Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - Statistical Data Included

When a problem gets so vast and so complex that it's hard to see how it can ever be resolved, it's perfectly natural to ask ourselves whether there was a time when, with sufficient foresight, it might have been prevented. If only we knew how to anticipate such problems, we tell ourselves, maybe we could avoid them in the future. So, applying that reasoning, let us ask how the seemingly intractable mess between the Palestinian people and the state of Israel ever got started?

We could blame it on Sarai, wife of Abram. According to the story in Genesis 16, it was Sarai's idea, when she was still childless in her late seventies, for Abram to have a child by her Egyptian handmaid, Hagar--so he did, and named the son Ishmael. But thirteen years later, according to Genesis 21, Sarai (now renamed Sarah) herself gave birth to a son by Abram (now Abraham), and this son was named Isaac. Sarah's actions led to rivalry between the descendants of Abraham's sons. According to traditions, Isaac became the progenitor of the Jews and Ishmael of the northern Arabs. Both sons were circumcised at God's command, but Hagar and her son were exiled to the southern desert. And exile is a major theme in both Hebrew and Arabic stories. Hagar is from the same Semitic root for emigrate as the Arabic hijra--the Hegira, Muhammad's emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE., which is considered the starting point of Islam.

Or we could blame it on Pope Urban II, who in 1095 CE instigated the first Crusade. The next spring, according to Karen Armstrong in Jerusalem:

   A band of German Crusaders massacred the Jewish communities of Speyer,
   Worms, and Mainz upon the Rhine. This had certainly not been the pope's
   intention, but it seemed ridiculous to these Crusaders to march thousands
   of miles to fight Muslims--about whom they knew next to nothing--when the
   people who had actually killed Christ (or so the Crusaders believed) were
   alive and well on their very doorsteps. These were the first full-scale
   pogroms in Europe.

The word pogrom means "devastation" in Russian, and there were many pogroms in nineteenth-century Russia. When Ariel Sharon addressed soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force at Jenin in April 2002, he reminded them that their struggle had begun "120 years ago." This could only have referred to the pogrom that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, when one of the plotters was found to be a young Jewish woman. The first aliyah ("going up" to Israel) of Jews began the very next year with the arrival of fourteen European immigrants at Jaffa in Palestine. This was an insignificant number compared to the mainly Sephardic (Spanish-Mediterranean) Jews already in Palestine and Syria (around 25,000 in 1800), some of whose family roots had been there for a long time. However, the first aliyah continued until 1903 and was followed by many more.

Or we might, if we choose, even blame the present troubles on Charles Darwin, whose promulgation of the idea of natural selection in the mid-nineteenth century was immediately picked up and twisted by "Social Darwinists" to support the notion that Aryans were inherently superior to the Semitic peoples and to justify anti-Semitic campaigns throughout Europe. It is important to remember, though, that whether such anti-Jewish discrimination took the form of pogroms or something less violent, it was carried out not by Palestinian Muslims but by European Christians. Those Jews who chose to emigrate to Palestine clearly saw it at the time as a better and safer place to be.

As far back as the 1860s a German Jew, Moses Hess, had advocated the formation of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. At that time most Jews in western Europe did not take such an idea seriously. Many of them, emancipated by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, had become successfully integrated into their societies and were comfortable where they were. By the 1880s, however, both western and eastern European Jews were beginning to be ready for this idea. Leo Pinsker advanced a proposal for a secular socialist Jewish state in his 1882 book Auto-Emancipation. Nathan Birnbaum seems to have been the first to propose the term Zionism for this concept in 1886.

But the real impetus for the Zionist program came from a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, who was shocked by the anti-Semitism demonstrated in the rigged trial and conviction for treason (in 1894 Enlightenment France, of all places) of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer. Herzl's 1896 book Der Judenstaat proposed that Jews should have their own nation-state. A superlative communicator, Herzl was able to bring the basic concept of Zionism to the attention of the world. The following year, on August 29, the first Zionist Congress met in Basel with the objective "to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law" and to promote the settlement of Palestine by skilled and professional Jews. Herzl himself was not personally committed to locating the new Jewish state in Palestine and seriously considered such places as the Sinai Peninsula, Kenya, and Cyprus.

Surprisingly, perhaps, there has been some resistance to Zionism from its very inception from the most orthodox elements in Judaism, based for the most part on three arguments: first, that Zionism is a secular movement and would imperil the essentially religious nature of Judaism; second, that the indigenous Jews and Arabs of Palestine have enjoyed a harmonious relationship that would be disrupted by the introduction of European Zionists in large numbers; and last and most importantly, according to Jewish eschatology, a Jewish state must not be established until the Messiah comes to lead it. The proportion of Orthodox Jews who hold to these views is hotly debated; today they appear to be represented mainly by a branch known as Neturei Karta (an Aramaic name meaning "Guardians of the City").

Nowadays, we have grown accustomed to hearing the present situation blamed not on Christian anti-Semitism but on intrinsic hostility between Muslims and Jews. Plenty of hostility has been built up on both sides over the past century, to be sure, but has it always been this way? Serious students, like Karen Armstrong in Jerusalem, William L. Cleveland in A History of the Modern Middle East, and I. J. Bickerton and C. L. Klausner in A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict are not quick to offer religious intolerance as a fundamental explanation of current events.

According to accounts of the early history of Islam, together with passages from the Quran and Hadith, Muhammad understood himself to be the last in a series of Jewish prophets, including Jesus, and his mission to be to renew the Jewish prophets' mission to Jews, Christians, and the whole world. The Quran uses the term ahl al-kitab (People of the Book) more than thirty times, mostly in Surahs 2-5, allotting special status to Jews and Christians as believers in the Torah and the Gospels (and later, when Islam spread to Persia, the term also included the Zoroastrians). Muhammad did reject those Jews who did not accept him as their prophet, and he regarded the Christian belief that Jesus was the son of God to be a form of polytheism. Still, as People of the Book, they were dhimmis (to be protected) under Muslim governments if they paid a jizya (poll tax).

In practice there was wide variation in the way Muslim authorities interpreted these rules, and instances are sometimes cited where Jews and Christians fared badly in areas ruled by Muslims. There are other cases, however, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived at peace together and even created a remarkably unified kind of community. Perhaps the most notable example is the Muslim city of Cordoba in Spain, where both the Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) and the Arabic philosopher ibn Rushd (Averroes) were born and wrote in Arabic--described in the recent book The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal.

The name Palestine originally meant "land of the Philistines." From Greek and Roman times, Palestine was often combined administratively with Syria to form Syro-Palestine. After the Ottoman conquest in 1516, most of Palestine was included in the vilayet (major administrative unit) of Syria. Much later, at the start of the nineteenth century, a weakened Ottoman Empire, having repeatedly failed to control Persia (now under the Qajar dynasty), was also forced to accept a semi-autonomous Egypt under Muhammad Ali. Among a series of expansionist moves east and south, Egypt captured Palestine west of the Jordan River--the part we now call "Palestine." Egypt held it from 1831 to 1840 before it returned to the Ottoman Empire, with the northern portion in the vilayet of Beirut and the southern in the smaller sanjak (district or "flag") of Jerusalem.

Between 1854 and 1869, Egypt built the Suez Canal. But in doing so it drove itself into bankruptcy and in 1882 became a British protectorate. Remember that around 1882 events in Russia and western Europe were leading toward the development of a Zionist movement and the start of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From 1882 on, proximity to the canal and to British power was to have a profound influence on Palestinian-Jewish relations.

The Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was called, began small and grew slowly during the years leading up to World War I. Immigration was funded mainly by a small number of wealthy European Jews, led by the French Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who was not a Zionist himself. Initially the land was owned by a few rich, mainly absentee landlords who lived in or near urban areas and occupied and worked by many poor peasant farmers (fellahin, in Arabic).

Usually the fellahin were driven off the land so that Jewish immigrants could occupy it. According to Justin McCarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population, History, and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (1990)--the definitive source for such population data--the first aliyah continued from 1882 to 1903, by which time about 90,000 acres were purchased, with about twenty villages and 10,000 new settlers, about half of them in the villages. Successive waves of immigrants varied strikingly in their past lifestyles, those from western or eastern Europe being more accustomed to urban or rural environments, respectively. Accordingly, some chose to work the land themselves while others hired back some of the fellahin. According to Bickerton and Klausner:

   Initial Arab peasant opposition subsided when the peasants realized that
   Jewish landowners would maintain the tradition of permitting them to work
   the land and keep their income. The number of Jewish settlers was too small
   to have any serious impact upon Arab agriculture, especially in the hill
   country. Interestingly, public opposition to Zionist settlement was led by
   the Greek Orthodox Christians of Palestine.

Still other immigrants gave up and emigrated from Palestine. Of the 40,000 new immigrants arriving in the second aliyah, between 1904 and 1914 (David Ben-Gurion was one of the leaders of this group), some estimates say that as many as 90 percent found the conditions inhospitable and left. By 1914 there were still only about forty Jewish settlements in Palestine, owning about 100,000 acres. Of this land about 4 percent had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund (established in 1901), a protected source considered Jewish national property. In 1914 the total population of Palestine was about 722,000, of which only about 60,000 or 8 percent were Jews (12,000 in collective farms and villages). This would be a net increase of only 35,000 in 114 years. By contrast, during the same period, the number of Jews in Europe increased from two million to thirteen million. Equally striking is the fact that, while almost three million Jews left Russia between 1880 and 1914, only about 30,000 of them went to Palestine. After World War I, however, a radical change took place.

The British presence in India and the Far East depended increasingly on control of the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. When the Ottoman Empire joined Germany at the start of World War I in 1914, Britain seized the opportunity to strengthen its long-term position in the Middle East by courting support from Jews and especially Arabs, many of whom (though by no means all) had long chafed under Ottoman rule. Over the next three years, three separate policy statements emerged from these efforts, partially contradicting each other. Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, sent a letter in Arabic to Hussain, Sharif of Mecca, on October 24, 1915, in effect offering independence to the Arabs who would support the British war effort.

The following June, under the leadership of Hussain's son Faisal, the Arab Revolt began--a stirringly romanticized version of which is familiar from the film Lawrence of Arabia. While General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby's forces moved north along the Mediterranean coastline, taking Jerusalem by December 1917, Arabs under Faisal and Thomas Edward Lawrence advanced by a parallel course along Allenby's right flank, east of the Jordan River, blowing up portions of the Hejaz railroad between Damascus and Medina, and taking Damascus by October 1918, shortly before an armistice agreement was signed by the Turks. To complicate later relationships, a Jewish spy ring operating in Palestine was very helpful to Allenby's success in taking Jerusalem. Thus the British had a commanding position over this region during the peace negotiations that followed.

Meanwhile, the British government had been following different tacks in separate discussions with French and Zionist representatives about the postwar disposition of captured lands in the Middle East. In May 1916, the Sykes-Picot agreement gave France "influence" or outright control over the northern and western areas corresponding roughly to Syria, southeastern Turkey, and the upper Tigris-Euphrates valley of modern Iraq. The area corresponding most closely to modern Palestine would be governed by an "allied condominium." Then on November 2, 1917, Lord Arthur James Balfour, British foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, head of the British Zionist Organization, an influential "declaration" of two essential parts:

1. "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."

2. "It being clearly understood that nothing 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."

These two statements contained vague language and translation ambiguities that would later be interpreted as contradicting each other or the McMahon letter. It is of historical importance that Chaim Weizmann, a brilliant Russian chemist and charismatic Zionist leader who worked in London during the war and much later became Israel's first president, played a crucial role in persuading David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and others high in the British government to support the Balfour Declaration.

Misunderstandings became apparent as soon as the Paris peace conference began. Looking for a way out, the British asked Faisal and Weizmann to negotiate personally in an effort to find common ground. Despite their own misgivings the two reached tentative agreement, only to find that everyone had underestimated the growing opposition of the local Arab population, now becoming fearful of Zionist expansion. As a result, the peace conference let the British and French settle Middle East divisions. The actual settlement resembled a simplified version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with "mandates" to be governed by Britain and France. The French mandate included modern Lebanon and Syria; the British mandate, modern Palestine, "Transjordan" (modern Jordan), and Iraq.

Neither Jews nor Arabs were happy with this outcome. Many Zionists were incensed by a ruling that Jewish immigration would not be permitted in Transjordan. This reaction led to the formation of a Jewish military group, which later became the terrorist organization Irgun. Much later outgrowths were the rise of Menachem Begin and the Likud party. Many Arabs likewise felt betrayed by the possibility of an eventual Jewish state within Palestine. With signs of violent resistance beginning to appear among both Jews and Arabs, the British government began to try to manage Jewish population growth by limiting or prohibiting Jewish immigration to Palestine through a series of three "White Papers" in 1922, 1930, and 1939. Winston Churchill, who was colonial secretary in 1922, issued the first of these. Each White Paper was enforced for a time but abandoned when opposition mounted to an unacceptable level.

Actual immigration reflected conditions in Europe with the approach and reality of World War II. Between 1914 and the start of the mandate and the end of the third aliyah (1922), there were 30,000 new immigrants. In the short space of the next fifteen years, the population of Palestine increased by almost 600,000:

                  Jews                    Arabs

   1922     93,000 (12 percent)    700,000 (86 percent)
   1931    174,000 (16 percent)    865,000 (82 percent)
   1936    383,000 (28 percent)    983,000 (71 percent)

This alarmed the Arabs. William Cleveland comments in A History of the Modern Middle East.' "It is little wonder that in a region of limited agricultural potential, the ownership of arable land became a matter of contention." He concludes:

   The cumulative effect of land transfers, British policy, and Arab notable
   attitudes was the increasing impoverishment and marginalization of the
   Palestinian Arab peasantry. Alienated from their own political elite, who
   seemed to profit from their plight; from the British, who appeared
   unwilling to prevent their expulsion from the land; and from the Zionists,
   who were perceived to be at the root of their problems, they expressed
   their discontent in outbreaks of violence against all three parties.

My account stops here--approximately seventy years ago. Readers may wonder what this story has to do with today's Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As of the 1930s, the state of Israel had not come into existence, and the Palestinians were referred to merely as Arabs. The Holocaust had not yet occurred, nor had squalid Arab refugee camps developed. Yet as can easily be seen, all the troubles of the present situation are latent in the story told thus far.

If this were a classic whodunit, we could stop here and invite the reader to finger the culprit or predict the course of later events. But in the September/October Humanist, we'll explore the rest of the story that leads to the present situation.

David Schafer is a consulting editor for the Humanist and a recently retired physiologist who now devotes most of his time to humanist research, writing, and teaching. For more background on this topic, the books mentioned are a good place to begin. For another balanced, compassionate perspective, read David K. Shipler's Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land.

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