Figure 4. Female members of the Iraqi Home Guard marching in Baghdad, 1959. Corbis.
This chapter examines the emergence and main features of four nationalisms in the Middle East: Zionism and early Israeli nationalism; early Palestinian nationalism; Egyptian nationalism under Nasser; and Maghrebi nationalism, as manifested in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and, to a lesser extent, Libya. These were not, by any means, the only forms of nationalism in the Middle East in the early and mid-twentieth century. But they had the most profound influence, affecting the lives of millions not just in the countries where they flourished but in the whole region. In fact, Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms unleashed forces and led to developments that to this day continue to shape Middle Eastern and global political history. The rest of the chapter concerns the genesis and nature of these two contending national identities and their more immediate regional impact on Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. The subtle nuances and complexities of each of these national identities, and their contribution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, are discussed further in chapter 9.
ZIONISM AND THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL
The birth of the state of Israel was predicated on three key principles: (1) the constitution of the Jews as a distinct people with a unique identity, a nation; (2) the placing of this nation on a specific territory, the biblical Eretz Israel; and (3) the territorial and juridical independence of this nation in the form of a modern country. Since the late 1800s, and especially beginning in the early 1900s and culminating in 1947–48, these principles have formed the very core of Israel. The formation of a Jewish nation was facilitated by Zionism: the nation’s precise nature and character, and even its language (Hebrew), were deliberately articulated by individuals who set out to resurrect an ancient kingdom and its people in a new, modern form. Every nation needs a territorial reference point, however abstract in definition and reality, and for the Jewish nation that reference point was in Palestine. And for the Zionist project to be successfully completed, the Jewish nation needed political and territorial independence, so Israeli statehood was declared on May 14, 1948.
The early history of Zionism reads like the determined crusade of a handful of individuals, among whom Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann stand out. Within a matter of years, however, what had started as individual and at times highly criticized initiatives had snowballed into a large-scale migration of European Jewry into the Promised Land. This migration was reinforced by growing, barbaric anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, first in Russia, then in eastern and central Europe, and eventually in Germany. Although Zionism reached its most articulate and organized manifestation in nineteenth-century Europe, earlier versions of it, in the form of a belief in the chosenness of the Jewish people and their return to the land the Bible identifies as Eretz Israel, existed among Jews scattered throughout the world. This classical Zionism did not, however, provide much incentive for a return of the Jews to Palestine, as one of its central precepts was that the Jews would return to Zion only at the coming of the Messiah.12 Nevertheless, the Jewish diaspora had some religious ties with the existing, though very small, community of Jews in Palestine. Estimates put the total number of Jews in the early 1800s at around 2.5 to 3 million, of whom some 90 percent lived in Europe and only about 5,000 lived in Palestine. Palestine itself had an approximate population of between 250,000 and 300,000, of whom an overwhelming majority were Sunni Muslim, some 25,000 to 30,000 were Christian, and an undetermined number, perhaps several thousand, were Druze.13
Ironically, Zionism developed in a larger intellectual context that was initially opposed to the project of Jewish national assertion and uniqueness. Throughout the early 1800s, the dominant intellectual trend among the minority of learned European Jews who had not been consigned to the ghettos was the haskala. The haskala was a literary and cultural “enlightenment” calling for greater integration into the European cultural mainstream and reform of some of Judaism’s archaic rituals.14 It was, in fact, a notable assimilationist, a prominent Austrian journalist named Theodor Herzl, who, upon witnessing the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus affair firsthand, decided that the Jews’ salvation lay in a hastened return to a territory of their own, a Zion free of prejudice and discrimination.15 In 1896, Herzl published a pamphlet called The Jewish State, in which he deplored the futility of assimilation, pointed to the pervasiveness of European anti-Semitism, and called for the establishment of a separate Jewish state based on Jewish identity and self-determination. The following year, in August 1897, he organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which some two hundred delegates attended.
If The Jewish State was an attempt to articulate the characteristics of a nation, the First Zionist Congress and the ones after it represented that nation’s emerging state. Herzl’s book is concise, and its message, though simple, must have been compelling to its intended audience. “We are a people,” he wrote, “one people.”
We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. . . .
Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves. . . .
Let all who are willing to join us, fall in behind our banner and fight for our cause with voice and pen and deed.16
Herzl did not create Jewish national identity; no one person creates a national identity from scratch. What he did was awaken what had lain dormant by pointing out, with contagious passion, that a separate, unique, identifiable Jewish nation did exist. “This pamphlet will open a general discussion on the Jewish Question,” he proclaimed.17 And indeed The Jewish State did spark debate, in essence becoming, for the early generation of Zionists, a political and national manifesto.
The Basel conference gave organizational shape to Herzl’s utopia. Its declaration stated simply that “the aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Herzl had already advocated as much. What the conference did was to initiate the necessary, concrete steps aimed at making the Zionist dream a reality. In this endeavor, it called for the implementation of four measures: promoting “the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers”; organizing and uniting world Jewry through the creation of appropriate institutions; heightening “Jewish national sentiments and consciousness”; and securing international diplomatic support for the Zionist cause.18 Implementing these goals was entrusted to a newly created World Zionist Organization, which became the seed of the future Jewish state. By the time the Second Zionist Congress was held in 1898, attended by about 350 delegates, the Zionist movement had grown significantly larger. Whereas only 117 local Zionist groups had been identified a year earlier, by 1898 their numbers had grown to over 900.19
Other statelike institutions were quick to follow: a Zionist bank, the Jewish Colonial Trust, in 1899; a Jewish National Fund to finance land purchases in Palestine; and even internal divisions between Herzl’s largely secular, “political” Zionism and an emerging “cultural” Zionism calling for greater attention to the essence of Jewish identity and character.20 The Jewish Agency, established in 1929 to manage the affairs of the Jewish community in Palestine, became something of a “state within a state.” Before long, a Zionist Federation of Labor, the Histadrut, a labor party called the Mapai, and a defense force, the Haganah, were established as well.21 Within this context successive waves of immigration to Palestine, called the aliya, were launched. The Jewish nation and the Jewish state were forming in a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing manner.
Table 1.Jewish Immigration in Each Aliya
SOURCE: Data from Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 60–61, 185, 208.
a Does not include illegal immigration.
By the time the Basel conference ended in 1896
, the first of five aliya was already slowly coming to an end (table 1). It had started in about 1881, and it lasted until 1900, during which time approximately twenty-five thousand mostly young, idealist Zionists immigrated to the Promised Land. But the experiences of this early group were less than successful, as many were new to farming and most were unfamiliar with actual living conditions in their new country. So unpleasant was the experience of the early arrivals that many returned to their countries of origin or emigrated to the United States.22 Further, many early Zionists discovered, much to their surprise, that Palestine was actually densely populated and intensively cultivated and that available land was consequently expensive.23 Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv, had grown to approximately fifty thousand individuals. During the second aliya, from 1904 to 1913, the Yishuv grew considerably, this time with significant support from the expanding network of Zionist organizations and with financial assistance from wealthy European philanthropists, chief among whom were members of Britain’s Rothschild family. The second wave of immigrants was mostly farmers and laborers. Since they had had little or nothing in their original countries to return to, they were determined to succeed in their new land. Thus the Yishuv increasingly assumed the characteristics of an integrated polity, more realistic and attuned to the conditions of its environment, and there to stay. Significantly, most of the leaders of the new state of Israel in 1948 would emerge from this aliya.24 The third aliya, generally dated from 1919 to 1923, brought thirty-seven thousand new immigrants to Palestine, expanding the Yishuv to about eighty-four thousand. Another seventy thousand Jews immigrated to Palestine between 1924 and 1928, during the fourth aliya, this time mostly urban and mercantile in orientation. With them came the rise of Jewish urban settlements and an increase in the organizational strength of industrial laborers.25 The fifth and last aliya, coming at the rise of fascism and the onslaught of the Second World War in Europe, occurred between 1932 and 1939, by the end of which the Yishuv’s population had grown to some 445,000, or about 30 percent of the total population of Palestine.26
So far, there has been no mention of the Palestinians, the indigenous population of Palestine, who by 1947 numbered approximately 1.3 million. This omission is by design, for it was largely within a context of Palestinian nonexistence—a perception that the Promised Land was empty of a people with an identity or rights—that the European immigrants set out on their successive waves of colonization of Palestine. Zionism, it should be remembered, was a product of the intellectual and political environment of nineteenth-century Europe, one in which an industrially advanced, “civilized” Europe was almost universally assumed to have the right and indeed the responsibility to dominate and colonize the rest of the world.27 The Zionists were a product of this intellectual milieu, although, as more time passed, for them colonization increasingly became a matter of life and death. This was a sentiment shared not only by Zionists but by notable non-Jewish Zionist sympathizers as well. “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad,” wrote Lord Balfour, whose famous declaration paved the way for the official establishment of the state of Israel, “is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land.”28
Others denied the existence of a Palestinian people altogether. Golda Meir, one of Israel’s most celebrated prime ministers, stated this position emphatically: “There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . . They did not exist.”29 Similarly, Israel: Personal History, by David Ben-Gurion—one of the central figures of the Zionist movement and the Jewish state’s first prime minister—is striking in its lack of mention of a previously existing Palestinian population.30 In his memoirs he wrote: “I believed then, as I do today, that we had a clear title to this country. Not the right to take it away from others (there were no others), but the right and the duty to fill its emptiness, restore life to its barrenness, to re-create a modern version of our own nation. And I felt we owed this effort not only to ourselves but to the land as well.”31 This viewpoint was most pointedly summed up in the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land.”32 The central assumptions of Zionism were that only God’s chosen people should be in the Promised Land, that the backward trespassers who were there had no rights to it, and that the problems posed by their existence on the land could be easily dispensed with. A passage on the Palestinians from Herzl’s diary, written in 1895, is instructive: “We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”33 Some of Herzl’s disciples were not as discreet, nor were they always willing to pay for Palestinian land. By most accounts, by 1948 only 6 percent of the land belonging to Palestinians had been bought by Zionists.34 Most houses were either simply destroyed or appropriated. One Israeli researcher has estimated that nearly four hundred Palestinian villages were “completely destroyed, with their houses, garden-walls, and even cemeteries and tombstones, so that literally a stone does not remain standing, and visitors are passing and being told ‘it was all desert.’”35
Figure 5. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the state of Israel. Corbis.
Figure 6. Israeli women taking an oath to join the Haganah, Tel Aviv, 1948. Corbis.
Many of the demolitions and other similar military operations in the Yishuv were carried out by one of the three active military organizations: the Haganah, the Irgun, and the so-called Stern Gang. The Haganah (literally, “self-defense”) was established in 1920 with a broad-based mandate to defend the burgeoning Jewish community in Palestine. Initially under the control of the Histadrut labor federation, the Haganah had ready access to a pool of eager volunteers and, under the command of former officers from the USSR and elsewhere, soon acquired an increasingly professional character. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the Haganah maintained an uneasy relationship with the British mandatory authorities: sometimes it was aided by a Bible-wielding, pro-Zionist British commander, Captain Orde Wingate, who collaborated with it against Vichy-dominated Syria; at other times it was declared illegal and its members were arrested.36 Nevertheless, throughout, the Haganah secretly registered men and women volunteers and continued to grow. It was eventually amalgamated into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) once that organization became the new state’s army.
A splinter military organization called the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), alternately referred to as the Etzel or the Irgun, was established in 1937 as a result of the withdrawal of an extremist group known as the Revisionists from the World Zionist Organization. Even more extreme was the group commonly known as the Stern Gang after the name of its founder, Avraham Stern, or, more officially, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lehi for short). Both the Irgun and the Stern Gang rejected the Haganah’s concept of “active defense.” Instead, they launched an intensive campaign of shooting opponents and bombing both British and Palestinian targets. One of the Irgun’s more infamous operations was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, in which ninety-one Britons, Palestinians, and Jews were killed and another forty-five were injured.
By the late 1940s, exhausted by the war in Europe, Britain was desperately searching for a way to end its mandatory rule over Palestine and simply leave. Earlier, from 1936 to 1939, it had also been forced to contend with an “Arab Revolt,” the fallout from which had only heightened Zionist extremism and terrorist attacks on British as well as Arab targets. The years 1947 and 1948 turned out to be fateful, for the British withdrawal from one town and region after another set off a frantic race between Zionist and Palestinian forces to gain control of the installations and command structures the British were leaving behind. Britain decided to turn over the responsibility for the mandate to the Unite
d Nations, which on November 29, 1947, adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into a separate Arab and a Jewish state, with Bethlehem and Jerusalem retaining international status (map 4). The UN Partition Plan, as the resolution came to be known, was highly favorable to the Zionists, who quickly accepted it, but was rejected by the outraged Palestinians.37 Although at the time Jews made up only about 33 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine and owned between 6 and 7 percent of the land, the plan awarded the Jewish state 55 percent of historic Palestine, most of it fertile. The area under Jewish control was also to include some 45 percent of the Palestinian population. The proposed Arab state, however, was given only 45 percent of the total land in dispute, much of it not fit for agriculture, and was to include a negligible Jewish minority. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to remain under UN jurisdiction, and Jaffa, though geographically separated from the rest of the Arab state, was to be a part of it.
Map 4. The United Nations Partition Plan
The Jewish acceptance and Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan became the subject of great historical controversy, often cited by subsequent Israeli sources as an example of the Zionists’ desire for peaceful diplomacy and the Arabs’ determination to wage war on Jews.38 But more recently there emerged in Israel a group of so-called new historians whose documentary and interpretative analysis of the events leading up to and following the creation of the state of Israel fundamentally challenged many of the “myths” of what had actually happened in 1947 and 1948.39 Among them was the intellectual and longtime political activist Simha Flapan (d. 1987), who had the following interpretation of the Zionists’ acceptance of the plan: “The acceptance of the UN Partition resolution was an example of Zionist pragmatism par excellence. It was a tactical acceptance, a vital step in the right direction—a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more judicious. And, indeed, in the period between the UN vote on November 29, 1947, and the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, a number of developments helped to produce the judicious circumstances that would enable the embryonic Jewish state to expand its border.”40
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