Wounded histories - The argument between Arabs and Jews

Politics and Play Ramachandra Guha

In 1873, the Indian entrepreneur, Jamsetji Tata, visited Jerusalem and was appalled by the religious dogmatism on display there. 'Can it be possible?' he asked, 'that nations and men claiming supremacy and possessing it over all the rest of the world, can be either such besotted fools or damned hypocrites as to say they believed all or even a part of the absurdities that are vended in Jerusalem to the pious believer?' Talking to people in the city, he was struck by 'the sheer stupidity, besotted partisan zeal or flagrant hypocrisy that can make a man oblivious to the common decencies of clear, straightforward arguments'. He found it 'interesting to note the covert sneer and incredulous tone with which the virtues and miracles of a place of Mohammedan belief were interpreted by a Christian guide, and vice versa'. At the time of Jamsetji's visit, the absurdities and hypocrisies being purveyed in Jerusalem were mostly the work of Muslims and Christians. But soon a third party entered the mix - the Jews. From the late 19th century, they began to migrate to Palestine in large numbers, making their home in a homeland they had left many centuries ago. This was an age of rising nationalism, with every linguistic and ethnic group in Europe seeking to make themselves into a nation. The Jews caught the bug, except that unlike the Poles or the Czechs or the Magyars or the Romanians, they had no particular territory within Europe they could call their own. Besides, they were harshly persecuted in the Continent. So they adopted the idea that their nation would be created afresh in Palestine. The pre-eminent Zionist ideologue of the late 19th century was Theodor Herzl. Herzl, and others like him, argued that the Jews who migrated to Palestine would uplift and educate the Arabs who already lived there. They thought the Jews had a civilizing mission in Palestine. A notable dissenter to this view was Asher Ginzberg, a scholar born in Imperial Russia, who wrote under the pen-name of 'Ahad Ha-am'. In an essay in 1891, he urged that Jewish settlers must be sensitive to the culture and rights of those already in Palestine, and meet them in the spirit of friendship and respect.  Seeing that this was not the case, Ahad Ha-am wrote in anguish: 'Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the diaspora [i.e. in Russia and Eastern Europe], and suddenly they find themselves in freedom; and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.' Such dissenters had little impact on Zionist opinion. Through the early years of the 20th century, the Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine proceeded apace. It was given further impetus by the Balfour Declaration, whose one hundredth anniversary falls next week. On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, announced that His Majesty's Government would support the creation of a 'Jewish National Home' in Palestine. The World War was coming to an end, with the British emerging as victors, and the Ottoman Empire, which had previously controlled Jerusalem and Palestine, as among the defeated. As part of the victory settlement, the British envisaged this establishment of a Jewish State. Encouraged by the Balfour Declaration, the migration of Jews to Palestine intensified in the 1920s, and intensified further in the 1930s, after the rise of Hitler and Nazism. In 1938, a correspondent asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of this longing of the Jews to make their home in Palestine. Gandhi answered that his 'sympathies are all with the Jews'. They were, he said, 'the untouchables of Christianity... Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them'. This sympathy did not blind Gandhi to the requirements of justice for those communities already resident in Palestine. If the Jews needed a national home, why should the Arabs pay for it? He was distressed that Jews from Europe had sought to enter Palestine 'under the shadow of the British gun.' A 'religious act', he insisted, 'cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb'. If the Jews wanted to settle in Palestine, they should do so 'only by the goodwill of the Arabs'. As things stood, however, the Jews had become 'co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them'. These words of advice and warning were disregarded. Jews and Arabs continued to fight it out in Palestine, their battles made more fierce by the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Jews and Arabs fought major wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and in 1973, the violence persisting in between and after these conflicts. Shortly after the 1956 war, the great historian, Hans Kohn, wrote an essay recalling those brave Jews who had pursued peace with the Arabs. He quoted a scholar writing under the pen name of 'Reb Binyomin', who, in 1953, defined the dissenter from Zionist orthodoxy as follows: 'What separates us from the mass of our people? It is our attitude toward the Arabs. They consider the Arab as an enemy, some even say eternal enemies. So speak the candid among them. The less candid speak supposedly about peace, but these are only words. They want a peace of submission, which the Arabs cannot possibly accept.' Such was the unflinching, unyielding position of the Zionist orthodoxy. However, speaking for himself and his tiny but brave band of dissenters, Reb Binyomin added: 'We, however, do not see the Arab as an enemy, not in the past and not today.' While Jewish by origin, Hans Kohn did not live in Israel himself. An influential historian who did was Jacob Talmon. After the 1967 war, Talmon wrote an essay in Encounter magazine entitled, The Argument between Arabs and Jews. Here, he noted that 'many as may have been the Zionist sins of commission or omission in this respect, every one of their attempts at a compromise had all along been met by Arabs with the absolute and implacable refusal to recognise any Jewish claim'. At the same time, while the Arabs (in 1967) refused to recognize any Jewish claim on the land at all, the Israelis, for their part, refused to recognize any Arab claim on any part of the holy and disputed city of Jerusalem. Thus Talmon observed that 'public opinion in Israel is so unanimous and determined on the retention of Jerusalem that no government would survive a week if it showed signs of giving in on that.' After their victory in the war of 1967, Israel came to occupy the West Bank and Gaza, and to control the whole of Jerusalem. These humiliations belatedly forced a sense of realism among the Arabs, who abandoned their once 'absolute and implacable refusal to recognise any Jewish claim'. This led to peace talks between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Government of Israel. An agreement signed in Oslo in 1993 officially put the seal on the so-called 'two-state solution', with the Palestinians accepting Israel's existence as an independent nation and in exchange hoping to get a nation of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. A hundred years ago, the Balfour Declaration mandated the creation of a Jewish National Home. Fifty years ago, after the war of 1967, the state of Israel became an occupying power. This year marked these two anniversaries, and in 2018 we shall mark a third, when it will be twenty-five years since the Oslo Accords mandated the creation of a Palestinian state. But there is no let-up in the quarrel between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, which is as fierce as it has been at any time over the past century. On both sides, positions have hardened. Back in 1967, Talmon had written that the 'wounded pride of a race with glorious memories of the past is not an ignoble feeling; but an obsessive sense of injury and self-pity is conducive to sterile self-centredness and stultifying misanthropy.' Tragically, this sense of victimhood identified by Talmon has applied both to Palestinians and to Jews. Both claim a great history in the distant past, both claim to be wronged in the recent past and in the present too. The wounds, real or imaginary, suffered by Jews have made them insensitive to the wounds, real and imaginary, suffered by the Palestinians, and vice versa. Reconciliation has also been made more difficult by the resurgence of religious fundamentalism on both sides. The struggle between Israelis and Palestinians used to be described once as a battle of right versus right. It is now more accurately described as a battle of wrong versus wrong. Both sides have committed savage acts of violence, using bombs and bayonets with abandon in pursuit of their national-religious goals. The besotted partisan zeal that Jamsetji Tata noticed back in 1873 is on an even more flagrant (and dangerous) display now. At the same time, as the more powerful party in the contest, and as the occupying power to boot, the Israelis perhaps bear a greater share of the blame. Under the leadership of their current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, more and more Israelis tend to see Arabs as an enemy, in the past and today. Until that changes, there can be no peace in the Holy Land. ramachandraguha@yahoo.in https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/wounded-histories-181384