Ten Myths About Israel. Ilan Pappé
axe to grind with Zionism. The new movement not only wished to colonize Palestine; it also hoped to secularize the Jewish people, to invent the “new Jew” in antithesis to the religious Orthodox Jews of Europe. This culminated in the image of a new European Jew who could no longer live in Europe, because of its anti-Semitism, but had to live as a European outside the continent. Thus, like many movements during this period, Zionism redefined itself in national terms—but it was radically different because it chose a new land for this conversion. The Orthodox Jew was ridiculed by the Zionists and was viewed as someone who could only be redeemed through hard work in Palestine. This transformation is beautifully described in Herzl’s futuristic utopian novel, Altnueland, which tells the story of a German tourist expedition arriving in the Jewish state long after it had been established.8 Before arriving in Palestine, one of the tourists had run into a young Orthodox Jewish beggar—he comes across him again in Palestine, now secular, educated, and extremely rich and content.
The role of the Bible within Jewish life offered one further clear difference between Judaism and Zionism. In the pre-Zionist Jewish world, the Bible was not taught as a singular text that carried any political or even national connotation in the various Jewish educational centers in either Europe or the Arab world. The leading rabbis treated the political history contained in the Bible, and the idea of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, as marginal topics in their spiritual world of learning. They were much more concerned, as indeed Judaism in general was, with the holy writings focusing on the relationship between believers, and in particular on their relations with God.
From “The Lovers of Zion” in 1882 to the Zionist leaders on the eve of World War I, who appealed to Britain to support the Jewish claim for Palestine, reference to the Bible was quite common. In pursuit of their own interests, Zionist leaders fundamentally challenged the traditional biblical interpretations. The Lovers of Zion, for instance, read the Bible as the story of a Jewish nation born on the land of Palestine as an oppressed people under the yoke of a Canaanite regime. The latter exiled the Jewish people to Egypt, until they returned to the land and liberated it under Joshua’s leadership. The traditional interpretation, in contrast, focuses on Abraham and his family as a group of people discovering a monotheistic god rather than a nation and a homeland. Most readers will be familiar with this conventional narrative of the Abrahamites discovering God and through trials and tribulations finding themselves in Egypt9—hardly a story of an oppressed nation engaged in a liberation struggle. However, the latter was the preferred Zionist interpretation, which still holds water in Israel today.
One of the most intriguing uses of the Bible in Zionism is that practiced by the socialist wing of the movement. The fusion of socialism with Zionism began in earnest after Herzl’s death in 1904, as the various socialist factions became the leading parties in the World Zionist movement and on the ground in Palestine. For the socialists, as one of them said, the Bible provided “the myth for our right over the land.”10 It was in the Bible that they read stories about Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars, which they appropriated as describing the ancient golden era of their nation’s birth. Returning to the land meant coming back to become farmers, shepherds, and kings. Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.
For many Zionist leaders, the reference in the Bible to the land of Palestine was just a means to their ends, and not the essence of Zionism. This was clear in particular in texts written by Theodor Herzl. In a famous article in The Jewish Chronicle (July 10, 1896) he based the Jewish demand for Palestine on the Bible, but expressed his wish that the future Jewish state be run according to the European political and moral philosophies of his time. Herzl was probably more secular than the group of leaders who replaced him. This prophet of the movement seriously considered alternatives to Palestine, such as Uganda, as the promised land of Zion. He also looked at other destinations in the north and south of America and in Azerbaijan.11 With Herzl’s death in 1904, and the rise of his successors, Zionism homed in on Palestine and the Bible became even more of an asset than before as proof of a divine Jewish right to the land.
The new post-1904 fixation on Palestine as the only territory in which Zionism could be implemented was reinforced by the growing power of Christian Zionism in Britain and in Europe. Theologians who studied the Bible and evangelical archeologists who excavated “the Holy Land” welcomed the settlement of Jews as confirming their religious belief that the “Jewish return” would herald the unfolding of the divine promise for the end of time. The return of the Jews was the precursor of the return of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. The Zionist project of colonizing Palestine was well served by this esoteric religious belief.12 However, behind these religious visions lay classical anti-Semitic sentiments. For pushing Jewish communities in the direction of Palestine was not only a religious imperative; it also helped in the creation of a Europe without Jews. It therefore represented a double gain: getting rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time fulfilling the divine scheme in which the Second Coming was to be precipitated by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in Hell should they refuse).
From that moment onwards, the Bible became both the justification and the route map for the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Historically, the Bible served Zionism well from its inception until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It played an important role in the dominant Israeli narrative—for both domestic and external purposes—claiming that Israel is the same land as was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. “Israel” in this narrative existed until 70 CE, when the Romans demolished it and exiled its people. The religious commemoration of that date, when the second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, was a day of mourning. In Israel it has become a national day of mourning on which all leisure-industry businesses, including restaurants, are required to close from the evening before.
The principal scholarly and secular proof for this narrative has been provided in recent years with the help of what is called biblical archeology (in itself an oxymoronic concept, since the Bible is a great literary work, written by many peoples in different periods, and hardly a historical text13). After 70 CE, according to the narrative, the land was more or less empty until the Zionist return. However, leading Zionists knew that appealing to the authority of the Bible would not be enough. Colonizing the already inhabited Palestine would require a systematic policy of settlement, dispossession, and even ethnic cleansing. To this end, portraying the dispossession of Palestine as the fulfillment of a divine Christian scheme was priceless when it came to galvanizing global Christian support behind Zionism.
As we have seen, once all other territorial options were ruled out and Zionism focused on the reclamation of Palestine, the leaders who took over from the early pioneers began to inject socialist, and even Marxist, ideology into the growing secular movement. The aim now was to establish (with the help of God) a secular, socialist, colonialist Jewish project in the Holy Land. As the colonized natives quickly learned, ultimately their fate was sealed regardless of whether the settlers brought with them the Bible, the writings of Marx, or the tracts of the European Enlightenment. All that mattered was whether, or how, you were included in the settlers’ vision of the future. It is telling therefore that in the obsessive records kept by the early Zionist leaders and settlers, the natives featured as an obstacle, an alien and an enemy, regardless of who they were or of their own aspirations.14
The first anti-Arab entries in those records were written while the settlers were still being hosted by the Palestinians on the way to the old colonies, or in the towns. Their complaints stemmed from their formative experiences, searching for work and a means of subsistence. This predicament seemed to affect them universally, whether they went to the old colonies or whether they tried their luck in the towns. Wherever they were, in order to survive they had to work shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or workers. Through such intimate contact even the most ignorant and defiant settlers realized that Palestine was totally an Arab country in its human landscape.
David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community during the Mandatory period and Israel’s first prime minister, described the Palestinian workers and farmers as beit mihush