Ten Myths About Israel. Ilan Pappé
to find people in Palestine at all, having been told the land was empty. “I was disgusted to find out that in Hadera [an early Zionist colony built in 1882] part of the houses were occupied by Arabs,” reported one settler, while another reported back to Poland that he was appalled to see many Arab men, women, and children crossing through Rishon LeZion (another colony from 1882).16
Since the country was not empty, and you had to overcome the presence of the natives, it was good to have God on your side—even if you were an atheist. Both David Ben-Gurion and his close friend and colleague Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (who along with Ben-Gurion led the Zionist socialist factions in Palestine and later became the second president of Israel) used the biblical promise as the main justification for the colonization of Palestine. This remained the case for the ideologues who succeeded them in the Labor party into the mid-1970s, and up to the very shallow secular Bible-ism of the Likud party and its offshoots of recent years.
The interpretation of the Bible as the divine justification for Zionism helped the socialists to reconcile their adherence to the universal values of solidarity and equality with the colonization project of dispossession. Indeed, since colonization was the main goal of Zionism, one has to ask what kind of socialism this was. After all, in the collective memory of many, the golden period of Zionism is associated with the collectivist, egalitarian life embodied in the establishment of the Kibbutz. This form of life lasted long after Israel was founded and it attracted young people from all over the world who came to volunteer and experience communism in its purest form. Very few of them realized, or could have known, that most of the Kibbutzim were built on destroyed Palestinian villages, whose populations had been expelled in 1948. In justification, the Zionists claimed that these villages were old Jewish places mentioned in the Bible, and hence that their appropriation was not an occupation but a liberation. A special committee of “biblical archeologists” would enter a deserted village and determine what its name was in biblical times. Energetic officials of the Jewish National Fund would then establish the settlement with its newly recovered name.17 A similar method was used after 1967 by the then minister of labor, Yigal Alon, a secular socialist Jew, for building a new town near Hebron, since it “belonged” to the Jewish people, according to the Bible.
Some critical Israeli scholars, most notable among them Gershon Shafir and Zeev Sternhell (as the well as the American scholar Zachary Lockman), have explained how the colonial appropriation of land tainted the supposed golden era of socialist Zionism. As these historians show, socialism within Zionism, as a praxis and way of life, was always a conditional and limited version of the universal ideology. The universal values and aspirations that characterized the various ideological movements of the Western left were very early on nationalized or Zionized in Palestine. No wonder then that socialism lost its attractiveness for the next generation of settlers.18
Yet religion remained an important aspect of the process even after the land had been taken from the Palestinians. In its name you could invoke and assert an ancient moral right to Palestine that challenged every other external claim to the land in those dying days of imperialism. This right also superseded the moral claims of the native population. One of the most socialist and secular colonialist projects of the twentieth century demanded exclusivity in the name of a pure divine promise. The reliance on the sacred text proved highly profitable for the Zionist settlers and extremely costly to the local population. The late and brilliant Michael Prior’s last book, The Bible and Colonialism, showed how the same kinds of projects were pursued around the globe in ways that have much in common with the colonization of Palestine.19
After Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the Bible continued to be used to similar ends. I have already mentioned Yigal Alon, who used the Bible to justify building a Jewish town, Qiryat Arba, on land expropriated from the people of Hebron, the nearby Palestinian town. Qiryat Arba quickly became a hotbed for people who took the Bible even more seriously as a guide to action. They selectively chose those biblical chapters and phrases that in their eyes justified the dispossession of the Palestinians. As the years of the occupation continued, so too did the regime of brutality against the dispossessed. This process of drawing political legitimization from a sacred text can lead to fanaticism with dangerous consequences. The Bible, for instance, has references to genocide: the Amalekites were killed to the last by Joshua. Today there are those, thankfully for now only a fanatical minority, who refer not only to the Palestinians as Amalekites but also to those who are not Jewish enough in their eyes.20
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