Conflict of Nations: Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is often said to be about land. This declaration is meant to counter the common misconception that the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have a historical feud going back hundreds of years and caused by an inherent religious and cultural disdain for each other. But, while claims over land play an important role in the two sides' animosities, it does not tell the full story.

The more accurate, and more complex, explanation for the conflict is to say it is about the evolving relationship between two peoples within the same area, specifically about the emergence in the late 19th and early 20th century of, firstly, a nationalism or re-nationalism of Jews, or Zionism, and, secondly, in reaction to Zionism, a nationalism of Palestinians.

That in a world of nation-states Jews would become nationalists was inevitable. That they would become Jewish nationalists was not. The same with Palestinian nationalism.

The development and definitions of both Jewish nationalism and Palestinian nationalism are the crux of the explanation of the conflict.

Zionism did not appear in reaction to Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians, but in reaction to real and perceived anti-Semitism in Russia and Europe. While the selection of Israel as the location for a Zionist state was based on religious factors, the decision to have a Zionist state largely was not.

Zionists came to Israel not determined to stamp out the indigenous population, but largely oblivious to it. An early slogan of the Zionist movement encouraging immigration to Israel was "A land without a people for a people without a land." Once in Israel, seeking land and believing this maxim, the Zionists had already planted the seeds of the conflict. For the most part, Zionist settlers expressed no animosity towards the indigenous population-they were not bloodthirsty aggressors-and, with rare but infamous exceptions, they did not remove Palestinians forcibly from their land. Instead, the Zionists' strategy was a simple economic one of purchasing the land of various Arab tribes representing the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Because of this, Palestinians started to define themselves as a people. Their nationalism emerged as an oppositional force to the Israelis. It did not take Zionists long to incorporate an opposition to Palestinians (and, to a lesser extent, all Arabs) into their ideology. Emergent nationalisms need an oppositional force for self-definition. Today, with relatively little anti-Semitism compared to historic rates in many parts of the world, the modern Israeli state is more reliant on defining itself in opposition to "Islamic terrorists" and to Hamas than in opposition to the specter of anti-Semitism. Similarly, in recent years, with Israel's granting increased autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians' nationalist ideology has splintered somewhat, causing Fatah to fight Hamas. However, neither Hamas nor Fatah have fond feelings toward Israel and their civil scuffle will most likely only be a temporary distraction from the larger ideological war between Palestinians and Israelis.

The above discussion about the emergence of two opposing nationalisms deserves to be broken down into its political, economic and cultural components. Political Forces

In the 18th and 19th centuries, explicit policies of European governments led the Jewish people, who resided in them during the Diaspora, accidentally but effectively to form their own nationalism. In 1791, the French, worried about Jewish uprisings, created a new policy for dealing with the Jews. They were to be "denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals." In effect, they were given all the rights of citizens-the ability to participate in government, academia and business-but still looked down on as a distinct, inferior group. Between 1851 and 1871, similar policies were enacted in Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Germany, "liberating" the Jews. The European countries gave individual Jews a front row seat to witness the emergence of nationalism in Europe. But they were not a part of it as a people, and anti-Semitism was prevalent in Europe.

During the reign of Czar Alexander II in Russia, from 1855 to 1881, the cruelties and restrictions placed on Jews under his predecessor lessened and "Russian Jewry began to examine its own culture more closely." But in 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated and replaced with Alexander III, Jews saw a reinstitution of pogroms, harsh government policies and a mandatory 25-year career of military service that started in childhood. Jewish nationalism emerged in Europe and Russia in response to anti-Semitism. It was also supported by the way Europeans and Russians were impartial in their dispensing of anti-Semitism to both religious and secular Jews.

In 1897, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian-born lawyer who worked as a newspaper reporter in Paris, founded the First Zionist Congress, which begat the World Zionist Organization. This organization set its sight on creating a "home" for the Jewish people by way of the "Basel Program."

Before 1881, the population of Palestine was only four percent Jewish. By the beginning of World War I, Jewish immigration resulted in a four-fold increase in the number of Jews in Palestine, although the fast birth rates of indigenous Muslims and Christians ensured that Jews still only consisted of 7.5 percent of the population. "In the years before 1914 a discrete Palestinian 'patriotism' (rather than a full nationalism) emerged, in large part as a reaction to Zionism."

World War I exacerbated the tensions between Jews and Arabs that were arising because of Jewish immigration and ultimately converted Palestinian "patriotism" to a form of nationalism. Trying to break up the Ottoman Empire, the British offered Arabian warlord Sharif Husayn "the right to establish an Arab 'state or states'" after the war if he would lead a rebellion against the empire. Husayn agreed and, with the help of British military advisers, including Colonel T.E. Lawrence (more commonly known as Lawrence of Arabia), Husayn waged the Arab Revolt. The British won the war and, after divvying the spoils with its allies, received a large swath of territory in the Middle East that it called Transjordan. Husayn claimed that the land the British promised him included Palestine, but the British, who never specified, disagreed. During the war, the British had more or less promised Palestine to the Jews by means of the Balfour Declaration. Winston Churchill, the British Colonial Secretary, broke Transjordan into Jordan and Palestine. He said that he had "created Jordan with a stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon."

The legitimization of Zionism by the British, and the end of the ruling political system, the Ottoman Empire, which was largely impartial towards Zionism and native Palestinian Arabs, hastened the formation of a Palestinian nationalism diametric to Zionist aims.

The emergence of a Palestinian nationalism was distinct from the broader Arab nationalism that preceded it. Palestinian nationalism differs from Arab nationalism in terms of the identity and intensity of their respective "other." Arab nationalism arose largely in response to the British and French mandates, which had neither left the greater Middle East entirely to its own devices nor treated Arabs as equal. The British and French were clearly an "other" for Arabs, but they were not as much a threat to Arabs as Zionism was to Palestinians.

Neither the British nor the French appropriated land, established a rival and competing economy, or established rival and competing political structures. Furthermore, mandatory rule was, theoretically temporary-a far cry from the permanent settlement program of the Zionists.

A more local, all-consuming and permanent threat required a more severe nationalistic reaction by the Palestinians.

Essentially, the establishment of a Palestinian nationalism set the basis for the modern conflict. It was 1920 when the newly formed Palestinian General Congress promised to "throw back the Zionists with all our force." By 1935 the discovery of arms shipments to Zionists triggered a Palestinian uprising, already being fomented by economic hardship. In 1937, "9,000 to 10,000 Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab fighters," known as mujahidin, attacked British troops and Zionist settlers in an organized rebellion. The British (20,000 troops were brought to Palestine) and Zionists worked together to strike back hard against Palestinians with "all the usual tactics of counterinsurgency." They were effective in suppressing the rebellion, but the incident served to cement the rift between Palestinians and Zionists and served as fodder for Palestinian rhetoric and resentments for generations. Economic Forces

While the formation of Israeli nationalism was largely a political creation, the initial population push towards Palestine and the success of Jews once in Palestine was largely due to economic forces.

The movement of Jews to Palestine happened in five phases, known collectively as aliyot and individually as aliyah. The first aliyah could be called the pragmatic aliyah. The 25,000 Jews who moved to Israel during the first aliyah, from 1882 to 1903, were mostly Russian and Polish and more interested in fleeing the pogroms and terror of Czar Alexander III than finding the type of nationalistic haven that Zionism's elite promoted.

They got along fairly well with their Arab neighbors, learning agricultural techniques from them and hiring them as laborers. However, by the second aliyah, from 1904 to 1914, the increase in Jewish population created tensions around the fact that Arabs lived on coastal, fertile land. Zionist settlers, now fully aware that Palestine was not a land without a people, "made the conscious decision to sever their economy from their neighbors."

A policy of buying land from Palestinians would form the economic impetus for the financial decline of the Palestinian peasant between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century. "The dominant figure in this story [of land purchase] was neither the Zionist nor the Arab nationalist: he was homo economicus." However, the result of this inequality of land ownership would be the source of deep resentment of both sides-Palestinians who lost their land and to some Jews who would lay claim to more land east of the Jordan River.

The creation by the World Zionist Organization of the "Jewish Agency" served many government functions for Jews in pre-1948 Palestine. Perhaps the strongest branch of the Jewish Agency was the Jewish National Fund, which the Jewish Agency gave the task of buying land from Palestinians. Wealthy European Jews, such as Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a banking heir, invested money in the national fund.

A convergence of factors would make Palestinians prone to accept the Zionists' offers on their land. The 1858 Ottoman government land code changed the ownership rights of Palestinian land (as well as the rights in other regions of Greater Syria). Before 1858, all land belonged to the state. Palestinians could work on and live on their land but could not sell it. The village leader, or shaykh, negotiated with the Ottoman government but had little administrative power within the village. The goal of the 1858 land code was to privatize property so that the Ottoman government could more easily levy taxes. The result was that power and property amassed in the hands of the shaykhs and other elite.

Between 1880 and 1913, Palestinians transitioned to a market economy, making them susceptible to market variations. It did not help that Palestinians stayed primarily in the volatile business of agriculture. The cash crop of cotton was especially popular and Palestinians found themselves trapped in "the boom-and-bust cycle of the international market." Jews, on the other hand, created "an industrialized, urban society." The socialist image popularized in the imagination by collectives, or kibbutzim, was in fact a minority, and, in the fourth and fifth aliyot, in the 1920s and 1930s, immigrants brought "business skills, capital, technical inventiveness, and modern industrial management experience" to the area. Economic disasters like the Great Depression in the 1930s sent the agricultural Palestinians spiraling in debt while the Zionists' industry continued to expand.

When the Jewish National Fund offered Palestinians money, they were offering money disproportionately to elites who had benefitted from the 1858 land code and also to elites and peasants who had suffered from the instability of the budding global market. It did not matter that "Arab opposition to land sales was frequently voiced by the very same people who were themselves selling land to the Zionists"; the numbers were against them. British officials saw the increasing economic inequality that this exchange was producing, but "the collusive efforts of willing sellers and eager buyers" hindered their attempts to stop it. By 1931, 20,000 peasant Palestinians had land bought by Zionists. By 1935, 30 percent of Palestinian farmers were landless and 75 to 80 percent did not have enough land to support themselves. Simple economic forces had brought about the existence of two people: one of which controlled the land's resources and the other of which did not. It is not hard to understand the motivations for the political upheavals mentioned above.

Cultural Forces

There is probably no greater myth about the Israel-Palestine conflict than that it is an ancient rivalry dating to biblical times. Cultural and religious differences between the two peoples are almost entirely a modern political wedge to prop up each group's form of nationalism.

Zionists agreed on Palestine as the location for Jewish immigration because of religious reasons although some suggested other locations such as Uganda (Herzl's suggestion) and the United States. Jews were "expelled by Romans [from Palestine] in the second century" and "from a theological perspective the Jews were cast out of Eretz-Israel and into exile" and the return to Israel was a belief of the religion even before the 1880s and the advent of Zionism. However, the choice to relocate the Jewish people was a political one not a religious one.

Until World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and greater Syria (an area that takes its definition from the Bible and includes the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel as well as parts of Jordan and Turkey), "Arab inhabitants of Palestine viewed themselves as Syrians," as "Ottoman subjects," or as "Ottoman citizens." They lived rural lives and produced, "olives, cotton, grains, melons The Jews living in Palestine were Sephardic and Ashkenazi. The Sephardic Jews were "Arabic-speaking Ottoman citizens who were integrated into the culture and, for all intents and purposes, had decent relations with the native Christians and Muslims," while the Ashkenazi Jews were "deeply religious Europeans who came to Palestine to pray as well as die." At the onset of Zionist immigration, both groups feared the change.

The ethnicity and religion of Jews and Arab Muslims was essentially co-opted by their respective nationalisms. Jews who came to Palestine were often secular and came because the European majority foisted the identity of Jew upon them. Once in Palestine, their identity was defined as "not Palestinian" as compared to "not Polish," "not German" or "not Russian." In the 1920s and 1930s there emerged institutions of government that reinforced religious definitions. The Jewish Agency was administered by Jews for the benefit of Jews. Similarly, the Supreme Muslim Council gained significance as a leading governmental body for Muslims. This separation between "Muslim" and "Arab" only continued to grow because while some Jews were Arabs (the Mizrahi Jews), none were Muslims, and because Islam provides a text for voicing discontent (the Qur'an) that the Arab ethnicity does not have.

While religious rhetoric of anger and difference is prevalent in Palestine and modern Israel from both sides, this is more a response to and not a cause for conflict. Revitalization Movements

In "Political Anthropology: An Introduction," Ted Lewellen writes that "religion may substitute for direct political action in cases in which natives have been rendered politically impotent by an alien power." For Palestinians, their religion did not so much substitute for political action as supplemented it.

The problem, as many Palestinians now see it, is that the Jews/Israelis are on their land and they want them to leave. In this matter their reaction resembles nativism, the type of revitalization where "the aim is to purge the society of unwanted or alien elements." The fact that there was a time before Zionism, when Palestine was comprised of 400,000 Muslims, 43,000 Christians and only 15,000 Jews, is reminiscent of revivalism, the type of revitalization with an "aim to reinstitute a former era of happiness."

The most important concept in understanding the role religion plays in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that religion emerged out of the political sphere. Revitalization movements are "despite the religious trappings, ... basically political." The Palestinian Islamic movement came out of a "political protest, a cry of pain and accusation in the absence of the ... power to confront the occupier on their own terms."

Similarly, the Zionist movement took a people, some of whom were religious and some of whom were secular, and imbued them with religion as a means of making an "'antisystemic protest'" against the anti-Semitism and oppression they were subjected to in Europe and Russia. Both Palestinian and Jewish nationalisms were born as an "opposition to some sort of dominant power." Jewish nationalism persisted even after it became the dominant power. Conclusion

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict arose out of competing nationalisms, each set to see the end of the other. While religious forces led Zionists to select Palestine as a location for their state, they based their decision to seek a state on the political force of exclusion. Once in Palestine, economic forces led to a transferring of land and power from the indigenous Arab tribes to the Jews. From there, the political force of nationalism ensured that the Jews redefined themselves as anti-Arabs, the Arabs as Palestinians, and that the Palestinians created a cohesive alliance against the Jews.

It is not helpful to blame either side of the conflict. The Zionists did nothing wrong in escaping the situation in Europe where they were regarded as second-hand citizens, discriminated against and burdened by unequal rules. It is a rare feat in the modern world for an oppressed people to evade oppression so successfully. Likewise, the Palestinians have been burdened with the loss of their land by the imbalances of the British Mandate as much as by the economic and military might of the Jewish people.

If there is hope for a peace in the future, it is for the change of the nature of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism away from the current nature that defines itself primarily by mutual hatred. The two-state solution currently in vogue is one possibility. For it to work, however, a change in the substance of the two states' nationalisms would need to take place. While so far both nationalisms have tended to define themselves as being inherently contradictory, it is not impossible to have a shift of philosophy that recognizes the right of the other to exist. Another avenue for peace is that, in time, the nationalist contradictions (and resultant hatreds) could dissolve, and Palestinians and Israelis could form a government together. This is unlikely to happen in the near future. It is also possible that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not be resolved until the political, economic and geographic makeup of the region is reshaped by forces that cannot now be predicted. In any event, true peace will only emerge when the forces that forged a sense of nationhood by two peoples sharing the same land evolve toward some new framework for collective identity in the place called Israel by some and Palestine by others.

Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. p. 15

Harms, Gregory. The Palestine-Israel Conflict. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2005. p. 60.

The Holocaust's influence on the formation of Zionism is often exaggerated. While the Holocaust did strengthen outside support for a state of Israel and increase internal fears of anti-Semitism, by the time of the Holocaust Zionism was already thriving in Palestine.

Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. p. 115

Gelvin, op. cit., p. 37

Harms, op. cit., p. 49

Gelvin, op. cit., p. 41

The Basel Program read as follows:

The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.

The Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end:

1. The promotion, on suitable lines, of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.

2. The organization and binding together of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international in accordance with the laws of each country.

3. The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness.

4. Preparatory steps toward obtaining government consent, where necessary, to the attainment of the aim of Zionism. - Ibid, p. 52.

McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia University Press. 1990. p. 10

Ibid, p. 26

Mandel, Neville J. The Arabs and Zionism Before World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. p. xxii

Gelvin, op. cit., pp. 80-81

Ibid, pp. 80-81

Ibid, p. 88

Ibid, p. 96

Ibid, p. 98

Ibid, p. 112

The tactics included "the collective punishment of villages, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, deportation
Ibid, p. 63

Ibid, p. 63

Wasserstein, Bernard. Israelis and Palestinians : Why do they Fight? Can they Stop?. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. p. 47

Gelvin, op. cit., p. 89

Ibid, p. 90

Ibid, p. 31

"In 1880 an estimated 79 per cent of the Arab population was rural" - Wasserstein, op. cit., p. 45

Gelvin, op. cit., p. 25

Wasserstein, op. cit., p. 45

Ibid, p. 39

Gelvin, op. cit., p. 105

Wasserstein, op. cit., p. 47

Ibid, p. 50

Gelvin, op. cit., p.106

Harms, op. cit., p. 47

Gelvin, op. cit., pp. 94-95

Harms, op. cit., p. 59

Ibid, p. 61

Wasserstein, op. cit., p. 107

Lewellen, Ted C. Political Anthropology: An Introduction. Third Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. 2003. p. 70

Ibid, p. 71

Ibid, p. 71

Ibid, p. 72

Ibid, p. 72

Ibid, p. 70

Ibid, p. 69