Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Unless there is very careful steering it is upon the Arab rock that the Zionist ship may be wrecked. —Herbert Samuel to Chaim Weizmann, 19211 I In the seemingly ceaseless struggle between Jews and Arabs over the land known alternately as Erets Yisrael and Palestine, few notions inspire as much passion and radical divergence as “the right of return.” Most Jews regard as historically mandated the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel after millennia of dispersion; a fair number of them (and, for that matter, of Christians as well) consider this act to be divinely ordained. Accordingly , the long-desired realization of the dream of return, as embodied in Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948) and Law of Return (1950), has been seen by Jews as an event of monumental significance—and, especially after the Holocaust, of essential restorative justice.2 Conversely, Palestinians regard the displacement of some three-quarters of a million of their people in the wartime hostilities of 1948 as the Nakba (the Catastrophe), for which “return” is the most just and obvious remedy.3 Whether or not millions of Palestinians would return to their or their ancestors ’ homes in the current State of Israel, if afforded the right, is unclear . Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki asserted in the summer of 2003 that while “almost all (Palestinian) refugees viewed the right of return as sacred,” he estimated that “only 10 percent of the refugees surveyed want to exercise the right of return in Israel.”4 Shikaki’s methods and conclusions quickly came under attack, primarily from fellow Palestinians who insisted that he was deeply mistaken about their willingness to surrender the right of return.5 In fact, Shikaki was attacked at a news conference announcing the results of his survey in Ramallah in July 2003. The reception accorded him gives a fair indication of the extraordinary contention that the issue engenders among Palestinians. Myers: Between Jew and Arab page 1 1| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 And to be sure, if there are different opinions among Palestinians on the question, the gap is far wider between Jews and Arabs. Whereas the renowned Palestinian intellectual Edward Said declared some years ago that there was “a universal Palestinian demand heard all over the globe for the right of return,” Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated the longstanding position of his predecessors when he asserted in an interview from May 2007: “I’ll never accept a solution that is based on (the refugees’) return to Israel, any number.”6 These competing notions undergird the towering walls that separate Zionist and Palestinian nationalism, as well as the competing Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives and public discourse. For much of the past six decades, these narratives have been almost entirely exclusive of one another. Each side has tended to see its claim to the land not only as superior to, but exclusive of, the other’s. Moreover, each side has seen the other as the chief aggressor in the struggle over the land— and, accordingly, justified its own behavior in the name of self-defense and national honor. For Palestinians, the Zionists were and remain colonial usurpers who succeeded in 1948 in their plan to supplant the native inhabitants of the land. For Jews, the Arabs were and remain unrelentingly hostile to the Zionist aspiration of creating a Jewish state. This hostility necessitated a steadfast and unwavering military effort that reached its successful climax in the War of Independence. These competing perspectives have become ritualized in commemorative days: Independence Day for Israelis, marking the declaration of the state on 5 Iyar (according to the Hebrew calendar); and more recently, Nakba Day for Palestinians, usually on 15 May (the date of the Arab states’ declaration of war on the new Jewish state), but in some places held to coincide with Israel’s Independence Day. This ritualization of historical memory reinforces the attitude of many advocates on both sides of the divide that to acknowledge in any way the validity of the other’s claim to the land is tantamount to national betrayal. The protagonist of this book, Simon Rawidowicz (1897–1957), did not subscribe to this belief. Neither a Palestinian nor an Israeli, Rawidowicz was a Jewish thinker, ideologue, and scholar who followed a long and meandering...