Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948.

• Author: Finklestein, Norman G.

Historian Anita Shapira is the bellwether of Zionist orthodoxy. Her most recent volume, Land and Power, effectively summarizes the current state of mainstream Zionist scholarship.

Shapira's main aim is to validate one of Zionism's central myths. The mainstream, labor Zionist movement long publicly maintained that it did not anticipate or intend to resort to force against the indigenous population to achieve its aims, but only did so as the result of an accumulation of intractable circumstances. Shapira does not put the myth of Zionism's "peaceful intentions"--or, as she dubs it, "defensive ethos"--in quite such crude terms. Indeed, she cannot; even within the dwindling circle of Zionist faithful, it carries less and less conviction with time. Thus, she repeatedly qualifies and contradicts her main thesis. The result is a book at war with itself: on the one hand, sustaining the myth of Zionism's "defensive ethos", but on the other, conceding that "defensive ethos" was simply a mask for what was, from its inception, a mission of conquest.

This internal conflict is, I think, the main significance of Shapira's book. It contains no original research, makes little use of recent scholarship, and extensively resorts to such dubious sources as the official History of the Hagana.(1) Even as a work of interpretation or synthesis, Land and Power offers few original insights. The main outline of Shapira's story--Zionism's initial strategy of gradual settlement and its eventual resort to outright armed conquest--has been described many times before, with considerably more eloquence and grace. Shapira writes in the wooden, bombastic style of most official histories. Here is the overwrought prose of the Zionist initiate--endlessly repetitious and barely coherent, often impenetrable and replete with arcane references.(2) In a word, Land and Power is in all respects a party-spirited work. Yet, precisely that is what makes it so interesting. It vividly captures the crisis of Zionist ideology--or, at any rate, the withering of another of Zionism's central myths.(3)

Shapira rightly places the Jewish settlement of Palestine within the framework of the Zionist idea. Zionism, Shapira observes, originated in the "Romantic-exclusivistic" (also: "German," "volkisch") brand of nationalism that purported that "blood ties, common ethnic origin," etc., not citizenship or "agreement," were the proper foundations of community. Accordingly, its aim from the outset was to create a Jewish state in "all of Palestine," that is, to "alter the demographic, economic, and cultural balance of power" so that Jews would be its "rulers and masters," "lords and masters" (also: "to change the character of the land from an Arab country to a Jewish one"). The minimum requirement for such a state was a Jewish majority that would "rule over" the Arabs. The ideal was a state that was homogeneously Jewish, since Zionism's ultimate purpose was "to liberate Jews from the burden of living in the midst of another people" (also: "liberation from a multinational situation ... from the obligation to take the existence of others in their country into consideration"). (pp. 6-7, 84, 112, 125, 138, 170, 280, 283, and 321)(4)

Throughout Land and Power, Shapira puts on an equal ethical plane--or, at any rate, makes no ethical distinction between--the Zionist aim to transform Palestine into a Jewish state and the resistance of the indigenous Arab population to such a conquest mission. Hence she refers to "rivals laying claim to the land"; to Jews as the "other contenders for Palestine"; to the Arabs as a "second full claimant to the land"; to the "struggle between two national movements for one and the same piece of territory"; to a "fundamental clash between two national movements fighting to gain sovereignty and control over the same country"; and so on. (pp. 107, 115, 117, 125, and 356) For Shapira, the conflict was essentially a clash between "two rights," more or less equal. This puts her ahead of mainstream Zionist historiography, which typically attaches a far greater value to the Zionist claim--but behind what I think any objective valuation shows.

The Zionist claim to Palestine rests on one or a combination of the following arguments: (1) divine right, (2) historical right, (3) compelling need. None of these can withstand close scrutiny, however.

Shapira makes little if any mention of the Jewish people's providential claim to Palestine. Rightly so, I think, especially since colonizing projects have typically invoked the same rhetoric of a "divinely-ordained mission," "chosen people," etc., and the same authority of the Old Testament to justify themselves. In the case of the United States, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the new national seal should show the children of Israel led by a pillar of light from the heavens, since he was "confident that Americans were the new chosen people of God." In later years, the same pretense was captured in the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny," which--in the words of the journalist who coined the phrase--signalled that the North American continent was "allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Arnold Toynbee once observed that it was the same "biblically recorded conviction of the Israelites that God had instigated them to exterminate the Canaanites" that sanctioned the British conquest of North America, Ireland and Australia, the Dutch conquest of South Africa, the Prussian conquest of Poland, and the Zionist conquest of Palestine.(5)

The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed the "historical right" (Shapira also refers to it as the "proprietary right") of the Jews to Palestine. It was a "right that required no proof ... a fundamental component of all Zionist programs." Steeped in German Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only--and only Jews could--establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil there. Noting its "German source," Shapira points to the "recurrent motif" in Zionism of the "mysticism that links blood and soil," the "cult of heroes, death and graves," the belief that "graves are the source of the vital link with the land, and they generate the loyalty of man to that soil," and that "blood fructifies the soil (in an almost literal sense)," and so on. Even so sober a thinker as Ahad Ha'am could aver that Palestine was "a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for farfetched proofs." The veteran Zionist leader, Menachem Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that "the Arabs recognize unconditionally the historical title of Jews to the land." (pp. 40-1, 45, 47, and 73-4)(6)

This sort of "historical right" was also seized by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East.(7) Germany was said to have legitimate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times," "fertilized by the most noble ancient German blood," "Germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav set foot there," "Teutonic-German Volksboden for 3,000 years as far a the Vistula .... In the 6th and 7th century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land ... admittedly only for a few hundred years," etc. The Slavic "interlopers," by contrast, were seen as "history's squatters" who merely "existed" in surroundings that they "could not master." Only the remnant or newly-settled German communities were supposedly able to "shape" the environment and by so doing make it "their own" in the course, ephemeral as it was, of Slavic rule. Poland under the Slavs, for example, was depicted as an artificial entity, more a melange of inchoate nationalities than a cohesive nation, that had fallen into a state of abject decay--"untilled fields surrendered to the thorny clutches of wild nature, desolate farm buildings, soil erosion ..."--with the notable exception of the German enclaves that managed to endure and even thrive despite all. Substitute the proper nouns and one could be reading any standard Zionist history of Palestine. Indeed, so profound is the affinity of these two literatures that it is registered even in specific phraseology. Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe's "defender" and "bulwark" against the "east," and the "bearers of civilization" against "barbarism." A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia," and "an outpost of civilization against barbarism."(8)

In any event, Zionism's "historical right" to Palestine was neither historical nor a right. It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right, except in the Romantic "mysticism" of "blood and soil" and the Romantic "cult" of "death, heroes, and graves." (The quoted phrases are Shapira's.)

The Zionist claim against the indigenous Arab population also rested on compelling need. This argument took two, overlapping forms. The first was the ideological, Romantic one that the Jewish "nation" suffered persecution on account of its "homelessness;" and only the "restoration" of the Jewish "nation" to a state of its "own" in its "ancestral homeland" would end the persecution. Yet, the claim of Jewish "homelessness" is founded on a cluster of assumptions that effectively negates the liberal idea of citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the state belongs to the majority ethnic nation. In a word, the claim...