The October 6 Project # 2 - When Did the Train Leave the Station?

Thoughts on the Origins of the Israel/Palestine Conflict

(photo from Pawling, New York)

When does something begin? While pundits and commentators often debate the state of the present in Israel/Palestine and offer resolutions, historians and scholars are often more interested in its origins. The question of genealogy, a topic that greatly interested philosophers from Nietzsche to Foucault, is a complex one – can we, in fact determine a “beginning” to any moment in human history, since it lacks linearity and progress. Partisans on both sides often use “origins” to strengthen their case, i.e. “the Arabs in the land always hated and rejected Jewish presence there” or “the Jews only came to displace us [the Arabs] and build their state.” Each side serves the narrative being procured yet upon a closer look, each is false.

What is the history of October 7? What are its origins? The founding of Hamas in 1987? Oslo, leaving Gaza in 2005? I think not. Perhaps its history is as old as the state itself, older, from 1917. Or maybe as we will see below, from 1913 in the wake of World War I which had a profound impact n Palestine even though the war was elsewhere,

So, what do we make of origins? Below I engage a 2015 documentary entitled “1913 Seeds of Conflict” by filmmaker Ben Loeterman whose starting point is a newly discovered film in French archives made in 1913 by Noah Sokolowsky called “The Jewish Life in Palestine.” It was the first film made in Palestine. By way of introduction, I lay out some of the early Jewish debates of the 1910s and 1920s that may better set the stage for an analysis of Loeterman’s film.

[Note: a longer and somewhat different version of my film analysis appeared in Religion Dispatches in June 2015. The posts of “The October 6 Project” are free. For those who wish to become paid subscribers to support this work, it would be much appreciated, thank you]

Introduction:

In his 1967 book Israel: An Echo of Eternity, Abraham Joshua Heschel refers to “the jungle of history.”

An interesting locution, and I think apt. A jungle is a place where things seem to co-exist against all odds—nature at its best and most beautiful, but also at its worst and most vicious. Nature doesn’t forgive. Or feel guilt. It is a kind of pure existence.

History, though, is a jungle. In this sense, Israel/Palestine is a jungle.

Zionism and the “Arab”

One of often unnoticed by salient points in Theodore Herzl’s now famous 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State is that the [Arab] inhabitants of Palestine, numbering about 700,000 at the time, were never mentioned. Not once. Later in his fantastical novel Altneuland (1902) Arabs do appear but only “good Arabs” those who would welcome the Jews to their land.

If course, the story is a bit more complicated. Herzl did recognize the Arabs in the land, but he did not quite recognize their “national” stature that would challenge and conflict with Jewish national claims. This was quite common in Europe at the time and in that sense, Herzl embraced a “colonialist” sensibility regarding the Arab population.

Zeev Jabotinsky also recognized the Arab population and, in his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall” strongly supported their rights as a minority in a majority Jewish Israel, the same way he fought for minority rights of Jews in Russia. And he did acknowledge that Arabs in Palestine have independent rights, but he did not acknowledge their rights to the land and as a national collective with rights to express that independence in the form of collective self-determination.

This general colonialist sentiment became concretized by British playwright Israel Zangwill (who wrote the play “The Melting Pot” that Teddy Roosevelt saw in New York City and adopted to America) when he wrote “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Anyone who lived or visited Palestine (Herzl did for about a week) knew this was not true, but it was assumed by many early Zionists from Lilenblum to Bialek, Brenner, U.Z. Greenberg and Berdichevsky (significantly Ahad Ha-Ad and Aaron David Gordon rejected this notion). What this meant in its most generous reading was that while many people lived in the land, they did not constitute a national collective, a people, but were largely nomadic. In fact, the acknowledgement of the Arabs/Palestinians in the land as a national collective is not formally recognized by Israel until the 1970s. Gold Meir famously declared in the 1960s, “Who are the Palestinians? We are the Palestinians.”

In her exhaustive and highly recommended book Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 Israeli historian of Zionism Anita Shapira lays out in great detail the early debates about what role, if any, Arabs (they were not called Palestinians then, in fact Jews in the land were often referred to a “Palestinian Jews”) would play in the Zionist project. These debates are integral to the origins of the conflict as they create parameters as to how the “Arab” was viewed through a Zionist lens, and speaks to how the Arab, and “the Arabs,” reacted. And what role the Palestinians have today in the Zionist project. (there is another Arab story here to be told, of course, but I am not equipped to do so. Neither side cancels the other).

This is a very complex story (see Shapira) and here I simply want to sketch two major camps the vied for power, one of which won decisively. The first were those who believed that Zionism could not, would not, succeed, whether practically or ideologically, unless the Arabs were (1) integrated into the Zionist project; and (2) were recognized as an independent national collective. Many of these figures became part of Brit Shalom and later Ichud that vied for a bi-national and not a “Jewish” state. Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Ernst Akiva Simon, Hans Kohn, and Yehoshua Radler- Feldman (R. Binyamin) were among those figures. They all considered themselves Zionists, although Kohn abandoned Zionism and moved to America where he became a renowned scholar of nationalism. Two other important figures worth mentioning here are Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856-1927) and Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922). Ginzberg penned two scathing critiques of life in Palestine during visits there called “Truth from the Land of Israel” where he chastised Zionists for how the Arabs were being treated in the yishuv. As I will devote another segment to Ginzberg’s essays, I instead offer a quote about Ginzberg’s essays from Shapira, “Jews in the Diaspora believed that Palestine was desolate and waiting for them to come and acquire land there….Jews in the Diaspora believed that ‘all Arabs are savages of the desert, a people similar to a donkey’ [Ginzberg’s words]. Thus, Jews can come, buy up land and settler there, while the Arabs fail to grasp what is actually going on.” (Shapira, Land and Power, 42).” This may have been quite accurate, until it wasn’t. As we will see below, once the Arab population began to realize that Jews were coming not to live in the land but as part of a state project that would exclude, marginalize, and even abuse them, the “conflict” beings to materialize, at least in thought if not yet in action.

A.D. Gordon was also highly critical of the exclusion of the Arab from the Zionist project. The great scholar of Gordon (and my teacher) Eliezer Schweid, offered the following assessment,

“[According to Gordon] If Zionism brings about a state though colonialist sponsorship and not through a movement of true renewal (tenu’at tehiya) that combines work with the Arabs and recognizes their national independence in the land where they have resided for many generations, this [project] will not be a redemption from exile but rather exile in a much more destructive way (galut b’zurata ha-geruah b’yoter).” The Foundations and Sources of A.D. Gordon’s Philosophy, [Hebrew] 10]

The notion of “Arab nationalism” here referring to what we today would call Palestinian nationalism, was not solely a product of Arab residents in Palestine. In fact, Hans Kohn, a founding member of Brit Shalom published a book in Hebrew in 1926 in Israel, entitled, “The History of Arab Nationalism.” Kohn and others believed that Arab nationalism including their claims to the land, that would result in bi-nationalism, could be a solution to the ethnostates he and others suffered from during World War I. In the words of Noam Pianko, “Kohn viewed Palestine as the laboratory for the development of a form of nationalism that would unify, rather than divide, humanity. He rejected the concept of Palestine as a territorial homeland that the Jews had histo4ical rights to reclaim.” (Pianko, Zionism and Roads Not Taken, 142).

There was, however, another sentiment among many in the Second and Third Aliyot that envisioned Zionism as an exclusively Jewish project, and thus the Arab will have to live in this Jewish state or find residence elsewhere. The Arab could perhaps stay, but they will never be equal, as they are Arabs in a Jewish state. The concept of “transfer” (which I addressed in a previous Substack and later essay) was part of this view. Interestingly, Zangwill advocated transfer as did many others such as Arthur Ruppin head of the Palestine Office in those years in charge of planning Jewish “colonies” and land purchases from absentee Arab landowners. Ruppin is an interesting figure as he was one of the founders of Brit Shalom and resigned after the 1929 massacres. His views on the state changed considerably.

Shapira continues, “As stated, the Arabs in Palestine were viewed as one of the more many misfortunes present in Palestine, like the Ottoman authorities, the climate, the difficult of adjustment – no greater or smaller than other troubles settler had to grapple with.” (Land and Power, 51). Unless the Arab buys into the exclusive Jewish nature of Zionism, they would be unequal and marginalized; culturally, and legally.

Anti-Jewish agitation among Palestinian Arabs begins quite early. For example, the Palestinian newspaper El-Carmel is first published in Haifa in 1908, the same year as the Young Turk rebellion which both forecasted the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and also ignited Arab solidarity in the empire in favor of self-determination. The years between 1908 and 1929 which was marked by the Arabs riots in response to a controversial attempt by some right-wing Zionist forces to ascend and claim the Western Wall as Jewish property (see Hillel Cohen The Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929) saw many skirmishes and attacks on both sides.

In some way, this can be captured by Mordecai Kushnir (1898-1967), a close associate of the more well-known Berl Katznelson (1887-1944) one of the founders of Labor Zionism, He talked about the difference between “national defense” and “national domination,” terms that have become very relevant to our time as we watch Gaza’s destruction. Has that distinction been erased? Is that what we are wtnessing?

Below I offer another assessment, as is often the case, of a small, seemingly inconsequential event that Loeterman suggests may be the true germ-cell of the conflict that still rages over 100 years later, a skirmish on a collective farm between two Russian-Jewish guards and a few Arabs who stole some grapes from a Jewish farm on their way home from work. In the scuffle, two people died, a Jew and an Arab. The case was never adjudicated. World War I intervened. Sometimes, maybe often, origins are that nominal, and often forgotten, but recalling them may give us a better context to think about the mushroom cloud that under which we still live.

Perhaps this exclusivist view of Israel’s exclusively Jewish character was proffered most forcefully by David Ben Gurion’s, whose vision formed the nascent state, and perhaps reached its apex in the 2018 Nation State Law that dictated Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people. A story of origins.

1913: Seeds of the Conflict

The film, “1913: Seeds of the Conflict,” premiered on June 30 2015 on PBS, consisting of rare and often striking footage of early twentieth-century Palestine, mostly taken from Noah Sokolowsky’s, 1913 film “The Life of Jews in Palestine.”

Loeterman’s film offers this footage along with interviews with a team of experts and short dramatizations featuring significant individuals of the time. The script of these dramatizations is taken directly from letters, court cases, and speeches, all in their original languages (with subtitles). While such dramatizations can often seem trite or contrived, they are used quite effectively in the film. Even hearing the Arabic, German, French, Hebrew and Turkish gives one a feel for the multiethnic dimension of this particular corner of the jungle.

1913 is not a year many point to as the germ-cell of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Loeterman suggests that it is; not in any obvious way, no seismic event, national conflict or political edict. Rather, three things happened in 1913 that frame this film.

First, Sokolowsky’s film “The Life of Jews in Palestine” was made, containing the earliest moving images of Palestine; second, Arthur Ruppin’s speech at the Zionist Congress that year focusing on “conquest of the land” through land purchasing that set the Zionist nationalist agenda on a new course; and third, a local skirmish between an Arab who stole some grapes near the Jewish colony of Rehovot on his way to selling his produce and a Russian-Jewish guard who beat him brutally not for, as the guard later said, “stealing grapes from a Jewish colony but stealing grapes from the Jewish people.” Two people died: one Jew and one Arab.

Loeterman’s film argues that this local skirmish was a match that ignited a fire. But to understand why Loeterman argues we must return to the jungle of history that is Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The story of “1913: Seeds of Conflict” begins on a politically mundane, yet artistically fascinating, note. Film archivist Yaakov Gross is informed that in a warehouse in France a few boxes of old films of Palestine were discovered. In those boxes was a film that depicts Jewish life there in 1913. It is one of the earliest moving images from Palestine. After World War I the film had vanished and was thought lost.

Like many propaganda films made after it, Sokolowsky’s film depicts burgeoning life in the Jewish colonies, or small agricultural towns, that dotted the lower plains at that time (the more fertile land was in the mountains where most of the Arab population lived). It also shows a bustling multiethnic and largely peaceful Jerusalem at a time before the four quarters (Armenian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim) separated its inhabitants into veritable enclaves.

And like many of the films that would come later, it rarely depicts Arabs—who at that time were the large majority of the population.

Examining one clip of a bustling Jewish colony in the film, the narrator stops to ask Gross, the archivist, about figures in the distance at the top of the frame, almost silhouettes, standing on a hill. “Who were they?” the narrator asks. Gross answers, “I don’t know.”

Of course, they were Arab villagers watching the filming from a safe distance. Gross’ “I don’t know” echoes throughout the film. And thus, the story of erasure begins.

The film does a good job going through the various Jewish immigrations that took place from the 1890s—beginning with the pogroms in the aftermath of Czar Alexander’s assassination in Russia in 1881, through the First World War, as Jews left Europe in increasing numbers. During this period, Zionism was still a nascent movement (during this period of immigration only 5% of Jews ended up in Palestine. Most immigrated to the US).

Yet slowly Zionism begins to take hold of a Jewish population, many of whom did not have nationalist aspirations, wishing simply to live a relatively secure life in the land. But as Europe continued to collapse, Zionism became a viable alternative—itself an expression of the density of this historical jungle, where things feed on that which seeks to destroy them.

Theodore Herzl knew this quite well when he wrote in his The Jewish State (1896) that “the misery of the Jews will be Zionism’s propelling force.” Interestingly Shapira begins her book Land and Power with the following sentence,

“The Zionist movement was born out of deep disappointment: the dream of the nineteenth century that progress was destines to carry the world forward toward an enlightened future in which the distortion, legal, perversions, and discrimination of past eras would appear like a passing nightmare….” (Shapira, Land and Power, 3)

Interspersed with both Jewish and Muslim academic experts on Zionism, the Arab Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire, this film offers a complex picture of a situation that went very wrong for reasons that all-too-often had nothing to do with either Jews or Arabs.

In this early period, they were all simply Ottomans, subjects of a dying kingdom.

The Young Turk Revolution in 1908 transformed the empire, already crumbling, from a centralized system of government to one that viewed the French Revolution as its model. Jews and Arabs in Palestine largely welcomed this revolution and viewed it as a positive step toward self-expression (not yet self-determination).

But something else began to happen. The mostly Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews who lived in Palestine before the second large Jewish European immigration (known as the Second Aliyah) in 1904-1914 were sometimes quite suspicious of these European Jews with their “Zionist” ideas who did not want to integrate into the empire. Many of them viewed themselves as proud subjects of the sultan and had a proud Levantine/Arabic culture they wanted to preserve as Zionists from Europe arrived with the intention of erasing it. (here see, Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew Palestine, and Other Displacements, 2017)

Zionists, and Palestinian Arabs, began to see the 1908 revolution as an opportunity to distance themselves from the empire altogether. As an illustration of this we meet an important figure, Albert Antébi, a Syrian Jew who played a crucial role in mediating between the Ottomans, the Sephardic communities, and the Zionists.

Antébi was a devoted subject of the sultan, a proud Jew who identified as an Ottoman who encouraged the new Jewish immigrants to do the same. Like the Arabs, he saw what was happening as the first decade of the twentieth century progressed: Jewish self-expression was becoming Jewish self-determination.

In some way, the Young Turk Revolution helped procure two things, Arab nationalism, and the space for Zionism to take root in Palestine. But that same social context also gave rise to new Arab newspapers such as El Carmel and El Palestine, around which coalesced a collective Palestinian identity. These papers openly challenged the Zionist project (not the “Jews”) and warned the Arabic-reading public of an ensuing confrontation.

As Rashid Khalidi argues in his book Palestinian Identity (2009) Loeterman suggests that Zionist and Palestinian identity emerge simultaneously in Palestine as the Ottoman empire experienced upheaval and eventual collapse.

The film depicts the turn from self-expression to self-determination among Zionists in three areas: Jewish purchase of Arab land from largely absentee landowners, the “Jewish labor” movement of the Second Aliyah (1904-1914), and the increasingly demeaning attitude many of the Zionist colonists had toward the indigenous Arab population (perhaps more a legacy of their identity as Europeans than their Jewish pedigree).

The central figure in the first case was German-Jewish immigrant Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943) who developed an intricate plan of Jewish colonies that would create an infrastructure of a future state. In 1890 this came to a head with a land dispute between members of the Jewish colony of Rehovot and Bedouins who had been living and farming that land (but had no Ottoman deed to prove ownership). The Jews bought the land outright and demanded the Bedouins leave without compensation. The Bedouins refused.

The case went to the Ottoman courts in Istanbul, but jurists threw it out of court deeming it a local dispute not worth addressing. The Bedouins had to leave and Rehovot continued to expand.

And thus, seeds of conflict were sown. The Arabs began to realize what was happening and they knew the Ottomans had no real interest in intervening. The Arab press in Palestine lambasted the absentee Arab landowners who were selling the land to the Jews at an inflated price, but to no avail. Those landowners had mostly left before the birth of any real national consciousness among the Arabs in Palestine.

The Jewish labor movement was largely the brainchild of the Second Aliyah immigrants (and then the third), the first “Zionist” immigration that gave rise to the Kibbutz movement. They wanted to create a society where the Jewish, and not Arab, worker created the infrastructure for their Jewish society. While done with ostensibly moral intentions, as Edward Said notes in The Question of Palestine, it also marginalized the Arab worker who stood by and watched a modern society blossom while he remained mired in a largely pre-industrial world. Many Jews came to see that “Jewish Labor” as an ideology as part of the problem. Even a strong Jewish Lavor advocate like Gordon was strongly opposed to excluding Arab labor.

As important, the film argues that the Jewish labor movement changed the relational dynamic from local to national. Arabs rightly felt that their land was no longer being used for Jewish colonies; it was now being used for a national project. Ruppin knew this and it greatly concerned him. His speech at the Zionist Congress in 1913 about “conquest of the land” through practical means contributed to a shift in emphasis of the Zionist movement. Pragmatics trumped co-existence. Ruppin wrote about the dangers of alienating the Arab majority, in one letter even suggested he “may have gone too far.”

But in the jungle once things start to grow it is very difficult to stop them.

The attitude toward the Arab is the third major focus of the film. As one expert noted, in the early Zionist imagination, the Arab was not a person but a part of nature (a part of the jungle). There was a stone, a tree, and an Arab. They were part of the landscape, considered nomadic, and not a functioning society.

One can see this is some of the early collections of photographs of Palestine published by Jewish photographers. It is what we would later call Orientalism. As I mentioned above, Zionists such as Ahad Ha-Am wrote passionately against this, not only on moral grounds but also because, like Ruppin and even like Antébi, he knew its consequences. Unless things change, Ahad Ha-Am argued, the Arab will become the enemy.

The film gives us a very cogent view of all these moving pieces that culminates in the 1913 theft of grapes that resulted in the deaths of an Arab and a Jew. The national struggle had its first casualties. Both sides knew it. And both sides wanted a peaceful resolution. They knew the Ottomans didn’t care anymore, they had bigger problems.

Negotiations began —it was a real moment of communication.

But then something came to disrupt this opportunity: World War I began. All attention turned elsewhere. It had been an opportunity, perhaps, a way to stop the ball from rolling out of control. Instead, like the 1913 film, it was a forgotten shrub, trampled on by the boot heels of history.

From our vantage point in 2015, many wars later, many deaths later, many failed attempts at resolution later, this film has an arresting quality. All sides are to blame. No sides are to blame. Fate is to blame. History is to blame.

The lack of hindsight on all sides was only a little worse than the lack of foresight. Things just happened too fast. From the Young Turk revolution in 1908 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 is only six short years. Yet in that brief span contingencies narrowed, ideologies took root in the rocky soil, local became national, and communal self-expression became national self-determination.

The film shows that all the major parties (except perhaps the Ottomans who were busy managing their own demise) knew what was happening. And yet nothing was done, or could have been done, to stop it.

The film, I think, invites us to take a closer look at the Arab fellahin standing in the distant hills in the top of the frame of Sokolowsky’s 1913 film. This is not to take sides, and I think the film does an excellent job not taking sides; it is rather to see how things could have been before they became what they were. Things could have been different, and along the way many on both sides knew it and futilely tried to warn the parties involved.

But history is a jungle and rarely yields to reason. Somewhere toward the end of the film, Amy Dockster-Marcus says in passing “we can’t control history.” My response is, “Is that true?”

Post October 7 Coda:

Where does this all leave us after October 7? Families still mourn, hostages are still captive, children are still starving. It’s hard to believe it may have begun with a few workers stealing grapes on their way home from the fields. And it’s hard to believe, or maybe not, that those who warned against the exclusivist Jewish nature of Zionism would cause rebellion after rebellion, from 1921 to 1929 to 1936, 1967, 1973, 1987, 2000 all the way to October 7. But visionaries (even negative ones) such as Zeev Jabotinsky warned us in “The Iron Wall” in 1925. “Jews will come, and the Arabs will rebel.” And Jabotinsky said they had a right to, because in their eyes we were stealing their land. He proposed an “Iron Wall.” The iron wall did not materialize on October 7, and tragedy ensued. Maybe we need another plan?

Some may suggest paths not taken is simply an academic exercise. Maybe. But maybe not. October 7 was not simply an atrocity disconnected from time, and history. It is a moment in time, and history. Is there complicity? Yes, there is always complicity in history, on all sides, from the time Cain killed his brother Abel. Maybe, who knows, the Holocaust was the exception? But October 7 was not the Holocaust.

We cannot change the past. But we must (re) make the future. People often fault scholars for living in the past. But I suggest that in fact it is not scholars who are living in the past but those who claim to be “realists” today who are living in the past – espousing the false myth of historical inevitability, the absolutist claim that hatred is eternal and not situational. There is little more dangerous than living in the past and thinking it is the future. Or as Jewish bard Bob Dylan suggested, thinking, believing, “that God is on our side.”