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The Palestine Nakba

Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory

Zed Books Ltd

Zionism and European Settler-Colonialism

Blood, Soil, Race and Land Conquest

The modern invention of the nation was a typical secular European practice of using collective memory highly selectively by manipulating certain elements of the religious past, suppressing some and elevating and mobilising others in an entirely functional way and for political purposes; thus mobilised memory is not necessarily authentic but rather useful politically (Said 1999: 6–7). Competing modes of modern nation-building and nationalist myth-making, with its invented national memory and its rewriting of history, have received extensive critical reappraisal in the works of Benedict Anderson (1991: 6, 11–12), Eric Hobsbawm (1990, 1996), Anthony Smith (1986, 1989: 340–67), Ernest Gellner (1983) and Elie Kedourie (1960). Hobsbawm's most comprehensive analysis of nation-building and myth-making in Europe is found in Nations and Nationalism since 1780; published in 1990 with the subtitle 'Programme, Myth, Reality', this work is about the 'invention of tradition', the creation of national culture, and the construction of national identities from a mixture of folk history and historical myths. In The Invention of Tradition (1996) Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger explore the way social and political authorities in the Europe of the mid-nineteenth century set about creating supposedly age-old traditions by providing invented memories of the past as a way of creating a new sense of identity for ruler and ruled (1996: 1–14, 263–83).

Inspired by German romantic nationalists such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the ideologue of the eighteenth-century German cultural renaissance, members of the nationalist elites of central and eastern Europe sought to create and transmit the new national ideology to their children. Their aim was to create a literature in the national idiom, in order to create a 'common descent' and a 'national spirit', indispensable for the nation-state to come into being (Rabkin 2010: 131). Inspired by post-Herder German völkisch nationalism of the nineteenth century, political Zionism was an anachronistic form of European romantic nationalism and a project of myth-making; it adopted a German version of European Enlightenment thought (Massad 2004: 61). German nationalist principles such as biology, racial purity, historical roots, and blood and soil (Blut und Boden), and a mystical attitude to the land, all became key features of, and guided, secular Zionist secular nationalism and its invention of Jews as a nation with its own land, the land of the forefathers (nahalat avot) (Massad 2004: 61). This is a form of tribal, 'organic nationalism' which espoused common descent and racialism. This intolerant organic (integral) nationalism celebrated the relationship of the Volk to the land they occupied and cultivated, and it placed a high value on the mystical virtues of cultivating a national soil and rural living.

Political Zionism originated in the conditions of late-nineteenth-century eastern and central Europe and European primordialist nationalist ideologies. This 'new' Zionist tradition of historical writing and its obsession with the rewriting of the history of the 'Jewish people' were further developed by Israeli historians and authors dedicated to 'writing the homeland' through what Laor has dubbed Narratives With No Natives (1995). According to Kimmerling, the invention of the Zionist nationalist project should be credited to two outstanding Jewish historians: German Jewish biblical critic Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) and Russian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), both of whom used Jewish (especially religious) and non-Jewish sources and texts to reconstruct a collective national consciousness of Judaism as an 'ancient nationality' existing from time immemorial. Dubnow thought that the Jews had been transformed into a 'European nation' and that it was up to them to demand the status of a national minority within the European and American nation-states. Among other writers, Lithuanian novelist Abraham Mapu sought, in his novel Love of Zion (1845) – in the French romantic tradition – to create a sense of Jewish collectivity within the framework of the biblical Jewish kingdom in ancient Palestine (Kimmerling 1999: 339–63). Although Zionism was a latecomer to the European romantic national tradition, the invention of the Jewish people and construction of a new collective consciousness in the nineteenth century — a tradition recast with 'historical depth' and ancient roots — was in line with other eastern and central European national projects of the age. These Zionist historians reinvented a new Jewish historiography which was not only divorced from Jewish collective memory but also at odds with it.

A new vernacular, land and soil 'redemption' (geolat adama and geolat karka'a), 'land conquest' (kibbush adama), immigrant settler-colonisation and demographic transformation of the land and the 'reestablishment' of Jewish statehood in Palestine, an obsessive search for ancient Hebrew roots, the historicisation of the Bible as a collective national enterprise and the creation of a new hegemonic Jewish consciousness, the Judaisation of Palestine and the Hebrewisation of its landscape and geographical sites have all been permanent themes of modern, dynamic and creative Zionism. The reinvention of both the Jewish past and modern Jewish nationhood in Zionist historiography and the creation of a modern Hebrew consciousness have received some scholarly attention (Myers 1995; Ram 1995; 91–124; Piterberg 2001: 31–46; Raz-Krakotzkin 1993: 23–56, 1994: 113–32). Commenting on the invention of a nationalist Jewish tradition and transformation of Jewish religion into nationalist ideology, Kedourie observes in Nationalism: 'Nationalist historiography operates ... a subtle but unmistakable change in traditional conceptions. In Zionism, Judaism ceases to be the raison d'être of the Jew, and becomes, instead, a product of Jewish national consciousness' (1960: 71).

Political Zionism was in fact a radical break from two thousand years of Jewish tradition and rabbinical Judaism; Zionist nationalism, a latecomer among the national movements of eastern and central Europe, looked for 'historical roots' and sought to reinterpret distant pasts in the light of newly invented European nationalist ideologies. According to American Jewish historian and theoretician of nationalism Hans Kohn, Zionist nationalism 'had nothing to do with Jewish traditions; it was in many ways opposed to them' (quoted in Khalidi 2005: 812–13). Zionist nationalism adopted German völkisch theory: people of common descent should seek separation and form one common state. But such ideas of racial nationalism ran counter to those held by liberal nationalism in Western Europe, whereby equal citizenship regardless of religion or ethnicity — not 'common descent' — determined the national character of the state.

Secular Zionist nationalism was a classic case of the invention of a people in late-nineteenth-century Europe and the synthesising of a national project. This invented tradition considered the Jews as a race and a biological group, and borrowed heavily from romantic nationalisms in central and eastern Europe. Political Zionism mobilised an imagined biblical narrative, which was reworked in the late nineteenth century for the political purposes of a modern European movement intent on colonising the land of Palestine. As an invented late-modern (European) tradition, Zionism was bound to be a synthesising project. As Israeli scholar Ronit Lentin has powerfully argued in Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Israeli masculinised and militarised nationalism has been constructed in opposition to a 'feminised' Other. The founding fathers of Zionism re-imagined the New Hebrew collectivity in total opposition to the despised Jewish Diaspora unable to resist the European anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust. Zionism's contempt for Diaspora Jews and rejection of a 'feminised' Diaspora and its obsession with synthesising a nation are reflected by the fact that its symbols were an amalgam, chosen not only from the Jewish religion and the militant parts of the Hebrew Bible but also from diverse modern traditions and sources, symbols subsequently appropriated as 'Jewish nationalist', Zionist or 'Israeli': the music of Israel's national anthem, ha-Tikva, came from the father of Czech music, the nationalist composer Bedich Smetana; much of the music used in nationalist Israeli songs originated in Russian folk songs; even the term for an Israeliborn Jew free of all the 'maladies and abnormalities of exile' is in fact the Arabic word for sabar, Hebrewised as (masculine and tough) tzabar or sabra (Bresheeth 1989: 131), the prickly pear growing in and around the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948. Even the 'national anthem of the Six Day War', No'ami Shemer's song 'Jerusalem of Gold', was a plagiarised copy of a Basque lullaby song (Masalha 2007: 20, 39).

Creating a Zionist Language

Zionist ideology emerged in late-nineteenth-century Europe at the height of the popularity of social-scientific racism and social Darwinist ideologies, not only in Victorian Britain but also in France, Germany and other parts of central and eastern Europe. Language construction (and the so-called 'Aryan languages'), the myth of common descent, the search for historical roots, ethno-linguistic 'organic' nationalism and superior-versus-inferior 'civilisations' were all central to the European reinvention of 'race' and racism in this period (Beasley 2010). In the European pseudo-sciences of the period, 'language' became a property of 'ethnicity', and the speakers of the Indo-European languages ('Aryan languages') were racialised and reinvented as the 'Aryan races', in contradistinction to the 'Semitic races'. Language and the resurrection of dead languages became one of the key ingredients of newly imagined 'ethnic nationalisms' — located mainly but not exclusively in central and eastern Europe — of which Zionism is but one example (Rabkin 2010: 129, 2006: 54–7). The Aryanisation/racialisation of the New German Man, for instance, and Semitisation of the New Hebrew Man (and European Jewry in general) were an integral part of the same social Darwinist racist projects.

In time Zionism was accorded paramount importance, likened to the 'resurrection of a dead language'. Yet, as a Zionist language, modern secular Hebrew, which took hold in the decade before the First World War, is about as distant from the Hebrew Bible's idiom as new Israeli sabras is from the ancient Israelites. In modern Zionism's efforts to construct a common past with a common vernacular for its culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse Jewish settlers from many different parts of the world, the reconstruction of Palestine's heritage as uniquely centred in an ethno-linguistic understanding of Judaism has played a central political role in efforts to de-Arabise Palestine and disinherit and displace the indigenous Palestinian population (Thompson 2011: 97–108; also 2008, 2009).

With the rise of secular Jewish Zionism in the late nineteeth century, modern secular Hebrew was invented and designed to play a major role in the educational and political efforts to create a New Hebrew Man, the mythological sabra who, an antithesis of the Diaspora and European Jew, was to live 'as a free man' in his own land (Rabkin 2010: 129–45, 2006: 54–7). The lexical 'modernisation' of Hebrew was the result of the literary work of the European Zionist Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth century. New words and expressions were coined and adapted as neologisms from a large number of languages and from the Hebrew Bible. Only partly based on biblical Hebrew, it was in particular influenced by, borrowed from or coined after Slavic languages, German, Yiddish, Russian, English, French, Italian, modern Arabic and ancient Aramaic. Yiddish (idish, literally 'Jewish') itself was a middle-high German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin which developed around the tenth century as a fusion of German dialects with Slavonic languages and biblical Hebrew. It was called mame-loshn (literally 'mother tongue') to distinguish it from biblical Hebrew, which was collectively termed loshn-koydesh ('holy tongue').

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), universally considered to be the instigator of the Hebrew revival and the creator of a modern Zionist vernacular, was originally 'Lazar Perlman', graduate of a Talmudic school in Belarus in the Russian Empire (Rabkin 2010: 132, 2006: 54–7). A linguistic utopian and secular 'organic-linguistic nationalist', the most influential lexicographer of the Zionist vernacular also borrowed many words from colloquial Arabic. A newspaper editor, Ben-Yehuda, who emigrated to Palestine in 1881, became the driving spirit behind this Zionist vernacular revolution (Stavans 2008). He set out to resurrect and develop a new language that could replace Yiddish and other languages spoken by the European Zionist colonists in Palestine. As a child he was schooled in traditional subjects such as the Torah, Mishnah and Talmud; later he learned French, German and Russian. He also studied history and politics of the Middle East at the Sorbonne University in Paris and learned Palestinian colloquial Arabic. In the four years he spent at the Sorbonne he took Hebrew classes. It was this experience in Paris, and his exposure to the rise of French linguistic nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, that inspired Ben-Yehuda to attempt the 'resurrection' of Hebrew as a practical and vital nationalist project.

After arriving in Palestine in 1881, Ben-Yehuda became the first to use modern Hebrew as a vernacular. He subsequently raised his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (the first name meaning 'son of Zion'), entirely through the speaking medium of 'Modern Hebrew'. Ben-Yehuda served as editor of a number of Hebrew-language newspapers, including Ha-Tzvi. The latter was closed down by the Ottoman authorities for a year following fierce opposition from Jerusalem's Jewish Orthodox community, which objected to the use of Hebrew, the 'holy tongue', for everyday conversation. In Jerusalem Ben-Yehuda became a central figure in the establishment of the Committee of the Hebrew Language (Va'ad HaLashon), later named the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language; he also compiled the first Modern Hebrew dictionary. Many of the new words coined by him have become part of the Hebrew language of today, but some never caught on. For instance, his word for 'tomato' was badura, from the Palestinian colloquial Arabic bandura; today Israeli Hebrew speakers use the word agvania — a word that reflects the European (and vulgar) term 'love apple' (French pomi d'amore, Italian pomodoro) for the fruit which originated in Latin America.

Zionist efforts were crowned with success when the British colonial authorities in Palestine decided, after World War I, to recognise Modern Hebrew as one of the three official languages of Mandatory Palestine, alongside Arabic and English. This achievement came in the wake of a series of important victories for the new language, such as the adoption of Hebrew as the medium in Zionist schools and Jewish settlements and the publication of several Hebrew-language periodicals and newspapers (Rabkin 2010: 132).

But the first Zionist novel written in Hebrew retraced the biblical story in a format reminiscent of other eastern European romantic nationalist literatures. It was written within the confines of the Russian Empire, in Lithuania, where two 'ethnic nationalisms' — Polish and Lithuanian — were locked in conflict, each glorifying its mythical past in modern literary forms, and in its own national language. Sometimes they had to share the same literary heroes, for example Adam Mickiewicz for the Poles, Adomas Mickevicius for the Lithuanians (Rabkin 2010: 132).

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Excerpted from The Palestine Nakba by Nur Masalha. Copyright © 2012 Nur Masalha. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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