The Arab-Jewish conflict over the land which Jews refer to as Eretz
Yisrael (the Land of Israel» and the Arabs call Filastin, was
permeated from the beginning by mutual denial of the collectivity
of the Other. The slogan which was coined by a Jewish leader at the
beginning of the century, "a people without a land for a land
without a people" expressed a widespread perception among Zionists.
As late as the early 1970s, Golda Meir, the prime minister of
Israel at the time, publicly denied the existence of a Palestinian
people.
The Arabs, for their part, could never understand or accept the
notion that the Jews, whom they knew for centuries only as a
religious collective, have ~he right to be considered as a
"nation." Article 20 of the Palestinian Charter, which the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) first articulated in 1965
as the basis for its entire political and spiritual struggle reads:
"Judaism, being a religion of the Covenant, does not constitute a
nationality with an independent existence, and the Jews do not
constitute a separate nation with a unique identity. The Jews are
the citizens of the states to which they belong."
Mutual denial is quite common between nations in conflict. However
in the Palestinian-Israeli case, both sides tried to write off the
very existence of the Other. This happened not only because the
conflict was seen by both sides as a zero-sum conflict, but
primarily since both the modem nation of Israel, as well as the
Palestinian political entity, were born along with the conflict
itself, and to a large degree were shaped by it. The conflict was
not simply a fight over a certain piece of land, but over the
evolving unique and self-articulated identity of both contenders.
Both sides required the total denial of the very existence of the
other, as a prerequisite for a full and unmitigated identification
of the self.
Being an Israeli Jew, and a Zionist, I shall deal primarily with
the Zionist perspective, leaving the task of analyzing the Arab
perceptions to Palestinian scholars. The following will be an
attempt to sketch the different parameters and the changing images
which structured the Zionist perceptions of the Palestinian
Arabs.
The Wasteland
During their exile, Jews imagined the land from which they had been
banished by God for their sins as an empty space, laying waste,
waiting for them to return and resettle it. Throughout two
millennia, the popular image of Palestine, and especially of
Jerusalem, in the eyes of Jews was of a city of ruins, barrenness
and wasteland. The destruction of their Temple by Titus in 70 AD
and the sights of its ruins symbolized for them the general
material condition of the entire land.
Numerous legends in the Jewish scriptures and prayers created in
the Jewish mind this image of the Holy Land as a wasteland. To be
sure, pilgrims could hardly fail to reinforce this image by their
reports on the destitute physical conditions which they saw in
Jerusalem and elsewhere in the land also in later periods. The
early Zionist settlers primarily saw large stretches of uninhabited
land, of malaria-infested swamps and many ruins everywhere, since
these lands were those available to their colonizing efforts. Thus
the entire Zionist project was conceived not only the redemption of
the Jews by their promised return to their land, but also the
redemption of the land from its destitution.
But to conceive of the land as waste and void also implied disdain
and denial of the other people who inhabited the land. They could
not be counted as its legitimate owners, since they did so little
to make the land bloom and become once more the "land of milk and
honey." In the famous song written by the lyricist Naomi Shemer
shortly before the Six-Day War in 1967, she describes the Old City
of Jerusalem, the access to which was barred to Israelis between
1948 and 1967, and states: "The market place is empty and nobody
gets up to the Holy Mount on the Jericho road." This is indeed an
odd line, since the markets in old Jerusalem were surely bustling
with their Arab inhabitants and the many pilgrims, and the road
from Jericho certainly resounded with the din of cars, camels and
donkeys climbing towards the Holy Mount. But for Naomi Shemer and
the mass of Israelis and Zionists who sang "Jerusalem of Gold" with
an anthem-like devotion, these did not count as real. That part of
the land that was empty of Jews was the important fact to be
redressed and redeemed.
The Iron Wall
Not all the early Zionists turned a blind eye to the Arab
inhabitants of the land. The first generation of Sabras, born in
the few colonies established by the first wave of Zionist
immigration in the 1880s and 1890s, were too few and too isolated
to be able not to encounter daily and mix intimately with their
Arab neighbors. Arab women often served as their nannies, young
Arabs ran their farms' affairs and lived inside their housing
compounds, armed Palestinians served as their guards, and the
Arabic language, which many of them spoke fluently, penetrated
their vernacular Hebrew as well. Some writers and artists imagined
the Arabs, and especially the Bedouins, as the contemporary
incarnations of the Israelites of old. The German-born painter,
Abel Pan, created portraits of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the
Patriarchs of the nation and their spouses the Matriarchs, taking
his models from Bedouins he saw when he arrived in Palestine at the
turn of the century. The common orienta list version of the "noble
savage" was not far from the imagination of these early artists,
who expressed romantic fondness of the "native," but surely also
patronizing attitudes.
A few Zionist leaders and thinkers looked at the situation with a
higher degree of realism. Although Palestinian nationalism and
self-consciousness started to find its overt expressions only by
the end of the first decade of this century, sensitive observers
could discern the seeds of the conflict already a decade earlier.
The most prominent of these was the renowned Zionist thinker Ahad
Ha'am, who drew his colleagues' attention to the burgeoning problem
already in 1891 in the article "Truth from the Land of Israel"
which he wrote after a visit he paid to the early Zionist
settlements in Palestine. "The Jews abroad tend to consider all
Arabs as desert savages [ ... ] but this is a serious mistake, the
Arabs like all children of Shem have sharp minds and are
resourceful," Ahad Ha'am wrote then, 100 years ago. He noticed that
initially many Arabs were friendly to the Jews since the scope of
Jewish colonization was still very small and did not seem to them
to present a real menace. "But when the time will come and the Jews
will develop in this country and will start to displace the Arabs,
they will not quit the land so easily."
Another prominent example was Yitzhak Epstein, a Hebrew teacher
active in the Galilee in the early years of the century. He
complained in an article published in 1907 of the self-delusion of
the Zionist leaders who failed to realize the severity of the "Arab
problem." Both these writers warned their colleagues of the strife
with which the clash between Jews and Arabs in the land was
pregnant. But only after the end of the First World War, in
response to the Balfour Declaration, which promised in the name of
Great Britain to help develop a Jewish homeland in Palestine, did
Palestinian national resistance to Zionism become more organized
and active under the leadership of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem. Yet most Zionists in the 1920s found it still
difficult to confront the Palestinian national movement. They tried
to explain it away by blaming it on the intrigues and perfidy of
the British government, or the manipulation of the otherwise
"friendly and peace-loving" (meaning docile) Arab fellahin
(farmers) by the feudal landowners and the religious Muslim
zealots.
Paradoxically, it was the radical Zionist nationalist Ze'ev
Jabotinsky who first recognized Palestinian nationalism as such,
and correctly understood the head-on clash between the two national
movements, who claimed ownership rights for the same land and
aspired to realize their new national identity in it. In a famous
article titled "The Iron Wall" published in 1923, he recognized
clearly that "in the land of Israel two nations will always live."
He wrote that, unlike the Arabs of Baghdad or Mecca, for whom
Palestine may well be a marginal area, "for the Arabs of Eretz
Yisrae1 this land is not a border area; this is their only
homeland, the sole center and base of their separate national
existence."
From his realism as an observer he recommended to the Zionists a
militant policy: The Jews must acquire the land without even trying
to win the agreement of its former inhabitants, and erect an iron
wall (meaning military power) in order to defend their project
against the Palestinian resistance and despite their bitter
opposition. The iron wall will have to be maintained until the day
comes in which the Arabs will be obliged to realize that Zionist
control over the land is irreversible. Only when the Palestinians
totally despair of the efficacy of their resistance, will peace
come to the land.
When the Savage Ceased to Be Noble
The armed and diplomatic Palestinian struggle against Zionism,
which intensified in the late 1920s and during the 1930s, could no
more be discounted. In the 1920s and the 1930s, hundreds of
articles, written by the most prominent Zionist leaders, appeared
daily on the so-called "Arab Problem" in the Hebrew press. However,
not willing to give up their aspiration to establish a Jewish
homeland in the whole of Palestine, the "Arab Problem" was
considered a problem for the Jews, to be solved diplomatically or
militarily. The "Arabs of the Land of Israel" (not yet referred to
as "Palestinians") were not accorded the status of a nation.
Also, a young generation of Jews, born in Palestine under the
self-imposed Zionist separationist policy in the first three
decades of the 20th century, came of age free from any of the
earlier nostalgia A few young fighters, such as Moshe Dayan and
Yigal Allon, knew the Arabs well, and may even have felt compassion
for them, but had no illusions as to their hostility to the Zionist
project.
For this generation, conquest inevitably implied military
activities whether defensive or offensive. The key reference was
now to the first military conquest of the Promised Land, led by
Joshua, the disciple of Moses. The Arab was no more the docile
fellah, who against his best interest was incited by his effendi to
hate the Jews, the "noble savage" of the Orientalist school, but
the Hittite, the Emorite, the Canaanite and the Jebusite - the
indigenous inhabitants of the land that had to be defeated and
conquered. Typically, David Ben-Gurion, the hero of this young
generation and their uncontested leader, said repeatedly that the
Book of Joshua (to my mind one of the less exciting of the biblical
books) was in his opinion the most inspiring book of the
Bible.
The almost total spatial separation between Arabs and Jews which
the 1936 Arab revolt brought about, facilitated the stereotyping of
the Other as the willful enemy. Images of Jewish victims of Arab
attacks, of burned fields (returning the land to its waste ... ),
of defiled holy scriptures and uprooted young plants planted by
"well-wishing" Zionist pioneers - these led not only to a denial of
the collective existence of the Palestinians. There was now a also
denial of their humanity and worthiness.
The Second World War brought about a respite of six years with the
Palestinian national movement in disarray through pro-German
orientation, Transjordanian meddling and internal strife. But
relations with the Jews were never the same and the image of the
Jews was dominated by negative stereotypes, suspicions and
expectations of a military showdown.
On the Israeli side, there was similarly a mostly negative view of
the Palestinian Arabs. The Israeli sociologist, Ruth Firer,
analyzed textbooks used in Jewish schools in Palestine during the
1930s and 1940s, and later in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s.
She discovered the overwhelming use of negative stereotypes, both
with regard to the "Arab mentality" in general, and to the
collective nature and rights of the Palestinians in particular.
Adjectives used to describe the Arab such as "barbaric,"
"primitive," "robber," "prone to be incited" were abundant.
According to one textbook, it was not national consciousness that
motivated the Arabs to oppose the Zionist enterprise but their
"appetite and impudence," and their armed struggle is depicted as
"pogroms perpetrated by mobs incited by their leaders."
The negative stereotyping of the Palestinian Arab came to a head in
the 1948 war. This war, however, also brought about the collapse of
Palestinian power and political presence. This development also
enabled the reappearance of the total denial of Palestinian
collective existence and rights as a unique national entity in the
eyes of most Israelis. At the beginning of the 1948 war, when in
the wake of the UN decision to partition Palestine, the
Palestinians again took up armed resistance, collective abusive
terms such as por'im (rioters) or knufiot (gangs), which were amply
used in the late 1930s to designate the Palestinian groups fighting
against the Jews, again became current in the Hebrew media. These
terms expressed disdain and moral delegitimization, but also showed
a hidden fear and deep-seated enmity.
The Eclipse of a Nation
The sweeping success of the military operations launched by the
Jews during April and May 1948, destroyed for almost two decades
the collective Palestinian entity, both military and as a unified
political factor.
The heyday of Pan-Arab ism under the leadership of Gamal Abdul
Nasser in the late 1950s and 1960s swept the consciousness of most
Palestinians, and relieved, for a while, the Israelis of the
obligation to confront the Palestinians as the main root of their
conflict with the Arab world. The "enemy" was no more the
Palestinian nationalist but the regular soldiers of the Arab
states. The Palestinian was relegated, in the eyes of the Israeli
Jews, to fulfill the role of the uprooted, impoverished refugee who
deserves humanitarian aid, but was now totally deprived of any
meaningful collective significance.
The Palestinian Arabs, who remained behind and now became
second¬class citizens of Israel, were designated as mi'utim
(the minorities), a euphemism to describe groups of people one does
not have to take into account too seriously. On the other hand, out
of desperation, a sense of vengance or a search for economic gain
the Palestinians from across the borders in the Gaza Strip (which
was controlled by Egypt), and the West Bank (which belonged to the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), embarked on campaigns to cross the
border to maraud Israeli settlers. These were considered by the
Israeli stereotype as pawns of political manipulation in the grand
game of the Arab states, rather than as an expression of their own
national aspirations.
However, the image of the "enemy" as an Egyptian or Syrian soldier,
entrenched behind barbed wire and mine fields, was more abstract
than the Palestinian one could meet before 1948 in the marketplace
or on the highway. The growing self-confidence of the Israeli,
especially after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and the grudging
acceptance of most Israelis of the 1949 armistice lines as the
permanent borders of their state, enabled many of them to relax and
view the Arabs as an eventual partner for peace in the Middle East.
To a large degree, during the 1950s and early 1960s, Ben-Gurion
himself realized Jabotinsky's prescription and led the country into
a fort, surrounded with an iron wall. But behind the wall, there
was now less need and less motivation to "hate" the enemy. Many
Israelis did not see an essential conflict between Tel Aviv and
Cairo or Damascus, let alone Amman and Beirut.
Like Jabotinsky in his day, it was now the turn of Moshe Dayan, the
admired commander-in-chief of the IDF in the 1950s, to develop a
realistic appreciation of the Palestinian plight. On the fresh
grave of Ro'i Rothberg, a young pioneer who was slain by
Palestinians near Gaza, referring to the Palestinian refugees he
said: "Why should we complain of their fierce hatred? For the last
eight years they have been rotting in the refugee camps of Gaza,
watching how we inherit in front of their eyes the lands and
villages which they and their ancestors inhabited, and make them
our own homes." But like Jabotinsky 30 years earlier, Dayan's
prescription remained the use of unwavering power: "We know that in
order to kill their dream to exterminate us we must be armed and
ready day and night. In order to inherit this land we must remember
that without the steel helmet and the muzzle of a gun we will not
be able to plant a tree or build a house." Dayan remained quite
confident that these Palestinians, languishing in their refugee
camps, should and could be contained behind barbed wire and mine
fields by the Arab states in which they now resided, and if not, by
the Israeli army directly.
The Palestinians Once More
The 1967 war and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip radically changed the entire paradigm of the Arab-Israeli
conflict in many ways. One of the most important innovations it
brought about was the reappearance of the Palestinian national
movement as an active and central actor on the Middle East stage.
On the one hand, the Palestinians could no longer be pushed aside,
neither as an irrelevant submerged minority inside Israel, nor as a
group of uprooted refugees who had yielded their struggle to the
Arab states. When Arafat took over the PLO and activated the armed
struggle, the Palestinians surfaced also in the Israeli mind, this
time as savage terrorists who had no moral inhibitions about
killing innocent citizens, including women and children, and use
the most atrocious violent means in their military struggle against
Jews around the world. With the murder of school children in
Ma'alot, of the athletes in Munich and of a crippled Jew in the
Achille Lauro cruiser, and dozens of other similar attacks, the
media set out to demonize the Palestinians.
On the other hand, two million Palestinians, headed by an
impressive elite and intelligentsia, now came into daily contact
with the Israelis through employment, commerce, direct exposure to
the media and, as well as through dialogues organized by peace
groups. Whether as an employer, a settler, a soldier serving in the
occupied territories, or a peacenik seeking cooperation and
dialogue, the average Israeli had now to confront the Palestinian
in human terms.
During the 1970s and early 1980s public opinion inside Israel was
polarized. There was a distinct shift to the right which entailed a
hardening of belligerent attitudes towards the Palestinian Arabs.
This shift contributed
to the rise of the Likud to power in 1977.
Yet, at the same time, the Israeli peace movement also gained
significance in the streets of Israeli town and cities. Among many
other kinds of activities which the different peace groups in
Israel initiated, a growing number of organized "coexistence"
~ducational seminars were launched. These were primarily meetings
and workshops organized jointly for Jewish and Arab Israelis, but
in an indirect way they also helped to break the negative
stereotypes of the Arabs in general. With less frequency, some
peace groups also organized meetings with Palestinians from the
occupied territories and visits to Palestinian villages and towns
by Israeli Jews. The peace movement also brought sOJp.e of the new
Palestinian leaders (such as Faisal Husseini or Sari Nusseibeh) to
speak at their public gatherings, allowing growing numbers of
Israelis to meet and listen to messages of peace and compromise
directly from Palestinian personalities.
The Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, brought into play
yet another dimension in the constantly changing imagery of the
Palestinian in the Israeli mind. The sight of young Palestinians
defying Israeli soldiers courageously with their stones, oral
defamations, belligerent graffiti and the hoisting of their flags
on electric wires and atop poles and minarets, was literally
brought horne every evening through the television newscasts.
Thousands of Israelis also experienced this frustration personally
during their stints of military duty in the occupied territories.
The immediate reaction was probably anger and disdain, but
gradually there developed a new appreciation of the courage and
resolve of their young opponents, disgust with their own posture as
oppressors, growing realization of the futility of the Occupation
and the invincibility of the Palestinian aspiration for
independence and self-determination.
The former popularity of the Jewish settlers also waned. A growing
number of Israelis were forced to realize that settlements in the
West Bank and Gaza can no more be considered as "the conquest of a
wasteland." The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated
areas in the world, and in the West Bank as well, the throngs of
Palestinian youth who packed the streets of Ramallah, Nablus and
Hebron served as a convincing reminder that the struggle now was
over a well-populated land.
Can You Trust Them?
During the last two years of his life, the late Prime Minister
Rabin kept saying that one of his strongest motivations to launch
in earnest a peace process with the Palestinians, was his
realization during the Intifada that Israel could not suppress with
military means the desire of the Palestinian for a political
collective expression. He distanced himself from Golda Meir's
assertion that "there is no Palestinian people." Some may now
argue: "Yes, but can you trust them? Did they give up their
aspiration to regain control over the entire land and thus undo our
own distinct national identity? Are they truly ready for
reconciliation?"
Recent research of children's Hebrew books and primary school
textbooks indicate a significant moderation of the treatment of the
Arab-Israeli conflict and the image of the Other; yet much of the
negative stereotyping still persists, especially in the state-run
"religious" (Orthodox) school system. It seems that the deep-seated
sense of mistrust Jews in Israel feel towards Arabs
in general, and Palestinians in particular, fed on many years of
this kind of negative stereotyping in the education system and in
popular culture, and still continues to be fed by its strong
residual praxis and impact.
These sincere suspicions lay behind the insistence of so many
Israelis that the Palestinians revise their Charter and remove the
articles which negate the rights of the Jews for nationhood and a
state, The answer to this question must be given by the
Palestinians as the peace process evolves. The Israeli peace
movement always insisted that a peace process with enemies never
starts with trust. It begins with a coincidence of interests and
must build into the peace treaties arrangements which can secure
the interests of both sides despite the lack of trust. Trust may
develop only after such arrangements have proven themselves.
There is no doubt that the initial changes in the perception of the
Other which took place during the last few years, as a result of
the different factors mentioned above, and largely as a result of
the work done by the peace activists on both sides, were an
important prerequisite for the inauguration and success of the
peace process itself. In his moving speech at the opening of the
Madrid peace conference in October 1990, the venerable Haidar Abdul
Shafi referred to the demonstration organized jointly by Peace Now
and the Palestinian leadership of the territories at the end of
December 1989, holding a chain of hands around the Old City walls
of Jerusalem; he addressed the Israeli delegation and said: "We
have seen you at your worst, but we have seen you also at your
best," To make us appreciate the "best" in our opponent and help us
forget the "worst," is the task of the educators on both sides for
the next decade, if reconciliation and good neighborly relations
are to replace strife and war in the Holy Land.
Extracts from a presentation at the "Palestinians and Israelis:
Educating about Each Other in the Era of Peace" seminar,
cosponsored by the Konrad Adenaur Foundation, the Interreligious
Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCD and the Palestine Peace
Information Center, December 7-8, 1995, Notre Dame Center,
Jerusalem.