Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture

Chapter 2. The Zionists: Colonized Colonizers

2 The Zionists Colonized Colonizers The Revolutionary Mimics The Zionist movement declared that upon returning to the motherland Jews would undergo a transformation from a subjugated minority in anti-Semitic Europe to an independent nation possessing its own territory. The Zionists saw themselves as true revolutionaries, “new” Jews composing a new chapter—indeed, a new book—in the history of the Jewish people. As we have already seen, this new Zionist history recognized neither those Jews who lived apart from the land nor those Palestinian Arabs who lived within the land but obviously were not Jews. As “new” Jews, the halutsim felt they were ushering in a new, unprecedented era of what Ben-Gurion and others termed the “Jewish revolution.”1 The Jewish revolution claimed its legitimacy in the ancient Jewish commonwealth. As late as 1937, when the intensity of Arab nationalism manifested itself in riots against Jews, Ben-Gurion was adamant about the indisputable Jewish claim to the land: “We are here in our own right to solve the Jewish problem. . . . It is not to give the Jews equal rights in Palestine. It is to change their position as a people. There is no other race and nation as a whole which regards this country as their only homeland.” While at this point in history the Arab inhabitants of the land could hardly be ignored, they did not figure in Ben-Gurion’s project of national restoration. With sweeping rhetoric he affirmed the exclusivity of the Zionist undertaking: “As a child cannot be bought of another woman, a mother must give birth to 51 52 Zionism and the Discourses of Negation her child, so the [Jewish] people itself must give birth to, must create by its own effort, by its own work, its country, its homeland.”2 It is not difficult to detect the fear of history behind Ben-Gurion’s uncompromising, non-negotiable claim to the land. As he saw it, the solution presented by Palestine could not, under any circumstances, turn into yet another historical defeat in the Jewish struggle for equality . Like his contemporaries, Ben-Gurion witnessed the miserable failure of the emancipation of Jews in Europe. According to Ben-Gurion, the principal objective of Zionism must be “making the Jewish people masters of their own destiny as any other free independent people.” The settlement in the ancient homeland could not be another land of dispersion, where Jews would again be forced to vie for equal rights. Ben-Gurion was determined to rule out such an option: “We do not intend to create in Palestine the same intolerable position for the Jews as in all other countries. . . . [We are here] to remove a grievance, a historical grievance of the Jewish people against the whole Christian world.”3 Irrefutable in view of the unhappy history of the Jews in Europe, the argument of grievance against the Christian world nonetheless seems puzzling, especially in terms of the Zionists’ assiduous adherence to Europe. Rather than seeking allies who had no part in the history of anti-Semitism in Europe, the “Jewish revolution” sought to tie its destiny to Europe. It would have been plausible for the revolutionary proponents of Jewish liberation and national renewal to treat Europe with reservations and to invest energy and effort in the quest for meaningful relations with the world of the Middle East. Yet, in contrast to Buber, Magnes, and other members of Brith Shalom and Ihud who struggled for a rapprochement with the Arabs, Ben-Gurion sought protection from Britain. In 1937 Ben-Gurion did not even consider—at least not publicly—the plan of the Jewish national home as a state. Rather, as he stated, “We should like this country to be attached to a greater unit, a unit that is called the British Commonwealth of Nations . . . and we should only be glad if in the future, when the Jewish National Home is fully established . . . it should be a member of . . . the British Commonwealth of Nations.”4 Indeed, as Buber’s observations and the research of post-Zionist scholars have shown, from the very beginning the Zionist movement identified itself with the imperialist West. Although it is true that a The Zionists 53 few years later Ben-Gurion—who, in the meantime, had turned into a devotee of mamlakhtiyut (statehood)—was to become the founder of the Jewish state, even then his need for an alliance with the West did...