Jews, Muslims, Palestine, and the Creation of Israel

It's increasingly difficult to dispute the fact that the twentieth century has the dubious distinction of being one of the bloodiest in terms of sheer numbers of individuals killed or displaced during the course of inter- and intra-state fighting. Aside from the glaring tragedies of the World Wars and the Holocaust, numerous other conflicts characterized by carnage on an unprecedented level flared during this hundred-year period, covering at various times large parts of southeast Asia, eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. By twentieth-century standards of violence, then, the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict is nothing exceptional and in fact has been mild relative to some of the wars that have raged around it. Yet the region's violence has for decades captured the attention of the wider world, preoccupied the planet's major economic and military powers, and perhaps most importantly has had the peculiar ability to sow violent conflict-with various interests co-opting the values and ideals of either the Israelis or the Palestinians and using them as a rallying cry against their enemies-in nearly every corner of the globe. To understand why the enmity between these two peoples remains so relevant we need to look both to the events that precipitated and the events that followed the creation of the Jewish state of Israel.

The history of Zionism did not, of course, begin with the founding of Israel as a sovereign entity. Theodor Herzl and other 19^th-century thinkers, responding to the disenchantment of many Jews with life in post-emancipation Europe, were responsible for laying the intellectual groundwork of the Zionist movement. Throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century, a number of "waves" of the movement's followers left their homes in Europe (and, less often, in America) and settled in Palestine, the spiritual epicenter of Judeo-Christian religious life. Such migration was not sanctioned by any official entities, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917-Britain's promise to reserve Palestine as "a National Home for the Jewish People," according to the Declaration-coupled with post-WWI chaos in eastern Europe certainly did nothing to discourage it.

Palestinian Arabs already present on the land were unprepared, to say the least, for this influx of settlers into their quiet pre-industrial region. Palestine was a thinly-urbanized area consisting of a fertile plain spreading inland from the shores of the Mediterranean, drier hills further to the east, and sparsely-inhabited desert to the south. Christians, Jews, and Muslims-who historically comprised the bulk of the population-had lived in relative peace here for some time, each community somewhat autonomous but under token control by elite Muslim families residing in the larger towns and cities. Tensions were slow to build, but as more Jewish settlers during the 1930s flowed in from the north and west-many fleeing the increasingly dangerous situation in Germany-and precious arable land became scant Arab Muslim frustration made itself felt in a widespread but unorganized way, first in a 1936 "general strike" and then in a more violent insurgent uprising that lasted from 1936-9 and was only brought to a close by the intervention of occupying British troops.

The contrasts between the entrenched Arab "natives" and the burgeoning Jewish immigrant community ran deep from the beginning and would have a lasting impact on the interplay between the two populations going forward. The majority of Muslims in Palestine lived as peasants in the countryside, farming mainly for subsistence but occasionally for the well-to-do urban elites who owned much of the region's fertile land. These urban elites, concentrated in major cities like Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, harbored a deep distrust for rural folk, a classic division which would prove problematic down the road. Regional loyalties also ran deep: the Palestinian Arab oligarchy was controlled by a handful of families, each of which could claim a discrete patch of the country as their area of jurisdiction. The most powerful of these families, the Husayni clan, effectively set the tone and substance of the Arab response to Jewish settlement, but longstanding networks of patriarchy and loyalty nevertheless fragmented the country sufficiently to preclude the appearance of a unified anti-settlement front until it was too late. Partially because of this twofold weakness in the Palestinian Arab "state," the only "military" the area's Muslims could claim as their own was the Mufti, a poorly-equipped, ragtag affair consisting solely of irregulars.

The rapidly-growing nonnative Palestinian Jewish community-the Yishuv henceforth-was an entirely different story. As soon as settlement began in earnest the Yishuv began to put together a shadow government (the term might sound sinister, but this is just a short way of saying that an excessive amount of planning had gone into the formation of the government-to-be before the Jewish state even existed) complete with functioning ministries that would assume power in Palestine once conditions were ripe. The same petty power disputes and regionalism that prevented the creation of large-scale governmental institutions in largely agricultural Arab Palestine was not an obstacle for the Jewish settlers. In light of the hardships Jews faced in Europe and elsewhere, especially as the onset of hostilities between Germany and Poland approached, a large portion of the European Jewish elite united behind the idea of a "national home" and kept money flowing to the Yishuv's developing shadow government. Jewish labor groups, seeing in the birth of a Zionist state a chance to uplift the workers who would help build its economy, were also instrumental in providing startup cash. Indeed, more moderate elements of the labor movement would help form the new state's first official governing coalition.

By 1947, once the dust had settled on the horror of the Holocaust, the rules of the game had changed completely. Before the Second World War, even with the mandate of the Balfour Declaration to lend legitimacy to the Yishuv's settlement of Palestine, world opinion on the question of a Jewish state had been either unformed or ambivalent. As would be expected, after the Holocaust world opinion-showcased in U.N. deliberations and resolutions-had turned definitively toward the creation of a Jewish state in the Levant, although its exact nature was still a point of contention. With its well-prepared shadow government ready to assume power once the boundaries of its state were fixed, the Yishuv clearly had the advantage over its Palestinian Arab neighbors. And with this advantage came two choices on how to proceed. The first was a pragmatic, less disruptive approach supported by the Yishuv's left: continuing to move Jewish settlers into Palestine and annexing it while securing as far as possible the property rights and freedoms of the Arabs already living there-creating, essentially, a bireligious state. The second, supported by the Haganah and IZL-the Yishuv's primary intelligence and military authorities-took a harder line, proposing to expel Arab villagers and townspeople either overtly or covertly from Palestine. A smaller group of extremists within the Yishuv wished to expel all Arabs from both Palestine and the Transjordan (roughly coterminous with modern Jordan) and enlarge the Jewish state accordingly, but their plan never gained much traction. Britain, which technically controlled the country, refused to intervene militarily regardless of the circumstances.

Needless to say, violence between Arabs skeptical that the first alternative would come to pass and Jewish settlers flared up during late 1947 and early 1948, and the Haganah and IZL responded accordingly. In a cycle of escalating retaliation, the Haganah in particular subjected Arab residents of villages and towns where violence had occurred to humiliating house-to-house searches and, as time wore on and the violence continued, many of the wealthier of these residents chose to flee to larger towns or leave Palestine completely. In contrast to what many outsiders criticized as Haganah's unfair, excessive counter-insurgency tactics, the new Yishuv government led by David Ben-Gurion put on a moderate face and stressed the need for reconciliation rather than punitive action. Yet logical constraints hampered the genuine desire of the moderate governing coalition from acting accordingly: Palestine faced the very real threat of invasion by the various standing armies in the Muslim-dominated Middle East once the British mandate expired on May 15 of 1948, and the Yishuv's military strategists feared that a two-pronged assault from without and within would be more than the fledgling state could handle.

In any event, as the violence escalated those Arabs who could afford to continued to flee Palestine. The Haganah and later IZL forces moved systematically into troubled areas, annexing settlements and intimidating residents into leaving. At the same time, paramilitary Arab militias moved freely about the countryside, arming farmers and terrorizing Muslim populations who expressed a desire for peace. As time passed, Palestine's small geographical area combined with the rapid stepping-up of the violence to create a sense of panic among lay Palestinians and encouraged many members of the middle and even lower classes to flee. Haganah concentrated much of its efforts along the heavily-populated coastal plain, dispersing large numbers of people who quickly fled either to more stable parts of Palestine or to neighboring Arab-majority countries, principally Syria and Lebanon.