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Title: Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 by Anita Shapira ISBN: 0-8047-3776-2 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $31.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Fine background
Comment: This book differs from many histories of Israel by reaching into 19th century to examine and explain the roots and context for the Jewish nationalism that preceded Israel's 1948 establishment as a state.
Shapira's first chapter explains the plight of Europe's oppressed Jews, which led to Theodore Herzl's convocation of the first Zionist meeting in Switzerland in 1896. Although periodic slaughters never reached the level of the Chmielnicki pogroms in 1648 and 1649, which left more than 100,000 Jews dead, as the 20th century began, anti-Semitism in Europe remained a terrible force. The 19th and early 20th century were meanwhile an era of universal nationalism. Peoples around the globe reached into their respective pasts, bolstering identities and calling for national borders. For the Jewish people, nationalism was heightened by a threat to existence that few if other people (except the Turkish Armenians) experienced.
Shapira shows admirably that hope and self-preservation, not belligerence, drove the first and second waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to Palestine. From 1881 through 1914, Jewish immigrants joined the families of co-religionists who had lived in Palestine since before the destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD. Some sensed hostility among young Arabs of Jaffa. Others, like David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson, remarked on little about Arab inhabitants except their extreme poverty, illiteracy and the diseases by which they were afflicted. The immigrants had no complex ideology or political structure; They merely wanted to live in Zion, which the Jewish people had for 2,000 years considered their homeland. Funded by Jewish organizations and philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild, they began buying land in quantity.
While some Jewish settlers developed a chauvinistic attitude, Shapira also shows that they had no plans to conquer resident Arabs. On the contrary, they adapted local customs and culture--wearing kaffia headdresses, riding horses and carrying weapons.
From 1905 on, as pogroms against Jews in Russia intensified, Jewish settlers arrived understanding the need for self-defense. Yet, no discernable confrontation between Arabs and Jews took shape until the Young Turk revolution rocked the Ottoman empire in 1908, bringing Arab nationalism to Syria in particular. Even then, disputes in Palestine remained local and concerned grazing rights and water. Buying land, Jews learned, did not always entitle them to water sources on it. Where Arabs considered grazing pastures public domain, Jews who had purchased land expected it to be theirs' alone. As they had in Europe, Jewish settlers optimistically hoped for peaceful relations with non-Jewish neighbors.
As World War I approached, however, moods crystallized. Zionist immigrants burdened their new situation with their previous outlook. As in Europe, they attributed the animosity of others to agitation and incitement, in this case, by Christian and urban Arabs. Here, as in Europe, incitement definitely existed. As the Ottoman grip on Palestine gave way to anarchy, anti-Jewish hatred increased. Jewish land purchasers were constantly beset by sellers' fraud: Claims and counterclaims, violence and counterviolence arose. Worse, legal purchases often displaced fellaheen--tenant farmers.
Based on their European experience, when violence arose against the Jews, they assumed the authorities would not protect them. Jewish settlers who had arrived hoping for peace and security in their ancient land discovered that they had exchanged one "existential threat for another." Jewish defensive thinking gelled after the Yom Kippur 1928 and August 1929 riots and lasted until 1936, when the Arab Rebellion--during which Jews were murdered with abandon--stimulated a Jewish offensive strategy.
This was followed by the most traumatic 9 years in Jewish history--1939 through 1947, during which the spontaneous response in Palestine was to go to the aid of Europe's Jews. Jews came, rightly, to believe that they could rely only on themselves. This ethos was celebrated by poets like Nathan Alterman and Hannah Senesh. The Nazis murdered the latter, then 26, after she parachuted behind enemy lines to aid her fellow Jews. In Palestine, Jewish self-preservation was directed at the British, whose grotesque 1939 White Paper, Shapira shows, locked Jews out of the National Home that the League of Nations approved for them in 1922. Alyssa A. Lappen
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Title: Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left to Right by Anita Shapira, Derek Jonathan Penslar ISBN: 0714683132 Publisher: Frank Cass & Co Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
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Title: Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 by Gershon Shafir ISBN: 0520204018 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest by Efraim Karsh ISBN: 0802117589 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The New Anti-Semitism : The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It by Phyllis Chesler ISBN: 078796851X Publisher: Jossey-Bass Pub. Date: 11 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Trouble with Islam : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith by Irshad Manji ISBN: 0312326998 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 16 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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