it guarantees equal rights—that allows the national majority to avoid reckoning with its settler status, even though that status is obvious in the history of Israel’s founding and in its nationality laws. Refusal helps to sublimate settler status, rendering it an invisible foundation of the state and allowing settlement to continue even as Israel professes to be a rights protecting democracy.
Who Is a Jew?
The most fundamental of Israel’s unanswered questions is who is a Jew. It is a question that has bedeviled Israeli authorities since the Law of Return was passed in 1950. Is a Jew defined by religion or ethnicity? Are Jews members of a religious community or a nationality? Or both? In a sign that the identity is not a purely secular one, Prime Minister Ben- Gurion refused to leave these questions to the Knesset, instead consulting a religious body, the Forty-Five Sages of Israel, in October 1958. Thirty- seven responded and only three suggested separating religion and nationality.49 Nevertheless, Minister of Internal Affairs Yisrael Bar- Yehuda advised a secular practice: a Jew is anyone who, within reason, declares herself a Jew. His successor, H.&M. Shapiro, issued different guidelines in 1960: only a person who was born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism according to halacha could be registered as a Jew. Furthermore, no one could claim to be a Jew while professing a non- Jewish religion. Shapiro’s definition made Jewish identity a matter of both heritage and religion, albeit excluding only other religious practices. One might, according to this system, be a Jew and atheist, as many Israelis are, but not, say, a Jew and a Christian.
This last guidance seemed tailored to address a practical case that had brought the issue to public attention in the mid-1950s. This was the application for return of Oswald Rufeisen. Rufeisen was born into a Jewish family but had converted to Catholicism in the course of surviving the Holocaust and become a friar. Rufeisen, however, insisted that he was a Jew by nationality, even if Catholic by religion, and therefore had a right to return. But the Israeli government refused to recognize him as a Jew, and the Supreme Court upheld this refusal, as religious authorities looked on wondering why a secular court had any say in the matter.
The Rufeisen case appeared to confirm that “Jew” is a religious identity, not a nationality. Zionism, it seemed, “had succeeded in creating a secular Jewish state only to discover that it was clinging to a definition of Jewishness based on religion.”50 Matters turned around in 1968 when one Benjamin Shalit petitioned to register his children as Jews. In Shalit v. Minister of Interior (1968), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Shalit and held that the registrar has no powers to overrule the bona %de declaration of persons as members of a given nation. In the majority opinion, Judge Zvi Berenson underlined a secular perspective: “The concept ‘nationality’ should be given a regular meaning appropriate to the spirit of the time and respecting the opinion acceptable to the enlightened portion of residents of the country.” He went on to explain: “ There should not be injected into the concept of nationalism, which according to the recognition of most human beings is separate from religion, the strictures of the Jewish halakhah . . . the view of the halakhah on the issue of the nationality of a resident of the country cannot serve as the basis of a ruling of the civil courts in the state of Israel.” The minority view was expressed by two judges. Judge Moshe Zilberg declared: “Jewish nationalism should not be detached from its religious foundations. Jewish religious belonging is necessary for Jewish nationalism. There is still no Israeli Jewish nationalism, and if it exists, it is not necessarily secular nationalism.” Judge Shimon Agranat went a step further: “In the history of the Jewish people, the racial- national principle was joined with religious uniqueness, and between these two principles a connection was formed that cannot be broken.”
A statutory definition of the term “Jew” was introduced, under pressure from religious parties, following the verdict in Shalit. Consequently, a Jew was defined as either a person born to a Jewish mother or a person who converted and is not a member of another religion. The demand that conversion be “according to halacha” was dropped. Furthermore, the Law of Return was interpreted to include family members of Jews, including children, grandchildren, spouses, and spouses of children and grandchildren. As a result, the state of Israel now has two legal definitions of who is a Jew: the narrow definition provided by the halacha, which Israeli law enforces in the sphere of personal affairs, and the broad definition in the amended Law of Return. This means that there is always a group among Israeli citizens who are considered Jews by the Law of Return but not by the halacha. This is how it came to be that a quarter of the immigrants from the Soviet Union— labeled there as Jews— found themselves labeled non- Jews in Israel, in the sphere of private affairs.
As the case of the Soviet Jews suggests, these questions of secular and religious identity have persisted throughout Israel’s history unto the pre sent, arising anew as if to remind us of the spiraling absurdities of legal Jewishness. Thus there was the case of Abdallah Zeldin Alexander Tsiorulin, who emigrated from Russia to Israel in 1992 with his second wife. Though not himself a Jew, he was classified as one since he was married to a Jew and was granted Israeli citizenship as a returnee. But some years later he converted to Islam and took a Muslim name. Consequently, the Ministry of Interior changed his official nationality from Jew to Arab.
Zionism cannot escape its inherent contradictions. And why should it? They are the foundation of the Jewish state. To resolve the tensions inherent in Zionism would be Israel’s undoing. If we wish to make sense of how Israel can be a secular, democratic, rights- protecting Jewish state, we have to look to the ideological basis of Zionism, which is not Judaism but modernity. Everything Israel does and is makes sense when we allow that Zionism is an expression of an aggressively colonial modernity.
These various contradictions foster a space of legal ambiguity productive in all the ways mentioned. In this space, another project flourishes: Judaization. I have touched on it briefly but now turn to it in detail. Judaization is the making of a Jewish national majority within the state. To realize this goal requires the dissolution of the Arab element— its numerical reduction and the elimination of its political voice. The Zionist state enables this by rendering Arabs either second- class citizens, as in the Israeli Arabs, or extralegal, as in the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and abroad.
Judaization: Ethnic Cleansing, Social Apartheid, and the Making of a Permanent Jewish Majority
In Israel, society had to be made Jewish. At the time of the independence, Jews lacked a clear numerical advantage in the territory. In 1947 no less than 45 percent of the population in the area designated for the Jewish state was Palestinian, according to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. How could Jews institute and maintain their status as the national majority— that is, the nation patronized by the nation- state—if they constituted only half the population? This was a problem of economic and military power, but also political legitimacy. Critical international patrons could hardly agree that the Jewish state governed in the name of the people when half of the people were not Jews. That contradiction might prove untenable at home as well.
Judaization, therefore, has been an ongoing project since the establishment of the state. It began with ethnic cleansing in 1947–1948, which reduced the Arab population of the territory that became Israel. It is generally accepted that about 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during the Naqba, although some put the figure higher. For those who remained, the project continued with apartheid— the application to the national majority and minority of separate law, designed to empower the majority at the expense of the minority. Specifically, Arabs were subject to military authority, while the Jewish population lived under civil law. Although Arabs were spatially concentrated— both to make them more easily governable and to strip them of land that was then distributed to Jews— this distinction in legal regimes was not territorialized. The jurisdiction of military authority was Arabs, not the zones in which they were concentrated. This approach mirrors precisely that of US Indian law and South African apartheid.
Like South Africa under apartheid, Israel is constantly developing and tweaking its laws and policies to stanch and prevent crises of native control. In particular, Israel has repeatedly updated its land laws to maximize the dispossession of the non- Jewish population, including Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin. These legal inventions include “derecognition,” whereby Palestinian majority localities are made extralegal: because they are not recognized by the state, they cannot legally expand or upgrade infrastructure, constraining population and making life untenable. The state has also developed laws to minimize the political power that attends land owner ship by fragmenting Palestinian communities. Strategic fragmentation ensures that, even where the majority of land is owned by Palestinians, the majority of seats on local governing councils are held by Jews. Israel has also used its education system, military, and quasi- public Jewish national institutions to isolate non- Jews socially and economically, empowering Jews and reducing the life prospects of Arabs and others deemed non- Jews.
This program has been enormously successful. By May&20#6 the Jewish population of Israel was approximately 6.37 million (74.8 percent), while the Arab population was 1.77 million (20.8& percent). These figures include the Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the Syrian population of the Golan Heights, both of which are occupied territories. Yet official Israeli discourse claims that the percentage of the Palestinians in the population has increased from about 12 percent in 1948, after the war. The Israeli government asserts that the increase is a product of higher birth rates among the Palestinians than Jews, ignoring the possibility that the emigration rate among Jewish Israelis is higher than that among Palestinian Israelis.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains, the threat of Palestinian presence— Arab, specifically—is existential from the standpoint of the Jewish State:
“We stated in the Declaration of In dependence that Israel will be a Jewish and democratic state, and to make sure that the democracy does not cancel out the Jewish aspect, we must ensure a Jewish majority. Regarding our relations with the Arab minority. . . . If they integrate, fine, but their numbers will reach 35 or 40 percent, at which time the Jewish state is at an end. If their numbers fall, but relations are violent and poor, that will affect the democratic fabric. So we need a policy that balances the two needs, but that first of all ensures a Jewish majority in the country”
Netanyahu was echoing Ben- Gurion, who had advised in 1947 that “only a state with at least 80& percent Jews is a viable and stable state.” Netanyahu’s comment is revealing in the way it collapses society and state. The demographic fear rests on the claim that a Jewish- majority society necessitates an institutionally and ideologically Jewish state. Gavison, the Hebrew University legal scholar, makes a similar point at the outset of her polemic “The Jews’ Right to Statehood: A Defense.” Too many people, she asserts, “ignore the legitimate existential needs of the Jewish state, such as the preservation of a Jewish majority within its borders and the development of a vibrant Jewish cultural life.”
The refusal to distinguish between state and society is at the heart of the nation- state. Modernity—in Europe, its colonies, and its avatars, of which Israel is one— presumes that state and nation must be one. Zionization and Judaization operate in concert to achieve this goal. If we step outside the ideological bound aries of colonial modernity, however, we can see clearly that there need be no Jewish state in order to have a Jewish- majority society. A society with a Jewish majority, and a Jewish character, may be found in a Jewish state, a binational state, or nonnational state. A characterologically Jewish society may even be found in a nation- state in which the nation is not Jewish. An example is the Orthodox Jewish communities of New York City and other parts of New York State. While Jews are members of the US settler population, the settler nation does not have a Jewish character. Even so, thoroughly Jewish societies exist within the United States. Gavison’s argument would sound very different if it began not with “the existential needs of the Jewish state” but with those of the Jewish people. The existential needs of Jewish people clearly can be met in the absence of a Jewish state.
Gavison may be right in claiming that “a stable and sizable majority of [Israel’s] citizens wants the state to be a Jewish one,” an argument that seemingly smooths out the contradiction of a democratic and Jewish state. But the unaddressed complication is that this “stable and sizable majority” was created through ethnic cleansing of non- Jewish Palestinians and the ongoing manufacture by the state of a Jewish demographic majority with a politicized Jewish identity. This identity is in no way inherent to being a Jew. Diaspora Jews do not choose it, and Jews who have left Israel actively reject it. Under other circumstances, Israel could have a Jewish social majority and a political majority comprising Jews and non- Jews. The apparently democratic desire for Jewish statehood is a product not of the uncoerced preference of Israel’s residents but of European political modernism, as refracted through Judaization.
The Ethnic Cleansing of 1948
In 1948 there were 526 distinct Palestinian communities. Four years later 418 had either been destroyed or were left intact but appropriated for other uses. Some ruined locations were turned into forests; only the remains of holy places and historical buildings survived as tell- tale signs among the trees. Others were fenced off and turned into ranches. Infrastructure left standing might be resettled by Jews, perhaps absorbed into an urban neighborhood. Some of those left intact became “artist colonies, exhibits, museums and tourist attractions” (for example, Ein Houd, Caesarea, the old port of Safad, Ez-Zib, parts of Ja!a and Acre) or public parks (for example, Yalo, Imwas, Kabri, Lubia, Dallatheh, Qula, Muzeir’a). Hadeel Assali, a Palestinian anthropologist, writes of the Port of Ja!a, “where old Palestinian homes and buildings have been repurposed into trendy artist galleries”: “The walkways around the port have signs for tourists, explaining the history of the area while completely writing the Palestinians out of it. It is not a ghost town, but the Palestinians are certainly ghosts.” Finally, a few intact communities were used to resettle Arabs who were displaced from their homes elsewhere inside the new state of Israel.
Among the 750,000 or more Palestinians forced out of the Jewish- majority state were not only Arabs but also Druze and Bedouin. Lana Tatour writes, “The Bedouin were— like the larger Palestinian population— subjected to forced transfer and expulsion by Zionist forces. Until then, the Naqab [Negev] region had been home to between 75,000 and 90,000 Bedouin belonging to 95 tribes. In the aftermath of the 1948 War, only 11,000 Bedouin belonging to 19 tribes remained.” The partition plan called for a division of Palestine into two states: one with hardly any Jewish residents and one with a 55 percent Jewish majority. This was not good enough for the Zionists, who sought greater demographic superiority within their designated region and drove non- Jews out of their designated region as well.
Within Israeli Jewish society, this claim of premeditated ethnic cleansing is controversial. Although few would disagree that Palestinian Arabs left Israel in large numbers, many are satisfied with the view that ethnic cleansing was not the result of a strategy directed from Zionist central command— that it was, rather, an unconscious, even unintended, outcome of uncoordinated developments. These questions of intension have driven scholarship on 1948 for de cades, with many early Israeli historians downplaying the violence.
Later Israeli scholars, a group known as the New Historians, have been forthright about the violence of Israeli state- building. Their research details hundreds of cases of forced removal affecting thousands upon thousands of Palestinians. But the question of intention remains. Benny Morris, one of the most prominent New Historians, has argued that the Palestinian exodus was born of “compelling war conditions” rather than design. On this view, the expulsion of Palestinian civilians— and in some cases their massacre— was unavoidable given the facts of the unfolding 1948 conflict.
Other historians, such as the Palestinian Nur Masalha, have taken a differ ent approach. Masalha does not join others in seeking a blueprint for Israeli actions in 1948 and, having failed to locate it, conclude that ethnic cleansing was unintentional. Rather, he points out that expulsion was inherent in the Zionist project. All along, Zionist leaders have responded to the native problem—or, if you will, the squatter problem—by presuming that it would not be solved through mutual accommodation but instead eliminated in service of Jewish dominion. The initial Zionist position on the native question was that Palestine was “a land without a people,” which Masalha understands as a claim that the Palestinians were a premodern relic with no significant “civilization” who could thus be dealt with as if they did not exist. Winston Churchill, a supporter of Jewish statehood, enunciated a similar position when he compared the Palestinian Arabs to a “dog in the manger,” opining that the Arabs had no greater right to the land than the dog “has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.”
The commitment to Arab elimination only increased as in dependence neared. Hannah Arendt noted that the 1944 Atlantic City Resolution of the American Jewish Conference, later adopted by the World Zionist Organization, left no room for Arab rights in Israel, whereas even two years earlier the Biltmore Conference— itself marking an uptick in Jewish exclusionism—had at least allowed the possibility of minority rights. “The Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution,” Arendt pointed out. That they had dis appeared from Zionist planning suggests that they were intended to dis appear from the Zionist state.
Masalha further observes that Zionists did not merely talk as though ethnic cleansing were inevitable; they also took up policies explic itly geared toward Arab expulsion. For instance, after the high point of the Palestinian resistance in 1936, the Jewish Agency set up a Population Transfer Committee. Following directives of the twentieth Zionist Council meeting in August 1937, the committee sought to bribe Arab countries to take the Palestinians. Preferred destinations included Iraq, the Syrian Desert, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The plans were seldom announced openly, for fear of antagonizing British public opinion, and were usually pushed through third parties: the Saudi plan through the British Orientalist Harry St.&John Philby, the Jordan Plan through the #937 Peel Commission, and the Iraq Plan through the #945 US Hoover Plan. Transfer remained an official goal after Israel came into being. On May 28, 1948, two weeks after Israel declared its independence, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett appointed a temporary Transfer Committee, which worked to depopulate Palestinian communities. Ben-Gurion later promoted the committee to a permanent government body. In his diaries he referred to the Committee as “Va’adat ’Akirah Vegerush”— literally, the Committee for Uprooting and Expulsion.66 It seems undeniable, therefore, that the ethnic cleansing of #948 was carried out deliberately, if not with directed orders. Jewish soldiers did not have to be so ordered; they knew what they were fighting for, in light of decades of rhetoric and policy, which established and implemented an ideology they were taught to share.
Further evidence of intention lies in the concerted effort to prevent the refugees returning. Ilan Pappé, another New Historian, documents 286 Palestinian Arab villages destroyed by August 1948— regardless of whether they were hostile or friendly— whose populations were prevented from resettling in their homes after the war. Pappé has further adduced evidence that Ben- Gurion knew about and approved of ethnic cleansing and that he and a small group of aides oversaw the effort. Again, Ben- Gurion’s own words speak loudly. As he explained to aides in 1949, “Before the founding of the state, on the eve of its creation, our main interest was self-defense. . . . But now the issue at hand is conquest, not self- defense.”
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians went on for months but was never completed. More than 150,000 either remained within the area of Israel or managed to return. About half that number were pre sent absentees, whose land and other property was expropriated. From the perspective of the Zionist establishment, this residual Arab population was a fact to be lamented. Yitzhak Ben- Zvi, who would become Israel’s second president, observed that “ there are too many Arabs who remained in the country.” Eliyahu Carmeli, a member of the Knesset (MK) declared, “I’m not willing to accept a single Arab and not only an Arab but any gentile. I want the state of Israel to be entirely Jewish.” Yehiel Duvdevany, an MK from Ben- Gurion’s Mapai party, added, “If there was any way of solving the problem by way of a transfer of the remaining 170,000 Arabs we should do so.” (There is some dispute over just how many Arabs were in Israel after the violence of 1948.) Zeev Onn, another Mapai leader, commented, “The landscape is more beautiful— I enjoy it, especially when traveling between Haifa and Tel- Aviv, and there is no single Arab to be seen.” But where there were Arabs to be seen, something would have to be done. That something was apartheid.
(Neither Settler Nor Native, pp 250-283, 2020)
