The Naqba dynamic: A sobering analysis of Arab-Jewish relations
LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD
Israeli Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon, writing in the aftermath of the Arab pogrom in 1929, described reality:
"Among the people of Talpiot [in Jerusalem] were many [Jewish] optimists who said the Arabs would never come into Talpiot; after all, many of them earned their living there…On the way we met some Arabs, from their faces we could see they had come to loot. [Someone] asked if he should kill them. Krishevsky said NO! We all knew that if it had been the other way around they would have done the opposite."
In a scenario of an all-out violent struggle, the state of Israel will gain the upper hand. Its security resources and experience, national will and moral urgency, will outweigh any combination of Arab grievances, guns, and an impulse to foment turmoil. When de-escalation fails, new rules will prevail. Israel may then set a strategic goal to turn the corner in this lengthy and bitter conflict, and not be limited to just riding out the storm as a transient altercation. Were the Arabs cautious in assessing the balance of forces, they would stop short of pushing the process to the end-point. When the aggressor loses, as in the 1948 Nakba debacle, he has only himself to blame.
WHO WILL GO?
The PLO Covenant from 1964, in Article 6, recognizes the right of Jews to stay in liberated Palestine on the condition that they resided there before 1917; the rest – all of them! – must leave. Bear in mind that Palestinian refugee return will be the complement to Jewish expulsion.
Ahmad Shuqayri, the first leader of the PLO, had coined the phrase of "throwing the Jews into the sea" three days before the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War.
It did not happen.
Yasser Arafat, three years after the 1993 Oslo Accord, shared a forecast with Arab diplomats in Stockholm: "There will be a migration of Arabs to the West Bank and Jerusalem…We will make life unbearable for the Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; Jews will not want to live among us. We Palestinians will take everything."
This has not happened.
Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, expressed his people's anguish and wish in addressing the Israelis in 1988: "Take your names with you and go…go where you wish. We have the future…leave our country. So go, it is time for you to go. We have work to do in our land."
An anticipated Jewish national disaster demands decisive action to frustrate an evil design aimed at Israel's existence; or it could be too late. After Jordan expelled Palestinians in 1970, Lebanon in 1982, Kuwait in 1991, Libya in 1995, and Syria in 2015, it becomes morally unobjectionable for Israel to be no less forthright in responding to subversive and disruptive Palestinians in days of crisis and breakdown.
It is time for the Palestinians to go.
*The Zohar (Parashat Lech Lecha) relates that the Ishmaelites [considered the ancestors of the Arabs], descendants from Abraham, earned the right to rule the Holy Land when it is empty of everything for a long time…Then they will block the children of Israel from returning to their place – until the right of the Ishmaelites expires.
The time arrived for the Jews to return home.
Book Review _ The European Left and the Jewish Question 1848-1993 Between Zionism and Antisemitism
While many look to the rise of both Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany to understand the Left’s evolution on the Jewish question, one period of time that is often overlooked is that of fin de siècle France and Italy — the opening of a century disfigured by the Shoah and the murder of millions of innocents.Fathom – The Three Best Recent Books on the Yishuv during the British Mandate, recommended by Donna Robinson Divine
While it can be argued that the First Zionist Congress, the founding of the Bund and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1897-1898 all presented paths to the Jewish future, the ideological turmoil in France and Italy after the deaths of Marx and Engels coloured the trajectory of the European Left at the onset of the twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century, France had had its fair share of anti-Semites on the Left such as Alphonse Toussenel and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Charles Fourier, the instigator of a utopian socialism, termed the Jews ‘a parasitic sect’. French history from the defeat in the Franco- Prussian war to the Dreyfus Affair to the Petàinist regime in 1940 is peppered with the obsession of discovering the hidden Jewish puppet masters — and making them pay for their disloyalty.
Michel Dreyfus, in an excellent essay, explains that this path was not linear, but notes that anti- Semitism in France regained momentum during the inter-war period. The French Right which had always regarded the verdict in the Dreyfus Affair as ‘a judicial coup d’état’, blossomed. Figures such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras feared that the Jews would gain influence in France as a social class rather than as a religious community.
Michel Dreyfus argues that Poland, Germany and Austria all revelled in anti-Semitism after 1933 and France and Italy after 1937. With the exception of the Protestant areas of Germany, these were all Catholic countries.
Before hashtags told us what to think and how to feel, it was slogans that stirred up energy for political causes. Repetition could turn the slogan into an idiom wielded by politicians but also shape how the people understood history and identity. This is how the slogan ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ – urging Palestine’s Jewish residents to cast off Jewish lifestyles forged in ‘exile’ – became a core Zionist principle shaping the narrative of the Jewish National Home in British Mandate Palestine. ‘Negating the Diaspora’ provided Palestine’s Jews with an explanation for their past as well as a direction for their national future. The hegemonic status of the slogan has hovered over Zionist historiography too, sometimes lending it a romantic quality. In recent years, however, the phrase has been critically rethought by a new generation of scholars, as illustrated by these three brilliant books about the British Mandate period.
Birthright Politics in Zion: Judaism, Nationalism, and Modernity Under the British Mandate, Indiana University Press, 2017
In her path-breaking work, Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman focuses on the reasons that drove Jewish women in Palestine to limit the number of their children. Population growth was central to the development of the Jewish National Home, but the role of women in determining family size is typically overlooked because of the many challenges in knowing how to coax out the data. Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman was among the first to place Palestine’s Jewish birthrates in the relevant comparative contexts – the Jewish world from which most immigrants came and the modernising influences they carried with them to Mandate Palestine. Ironically, Zionism’s own national ambitions triggered the very clash of imperatives that kept fertility rates low particularly for immigrants. More children generated more work for the very woman who sought liberation through agricultural labor while the harsh economic circumstances that immigrants had to endure also kept birth rates low. What Jews living in Palestine realised was that a new national identity was more easily proclaimed than summoned into existence.
Carnival in Tel-Aviv: Purim and The Celebration of Urban Zionism, Brill, 2016
While Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman has reshaped the study of the Yishuv by probing the personal, Hizky Shoham has reconstructed it by examining Jewish life in the public domain. His work concentrates on religious observance, showing that the gap between what Zionist leaders said about Palestine’s Jewish society and the way in which most people ordered their lives was striking. Even as they denounced the religion of their parents as doomed to extinction, Zionists were beholden to the Jewish canon and calendar. Whether feeling the stirring of an atavistic awe or simply continuing a lifestyle that met family and community needs, religion remained a core element of British Mandate Jewish culture. A parade at Purim or a carnival giving people of a certain social class the opportunity to show off their status helped the Jewish story take on a performative majesty displaying its rituals when European Jews were desperately trying to keep theirs hidden. Part of the goal was designed to imprint the Jewish story on Palestine’s landscape, changing identity not so much by announcement as by lived experience.
Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, Brandeis University Press, 2016
In their trailblasing study, Moshe Naor and Abigail Jacobson examine the multiple ways the Oriental and Sephardi communities identified with the idea of homeland but had a troubling relationship with many of the institutions gaining political power over Jews in the years of British rule. During the Ottoman Empire, Jews from the Middle East helped European immigrants [Zionist and non-Zionist] negotiate through what appeared to them alien imperial economic and political domains. When British rule dismantled the Ottoman Empire, it rendered the vital functions of these Jews as cultural bridges irrelevant. And in spite of sharing language and culture with the country’s Arabs, there was more demand for Middle Eastern Jews to report on Palestinians than to establish a dialogue with them based on common interests. No surprise, then, that Jews from Middle Eastern countries were recruited to become Zionism’s first generation of spies.