RELIGION, RACE, AND THE CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN ENCOUNTER
In the years after the 1948 war, ostensibly secular nationalism emerged as the dominant language on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.33 Secularists among Israelis and Palestinians, representing the political elites in both societies, sought to define their respective movements as national struggles to restore a nation to its homeland. And yet any observer of the contemporary, early twenty-first-century conflict recognizes the central role religion plays in each society as well as in each side’s conception of its counterpart. Israel’s rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox community wields immense power in domestic and budgetary politics (evidenced, not least, by the popularity of political parties formed for hardly another purpose than to rein in this power), and the religious nationalist settler movement exercises its muscle in the state’s policies in the West Bank. At the same time, that Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement, which, according to its charter, “owes its loyalty to God, derives from Islam its way of life and strives to raise the banner of God over every inch of Palestine”—won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip is indicative of the prominent place of Islam in today’s Palestinian politics. As important, each side perceives religion as a central, guiding force in the other’s actions. Many contemporary Israelis believe that the Palestinians are all—or are dominated by—Islamist extremists whose religious requirement of jihād ensures that they will continue to fight Israel until they have removed the Jewish infidels from Palestine. That mass violence erupted when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary in September 2000, and that the half-decade of bloodletting that followed quickly became known as the al-Aqsa Intifada (after the mosque that sits atop the mount), reveal not only the enduring importance of religious symbols in the conflict but also the sense among many Palestinians that, notwithstanding their protestations of secularism, Israelis actually have a religious agenda that seeks to undermine Islam’s (literal and figurative) foundations in Palestine. While we must not draw a straight line from this book’s conclusions about the Ottoman period to the contemporary conflict in the twenty-first century, the prominence of religion in today’s mutual perceptions should be recognized not as a historic aberration but rather as the latest stage in the story of evolving ideas and perspectives about religion in this encounter that began more than a century earlier.
If religion remains, or has again become, central in today’s mutual perceptions among Israelis and Palestinians, what may be said of the present status of ideas of race? To be sure, explicitly racial discourse has largely fallen out of favor,34 especially in light of the widespread perception of the horrific potential of racial thinking as articulated by Nazism and as evidenced in the Holocaust. Yet, at least in the minds of each side, its antagonist tenaciously employs racial, indeed racist, ideology. This accusation was made most famously in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted in 1975, which declared that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This alleged link between Zionism and racism had already been made the previous decade in the Palestinian National Charter, in which the Palestine National Council declared that Zionism “is racist [‘unṣuriyya] and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.”35 Even after the UN’s revocation of Resolution 3379 in 1991, the indictment of Zionism as a form of racism and of Israeli policies as racist remains prevalent. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s reference, in his 2011 speech before the UN General Assembly, to Israel’s “settlement and apartheid policies and its construction of the racist annexation wall” is characteristic of contemporary Palestinians’ association of Israel with racism in general and with South African apartheid in particular.36 On the Israeli side, a popular focus on the mandate-period Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini and his wartime relationship with Adolf Hitler reinforces the sense among Israelis that their Palestinian antagonists are, like the Nazis, motivated not by legitimate claims but by irrational racism.37 Israelis point to Hamas’s embrace of conspiracy theories historically linked to racist antisemitism, most notably the Hamas Charter’s claim that “their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as evidence that Hajj Amin’s legacy lives on.38 Notions of race clearly remain part of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian discourse, even as these racial ideas are now generally relegated to condemnations of the other side’s motivations and bigotry. Both sides, it would seem, are at least partially correct in their perceptions of the other, and, as such, both also project their own prejudices onto the other.
I close with a statement of hope that emerges from this research: the ways in which people perceive and understand one another are not fixed or immutable. Given later events, I was surprised by much of what I discovered in this study; Zionists and Arabs imagined one another in very different terms in the Late Ottoman period from the ways their descendants look at one another today. The perceptions have changed, if generally not for the better. Just as perceptions can worsen, however, it stands to reason that they can improve as well.
* * *
1 This organization “first appeared in Jaffa early in November 1918, then spread to Jerusalem later in the same month.” See Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, 158. On the MCA’s origins and its emergence as the dominant nationalist organization among Palestinian Arabs in the years immediately following the Great War, see Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918–1929, 32–34, 105–8.
2 According to Muslim tradition, Jerusalem was the first of the two directions of Islamic prayer [ūlā al-qiblatain] but had been replaced by Mecca in the second year of the Hijrah. See A. J. Wensinck, “Ḳibla,” Encyclopaedia of Islam; and “Qibla,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān. ʿAbboud, al-Arḍ al-muqaddasa wa-ṣ-ṣahyūniyya, 11.
3 ʿAbboud, al-Arḍ al-muqaddasa wa-ṣ-ṣahyūniyya, 13.
4 I know of no earlier use of this phrase and, in personal correspondence, Mark Cohen confirmed that he, too, had not seen this phrase used previously. See Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross.
5 On the role of Christians in the development of mandate-era Palestinian nationalism, see Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine; Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine.
6 ʿAbboud, al-Arḍ al-muqaddasa wa-ṣ-ṣahyūniyya, 7.
7 Ibid., 13.
8 This reference is presumably to Pope Benedict XV (served from 1914 to 1922), who had expressed his opposition to Zionism. See Minerbi, The Vatican and Zionism; Kreutz, Vatican Policy on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. The previous pope, Pius X, had also famously opposed Zionism in his meeting with Theodor Herzl. See Canepa, “Pius X and the Jews.”
9 ʿAbboud, al-Arḍ al-muqaddasa wa-ṣ-ṣahyūniyya, 29.
10 Ben-Ẓevi, ha-Tenuʿah ha-ʿarvit, 20–21.
11 As per the Balfour Declaration, the language of which was adopted in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
12 “Palestine Communities Ordinance: Text,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service, Jerusalem, February 16, 1926 (March 12, 1926).
13 Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, 37–38.
14 Plural of waqf, an Islamic legal endowment.
15 On the Supreme Muslim Council, see Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council.
16 Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 55–56. See also Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 17–20.
17 On this pattern, see Wasserstein, “Patterns of Communal Conflict in Palestine.”
18 Cited in Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism, 45.
19 Feisal-Weizmann Agreement, January 1919.
20 Emir Feisal and Felix Frankfurter Correspondence (March 3–5, 1919) in Laqueur and Rubin, eds., The Israel-Arab Reader, 19–20.
21 See Pedersen, “The Impact of league Oversight on British Policy in Palestine,” 42.
23 It is worth noting that in the White Paper issued in 1922 by the British just before the official ratification of the mandate by the league of the Nations, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill explained that by “the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine,” the Balfour Declaration meant “the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become “a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on the grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.” Italics mine. Winston Churchill, “The Churchill White Paper (June 1922),” in laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 27.
24 See Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System.”
25 Article 125, Treaty of Sevres, 1920.
26 Article 143, Treaty of Sevres, 1920.
27 Article 64, Treaty of Trianon, 1920.
28 See, e.g., Article 149, Treaty of Sevres, 1920.
29 Articles 86 and 93, Treaty of Versailles, 1919. The same was demanded in 1920 of the Serb-Croat Slovene state, Roumania, and Hungary at Trianon, and of Greece and Armenia at Sevres. Articles 44, 47, 58, Treaty of Trianon, 1920; Articles 86, 93, Treaty of Sevres, 1920.
30 British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald: The MacDonald letter (February 13, 1931), in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 38.
31 The British Government: The White Paper (May 17, 1939), in ibid., 44.
32 The Arab Office: The Arab Case for Palestine (March 1946), in ibid., 60. For a discussion of this meeting and for the text of Albert Hourani’s testimony to the committee, see Khalidi, “On Albert Hourani, the Arab Office, and the Anglo-American Committee of 1946”; Hourani, “The Case against a Jewish State in Palestine.”
33 If from 1922 to 1946 the terms of the League of Nations mandate set the tone and fixed the boundaries of the discourse on difference—removing the race-religion-language triad from the realm of legitimacy—united Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947 on the partition of Palestine delegitimized an additional fourth term, namely, sex. The resolution read: “no discrimination of any kind shall be made between inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex.” The inclusion of sex in this list is, of course, a consequence of significant changes in the realm of gender equality in the West. As in the case of the mandate, this resolution set the terms that all parties would have to consider in articulating their own positions. In the 1948 Israeli proclamation of independence, the state’s founders were willing to agree to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion [dat], race [geza‘], or sex.” Language, however, is notably absent from the list, a sign of the sensitivity of the issue of language in the Zionist enterprise. (The proclamation nonetheless ensures freedom of language.) In contrast, the Palestinian National Charter, drafted in 1964 and approved in 1968, insists that with “the liberation of Palestine,” freedoms of worship and visit would be extended “to all, without discrimination of race [al-ʿunṣur], color [al-lawn], language, or religion [ad-dīn].” The absence of “sex” in this list may reflect different gender concerns in the Palestinian national movement of the mid-twentieth century; the inclusion, instead, of “color” was meant to ally the Palestinian cause with other anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and antiracist movements of the period. Whatever ambivalences may be discerned concerning sex discrimination in 1968 appear to have been overcome within two decades. The Palestine National Council’s Declaration of Independence of November 1988 ensures that “governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality, and non-discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color or sex.” The texts of the documents cited here are found in laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 75, 82–83, 119, 356.
34 A recent Israeli exception can be seen in the case of upper Nazareth mayor Shimon Gaspo. See “If you think I’m a racist, then Israel is a racist state,” Haaretz, August 7, 2013, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.540278.
35 Article 22, Palestinian National Charter, in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 119.
36 “Full transcript of Abbas’s speech at uN General Assembly,” http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/full-transcript-of-abbas-speech-at-un-general-assembly-1.386385.
37 On this subject, see Penslar, “The Hands of Others.” This is a review of Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust.
38 Hamas Charter in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 347.
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