It was these towering ideas, emotions, and traditions that set the stage for the appearance of political Zionism a hundred years ago, when the next to last of the series of empires that had occupied the land began collapsing of its own weight. It was then that men of vision like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau emerged, foreseeing the historic opportunity presented by the Ottoman Empire’s decline. In addition to offering a concrete political solution—namely, the founding of a Jewish state—Herzl also established the institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization and the successive Zionist Congresses, beginning in 1897, that were to put his plan into action.
What Herzl was able to do was to translate a native, emotional Zionism that beat in millions of Jewish hearts into a political movement that took account of the modern world. He understood the forces of politics and power, of personality and persuasion; above all, Herzl was animated by a profound understanding of history and by a vision of the impending tragedy of European Jewry and of the triumphant possibility of revived Jewish statehood. He therefore pressed the Zionist claim with all the urgency he could muster.
While his disciples in many countries propelled the ideas of political Zionism toward the concrete goal of the founding of the state, Zionist pioneers undertook the massive effort of settling a land that had been allowed to fall into disuse by absentee Arab landlords living the good life in Beirut and Damascus. The Jews turned barren scenery, alternating between rock and swamp, into productive farmland, dotted first with villages, then towns, then cities. This effort was assisted by a few wealthy Jews, most notably Moses Montefiore and Baron Rothschild, who put up the funds for many of the pivotal early projects. The first such enterprise was appropriately titled Rishon Le-Zion (“The First of Zion”), an agricultural settlement founded in 1882 by Russian Jewish settlers who soon received Rothschild’s assistance.
When Abraham Markus, my maternal great-grandfather, arrived at Rishon Le-Zion several years later, in 1896, it was still a cluster of red-tiled whitewashed houses springing up in the middle of a sandy wilderness. (Today it is prime real estate, minutes away from Tel Aviv on the coastal highway.) One of the “Lovers of Zion,” Abraham wanted to be a scholar-farmer, planting almond trees by day and studying the Talmud at night. By the time my mother was born in nearby Petah Tikva (“Gate of Hope”) in 1912, the family was living, amid orchards they had planted, in a fine house with a promenade of palm trees leading up to it.
But these luxuries were enjoyed only by the few “established” families; newcomers had to face much tougher conditions. When my paternal grandfather Nathan arrived in Palestine in 1920, there were hardly any paved roads and virtually no modern transport. The family disembarked from the ship in rowboats, as there were no mooring facilities in the port of Jaffa at the time. After spending some time in Tel Aviv, the new Jewish suburb of Jaffa, they traveled for two days on a dirt road to Tzemah on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. There my grandfather and my father boarded a boat to take the luggage to Tiberias five miles away, while the rest of the family continued by carriage. It was late afternoon, and the sudden violent gales so typical of the lake nearly smashed the vessel in two. They stayed overnight in Tiberias, then made their way by horse-drawn carriage up the steep slopes to Safed, changing horses in Rosh Pina, another point of Jewish settlement in the barren wilderness that was otherwise relieved only by sparse Bedouin encampments. As late as 1920, the trip from Jaffa to Safed took more than three days. Today it can be done comfortably in three hours.
Beginning with the first wave of Zionist immigration in 1880 and continuing through successive waves before and after World War I, the country was rapidly transformed. The Jews built roads, towns, farms, hospitals, factories, and schools. And as Jewish immigration increased their numbers, it also caused a rapid increase in the Arab population. Many of the Arabs immigrated into the land in response to the job opportunities and the better life afforded by the growing economy the Jews had created—so much so that in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was moved to observe that “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.” 44
The improved economic conditions that the influx of Jewish industry and commerce created fueled a steep rise in income and industrialization among the Arabs of Palestine that had no parallel in any neighboring Arab country. Thus by 1947, the wages of the Arab worker in Haifa were twice what his counterpart was receiving in Nablus, where there was no Jewish presence. 45 Similarly, the number of factories owned by Arabs increased 400 percent between 1931 and 1942, while the number of their employees increased tenfold between 1931 and 1946. 46
The most dramatic increase in Arab immigration was to the areas of Jewish habitation. Between 1922, the advent of the Mandate, and 1947, the Arab population in the Jewish cities grew by 290 percent in Haifa, 158 percent in Jaffa, and 131 percent in Jerusalem, as compared with 64 percent in Hebron, 56 percent in Nablus, and 37 percent in Bethlehem, where there were few or no Jews. 47 But the fact that Arabs migrated into what would eventually be a domain of millions of Jews hardly altered the prevailing international conception that this was to be a Jewish land, albeit one with an Arab minority. Thus, the unceasing Jewish claim to the land has been backed up in the last hundred years by unrelenting Jewish efforts to settle it and bring its open wastes back to life.
* * *
However valid the Jewish claim has been, its relevance would have been mitigated if the Arabs had been able to show an equally persistent claim to the land over the prior centuries. The Arab side makes precisely this claim today—that in recognizing the Jewish historical claim, the men of Versailles disregarded the presence of a nation that had come into being in the intervening period and that had developed unique cultural and historical ties to the land that overshadowed and superseded those of the Jews. The world’s leaders, the Arabs claim, erred in believing that they were “giving a people without a land a land without a people.”
Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Woodrow Wilson, and many of the other statesmen of Versailles were men of education, intelligence, and vision. But were they really so fired up with the passions of biblical restoration and humanist ideals that they were simply blinded to the basic demographic and national facts on the ground?
In fact, they were not. They acted from a reasonable assessment of the well-known and well-documented situation in Palestine in their day—anchoring their policies in facts that have since grown increasingly unfamiliar to many people.
The basic Arab claim is that the Jews seized Palestine from an Arab people who had lived there for ages and was its rightful owner. At his speech at the United Nations in 1974, Yasser Arafat declared:
The Jewish invasion began in 1881…. Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture. 48
Arafat and Arab lore thus date the beginning of the Zionist invasion at 1881, when the first wave of the modern Zionist immigration began. (By then, Jews had outnumbered Arabs in Jerusalem for sixty years.) 49
By now, the idea that the Zionists stole the land from its age old native inhabitants has been so deeply implanted by Arab spokesmen that in many circles in the West it is almost impossible to dislodge. But it is not supported by history. The description offered by Arafat and others of Palestine before the return of the Jews as a verdant area teeming with people is flatly contradicted by the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of European and American visitors to the Holy Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the reports of the great archaeological explorers from Robinson onward.
In recent centuries, as the interest in biblical scholarship and archaeology grew in Europe and America, diplomats, writers, scholars, soldiers, and surveyors toured the Holy Land in increasing numbers. They produced detailed records of what they saw, most often in the form of books, travelogues, and articles published in various periodicals. Without exception, they g
ive an account of the demographic and physical condition of the country that is completely different from the one the Arabs offer today. As early as 1697, Henry Maundrell wrote that Nazareth was “an inconsiderable village,” that Nablus consisted of two streets, that Jericho had become a “poor nasty village,” that the fortress city of Acre was “nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin.” 50 In 1738, English archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote of a land of “barrenness and scarcity… from the want of inhabitants.” 51 In 1785, Constantine François Volney described the “ruined” and “desolate” state of the country:
[W]e with difficulty recognize Jerusalem….[The population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand…. The second place deserving notice is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem…. [A] s is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon about six hundred men in this village capable of bearing arms…. The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the most powerful village in all this quarter, and… able to arm eight or nine hundred men. 52
Yet in 1843, Alexander Keith wrote that “in his [Volney’s] day, the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation.” 53
In 1816, J. S. Buckingham had described Jaffa as “a poor village,” and Ramleh as a place “where, as throughout the greater portion of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.” 54 By 1835, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine gave this description:
Outside the gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound. We found the same void, the same silence as we should have found before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneum…. a complete, eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country… The tomb of a whole people. 55
And in 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported back to England, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.” 56
Perhaps the most famous traveler to the Holy Land was Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867 and wrote of his experiences in The Innocents Abroad:
Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.
For dreary solitude, Twain recommended the Galilee:
These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines … ; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms…. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…. We reached [Mount] Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole route.
In “the barren mountains of Judea,” as he called them, he found more of the same:
Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago….[Bethlehem,] the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will to men,” is untenanted by any living creature.
And around Jerusalem:
The further we went… the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There could not have been more fragments of stone… if every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and distinct stone-cutter’s establishment for an age. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country…. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and become a pauper village.
And for the country as a whole, he gave this bereaved lamentation:
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies…. Palestine is desolate and unlovely…. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. 57
Twain’s observations were echoed fourteen years later in the report of the eminent English cartographer Arthur Penrhyn Stanley on Judea: “In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.” 58
Stanley wrote these words in 1881—the very year that Arafat designates as the beginning of the Zionist “invasion” and the “displacement” of the dynamic local population. That Arafat is caught in another lie is by itself unimportant. What is important is that this lie, endlessly repeated, refined, and elaborated, has displaced what every civilized and educated person knew at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews who were living in intolerable and increasingly dangerous conditions in the ghettos of Europe and who were yearning to return to the land and bring it back to life.
It is true, of course, that there were Arabs living in Palestine, and that in the middle of the nineteenth century they outnumbered its Jewish population. But by the third quarter of the century the total population of the entire country, Arabs and Jews, was still only 400,000—less than four percent of today’s figure. 59 By the end of World War I, that number had reached 900,000 on both banks of the Jordan, and roughly 600,000 in western Palestine (the present state of Israel), although these are still insignificant numbers when compared with the overall potential of settlement and habitation. 60 As the German Kaiser, who visited Palestine in 1898, said to Herzl, whom he met there, “The settlements I have seen, the German as well as those of your own people, may serve as samples of what may be done with the country. There is room here for everyone.” 61
When intelligent and humanitarian men such as Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George considered this wasteland of Palestine, they understood that its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own—especially when the vast reaches of Arabdom (which extends over five hundred times the area of today’s Israel and the administered territories combined) * would be considered a homeland for the Arabs. As Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky put it a few years later, in his testimony before the Peel Commission:
I do not deny that [in building the Jewish state]… the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country of Palestine. What I do deny is that that is a hardship. It is not a hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many National States now and so many more National States in the future. One fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live in someone else’s State…. I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, No. 6. [Today there are twenty-one Arab states]… but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish claim to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation. 62
In trying to shore up their historical claim to Palestine, the Arabs have not merely distorted the demographic and physical conditions of the country in the nineteenth century. They have tried to persuade the world that the Arabs of Palestine had forged a distinct and unique national identity over the centuries; otherwise, they knew, they would not qualify for self-determination. Thus, they claimed that when the Jews “invaded,” they took over what had been an independent country, “Palestine,” inhabited by a distinct nation, “the Palestinians.”
But this claim, too, makes a farce out of history. As Bernard Lewis states, after the Arab conquest there was no such thing as Palestine: “From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the sa
me, within a larger entity.” 63 The Turks parceled the land out among four distinct administrative districts, or sanjaks. The Jerusalem District included the Sinai and stretched into Africa, while Samaria, Galilee, and Transjordanian Palestine were three additional, separate districts. A succession of rulers had carved up the country’s territory and distributed the parts among the various districts of their empires, so that there was never an Arab state of Palestine, or even an Arab province of Palestine. Even the very name Palestine fell into disuse among the Arabs, only to be revived by the British—and appropriated from them by the Arabs in this century.
Who were the champions of the presumed Palestinian nation under the two centuries of Mamluk dominion or under the four centuries of Turkish rule? In what political organizations, social institutions, literature, art, religion, or private correspondence were expressed the ties of this phantom nation to that carved-up land? None can be cited. Throughout this long period the Arab inhabitants of Palestine never showed a hint of a desire for independent nationhood, or what is called today self-determination. There were Arabs who lived in Palestine, as elsewhere, but there was no such people as Palestinians, with a national consciousness, or a national identity, or a conception of national interests. Just as there was no Palestinian state, so too there was no Palestinian nation or culture. Such was the conclusion of the 1937 British Royal Commission, which attempted to determine what should be the disposition of the land:
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