by Jo Roberts
If not religion, what will hold Israel together? Today fear of the Arabs performs for the Israelis the same unifying function that Gentile persecution and discrimination performed during the Dispersion.[1]
The anonymous reporter’s blunt prose strikingly delineates several of the strands that formed the emerging Israeli national identity after the 1948 War. There was euphoria at the realization of the Zionist dream: for the first time, Jews had engaged in the political and military arena on their own terms and had won the freedom and security of a Jewish state. There was also a deep distrust of those who somehow threatened this new reality: the Arabs of surrounding states, and particularly the Palestinian Arabs who shared the territory of Israel; but also Jews of the culture most Israelis had chosen to leave, that of diasporic Jewish life in Europe.
In the previous chapter, Ilan Pappé talked about how “in order to create a new collective identity, to idealize it, to make it a positive one, you have to know also who you are not, and negate that Other in order to make your own collective superior.” This process begins, he said, “by you not only redefining yourself against the societies which you have left for various reasons, but redefining yourself also against the societies you have found.” In this chapter, we’ll look at the different ways this dynamic played out in the construction of the “newly minted” Jewish-Israeli identity.
The idea of the new Jew, or “Sabra,” came to prominence in the early 1930s as Jewish presence in Palestine consolidated and grew under the British Mandate.
Named after the prickly pear cactus, the Sabra was a fearless fighter and hardworking pioneer; confident, Spartan, easygoing; deeply loyal to the secular socialist values of the collective. He* was equally comfortable whether vigilant on night watch duty, singing songs with his friends around the campfire, or working days on end in back-breaking conditions as he planted the rocky fields or readied swampland for cultivation.
This “New Hebrew” identity was grounded primarily in difference from diaspora Europe. In Eastern Europe and Russia, Jews had predominantly lived in shtetls, the towns and villages of Orthodox Judaism. To the young pioneers this life was insular and bookish, dominated by the strictures of religion and study of the Torah, and by the pervasive fear of ethnic violence. In coming to Palestine, they chose a very different way to live: independent, strong, and rooted in the ownership and cultivation of land — a calling so long denied to Jewry. Urban Jews of Western Europe were deemed equally flawed for what was seen as their craven desire to assimilate, to discard their Jewish heritage for the sake of fitting into a gentile society that quietly despised them. Rooted once more in their ancestral homeland, the New Hebrews believed that they could refashion what it meant to be Jewish by reclaiming the land of Israel and its landscape through their vision and labour.
By 1948, most of the Jews of Europe were dead or in Displaced Persons camps, many trying to get to Palestine. But they didn’t come because they had believed all along in the Zionist dream. Indeed, from the Sabras’ perspective they had consciously chosen to remain in Europe rather than face the challenges and struggles of laying the groundwork of this new society. They came now as refugees. “Did you come here from conviction, or from Germany?” was a standard jibe.[2] Worst of all, they came as a destroyed people. To the Sabras, who had won their state through hard fighting, this was unfathomable. How could the Jews of Europe have let this happen? Why did so very few of them fight back? They had simply gone “like lambs to the slaughter,” and for this most of all many Sabras disdained them.
Strength was a key virtue for the proud and independent Sabras. They were warrior Jews, determined never again to suffer the persecutions that had paved their history. “We fight, therefore we exist,” wrote future prime minister Menachem Begin. The frontier settlements of the Yishuv had doubled as military outposts, rebuffing Arab attacks through self-defence. Jewish militias had turned to sabotage and violence against the British before Partition, and those militias had hastily reassembled into Israel’s army. Everybody was trained in arms: as in the Yishuv, so in the new state, the lines between civil society and the military were blurred. In his memoir of Etzel, the hard-right militia he had headed in the 1940s, Begin noted:
The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight…. Out of blood and fire and tears and ashes, a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over 1,800 years, the “FIGHTING JEW.” It is axiomatic that those who fight have to hate.... We had to hate first and foremost, the horrifying, age-old, inexcusable utter defenselessness of our Jewish people, wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, to the majority of whose inhabitants the defenselessness of the Jews was a standing invitation to massacre them.[3]
Begin’s political beliefs did not then reflect the mainstream of Jewish political life in Palestine, but his perspectives were not unique. The lessons of history were stark — for Jews to survive, they must be strong.
The pioneers, and their Sabra children, wanted to create a new society that distinguished them from the culture of the lands they had left, but they were nonetheless imbued with European attitudes and prejudices. Perhaps internalized European anti-Semitism helped forge their attitudes to their co-religionists. In his 1886 bestseller La France Juive, Catholic populist Edouard Drumont had written: “The Jewish Semite … can live only as a parasite in the middle of a civilization he has not made.”[4] His words echo eerily in the writing of Zionist scion A.D. Gordon some forty years later:
[W]e are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil; there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either.[5]
Similarly, the pioneers were shaped by European attitudes of their time towards the Arabs of Palestine. The new Jewish state would form “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,”[6] wrote Theodor Herzl, exemplifying the colonial mindset defined by cultural critic Edward Said as “Orientalism.” In his influential book of the same name, we see again how a collective identity is defined as against an Other. Said describes how within European discourse the Orient (here, the Middle East) and the West were (and are) positioned as essentially different. “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe,” says Said, “it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”[7] From a twinning of fear and fascination, and the need to believe in the inherent superiority of one’s own culture, a constellation of polarized stereotypes unfolded within the European imagination. Arabs were exotic, dark-skinned, hyper-masculine warriors, for example, or childlike imperial subjects, feminized and passive. Repeated and reinforced in literary and artistic representations of the Orient, these stereotypes were further entrenched by the longstanding realities of geopolitical mastery.
It was from this perspective that the dominant European culture (here, imperial Britain) understood and engaged with both its Arab colonial subjects and its resident Jews. As we have already seen, the European Jews who absorbed these prejudices were themselves the tainted and suspect Other. For Western Europe, Jewish immigration to Palestine performed a double service: it placed Europeanized Jews on the threshold of empire to mediate between the Oriental Other and the civilized West,[8] and it removed Jews from Europe. Fulfilling this function won (Zionist) Jews some measure of acceptance. Zionism was too small a movement to succeed in its territorial ambitions without the essential goodwill of the British Empire. Sheltering under the welcome cloak of imperial approbation, they were disinclined to challenge the prejudices they and the British mutually held about their Middle Eastern neighbours.
Jewish and Ar
ab communities developed quite separately in Mandate Palestine, with little intermingling between the two. This left ample space for superficial generalizations. Shaped by the Orientalism of the Europe they had left behind, the pioneers replicated the same hierarchies of identity that had been imposed on them — they looked down on Arabs, seeing them as backward and less civilized, trapped in blood-feuds, poverty, and the ever-present dirt.[9]
They also admired them. Romantic ideals of fearless desert warriors meant that Bedouin culture in particular was esteemed, as the antithesis of what they saw as the anemic lives of the perennially persecuted Jews of the European diaspora. “We are a withered and weak people with little blood. A nation like ours needs savage men and women. We need to renew and refresh our blood…. We must have Jewish Bedouin. Without them we will not move, we will get nowhere, we will not get out into open space. Without them the redemption will not come,”[10] says Romek Amashi, hero of the 1929 novel, The Wanderings of Amashi the Guard.†
The Palmach, the elite strike force of the Yishuv’s Haganah militia, was a collective cultural icon. Palmachniks epitomized the Sabra ideal, working on a kibbutz when not in military training or action. Ranging across the hills and valleys of Palestine they learned the land and its ways, which gave them a cachet an urban Jew could never hope to attain. They expressed their deeper familiarity with the land by taking on Arab customs. Palmach officers wore the Arab kaffiyeh (headscarf) — also cherished by Arab nationalists — and evening campfire gatherings with Arab coffee, mint tea, and communal singing in the Bedouin style became central to Palmach culture. Arabic expressions passed freely into their vocabulary. Some mutated into new words as they passed into familiar Hebrew speech, others retained their original form.
These idealized perceptions shifted as time passed, especially as the frustrations of the Palestinian Arab fellahin turned into violence when their landlords sold the land they worked to the new settlers. By the 1940s, fascination with Arab culture had fallen away, even as some elements of that culture had become a fixed part of Sabra identity, and Arabs had solidified in the Zionist imagination into the primary role of “enemy.”
As the fighting ended in January 1949, the new Israelis found themselves sharing the territory of their state with 160,000 Palestinian Arabs.
In the intellectual melting pot of the Yishuv this had long been anticipated. Ideas ranging from a binational state to transfer of the existing Arab population had been discussed. As late as 1947, some Zionist leaders believed that after Partition the remnant of Arabs in the land of Israel could merge fairly harmoniously into the new society, joining the Jewish majority in a shared labour union and even serving in the army. But after the experiences of the war such hopes evaporated. Israel, as its Declaration of Independence proudly declared,‡ was a Jewish state. That was its raison d’être. Despite the promises of “complete equality of social and political rights” that the Declaration afforded to the Arabs who remained within state borders, their presence was an anomaly.
What was to be done with them? At first, the country’s leadership debated the possibilities of mass transfer beyond Israel’s borders, but it was deemed that this would shake Israel’s precarious standing on the international stage. Instead, fearful that the Arab residents of Israel might act as a fifth column, the government placed them all under martial law. The legislation that facilitated this move had been introduced as Defence (Emergency) Regulations in 1945 by the British, to suppress the Yishuv’s open rebellion against them. It had been condemned by Jewish legal experts at the time as “the destruction of the rule of law” and “terrorism under official seal.”[11] Under those regulations it now became possible to seal off and isolate Arab areas, place villages under curfew, and hold people under indefinite arrest without charge or trial. Permits were needed to leave the designated area, whether for work, family, or medical reasons.
In these “closed areas” citizens were segregated from other Arab communities and from the rest of Israeli society, with a separate (military) court system and separate schools. The state school system for Arab children was barely functional. By 1966, there were only eight high schools for Palestinian Israelis in the entire country. One teacher described an early posting where the only access to the rented room in which he taught was through the family’s stable; the students would go out and gather white stones for chalk, and he would copy passages out of his textbook onto the blackboard as there were no other copies.[12] This educational neglect was to handicap another generation of Palestinian Israelis.
Abuses were common under martial law. With no clear, centralized goal, the regulations were imposed arbitrarily by local officials. Several times the Knesset discussed incidents of villagers being herded into a field for inspection and held there for hours, without water, only to find when they finally returned home that their houses had been looted.
Residents of Jaffa, formerly the economic and cultural capital of Arab Palestine, fared no better than Palestinian Arabs in rural areas. After the city was taken, its remaining residents, together with refugees from the surrounding villages, were corralled into the neighbourhood of Ajami, which became a ghetto, its perimeter marked by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers with guard dogs. Their living arrangements, and their work, were now under the command of the occupying Jewish forces. Shaban Balaha’s elderly father was one of them. “People were taken to work in the port and in the municipality, without pay, for free,”[13] Shaban Balaha says. His son-in-law Abed Satel, who is translating for us in the spacious, shady front room of the Balahas’ Ajami home, explains: “Before 1948, Jaffa was important for two things: the port, and the orange fields. After the war, the orange fields of all the Palestinians who had left were taken by the government. The men of Jaffa were then forced to go to work on the orange fields to collect the oranges for Jewish companies. He [Shaban Balaha] was one of them, and my father was also.”
Those who remained carried the weight of the new state’s policy of open Jewish immigration, involuntarily sharing their homes with the new arrivals. Two immigrant families were moved into the house Shaban’s father had found in Ajami: one from Bulgaria, the other from Romania. Abed commented:
You know, they are from different cultures. There’s a social shock when a Muslim family is forced to stay with a foreign family of another religion. There are many difficulties. The Arabs do not speak Hebrew, and neither do the newcomers. Even the communication was problematic. They had to share the kitchen and the bathroom. After all this trauma, you have had to leave your house, you are worried about your family, you’ve been through a war, you are meeting a foreign people and don’t know how they are, and in this situation they bring a family that you don’t know and they put them in your house. It’s a big shock.
This chafing proximity could break into open violence. Shaban got into a fight with a Turkish Jew who was drunk and cursing Mohammed, and still has the knife scar on his wrist. The police who enforced social order struggled with the multiple identities of Ajami’s residents. Many of the newcomers were Jews from Muslim countries. It was hard to tell them apart from the Arabs of Palestine.
Many fleeing Palestinian Arabs had lost their homes and land, and in the early 1950s Israeli lawmakers made their dispossession official. The Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 allowed the government to legally appropriate the land of anyone who was deemed absent from their regular residence during the fighting, according to the complex criteria of the legislation. In the chaos of the war, anyone who had fled to a place “which was at that time occupied by forces which sought to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel”[14] lost their land. “[E]very Arab who was not in his place of residence on a certain date, whatever the reason (flight, evacuation, transfer), is considered an evacuee,”[15] stated the prime minister’s advisor Zalman Lif. In 1952, the Land Acquisition Law retroactively sanctioned transfers of land to the state, effecting an even broader sweep than that achieved under the provisions of the earlier Act. Altogeth
er, millions of acres of land formerly inhabited or used by Palestinian Arabs were brought by these legal mechanisms into state ownership.
Most of this land belonged to Palestinian Arabs now living as refugees in camps across the Lebanese and Jordanian borders. But some of it had been owned by people who had been internally displaced — people who, like Dahoud Badr and the Sama’an family we met in Chapter 1, had been forced to leave their villages but had remained within the borders of what was to become the Israeli state. They were deemed to be “present absentees,” present in the land but absent from their homes during the specified period, and their lands too were confiscated. Over successive decades legislation sanctioned the continuing plunder of their land. During the first forty years of the state, 50–80 percent of the lands Palestinian Israelis believed they owned as individuals and as communities would be taken from them.
The present absentees were in the state but not of it, citizens of a country that excluded them from its self-definition. This ambiguity dogged relations between the isolated Arab population and the officials who administered their legal and physical containment. In October 1956, as Israel invaded Egypt during the Suez crisis, it spilled over into violence at Kfar Kassem. The village was already under nightly curfew, but on October 29 that curfew was brought forward without warning, and villagers returning home from working in the fields were shot down by border police. Wounded villagers lay unattended through the night until the curfew was lifted; altogether, forty-nine people were killed. “We talked to them,” Jamal Farij, one of the few survivors, told a press conference fifty years later. “We asked if they wanted our identity cards. They didn’t. Suddenly one of them said, ‘Cut them down’ — and they opened fire on us like a flood.”[16] Two police officers were convicted of murder, but were out of prison just over a year later.