Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (19 page)

which they lived and contributed to their oppression by the non-Jewish cultural majorities within those countries. In Herzl’s view, the only resolution to these hardships that the Jews faced was for the Jews to obtain political autonomy in their own nation-state, thus emancipating their Jewish nationality from its oppressed condition. Like Pinsker, one of the most important foundations of Herzl’s worldview was the idea that the Jews were bound primarily by their sense of secular political identity, more so than their religious one. In this vein, Herzl did not identify Israel/Palestine as the territory for a future Jewish nation-state.16

The Jewish State had a powerful impact on many European Jews and gave modern Zionism a clear and tangible political manifesto. Through Herzl’s work, the first Zionist Congress took place in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. More than 200 people attended and it was a historic threshold event for Zionism. The members of the Congress agreed that the primary goal of Zionism was to establish a legally recognized home in Israel/Palestine for the Jews. The Congress also declared the establishment of the World Zionist Organization as the central organizational body of the Zionist movement. In addition, several integrally-related committees were formed to provide the movement with unity and direction.17 In the period after the Basel congress, branches of the central organization were created in many different parts of Eastern Europe and Zionists attempted to generate support among Jews and non-Jews for a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. The Zionist Congress met every year after 1897 and, while attendees sometimes sharply disagreed on various subjects, Herzl’s ability to attract ever-increasing numbers of participants added strength to his Zionist cause.18

Herzl tried to secure the support of Western European Jews, the United States government, and the Ottomans, and failed on each of these fronts. Many Western European and American Jews did not want to support Zionism because they thought that efforts to create a Jewish state and its establishment would potentially threaten their own citizenship in their home countries and catalyze increasing amounts of anti-Semitism where they lived. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, which included Israel/Palestine and vast areas of the Middle East, also opposed the possibility of European Jews settling anywhere in the Middle East because of the threat that it could eventually pose to Ottoman sovereignty and the possible conflicts that could arise between the Eastern European Jews and the indigenous Muslim and Christian populations in Israel/ Palestine. The governments of most Western European countries saw no incentives in supporting the Zionist cause either. By the time of Theodor Herzl’s death in 1904, he had provided Zionism with an organizational structure and the kind of momentum that survived his passing, but he had not garnered the backing of governments and other institutions that could have helped him fulfill his dream of the establishment of a Jewish state.19

Britain and the Zionist Movement

However, during and after World War I, the political status of Zionism improved considerably. During the course of World War I, several factors brought the question of Zionism before the British cabinet. The most urgent factor for members of the British government was their belief that Jewish groups in the United States and Russia had the ability to influence their respective governments’ attitudes toward the war. Until the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, members of the British cabinet, some of whom were Zionists, held the deep concern that the German government – against which Britain was waging war with great vehemence and at enormous cost – would make a declaration supporting Zionist aims and thus Germany could gain enthusiastic support from American Jews. The members of the British cabinet feared that this support, which the American Jews would give to Germany, would then compel those Jews to work toward blocking the American alliance with Britain during World War I. This possibility horrified members of the British cabinet because they viewed American military and political support as absolutely essential in the British war effort against the Germans and other Axis powers.20

Members of the British cabinet were also thoroughly committed to keeping the Russians in the war, as the Russians, the British, and their allies fought the Germans and the other Axis powers. By the autumn of 1917, largely because of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had succeeded in overthrowing Russia’s czar and seizing control of Russia’s government in October 1917, members of the British cabinet were concerned that Russia might withdraw or substantially reduce its commitment to the war effort. Some British government officials argued that a British gesture of goodwill toward Zionist aspirations might persuade influential Jewish members within the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Russian government to keep Russia in the war.21 The extent to which these British officials’ ideas were well- or ill-founded is arguable. What is far more important is that these ideas existed and that they played a crucial role in influencing Britain’s eventual, while often wavering and contradictory, mitigated support of Zionism.

Russian-born Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist spokesperson in London who was a chemistry professor and would eventually become Israel’s first President, played an influential role in the formation of Britain’s policy toward the Middle East. Weizmann, who was a guiding spirit within the World Zionist Organization and played a key role in establishing additional chapters of it, maintained strong relationships with members of the British cabinet and kept the topic of Zionism in the forefront of those officials’ minds.22 One factor that assisted Weizmann in his Zionist endeavors was the fact that members of the British cabinet believed that Britain’s support of Zionism could potentially

serve British imperial interests in a strategically essential part of the Middle East. British officials hoped that Britain’s sponsorship of Jewish settlement in Israel/Palestine would require a British presence in that region and would thus block France from an area that was contiguous to the Suez Canal zone, which was economically, politically, and militarily vital to Britain.23

Thus, four of the converging factors that interacted to cause Britain to produce a declaration in support of Zionist goals in Israel/Palestine were:

Foreign Office November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

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, it being clearly understood that noth- ing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours,

Arthur James Balfour24

This monumental document would come to have an overwhelming and unstoppable effect on the Middle East, Muslim-Jewish relations, Arab- Jewish relations, and eventually significant parts of the world outside of the Middle East. Among other realities, the very statements that Britain would

and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” proved to be, in and of themselves, utterly contradictory and were emblematic of the subsequent contradictions and vacillations in British policies toward the Jewish settlers and the indigenous Arab populations of Israel/Palestine. The area of Israel/Palestine that came to be known as the Palestine Mandate, which came under British military occupation in 1917, was not a distinctive administrative entity under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans viewed that territory as part of southern Syria and it was divided between (1) the Ottoman province of Beirut; (2) the Ottoman province of Damascus; and

(3) the Ottoman special administrative unit of Jerusalem. After the British captured Jerusalem in December 1917, they detached the territory of Israel/ Palestine from Ottoman rule and placed Israel/Palestine under their own military occupation.25 In 1920, the San Remo Conference confirmed the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s Palestine Mandate and put Britain into a position where it replaced its military government in Israel/Palestine with a civilian one.26 In 1922, the recently established League of Nations gave its formal approval of Britain’s Palestine Mandate and added provisions that raised the expectations of Zionists while deeply frustrating many of the Arab residents of Israel/Palestine. In addition, the League of Nations’ pronouncement incorporated the Balfour Declaration and recognized Hebrew as an official language in Israel/Palestine.27

Jewish Settlement of Israel/Palestine

These events opened the door to the immigration of mostly western Jews to Israel/Palestine. The Jews’ ensuing efforts to settle Israel/Palestine could be considered largely successful from a Zionist perspective and overwhelmingly infuriating from an Arab one. Between 1931 and 1946 the number of Jewish settlers in Israel/Palestine rose from approximately 174,000 to almost 600,000, while, during the same period, the Arab population in that region rose from approximately 865,000 to just over 1.3 million. More significantly, however, Arabs comprised 82 percent of the population of Israel/Palestine in 1931 and only 67 percent in 1946. During the same period, Jews comprised 16 percent of Israel/Palestine’s population in 1931 and 31 percent in 1946.28 Jewish immigration and land acquisition were the main foci of Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish state. The Zionists’ goal was to increase the Jewish population of the mandate area through as much Jewish immigration as possible so that the Zionists could have, what they perceived to be, a tenable claim to a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. In order to settle, house, and feed the Jewish immigrants, the Zionists found it necessary to acquire as much cultivatable land as they could. The Zionists’ commitment to maximum Jewish immigration and their efforts to acquire land were developments that

the Arabs of Israel/Palestine found deeply threatening. They began to believe that the western Zionists were acquiring and/or expropriating land that the Arabs believed rightfully belonged to them.29

One of the organizations that played a crucial role in enabling Jews to settle in Israel/Palestine was the Jewish Agency, established in 1929, which was a reorganized version of the Palestine Zionist Executive which was created in 1921 by the World Zionist Organization. The Jewish Agency provided some of the services to the Jewish people that one would typically associate with a government, which included immigrant settlement, banking systems, and health care, among other things. The Jewish Agency played a key role in mobilizing Jews to come to Israel/Palestine, providing them with almost all of the services that they may have needed to settle in an utterly unfamiliar and foreign region, which, in most cases, was very far from the Jewish settlers’ original homes. With the goal of maximizing the number of Jewish settlers in Israel/Palestine, the Jewish Agency worked in tandem with a variety of Zionist organizations including the Jewish National Fund, which purchased properties it looked upon as belonging to the Jewish people and then leased those properties to Jews at a very low rate.30 Purchasing land from Arab owners who were absentee and others who were present in Israel/Palestine was one way that Zionists acquired property in the region. At various times in the history of Jewish settlement in Israel/Palestine, the Zionists also used violent force against the Arabs as a means of defending the properties that they had already purchased or taking other properties from the Arabs.31 Concomitantly, militant and frequently violent Jewish organizations such as the Irgun, Haganah, and the Stern Group (also known as Lehi) engaged in brutal and coercive tactics in their efforts to establish a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine.32 In response to a wide variety of Jewish tactics that were devoted to laying claims to land, the Arabs, at times through negotiations and at other times through violence, tried to defend their properties. In addition to using armed force to repel the settlers, the Arabs engaged in largely unsuccessful efforts to persuade the British to restrict Jewish immigration and land transfers from Arabs to current and prospective Jewish settlers.33

In the Palestinian Arabs’ efforts to resist the Jewish settlements and the possible establishment of a Jewish state, they formed in 1932 an organization named Hizb al-Istiqlal al-Arabiyya fi Suriya al-Janubiyya (The Arab Independence in Southern Syria Party), which was devoted to creating an independent Palestinian state in Israel/Palestine, and another group with the name Youth Congress, which had a similar purpose.34 In addition, on April 25, 1936, the Palestinians established an organization named the Arab Higher Committee which attempted to coordinate the efforts of a variety of Palestinian groups against the Israelis.35 During the 1920s there were several Palestinian revolts and strikes directed against the Jewish settlements