User talk:Adam Carr/Zionism

Hi Adam! I really appreciate your attempt at rewriting Zionism. It is a subject that I know fairly well, but I have avoided dealing with the issue because of the inevitable flamewars it will evoke--from both sides, mind you. Other attempts I have made to write on Jewish history have led me to some fierce attacks and even being called anti-Semitic--odd, considering that I am responsible for Jewish education in a Jewish museum. Whatever ...

In any event, I have a bunch of comments to make regarding what you wrote. For instance, 1897 as the date for the founding of Zionism: This was the date of the First Congress in Basel, and I can understand why you would give this date as the official founding of political Zionism. There are, however, alternatives. Herzl wrote The Jewish State before that--according to the story, in response to the Dreyfuss Affair (which should also be mentioned). However, Nordau and Hess wrote Autoemancipation and Rome and Jerusalem even before that. The First Aliya (Biluim) was in 1882, Petach Tikvah was founded by people who left Jerusalem in 1870-something, etc. In other words, Herzl was not operating within a vacuum (I am avoiding the more obscure references to Kalischer and Mohilever, the students of Elijah of Vilna, etc.).

Another common mistake people make is identifying almost all Jews as pro-Zionist. The Reform Movement in the U.S. and Germany, for example, were vehemently anti-Zionist, as was the Agudah movement on the right, right up until partition. There were certain turning points. You rightfully mentioned the pogroms, though I think especial mention should be made of Kishinev (1903), the Damascus Blood Libel and the Alliance Israelite, and of course, Montefiore's involvement in Jewish rescue (he was active in the pre-Zionist movement in the 1860s). Other anti-Zionist groups included the Bundists, and especially the Autonomists under Dubnow, who wanted to secure Yiddish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe. HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) was also quite involved in keeping people out of Palestine--when my family left Ukraine for Palestine at the turn of the century, the made it to Alexandria, where HIAS convinced them to go west, and brought them to New York. Of course, the communists in Russia were anti-Zionist as well. In fact, most Jews were until 1945, when the dimensions of the tragedy in Europe became known.

As for politics and the native Palestinian population, there were, of course Borochov and Berdichevsky, both Marxist ideologues, who believed that the brand of Zionism they preached would overcome ethnic differences and create a unified proletariat of Jews and Arabs. A more extreme version of this appears with Ratosh and his Canaanite movement--alright, they never had more than ten members, but they were philosophically significant (and the Biluim were all of twelve people, but everyone counts them). Jabotinsky did tackle the issue of the Palestinians as well, but suggested that the new state be governed by a presidential regime, with an Arab Vice-President (shades of Lebanon...). Then of course, there were Buber and Magnes in Ichud, who wanted a binational secular state.

I would also bring up cultural Zionism (Ahad Ha'am) and the bizarre mystical vision of a Jewish peasantry as described by A.D. Gordon. Zionism was not solely a political movement.

This is just some food for thought. It is a topic I try to steer clear from because of the inevitable flame wars.

BTW, if you want the gay angle, Jakob de Haan is fascinating. I have a great scoop on the assassination from someone who was in the know, but I cannot verify it, so it cannot go in. See ya. Danny 16:04, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Adam, I just noticed this article. It is certainly much better than the previous article but there are a few things I don't think are right. I will try to comment on them here in the next few days. I presume you know that you are going to get trouble from you-know-who. And if you don't don't know who you-know-who is you are in for a shock. --Zero 08:56, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

It looks like an excellent article. However, I have lost all desire to work on this subject. The flame wars are too much for me. However, I would support your edits. By the way, the above mystery user Zero0000 is warning you about was me...and as usual Zero000 is totally wrong. He is just trolling. :( RK 12:36, Oct 19, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Adam, I just took a look at this and was very impressed. One small suggestion: I would be interested in seeing you expand the paragraphy beginning with: "Some liberal or socialist Jews outside Israel still oppose Zionism..." to discuss international support of Zionism and the differences in the US and Europe. A useful reference might be Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry. Good luck! -- Viajero 20:58, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

It has some interesting stuff, but I would recommend instead Novak's book The Holocaust in American Life for a less polemical and more detailed discussion. --Zero 01:15, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I think I will need an explanation of why the Holocaust industry debate is relevant to this article. Adam 01:37, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I don't think it is and I would not suggest introducing it. I suggest Novick [not Novak, that memory of mine again] as one good source for the development of Zionist thinking in America since WWII, which is inseparable from the holocaust issue. Also because it is a good read. --Zero 03:20, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Zero's comment for today: later flood of Jews expelled from the Arab countries
- That is simply not correct. Very few of them were actually expelled (forced to leave without real alternative). The circumstances varied from country to country but in none of the larger cases were the Jews actually compelled to leave by force or threat of force or legal coercion. The most that can be said in most cases is that the Jews felt their position becoming precarious and Israel appeared to offer them better prospects. Of course, once they started to leave in large numbers they were exploited (their property confiscated etc), but that belongs in another article. --Zero 14:33, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I know a family of Moroccan Jews who will tell you a very different story, Zero, but feel free to alter the sentence. Adam

I know a family of Yemini Jews who say that the government of Yemen treated them better than the Israeli government did. Such anecdotes are little use by themselves. Anyway, that is a discussion for another time. For this article the issue is peripheral and I sidestepped it by not saying anything at all about why there was a "flood" of Jews from Arab countries. --Zero 11:30, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Zero's comment for tomorrow: a thinly populated backwater of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by perhaps 200,000 people and later The Arab population was small, poor and thin on the ground.
- I'm afraid you have fallen for a classic Zionist myth. In fact Palestine was in the upper half of population density for the regions of the Ottoman empire. There's no sense in which it was a backwater. As for the Arab population, it was approximately 356K, 441K, 497K, 563K, 645K, and 683K in 1860, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910 and 1914, respectively (K=1000). These figures are from McCarthy, The Population of Palestine, based on Ottoman census data. Yes, I will fix these problems, though the second one is part of the section on Arabs that has other problems too. Cheers. --Zero 11:55, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I was quoting Howard Sachar, History of Israel: "As late as 1882 the Arab population of Palestine barely reached 260,000. Yet by 1914 this number had doubled, and by 1920 it reached 600,000." The suggestion cleary was the that Palestinian population began to rise only when the growth of the Yishuv began to provide employment. I've seen this in several other sources too. You disagree? Adam

I suspected you were quoting Sachar, specifically the first (1979) edition. He is quite wrong on this issue and corrected himself in the second (1996) edition. At the same time he withdrew the claim of massive Arab immigration which he probably had deduced from the same mistake. There are quite a few errors in Sachar, so it is worth checking details in other places. Anyway, the only sources of statistics except for travellers' tales are the Ottoman censuses (which were more like a continuous registration system than modern censuses). These have been analysed in considerable detail by Ottoman scholars starting with Kemal Karpat and Stanford Shaw, and more recently Justin McCarthy whose book cited above is now regarded as the standard text on the subject. --Zero 13:09, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Another example of Sachar's accuracy: the increase between 1922 and 1946 was 118 percent, a rate of almost 5 percent annually (check the arithmetic). --Zero

Adam, isn't that a poster for a film? Maybe the caption should be "A Romanian poster for a film promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine, 1930s". (Admittedly, my Romanian is a little rusty...) --Zero 14:53, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)

A few things that should be added or clarified:

You mention support at the United Nations for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but you never mention the successful partition resolution.
The capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 was an earthquake in Zionist history, but you don't mention it.

--Zero 14:53, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Israel Shahak is (a) Israeli not American, (b) dead.
Where did you get the claim that Peter Novick is anti-Zionist?

(I have some longer comments but ran out of time today. --Zero)

Zero: your points

Yes it is a film poster, but it is a film promoting settlement in Palestine so I don't think the distinction is material
I think the partition plan belongs under History of Israel and History of Palestine
Yes I should say more about the consequences of 1967. I will do so.
The list of names I copied from the old article. It is not an area I know well, so if you can supply a better sentence please do so.
Adam 15:38, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Random remarks

The first line of the poster says "Toward a New Life" in Romanian, and the second line says "The Promised Land" in Hungarian. I think the fine print says the same thing in both Romanian and Hungarian but I'm not sure what it is. Maybe something like "Unique Palestinian talking movie" (a wild guess I admit).
The Zionists regarded the UN vote to be a key moment ranking with the Balfour Declaration and they were right. I added it.
The paragraphs on Zionism and the Arabs are not right and I plan to rewrite them. The Zionist leaders were well aware of the situation on the ground in Palestine, even though the rank and file were not. Nor is true that there was little Arab opposition in the early days. Even before the Zionists' real intentions became known to them in 1897 there were repeated appeals to the Ottomans and some serious violence. After 1897 the opposition became intense. The sentence There was almost no Arab educated class to speak on their behalf. is not correct but in any case the very last thing the Zionists wanted was to negotiate with the local Arabs, who never would have agreed to their main demands. Instead, they approached the Ottoman authorities, external Arab rulers (like Prince Feisal), and later the British, in order to bypass the locals. Listen to Weizmann complaining to Balfour about the British tendency towards democracy: This system does not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab. The Turk, being himself of inferior culture, saw in the Jew a superior to himself and to the Arab, and so by virtue of his intelligence and his achievements the Jew held a position in the country perhaps out of proportion to his numerical strength. The present system tends on the contrary to level down the Jew politically to the status of a native (May 1918, citation on request).
--Zero 10:40, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I've made a start on a replacement section "Zionism and the Arabs", comprising everything between the rows of asterisks. All comments (ok, most comments) are welcome. The primary sources of information, apart from my semi-operational memory, were

Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War One.
Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement
Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs
Morris, Righteous Victims
Patai (ed.), The complete diaries of Theodor Herzl
Alan Dowty, Much Ado about Little: Ahad Ha'am's "Truth from Eretz Yisrael, Zionism, and the Arabs Israel Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2000) 154-181.

--Zero 09:46, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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The early Zionists were well aware that Palestine was already occupied, mostly by Arabs, who had constituted the majority of the population there for over a thousand years. However, the attitude the Zionists had towards this problem remains one of the most debated historical questions. A large part of the difficulty is due to the sparsity of hard evidence, and the equivocal nature of what is there. Should we judge, as many historians do, the attitude of Herzl to be the benevolent paternalism shown by his novel Altneuland, which describes a utopia in which the Arabs sing the praises of the Jews who brought them both prosperity and equality, or is the truth closer to the plan Herzl confided to his diary, to "spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country"? There are champions of both viewpoints, and not only amongst polemical writers.

What can certainly be said is that the Zionist leaders generally shared the attitudes of other Europeans of the period in the matters of race and culture. In this view the Arabs were one of the world's many primitive races, who could only but benefit from Jewish colonization and in any case did not have the standing to object to it. On many an occasion this attitude led to the Arabs being essentially ignored, or even to their presence being denied, as in Zangwill's famous slogan "A land without a people, for a people without a land". Generally though, such myths were simple propaganda invented by leaders who saw the Arabs as an obstacle to overcome, but not a serious one. It was hoped that the wishes of the local Arabs could be simply bypassed by forging agreements with the Ottoman authorities, or with Arab rulers outside Palestine.

One of the earlier Zionists to warn against these ideas was Ahad Ha'am, who warned in his 1891 essay "Truth from Eretz Israel" that in Palestine "it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled", and moreover

From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake. ... The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand, since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their future. ... However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place.

Though there had already been Arab protests, successful but ultimately ineffectual, to the Ottoman authories in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist enterprise became known. This opposition did not arise out of a Palestinian nationalism, which was in its mere infancy at the time, but out of a sense of threat to their livelihood and hegemony. This sense was heightened in the early years of the twentieth century by the Zionist attempts to develop an economy in which Arabs were largely redundant, such as the "Hebrew labor" movement that campaigned against the employment of Arabs. The severing of Palestine from the rest of the Arab world in 1918, and the Balfour Declaration and its adoption amongst the principles of the British mandate, were seen by the Arabs as proof that their fears were coming to fruition.

Nevertheless, despite clear signs that a true Palestinian nationalism was arising, much the same range of opinion could be found amongst Zionist leaders after 1920. However, the division between these camps did not match the main threads in Zionist politics so cleanly as is often portrayed. To take an example, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Vladimir Jabotinsky, is often presented as having had an extreme pro-expulsion view but the proofs offered for this are rather thin. According to Jabotinsky's Iron Wall (1923), an agreement with the Arabs was impossible, since 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. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile.

The solution, according to Jabotinsky, was not expulsion (which he was "prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never [do]") but to impose the Jewish presence on the Arabs by force of arms until eventually they came to accept it. Only late in his life did Jabotinsky speak of the desirability of Arab emigration though still without unequivically advocating an expulsion policy. The situation with socialist Zionists such as David Ben-Gurion was also ambiguous. In dozens of articles and speeches Ben-Gurion upheld the official position of his party that denied the necessity of force in achieving Zionist goals. The argument was based on the denial of a unique Palestinian identity coupled with the belief that eventually the Arabs would realise that Zionism was to their advantage. Privately, however, Ben-Gurion knew that the Arab opposition amounted to a total rejection of Zionism grounded in fundamental principle, and that an existential confrontation was unavoidable. In 1937, Ben-Gurion and almost all of his party leadership supported a British proposal to create a small Jewish state from which the Arabs had been removed by force. The British plan was soon shelved, but the idea of a Jewish state with a minimal population of Arabs remained an important thread in Labour Zionist thought throughout the remaining period until independence.

I added some comments in bold in the body of the text. I think it is fine--if it is long, perhaps the quotes could be summarized in a line. No need for two quotes from Ahad Ha'am. I would also remove contemporary Transfer politics: as mentioned, Jabotinsky's views were complex and contradictory, while most supporters of Transfer today use them as a crutch to support a response to what they believe are contemporary exigencies, which have changed considerably since the 1920s and 1930s. This is about contemporary Zionism, not modern Israeli politics. Ben Gurion had his opposition too, but it was minimal, paerticularly after the assassination of Arlosoroff. One thing I would add, space permitting, is Ichud (Magnes and Buber), who came to reject Jewish statehood in favor of a binational state modelled on Switzerland, and the "Right-wing." Even Avraham Stern spoke of a joint Jewish-Arab struggle against colonialism, which explains why so many Stern Gang people ended up on the left (Uri Avneri for instance). Danny

Thanks, I'll produce a new edition within a few days. On the matter of the Yemenites, I was relying on my memory of a journal article that I don't have here, but I have the citation and will look it up again. The basic story is that by 1907 or so the "Hebrew labor" movement was in serious trouble due to the lack of laborers. East Europeans were judged insufficiently willing to emigrate, so in 1910 the labor leader Shmuel Yavne'eli went to Yemen to recruit laborers from there. I have a citation for that [Gorni, Israel Studies, 6.3 (2001) p62], but what I'm not sure about at this moment is how successful he was in numerical terms. I'll look it up, but will also think about whether it is too peripheral for this article. (However, when we write our wonderful future article on the Yemenites in Israel, it will certainly belong there ;-). --Zero 12:55, 30 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I make some small edits, all of them in the direction of shortening the section, but Danny is right about Ichud deserving a mention and that is next. I'm going away for a week though.--Zero 13:46, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)

* * * * * * * * * * *

A few things I think the article needs:

It is not clearly described how Zionism was very much an Ashkenazi phenomenon that to a large extent ignored the large Jewish populations in Arab countries (and even the existing Jewish population in Palestine, which was described disparagingly by many European visitors).
The effect of the 1967 land capture needs to be described, not in military terms but in terms of its effect on the Zionist movement. The existing references to 1968 don't make sense without this context.
The article mentions the binational idea in two places that are not really consistent with each other and this should be streamlined. However, see the next comment.
In order to protect this article from the Israel-Arab-related edit wars, it ought to define itself in such a way that modern politics is excluded. Exactly how to do this is not clear, but I wonder if some topics ought to be reduced to links despite their relevance. It would be better to have a good article that is slightly incomplete than one that is repeatedly worked over by the fanatics.

--Zero 13:46, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Team: I have now placed a somewhat trimmed version of Zero's text on Zionism and the Arabs in the article, and done a general edit. Comments please. Do we think we are close to having a text that can replace the existing Zionism article? Adam 13:22, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)