Origins of Political Concepts and the Zionist Movement (Pre-1948)
Prof. Shlomo Avineri[1]

I would like to start by sharing a true story about politics and poetry. In 1968, when Moshe Dayan was Defense Minister, Fadwa Tuqan from Nablus wrote a nationalist Arab poem on Jerusalem that contained some un­pleasant lines regarding Jews and Israelis. Dayan, being a very unusual person, invited Tuqan and some of his friends one Saturday to his home. The next day the Is­raeli newspa­pers were full with stories about their alleged discussion during lunch. As a result, the Is­raeli right-wing raised a motion of no-confi­dence against the Minister of De­fense be­cause they felt he had given an ‘en­emy’ of the Jews some sort of legitimacy by invited Tuqan to his home. At the time, how­ever, Dayan knew he had a majority in par­liament and that he had no reason to worry. When he came to the parliament, Dayan re­butted his peers by reading the poem, and explaining, “Look, this poem is as terrible to me as it is to all Israeli Jews. But it inspires: it moves people to kill us and it moves people to put their own lives in jeopardy. So we should listen to the poet. Be­cause if we don’t understand the poetry of the other, we will never understand what moti­vates them and therefore we will never un­derstand how to make peace with them. One day, let’s hope that they will listen to our po­etry, too.” I think we are beginning to listen to the poetry of the other.

At the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th Centuries, two very important develop­ments occurred which resulted in the current state of affairs. The first was the emergence of modern Arab nationalism. Although people of this region spoke Arabic at that time, they lived under the Ottoman Empire and were subjects of the Sultan in Istanbul. Thus, their primary unifying identification was their Is­lamic religion, although of course Christians were also sub­jects of the Sultan. Towards the end of the 19^th Century, however, there was a significant shift in the sense that people in this region began to self identify as Arabs, re­gardless of their religion or the ethnicity of the ruling Sultan.

Arabism at that time was dominated by the Arabic language and the common Arab cul­ture, which were the unifying factors across different religious backgrounds. At the same time, the spread of education, secularization, modernization, and the ideas that came with the French Revolution and Napoleon’s pres­ence in Egypt greatly influenced thinking in the region. Most of the ideas of the enlight­enment were revolutionary at the time, both here and in Europe.

Something similar, though under different cir­cumstances, was happening to the Jews, es­pecially in central and Eastern Europe. It is important to understand this in order to un­derstand the emergence of Zionism. Zionism was not just a response to anti-Semitism or the persecution of Jews that occurred in many countries. Although in some areas the Jewish situation had not been bad, Jews of­ten found themselves emigrating to places where it was much worse. For instance, in Russia during the 19^th Century, Jews found their only com­fort in the idea of a religious redemption, in which their Messiah would come to take them to live peacefully in the land of Israel.

While the European Enlightenment and Euro­pean secularization impacted the experi­ence of the Arabic-speaking people in this area, the question of Jewish identity in Europe was of quite a different nature. Before the French Revolution, for example, if a European was asked about his identity he would have an­swered according to his relig­ion. Thus, the pri­mary identity of people at that time was based on religion. People re­lated to others in terms of religiosity, espe­cially in mixed popu­lations.

Identities in Europe started to change be­tween the French Revolution in 1789 and the Revolutions of 1848, also known as the ‘Spring of the Nations.’ People, especially intellectu­als and teachers, started identifying them­selves according to their nationalities. In other words, they thought of themselves as French­men, Germans, Italians, Polish, Hun­garians, etc. The move towards Arabism marked a similar change in the Middle East.

This shift in perception, combined with secu­larization and liberalism, put the Jewish peo­ple in a new and revolutionary situation. Many Jews, however, found this exposure to liber­alism and openness problematic. Their new­found acceptance into society led to integra­tion, which threatened long-standing Jewish practices and identity.

Prior to the French Revolution, European coun­tries viewed themselves as Christian. Kings were Christian kings by the grace of God, and schools were instruments of the Church. At that time, Jewish people did not send their children to Christian schools be­cause they would not be accepted. In most cases, Jewish people were tolerated, but they could not hold public office, buy land, serve in the army, and were limited to certain occupa­tions. After the French Revolution, however, each individual was considered a citizen re­gardless of his re­ligious or ethnic back­ground. For the first time, Jewish people could send their children to state schools in­stead of re­ligious schools. Also, they could become doctors or lawyers, and they could study.

However, if a Jewish child wanted to enroll in the new secular school system, he would be forced to attend on Saturday, the Jewish Shab­bat. According to Jewish religious tradi­tion, it is permitted to study on Saturdays but not to write, because writing is work. Fur­ther­more, if a Jewish son is sent to university, he will likely live in a different town away from his family and will be expected to eat in a non-Kosher cafe­teria. Should his parents tell him not to eat pork, or not to eat in the cafete­ria at all, or that it does not matter if he eats pork? Later, the stu­dent becomes a lawyer or a doctor and opens an office or a practice. He then faces the question of whether or not to open on Saturdays.

This question of identity touched every part of the Jewish person's life, including his name. Until around 1800, Jews had Jewish names. As the world became more secularized, mod­ern Jews began to adopt two names. When the children were sent to school it was not un­usual that Abraham became Albert, or Is­rael became Isador. This exemplifies the common Jewish condition of living in two worlds and developing two identities. Under the Hebrew model of enlightenment, one was a Jew at home and an assimilated European on the street.

This question of double identity created crises and tensions. When fights erupted between nationality groups such as Poles, Russians, Ukrainians or Hungarians, the Jewish popu­lations were caught in the middle, as they had no national affiliation. Thus, the emergence of the nation-state in Europe, together with lib­eralism and the opening of the society to­wards the Jews created a Jewish sensitivity to the question of identity in the modern world.

Furthermore, the emerging modern Jewish in­telligentsia in Central and Eastern Europe was constructing an increasingly secular Jew­ish iden­tity. Although they discarded many tradi­tional religious practices, they were very much aware of their identity as Jews with a common history, language, and belief in their origins in the land of Israel. The intel­ligentsia was re­spon­sible for secularizing the Hebrew lan­guage, which had once only been used in Scripture and prayer. They also cre­ated some non-religious holidays such as Hanukah, the Festival of Light. The origin of Hanukah is al­most nonexistent in Jewish re­ligious tradi­tion, but instead recalls the time when the Greeks came from Syria and the Jews were forced to remain sequestered without provi­sions. There was no holy oil at the temple, but then a mira­cle happened and the oil lasted for eight days, which is why Ha­nukah is cele­brated for eight days. Behind this religious-mythological story is the rebel­lion of the Jews against the pagan Greek kings who wanted to force paganism upon them. Until around 1850 this was a very mi­nor Jewish holi­day, espe­cially for very relig­ious Jews. People even worked during this holiday, simply because it was not biblical. In the 19^th Century, however, modern, secular, Europe­anized, multi-lingual Jews who did not fast nor go to synagogue on Yom Kippur and who did not keep kosher transformed it into a major holiday. This shows how tradition is ac­tually developed and con­structed. Hanukah became a symbol of the fight for religious and national freedom, just as the Jews under the pagan kings of the Greeks had fought for re­ligious and national freedom.

The secularized intelligentsia drove this early identity transformation and began to view them­selves not as simply a religious commu­nity but as a nation dispersed throughout the world. Many Jews in the late 19^th Century wanted to leave Russia for the west, as they were facing increased persecution for their role as revolu­tion­aries, socialists and com­munists. This post-1881 emigration wave is the root of many of today’s 3-5 million Jews in America, as well as those in Latin America, South Africa, Aus­tralia, and other non-Euro­pean countries.

Thus, the beginning of Zionism can be dated back to the 1880s. The First Zionist Congress convened in 1897, marking the first time that Jews decided to create a nation of their own, rather than remain a persecuted minority over many nations. Again, the orthodox rabbis were very much against such a project, say­ing the creation of a national state was blas­phemy. From the beginning, Zionism was thus not just a continuation of the Jewish be­lief but a break and reinterpretation of tradi­tion. Theodore Herzl, a journalist in Vienna, was the founder of the formal Zionist organi­zation that con­vened the 1897 Congress in Basle. His book The Jewish State had been pub­lished a year earlier.

At the time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was second only to the Russian Empire in terms of its large Jewish population. Though relatively liberal, it was coming under pres­sure from Hun­garian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Ger­man nationalist movements. Herzl re­alized that the multi-national empire was going to split into different national states, and that the Jews as a minority would face increasing per­secution in each one. Thus, the Zionist move­ment emerged as a rebellion against religion that oddly employed both historical and relig­ious memory, and as a re­sponse to the Euro­pean nationalization process.

Zionism as a movement was never a mono­lithic entity, and many of its original factions later transformed into parties. In the early days the Zionist movement had no power and no state, and most of the rabbis and the rich Jews were anti-Zionist because they felt very com­fortable with the way things were. An im­por­tant aspect in these times was the move­ment’s attempt to be inclusive. For example, despite the fact that most of the delegates of the First Zionist Congress were secular, they decided not to convene on Saturday out of respect for the religious minority, who would not have attended.

Membership in the First Zionist Congress was extended by invitation only. At the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, it was decided that a voluntary contribution and a symbolic mem­bership fee of half a dollar would attract as many people as possible. The participants also decided that women could become members. The decision had little to do with feminism but instead was based on the goal of increasing the movement’s membership. Women ob­tained the right to vote in the elec­tions held at the Third Zionist Congress. This came at a time when no country in the West had yet intro­duced women’s suffrage.

The Zionist organization was successful be­cause it created institutions that became the backbone for the infrastructure of the Jewish State. The British Mandate in Palestine al­lowed both the Jewish and the Arab commu­nities to organize themselves, but it did not create the infrastructure of a state. According to British Law in Palestine, both communities could each organize their own institutions for the provision of education and health care.

The Jewish community of perhaps 60,000 or 70,000 decided that the electoral process was necessary for the creation of their institu­tions, which in turn raised the issue of women’s rights. The religious parties did not want to grant women the right to vote, so a deal was made which represents the root of some of the prob­lems and achievements of secular-relig­ious relations in Israel today. The relig­ious par­ties, who perhaps represented 10-12 percent of the population, were ready to ac­cept women’s right to vote if the majority in return accepted that only kosher food be served in all Zionist institutions in Palestine. This was an early example of the creation of coalitions.

Under these circumstances a General As­sem­bly of the representatives of the Jewish com­munity in Palestine was first elected in 1923, and regular elections followed every few years. Political parties were established (a number of socialist and social-democratic parties, liberal as well as orthodox and right-wing parties), and since 1932 Labor became the dominant party and its leader, David Ben-Gurion, be­came chairman of the Jewish Agency for Pal­estine and thus the leader of the Jewish com­munity in the country, presid­ing over a coali­tion made up of a number of left and center parties. The Jewish Agency was responsible for finance, education, de­velopment, and set­tlement activities. In this way it was similar to what the Palestinian Authority is now for the Palestinian Arabs. The Arab community in Palestine also, mainly through the Arab Higher Committee, organ­ized an assembly of notables stemming from the big families like the Husseinis. It was not as active as the Jewish community in terms of promoting education, founding schools, or creating infrastructures. This was mainly due to the fact that Palestinian society at that time was still very traditional, very much based on notables, tribalism and regionalism.

After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the representative assembly of Pal­es­tinian Jews elected since 1923 became the provisional government. Within nine months, in January 1949, the elections for the first Knesset returned the same parties that had existed in the pre-state Jewish community and led to the same coalition. It should be emphasized in this context that never within the Jewish community in Palestine or in the state of Israel has one party obtained a ma­jority. This is partly because the Israeli sys­tem follows representative visitation, which is more difficult than the British or American system where the winner takes all. However, the goal of national movements is to repre­sent every­body, even small groups with no more than five percent of the population be­hind them.

A parable ascribed to the Greek philosopher Esau says that the gods gave us two sacks and put one of them in front of us and the other one in the back. The one in front of us has all the sense of the others, which we can always see. The one in the back, which we cannot see, is our own sense. In terms of na­tional movements, this can be read as fol­lows: we see our pain but we do not always see the pain of the other. We see our com­promises but not that of the other.