Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition

Author(s): Tamar S. Hermann

Source: Israel Studies , Vol. 18, No. 2, Shared Narratives—A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue /
Guest Editors: Paul Scham, Benjamin Pogrund, and As'ad Ghanem (Summer 2013), pp. 133-
147
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.18.2.133

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 Tamar Hermann

Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism:

Possibilities of Recognition
“B oth Palestinian nationalism and Zionism, as concepts,
embody the same principle; namely both are nationalist movements based
on the requirement of a homeland for their own people.”1 The critical prob-
lem, however, seems to be that both have been claiming the same piece of
land for their homelands, and thus the source of trouble is more practical
than ideological. Contrary to the assumption hidden in this article’s given
title, political ideologies do not recognize nor reconcile with each other, nor
do they determine who recognizes whom and who reconcile with whom. It
is only individuals, and sometimes also collectives, who—metaphorically
speaking—initiate or undergo such modifications of relationship. Individu-
als tend to justify changes in their personal relations by terms that are either
emotional (e.g., fallen in love with her, cannot stand him anymore) or based
on moral-normative grounds (e.g., he behaved decently, she promised, yet
. . .). Collectives, on the other hand, often rely on political ideologies as
their justification—or excuse—for moving from one state of relations with
another collective to a different state. Yet, as the dominant Political Realist
school argues, particularly, although not only, on the collective/national
level, inter-relations are first and foremost determined by needs and inter-
ests of the actors. Ideologies are just the legitimizing hooks to hang on, not
the genuine source of or the motivation for such a change.
Thus, it is unlikely that Great Britain gave up on its empire because
it suddenly, in the late 1940s, recognized that the Indians, the Kenyans or
the Jews in Palestine are entitled to national self-determination. Similarly, it
is difficult to believe that the apartheid regime in South Africa dismantled
itself because, out of the blue, in the mid 1990s, its leaders reflected upon
and recognized its moral fallacies. More likely, in both cases, the situation
reached the point at which the costs of maintaining the status quo became
higher than the benefit, even considering the costs involved in changing
it. In both cases, however, ideological reasons for the change were sought
in order to legitimate it. Therefore, in order to predict the prospects for

133

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134 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

mutual recognition and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians,

the conditions under which the two sides are operating and how they got
there are no less, if not more important that their proclaimed ideologies.
This article deals primarily with the Israeli Jewish side, suggesting that
the reading of the Zionist “Diktat” has changed dramatically from one
period of time to the other, depending on the contemporaneous needs and
interests. Therefore, Zionism per se has never been nor will it ever be the
factor which enables or, alternatively, impedes peacemaking between Israeli
Jews and the Palestinians. Actually, like most other ideological “ism”s, Zion-
ism resonates differently with different audiences and in different contexts
and times. Thus, in the ears of some it has the pleasant tone of a celebratory
national revival movement with few equivalents in terms of its practical
achievements. However, to others, it generates the alarming reverberation
of racism, occupation and expulsion. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether
there has ever been one “Zionism”; rather, in fact, there have always been
several “Zionisms”. These “Zionisms” have indeed shared some common
postulates, but have contested with each other over many other critical
issues, some of which strongly related to the Jewish-Palestinian strife; first
and foremost - the territorial issue.

PAST EXPERIENCES

As it is widely known, Zionism is both a political ideology and a move-

ment which originated in Europe in the late 19th century. It emerged
somewhat after the peak of the first wave of modern nationalism which
flourished there since the late 18th century. Under this influence, early
Zionism reflected in many respects more of the European secular concep-
tualization of the “nation” notion, with its strong emphasis on territory
and sovereignty, than the classical Jewish conceptualization of a “people”,
basically spiritually oriented and lacking physical and political foci. The
main conceptual pillar of Zionism, shared by all its proponents, was that
all Jews, wherever they lived, constituted a nation (i.e., not only a religious
or ethnic community), which was associated with a specific geographical
area. The Land of Israel/Palestine was considered as the natural place for this
national endeavor to be established because of the historical and religious
attachment of the Jewish people to this specific territory,2 although at the
beginning it was not the only option, as other places were also considered.3
However, Zionism was not a “normal” national movement from its very
beginning. This is because, unlike most European national movements

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 135

of the time, it was conceived of and gained momentum far away from its
designated territory.
A second pillar was the contention that the only remedy for anti-
Semitism, which had haunted the Jews throughout history, was the estab-
lishment of a Jewish homeland in which persecuted Jews from all over the
world could find refuge at any given moment.
Third, Zionism was first and foremost looking for a panacea for the
prolonged persecution of the Jews by the gentiles generally, not mobilized
against a specific foreign political entity which dominated its designated
land and the people.
Fourth, while most other national liberation movements in the 19th
and the 20th centuries were motivated by the drive for the amalgamation
and recognition of a collective national identity, the specific identity of
the Jews as a people has always been clearly defined and widely recognized
(often with rather heavy negative implications).
Last but not least—the emancipation aspired to by Zionism was
not from an occupying power but to a great extent from the “abnormal”
exilic existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. In other words, it
has contained a strong self-emancipatory element, reflected in its call for
the “normalization” of the Jewish people, a desire which, as we shall see,
strongly influenced the means later chosen in the evolving conflict with
the Palestinians.
From the very beginning, the leaders of the Zionist movement were
not of one opinion regarding the nature of the homeland they envisaged.
For example, they held different opinions on what should come first: inter-
national formal recognition of the right of the Jewish people for a homeland
or, on the contrary, that as many Jews as possible should immigrate to the
land of their forefathers and establish de facto their claim over it by cultivat-
ing its soil. The first was a precondition set by the founding father of Zion-
ism, Theodor Herzl, and his “political stream”, while the second was urged
by the opposing “practical stream”. The latter contended that when Jews
prevail in the land and master it, then international political recognition
would seal this practical bonding through its consent and recognition.
Yet another stream “Spiritual Zionism”—argued that the creation of
a viable Jewish community in the Land of Israel, not necessarily large in
numbers, was indeed needed, but this was in order to fulfill the special
spiritual mission of the Jewish people, not in order to solve their existen-
tial, political, and economic hardships. The latter stream (which of course
devalued the territorial aspect of the Zionist endeavor) has always been a
minority position. Politically it dissipated with time and became totally

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136 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

peripheral after the Holocaust, which had so clearly manifested, at least

according to the mainstream interpretation, the fragility and vulnerability
of the Jewish Diaspora.
It should therefore be kept in mind that original Zionism emphasized
neither the value of establishing demographic superiority nor the aspect of
political sovereignty. The declared aspiration as well as the practical efforts
in which almost all Zionist streams participated in the years to come to
create a Jewish majority west of the Jordan River and gain a sovereign status
for the Jewish state, developed only with the unfolding of the conflict with
the Palestinians and, to a considerable extent, as a result of this clash.
Against this background the question is: what were then the causes
of this conflict and at which point in time did the friction between the
two ethno-national collectives enter the “slippery slope” phase, which has
invested it with its widely held and unavoidable image? The answers to
these questions could be of help in assessing the chances for future positive
transformation in the relations between the two people (or, as the title puts
it somewhat misleadingly, between Zionism and the Palestinian national
movement).
Unfortunately, it is argued here, there is not today nor in the past, a
single agreed-upon answer to any of them. Thus, those holding the colo-
nialist interpretation of Zionism would argue—following, for example,
Franz Fanon’s interpretation of anti-colonial struggles—that the conflict
was inevitable because of the fundamental clash of interests between the
( Jewish) foreign settlers and the indigenous people (the Palestinians) whose
lands were taken over. According to this reading, by its very nature the prac-
tical Zionist endeavor (yet not necessarily Zionism as an ideology), put the
two people on a collision course. The conclusion usually drawn from this
interpretation is that until all Palestinian lands are returned to their original
owners, an option which is of course unacceptable from the Zionist point
of view, the struggle will continue.
Paradoxically perhaps, a similar assessment regarding the unavoid-
ability of conflict is held by the opposite school, i.e., by those perceiving
the Land of Israel as indivisible and the sole patrimony of the Jewish
people. The Palestinian claim over the land is regarded in this conceptual
framework as unjustified as well as impossible of fulfillment, and therefore
Jewish-Palestinian relations can only be zero-sum. This reluctance to share
is usually based on one of the following two reasons and sometimes on the
combination of both: a) the divine promise of the land to the Children of
Israel, the breaking of which is a theological sin, and b) security—if parts of
the land are given to the Palestinians, Israel will be highly vulnerable from

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 137

the strategic point of view. As already noted, neither mode of reasoning

is an integral part of “original” Zionism. Other, no less devoted Zionists,
have not seen the land as indivisible and have been ready to recognize
some—if not all—of the claims of Palestinian nationalism as justified.
Those who accept this compromise interpretation of the Zionist creed may
well respond to the question above by stating that had both sides—Jews and
Palestinians—adopted different means of dealing with their disagreements,
the ongoing and violent struggle could have been prevented altogether and
the conflict might have been significantly modified or even resolved.
One thing is clear though—that the Jewish-Palestinian struggle was
not foreseen as unavoidable or even as highly probable by the forefathers of
Zionism. Of all issues considered as potential obstacles to the implementa-
tion of the Zionist vision, the hostility of the Arabs was not on the top of
the list. In Herzl’s visionary Altneuland, depicting the imagined realities of
life in a modern and recognized Jewish country, he foresaw harmonious
relations between its citizens, who would be people of all religions. Even
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionism from which the
secular Israeli Right emerged, wrote in one of his famous poems, “Two
Banks to the Jordan River”, that in that greater Israel the children of all
three faiths—Muslims, Christians and Jews - would co-exist, prosper and
enjoy happiness together. He never spoke of expelling the Palestinians
from their homeland, although later on, when the conflict escalated into
violence, he indeed advocated the construction of an “Iron Wall” between
the two nations.
Thus the early Zionists did not see the movement they envisaged and
created as a modern replication of Joshua’s biblical, bloody conquest of
Canaan. Since its original aim was to remove the existential threat which
had been hanging over the heads of the Jews almost everywhere and at all
times, it might well be that the early Zionists’ vision and preparation of
how to translate their vision into practice would have been different, had
they been aware of the Palestinian factor and the high costs in terms of
bloodshed that would be exacted in order to realize their dream. In light
of this original aim of Zionism, the dismal reality under which Israeli Jews
actually live, facing a greater existential threat than many Jews residing
today in the Diaspora is therefore quite ironic.
However, some Zionists were already sensitive at a very early stage to
the destructive potential of large Jewish immigration to the land, which
would necessitate massive purchase of Palestinian lands. They predicted
correctly the envy that would be incited by the establishment of function-
ing and prosperous Jewish economic, social and political institutions. They

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138 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

warned then that the Arabs living in Palestine would not be able to see
this demographic, political and economic transformation without feeling
deprived and the need to resist. They therefore called upon the Zionist
leadership to take emergency steps so that the avalanche of hatred would
not start sliding down, destroying everyone in its way. For example, already
in 1907, the widely respected educator, Dr. Itzhak Epstein published an
article entitled “The Hidden Question.” He denounced the passive attitude
or turning of a blind eye by the Zionist leaders to the evolving conflict and
suggested that, “when settling in a land, we should immediately seek for an
answer to the question of what are the farmers whose lands we are purchas-
ing going to do?” Acknowledging the explosive potential of the situation
he went on to advise

We are a people with no battleships, we are sincere, and we have no intention

of oppressing and undermining the national character of our neighbors. [. . .]
We must then create an alliance with the Arabs and sign a pact with them
which will be highly beneficial for both nations and humanity in general”.4

Needless to say, his sense of urgency was not much noticed or acted upon.
This disregard was not primarily rooted in a Jewish perception of the
Arabs as hostile, and therefore no compromises should be made with them,
but rather because other matters seemed to be much more urgent, such
as creating sufficient income sources and establishing community institu-
tions and services as well as gaining international recognition. In fact, by
and large, the Arabs were looked upon with a combination of suspicion
and dislike, alongside the prevalent romanticized European image of the
brave, generous “sons of the desert”. Thus, in the first two decades of the
20th century, the Palestinians were considered as militarily and economi-
cally weak, politically unsophisticated and disorganized and therefore not
presenting a significant impediment to the growing Yishuv (the Jewish
pre-state community).
The reluctance/inability of the mainstream Zionist leadership to
acknowledge the problem remained intact until the late 1920s-early 1930s.
The early outbreaks of Arab violence against Jews, in 1921 and even 1929,
were interpreted as local, sporadic, and transitory. No urgent need to reflect
upon the potential repercussions of accelerating Jewish land settlement
was then felt by the upper echelons of the Zionist establishment, nor were
changes in immigration or other policies introduced. When eventually
these Zionist leaders fully grasped the depth of Palestinian hostility follow-
ing the 1929 and, even more so, the bloody and violent events of 1936 in

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 139

which many Jews were killed by their Arab neighbors, the opportunity to
deal with a minor-scale conflict had already been lost.
The means adopted by the Yishuv to deal with this newly-recognized
reality deeply influenced the future course of events. The 1930’s can be
understood as the beginning of the emergence of the specific Jewish-Israeli
mode of thinking about national security. This conceptualization has been
based on the maintenance of a strong defense force (later, on strategic
military superiority) along with deep skepticism regarding the attainability
of a consensual political solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. This
explains, at least in part, why no real attention was paid, for example, to
the views of Brit Shalom, the intellectual circle created in 1925 in Jerusalem
by some high-profile personae in the Yishuv, who tried to promote the idea
of a bi-national state. They suggested a political framework, the institutions
of which would be comprised of an equal number of Jewish and Palestinian
representatives and office holders, regardless of the two national communi-
ties’ respective share of the population. Even less popular within the Zionist
camp was the appeal of this group to limit the Jewish immigration as a sort
of a “confidence building measure”, which might have calmed Palestinian
fears of a Jewish takeover. Instead, most intellectual and practical efforts of
the Yishuv in the first three decades were directed towards achievement of
a numerical majority as well as towards political, economic and military
superiority.
This went hand-in-hand with the oft-cited Zionist aspirations for the
“normalization” of the Jewish people. The implications of campaigns carried
out in this context, such as the one for ‘Avodah Ivrit’ ( Jewish labor—i.e., the
encouragement of employers to hire only Jewish workers and of consum-
ers to buy only Jewish products), were therefore regarded from the narrow
nationalistic point of view and almost never from the wider perspective of
the worth of benevolent or cooperative Jewish-Arab relations.
By the mid-1930’s, awareness of the fundamental conflict of interests
had already matured on both sides. Although today, in order to establish
the Palestinian claim over the land, much intellectual effort has been put
into academically and empirically creating and sustaining the argument that
the Palestinians have had a unique identity for hundreds or even thousands
of years, the more prevalent scholarly view is that the growth of Palestinian
national identity began relatively late and, to a large extent, as a response
to the challenge posed by Zionism.5
Palestinian identity per se actually began to crystallize only during the
British Mandate and was manifested in full with the Arab revolt of 1936,
at which time the Zionist movement was already well-established and the

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140 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

majority of the great national revolutions in the West already completed.6

On the other hand, the Palestinian national movement emerged several
decades before the upsurge of the second wave of modern nationalism, in
the form of the anti-colonial movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s in Asia
and Africa.
This “in-between” timing was not helpful for the Palestinians in their
effort to gain international support and sympathy for their national move-
ment. The international reluctance to support the Palestinian cause against
the Zionist one was further curtailed because of the rather enthusiastic
alignment of certain prominent Palestinian personae with the Fascist and
Nazi regimes, whose terrible consequences for the Jewish people were
widely known. This alignment of Palestinian leaders with these regimes in
the late 1930’s and early 1940’s further strengthened the mainstream Zion-
ist reading of the Palestinians as irreconcilable enemies, who could not be
partners in any shared future.
It is suggested here that in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, on both
sides, benevolent nationalism turned much less benign. This cognitive
transformation, together with deep cultural differences between the two
collectives involved, the heated competition over the territory, and the
pressures created by the persecution of European Jewry which, before the
Holocaust considered the land of the forefathers as the only refuge from
physical annihilation and, later, as the only place suitable for national reha-
bilitation, diminished the chances that this conflict could be mitigated. It
matured in the 1940’s into a full-fledged antagonism. The head-on collision
of the two national movements occurred in the late 1940’s with both sides
convinced that they could not possibly lose this battle and still survive as
a viable national collective. It was—at least perceptually—a life and death
struggle, which ended in a highly asymmetrical state of affairs; the estab-
lishment of the independent State of Israel on the one hand and the total
destruction of Palestinian society in Palestine—the Nakba—on the other.
The trauma experienced by the Palestinian side in 1948–49 was so
deep that it took about 15 years before the emergence of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO), which was established in the mid-1960s in
order to put the Palestinian national movement back on its feet and reclaim
Palestinian lands and honor. The Palestinians were by then scattered all
over the region and beyond. The mainstream Zionist narrative maintained
it was because they ran away after their failed effort, with the support of
seven Arab states, to annihilate Israel, while the Palestinian mainstream
narrative and the radical Jewish scholarly version maintained that they were
purposely driven out by the Israeli armed forces.

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 141

This prolonged “time out”, during which the Palestinians as a nation

were hardly active politically or militarily, enabled Israel to direct its human
and material resources to the stabilization of the new state institutions,
including the strengthening of the IDF, and to the absorption of the huge
waves of immigration—Holocaust survivors and refugees from Middle
Eastern countries, all endorsing conflictive rather than cooperative images
of the world and the rules of survival in it. This does not imply that the
new Israel has not been troubled by security concerns; another round of
fighting was always expected from the War of Independence onwards.
Still, immediately after the establishing of the state, no significant national
Palestinian movement existed for it to compete against. It is not accidental
then that the Middle East struggle was termed and understood as Israeli-
Arab, not Israeli-Palestinian. This did not change much until the late 1980s,
when the first intifada erupted, with the Palestinians not being officially
acknowledged as standing politically on equal footing with Israel even at
the Madrid conference of 1991.
Recognized or not, active or not, the Palestinians’ desire to go back to
their original places of residence, now under Israel’s rule, never disappeared.
Palestinian identity was perhaps shattered but it never diminished. A large
number of Palestinian refugee families have been keeping the keys to their
homes, located in what was now sovereign Israel, as their most cherished
family belonging. Those who stayed in Israel lost their political leaders and
other elites, who escaped elsewhere, while the remainder became Israeli
citizens, often against their will. They also lost much of their lands and
financial assets and were collectively put under Israeli military rule until
1965. Although formally Israeli citizens possessing equal rights as such,
their basic liberties were impaired, for example by preventing them until
1965 from moving from one place to another within Israel without special
permits. The authorities also kept a close eye on them and forestalled any
effort to set up associations aimed at promoting Palestinian national aware-
ness or national interests. The issues of recognition, let alone reconciliation,
were therefore totally irrelevant at that time.
The 1967 War, which marked the commencement of the prolonged
Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza
Strip, dramatically changed the juxtaposition of the two national move-
ments. The pre-war waiting period, with its skyrocketing existential anxiet-
ies including fears of a repeat Holocaust, strengthened the already preva-
lent zero-sum reading by Israeli and non-Israeli Jews of relations with the
Palestinians. Against this background it is not surprising that the Israel’s
immense military victory was interpreted by many in the country in terms

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142 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

of a divine redemption, which should be cherished and maintained, not

be given up on. Also the sense of redemption gave rise to a new sort of
Zionism—the messianic one, which mixed religious, chauvinistic and
security-based motives in claiming of the entire Land of Israel. This new
version has nourished the Jewish settlement project in the occupied ter-
ritories. As a consequence, those political bodies within Israel which rec-
ognized the potential for the 1967 military achievement to be translated
into tradable political assets in the context of peace negotiations and which
warned against the negative implications of a prolonged occupation, such
as the Movement for Peace and Security which emerged in late 1967 did
not gain momentum.
The fact that those who called for negotiations could not point to seri-
ous Palestinian partners for such efforts—because the territorial expansion
of Israel in the wake of the 1967 War meant another national catastrophe
for the Palestinian people, with many again having to leave their homes and
find refuge in other places—caused the Israeli advocates of negotiations and
recognition of the Palestinian national claims to become even more politi-
cally marginal. After 1967, the imbalance between the Zionist endeavor
incarnated by the State of Israel and the Palestinian national movement
grew wider than ever before. During the postwar period, Israeli-Jewish
acknowledgement of the Palestinians’ national rights or ideas about recon-
ciliation was hardly put on the table, and even when raised, their relevance
was perceived as close to nil.
The shock of the 1973 War, out of which Israel again emerged militarily
with the upper hand but politically chastened, transformed the domestic
“political structure of opportunities”, a fact which in its turn opened the
door for alternative views to infiltrate into the collective psyche. The “Pales-
tinian aspect” of this specific war was absent, and yet it deeply affected the
overall Israeli reading of the nature of and possible solutions for the Middle
East conflict. The previously dominant Mapai Labor party was severely
bitten (not electorally at first, as it still won the post-war 1974 election, but
lost the subsequent one in 1977) and never recovered its previously uncon-
tested position as the organizational pillar of mainstream Zionism and as
the state’s dominant party.
Following the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir, who once declared
that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, lost much of her
public appeal, which in any case was mediocre, together with the political
thinking she represented. A question mark necessarily appeared next to the
assumption regarding military superiority as the best “insurance policy” for

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 143

Israel’s future. The strategic depth achieved by the territorial expansion of

the 1967 war proved insufficient in 1973 as a long-term and secure existence.
Thus, when Israel launched the 1982 Lebanon War, the classic “rally
‘round the flag” phenomenon was interrupted by loud voices opposing
this intervention, which was first and foremost aimed at destroying the
Palestinian basis in South Lebanon. Military operations like this, it was
argued, would only aggravate the regional animosities and lead nowhere.
The exposed “grand plan” of minister of defense Ariel Sharon for driving
the Palestinians in large numbers out of Lebanon into Jordan and thereby
making it, in due course, the true “Palestinian state” by changing the demo-
graphic composition of the Hashemite Kingdom, was even more strongly
opposed. Protests against the war were based on the widespread realization
that it could hardly fit within the category of an “unavoidable” or “defen-
sive” war. This perception, combined with the tragedy of the massacre in the
Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which Israeli forces did not
themselves commit but did nothing to prevent their Lebanese allies from
carrying out, brought the Palestinians back into the picture.
This first time ever Israeli “bottom-up” political disapproval of the war
was accompanied by the development of a revisionist academic analysis of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, soon known as the “New Historians” school.
Although fiercely attacked on both ideological and academic bases, the
publication of books and articles by those historians who challenged the
postulate that the conflict was forced on the Jewish Yishuv and then on the
State of Israel by Palestinian hostility, plus the unearthing of new evidence
regarding some morally doubtful actions taken by the Israeli authorities
and military forces during the fighting, particularly during the War of
Independence, left deep traces in the Israeli-Jewish collective cognition.
The “Zionist project” was no longer presented as morally impeccable, even
if some widely accepted justifications for the problematic acts committed
have been found and presented. The Palestinians, in their turn, were now
portrayed as victims, even if not completely innocent ones. The changing
of the definition of the conflict from Israeli-Arab to Israeli-Palestinian was
soon to become widespread, even prevalent.
The ensuing years witnessed the mushrooming of Israeli-Palestinian
informal meetings. The Israelis were primarily academics or political activ-
ists but also included people rather close to the Israeli political establish-
ment. The Palestinian partners to these meeting were often PLO officers or
people close to the PLO’s leaders. Almost all these meetings were dedicated
first of all to mutual understanding and secondly to the exploration of
the possibilities of finding mutually acceptable resolution formulae. The

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144 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

intensity and frequency of these meetings became so high in the 1980’s that
in 1986 a Knesset law outlawed them, based on the argument that the PLO
was formally committed to the conducting of an armed struggle against
Israel and that its covenant did not recognize Israel’s right to exist. This
was tantamount to closing the stable’s doors after the horses had bolted.
Although some Jewish activists of the Israeli Left were indeed taken to
court for transgressing this law, the meetings did not stop and even grew
in number and frequency, and the law itself contained enough loopholes
as not to be a serious impediment.
By the late 1980’s, significant parts of the Israeli Zionist Left already
openly recognized, not only the existence of the Palestinian nation and
national movement but even the justice of its claim over parts of the prom-
ised land. Reconciliation, in terms of understanding and forgiveness for past
atrocities, on the other hand, was not on the agenda of the mainstream of
either side at that time, although some small dialogue and peace groups
were already working in this direction.
This recognition by the moderate Israeli Jewish Left of the Palestin-
ians’ national rights opened a deep cleavage with the Israeli Right, with
both political camps defining themselves politically as devoted Zionists.
The Zionists of the far Right have perceived the Palestinians as a part of
the larger Arab nation, not as a people in its own right. Even the more
moderate right-wingers who recognized the separate Palestinian national
identity denied the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ territorial demands. Some
based their negation of Palestinian national rights on security, maintain-
ing that such rights cannot be recognized, let alone implemented, without
jeopardizing Israel’s safety. Others put forward a religious rationale for not
doing so. From the vantage point of the adherents of messianic Zionism,
which mushroomed after the Six Day War, Palestinian secular nationalism
(like the humanistic, universalistic agenda of the secular Israeli Left) has
been perceived as completely invalid compared with Jewish claims allegedly
made and sealed in the Bible.
The eruption of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 proved beyond
doubt that the Palestinian national movement had matured and was no
longer latent or marginal. This created a schism within Israeli Jewish soci-
ety on how to deal with it. With the PLO’s recognition in 1988 of Israel’s
right to exist, the door for peace negotiations was opened. Although at the
Madrid Conference of 1991 the Palestinians were still not granted their own
delegation but operated under a Jordanian “umbrella”, it became clear that
the real hope for Middle East peace was in mutual recognition and reaching
an agreement between the leaders of the Jewish and the Palestinian national

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 145

movements. The view of about half of the Israeli Jewish public was now
that, once this was achieved, all other contested issues between Israel and
the other Arab actors would become resolvable.
The Oslo process was actually launched under this working assump-
tion. In certain phases it also implied the possibility of future reconcilia-
tion, if an agreed-upon peace treaty could be reached and implemented. Of
course, the Oslo Process did not bear the expected fruit, and on the formal
level ended in late 2000. However, it is suggested here that the wheel could
not and was not fully turned back, as the acknowledgement invested in
the 1993–2000 peace negotiations, as futile as they might have been, could
not be annulled. The Palestinian right of national self-determination had
already been recognized on all relevant levels—that of the Israel leaders and
public, of international law, of international public opinion, and of course
that of the regional and international politicians and political institutions.
This recognition survived all declarations by the Israeli authorities, fol-
lowing the dismal events of the second intifada which broke out in 2000,
of the Palestinian leaders’ “irrelevance”, and all other steps which implied
non-recognition.

PRESENT AND FUTURE

Some observers of Israeli-Palestinian relations insisted that the post-Gaza

withdrawal “buzz word” in the Israeli political arsenal—unilateralism—
meant the reversal of the recognition invested in the Oslo process of the
Palestinians’ status as partners to the shaping of the future of the land. The
first move made in the framework of this policy—the unilateral withdrawal
from Gaza and from limited areas in the north of Judea and Samaria in the
summer of 2005 - was accompanied by other practically unilateral moves,
such as the building of the separation wall.
At first glance it may seem now as if we are back where we were almost
one hundred years ago—when the early enthusiastic pioneers of the Zionist
endeavor took little notice of the aspirations, interests, and needs of the
Palestinian population. However, it is argued here that this impression is
rather superficial. True, because of the frustration of the inability to reach
a peace agreement and much more so because of the anger and pain caused
by the violence aimed at Israeli citizens in the context of the second intifada
and of rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, the majority of Israeli Jews are
today highly suspicious of the Palestinians and therefore support almost
all policies which create maximum physical and cognitive distance from

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146 • isr ael studies, volume 18 number 2

them (and it seems that this understandable feeling is prevalent on the

Palestinian side as well). This state of mind, found on both the leadership
and grassroots levels, was clearly reflected by the very high popularity of
Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, which sent a very negative signal to the
Palestinian side, implying Israel was not being taken into consideration its
national aspirations, needs, and interests. Indirectly, this very move sug-
gested that Israel actually accepted the fact that the Palestinians owned
and were in charge of the evacuated parts of the land. Subsequent events
in Gaza put paid to the widespread popularity of unilateralism, though it
has reappeared somewhat as Hamas has gained in strength.
More evidence for this de facto recognition is the fact that as of today
a constant majority of about three-quarters of the Israeli Jewish public
supports the two-state solution and prefers it to any other future scenario,
particularly to that of “Greater Israel”.7 Public opinion surveys also indicate
that the formerly total opposition to making any concessions to the Pales-
tinians regarding the issue of Jerusalem has been gradually eroded and the
claims of the Palestinians over the holy city are no longer widely dismissed.
However, with regard to borders, Jerusalem, water, and many other critical
issues, while Israeli Jews in the post-Oslo era hold views considerably more
flexible than they did in the past, the Palestinian claim for the “Right of
Return” is still a total taboo. The idea of the return of any number of Pales-
tinian refugees or their descendents into Israel’s territory is perceived as an
existential threat. Admittedly, here, no move in the direction of recognition
can be found thus far.
The present situation is similar with regard to reconciliation. As of
today, there are minimal prospects for significant reconciliation endeavors
to take off, much less succeed. However, this is not because of the Zionist
outlook but because of the deep and prevalent conviction on the Israeli side
that the Palestinians have not and will never come to terms with the exis-
tence of Israel as a Jewish state in the Middle East, an attitude considerably
strengthened by Hamas’s proclamations that Israel will disappear, and little
mitigated by occasional statements, from the same sources, that it might,
in fact, accept the two state solution. Peace is therefore understood here
on the practical level as only the absence of war and violence. No positive
peace which is stable and would enable the two sides to fully utilize their
full human and other potentialities is currently expected by Israeli Jews to
develop out of a future peace agreement. In fact, the surveys indicate that
most Israeli Jews expect some level of terror to go on for many years, even
after the signing of mutually agreed peace treaty.

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 Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism: Possibilities of Recognition • 147

Reconciliation, if understood as a process by which the protagonists

to a protracted conflict admit to past wrongdoing, repent, and accept the
fact that the other side has suffered too, and then go on to create a shared
vision of a peaceful future, is not likely to be a popular direction with the
Israeli side in the foreseeable future. It is doubtful that the Palestinians
would be more open than the Israelis to such a process. Therefore, it seems
that statements such as Nusseibeh that, “both [Zionism and Palestinian
national movement] must change, as their ideals have become dogmatic
and endanger the continuity of both nations” perhaps sound nice but are
quite unrealistic. It is only the successful conversion of ideas and feelings
to reality over the course of the conflict which has thus far brought us to
the intermediate phase of mutual recognition, and which in the more dis-
tant future may, although not for certain, may bring us to the end point
of reconciliation.

Notes

See dialogue discussion http://www.israelstudies.umd.edu/sharednarratives.html

1. Sai’da Nusseibeh, “Must Palestinian Nationalism and Zionism Change for
a Lasting Middle East Peace?” (http://mideastweb.org/IsraelPalestineNationalism
.htm).
2. Some argue that Zionism internalized the colonialist view that Europeans
had the right to settle in other parts of the world, and therefore did not hesitate
to call for the taking over by Jews of areas populated by Palestinians. Arguments
claiming the adoption by early Zionists of the “white man’s burden” creed, i.e., its
mission of civilizing “primitive” regions in Asia and Africa, have also been made.
3. In 1903 Joseph Chamberlain, on behalf of the British government, offered
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, lands in East Africa for
establishing an autonomous Jewish colonial settlement there.
4. Yitzhak Epstein, “The Hidden Question,” Ha’shiloah (1907): 193–206
[Hebrew].
5. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National
Consensus (New York, 1997).
6. The clear-cut demand for a Palestinian state was raised only after the estab-
lishment of the PLO in the 1960’s.
7. Hamas’s representatives just claimed that their readiness to openly accept the
“two states” solution is a de facto recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

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