The intellectual foundation of Zionist racism against Jews and Arabs (4 / 4)
The
emptying of Palestine of all or most of its inhabitants (in other words, their
removal) is one of the constants of Zionist thought, silently embedded in the
core of the Zionist formula. This is both logical and comprehensible: had the
land been seized while its people remained upon it, the establishment of a
functional state would have been impossible, and instead, an ordinary state
would have arisen—one representing the interests of its inhabitants, with
varying degrees of justice and injustice. The “Jewishness” of the state
(assuming the removal of the native population) thus guarantees its
functionality and its role as a client entity.
From
this perspective, the disappearance of the Arabs was inevitable. This is why
the fundamental characteristic of Zionist colonization and settlement is its
nature as settler colonialism. Its Zionism lies in its replacementist
character, just as its replacementism is the inevitable expression of its
Zionism (and its so-called “Jewishness”).
Although
tracing and documenting the notion of the “absent Arab” is exceedingly
difficult—since what is absent cannot be recorded and analyzed through
traditional methods based on quotations, texts, and their interpretation—there
nevertheless exists a considerable body of Zionist statements and concepts that
can only be understood within the framework of this very notion. All the
extensive discourse on the Holy Land, Eretz Yisrael, Zion, and the
Promised Land ultimately rests upon the implicit assumption of an absent Arab
Palestine.
The
discourse surrounding the settlement of immigrants from Tsarist Russia as aliyah—literally
“ascent”—and their depiction as ma’apilim, that is, Jews entering
Palestine as the ancient Hebrews once did despite all obstacles and hardships,
likewise presupposes the absence of the Arabs and of their history. Indeed, one
may argue that the entire Zionist lexicon (negation, return, ingathering
of the exiles, etc.) rests upon the figure of the “pure Jew,” which in turn
presupposes the absent Arab. To read any Zionist text or to comprehend any
Zionist program is therefore exceedingly difficult—if not impossible—without
positing the notion of the “absent Arab” as both an ideal construct and a point
of reference.
Zionist
perceptions of the Arabs are articulated through the very economic and legal
structures of the Zionist settler project: beginning with the Law of
Return—which grants Jews of the diaspora the right to “return” to the Promised
Land—through the regulations of the Jewish National Fund, which enable the
“chosen people” to seize possession of the “holy land,” and culminating in the
legislation that bars Arabs from returning to Palestine, thereby
institutionalizing the figure of the “absent Arab,” or the Arab who must be
made absent.
The Arab as Jew and the Jew as Arab
Two
central themes recur in Zionist writings: the Jew as Arab and the Arab as Jew.
Although they appear as opposites, both stem from one of the fundamental and
recurring ideas in Zionist thought: the liquidation of the Diaspora—that is,
the dissolution of Jewish communities across the world. Zionism begins from the
conviction that the Diaspora is unfit for survival; the Jews of exile are
depicted as sickly, pathological, parasitic figures. It is worth noting that
the literature of antisemitism itself contained a coherent and systematic
critique of what came to be labeled the “Jewish character.” This critique, in
turn, became part of Zionism’s own cognitive arsenal, as the movement presented
itself as the force that would “normalize” the Jews—that is, transform them
into a natural people and liberate them from the allegedly negative traits
presumed to adhere to their identity.
The
first of these central themes—the Jew as Arab—was prevalent in Zionist writings
produced before the contours of the Zionist settler project had been fully
defined, before its cognitive map had crystallized, and before the Arab had
been constructed as the “Other” (a development that arguably followed the
Balfour Declaration). In this earlier stage, the Arab could be perceived as the
Easterner, the representative of healthy non-Jews with whom one might identify
and even merge in order to be cured of the maladies of exile. Within this
framework, the Arab was transformed into a romantic hero, enveloped in dense
layers of mythic aura.
It
appears that some of the early Zionist settlers from the Bilu group, inspired
by the romantic visions prevalent in Europe at the time, regarded their
settlement in Palestine as a kind of “return to the pure East” (in contrast to
the corrupted West, filled with evils). Within this vision, the “Arab” was
imagined as the sage who would teach them all secrets, guide them, and lead
them to the right path. This outlook was adopted by one of the leaders of the
Second Aliyah, Meir Wilkansky, and later by Joseph Lyddor (a close friend of
the Zionist leader Haim Brenner; both were killed in clashes with Arabs). It is
also noteworthy that the first Zionist military organization, Hashomer
(“the Watchman”), wore Arab dress, and some of its members lived among the
Bedouin in order to learn their ways.
Zionist
literature of this early stage was imbued with such romantic visions. Moshe
Smilansky, the Zionist writer, published a series of books under the pseudonym al-Khawaja
Musa, in which he depicted with great admiration the lives of Palestinians,
who in these works were transformed into Bedouins and wandering shepherds
reminiscent of figures from the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, in a short story
written in 1892 by Ze’ev Yavetz, a Jewish child in the settlement of Petah
Tikva is described as learning from the Arabs how to train his body to endure
“heat and frost, floods and drought.
One
of the most extreme and striking examples is a play written by Aryeh Orloff
Areli, published in 1912 in the journal Ha-Shiloah (edited and issued by
Ahad Ha’am in Odessa). The play portrays a group of pioneer settlers from the
Second Aliyah living on a collective farm. Its heroine is the Zionist settler
Naomi, who rejects the love of two of her comrades and instead favors a
traveling Arab peddler named Ali. When one of the pioneers kills a young Arab,
Ali avenges his slain friend by killing the Zionist. Yet even this act does not
diminish Naomi’s love for him. The play concludes with a stormy monologue in
which Naomi addresses her fellow Zionists: “My soul despises you, civilized
worms. I have learned something from the fierce Arab; I have learned these
words from him: Allah Kareem”—which is, in fact, the title of the play.
This
current appears to have been so widespread that Ha-Shiloah published an
article by the Zionist journalist and critic Joseph Klausner, in which he
reproached Zionist writers settled in Palestine for portraying all the Jews
there as Arabic speakers who resembled the Arabs in every respect. The current,
however, persisted and took on a different form: a call for Semitic unity and a
belief in the common Semitic origins of both Arabs and Jews—a view later
articulated by the ideology of the Canaanite movement, which for a time gained
traction among certain Zionist intellectuals. It should be noted that this
conception of the Arab—as Bedouin and romantic hero—is characterized by a high
degree of abstraction. Here, the Arab is not a concrete, historical human
being, but rather an abstract romantic construct devoid of specific rights.
Moreover, in this conception the Arab is a Bedouin, a nomadic figure unattached
to the land—a portrayal that undoubtedly serves Zionist interests.
The
glorification of the Arab, in reality, entails his separation from his land and
the denial of his concrete humanity, reducing him to something akin to static
relics (what in Egypt we call antiqa, or “antique”). In this respect,
Zionism once again does not differ significantly from Western racism, which was
never opposed to admiring the “glorious past” and “ancient splendor” so long as
such notions remained severed from lived reality and were not invoked as
indicators of what the bearers of that heritage might achieve in the future.
This cognitive trope eventually disappeared altogether from Zionist discourse,
leaving behind only faint and fading echoes.
The
notion of “the Arab as Jew” is far clearer, more central, and more recurrent.
When we examine many Zionist (and Israeli) cognitive constructs—the Arab as
backward, the marginalization of the Arab, the Arab as an economic animal, the
Arab as someone with a fixed national affiliation, the Arab as a parasite, the
Arab as driven by religious fanaticism, and Arab nationalism as a movement
subservient to the British—we find that these are precisely the same attributes
ascribed to the Jew in Western antisemitic literature. Such literature sought
to strip the Jew of rights and to expel him as a parasitic, marginal,
non-belonging figure—ultimately culminating in his extermination.
As we
have noted, these constructs formed part of Zionism’s cognitive arsenal, which
it absorbed, adopted, and first applied to the “Other” (namely, the Jews of the
Diaspora), before projecting them onto a new “Other” (the Arab). This served as
a strategy to efface, marginalize, dehumanize, expel, and eradicate him, while
severing his relationship to the land—precisely as anti-Semites had done to
Jews within the framework of Western civilization. Ironically, in this reversal
the Jew assumes the role of the Gentile, slaughtering the Arab-as-Jew after
attributing to him every evil and denouncing him with every vice, just as
Gentiles once stripped Jews of their rights before slaughtering them.
_______________________________________________
Source: The Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism – Volume III: Zionist
Racism and Terrorism, by Abdulwahab Al-Messiri.
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