Discussion Group Report

Israelis and Palestinians keep killing each other; and the world looks on in dismay, wondering whether it will ever stop.

How did it all get started? David Shaffer outlines the etiology of the conflict in an article with the same title as the present one in the July-August issue of The Humanist. He says we could blame it on one of several causes. One is Sarai, wife of Abram (now Abraham), who wanted him to have a child by her handmaid, Hagar. But 13 years later Sarai herself gave birth to a baby named Isaac. According to the tradition, rivalry developed between descendents of the two sons; and Isaac became the progenitor of the Jews and Ishmael of the northern Arabs, who were then exiled with their mother to the southern desert. Another is Pope Urban II, who in 1095 CE instigated the first Crusade. It was actually carried out against Jews, rather than Arabs, because the latter were deemed Christ-killers and were located in a place of much easier access than the latter. A third is Charles Darwin, whose idea of natural selection in the mid-19th century was twisted by "Social Darwinists" to justify anti-Semitic campaigns throughout Europe to support the notion that Aryans were inherently superior to Semites. Please note that the above persecutions were carried out, not by Palestinian Muslims, but by European Christians. Those Jews who chose to emigrate to Palestine saw it at the time as a better and safer place to be.

In 1800 there were only 25,000 Jews in Palestine. This number increased to 60,000 by 1914. During the same period the population of Jews in Europe grew from two million to 13 million.

In the 1860s A German Jew, Moses Hess, began advocating a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. At that time most European Jews did not take the idea seriously. Emancipated by 18th century Enlightenment ideas they had successfully integrated into their societies and were comfortable where they were. However, by the 1880s they were beginning to get used to the idea. Leo Pinsker proposed a secular Jewish state. Nathan Birnbaum apparently was the first to propose the term Zionism in 1886.

But the real impetus for his program came from Theodor Herzl, who was shocked by the anti-Semitism demonstrated in the rigged trial and conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer (in Enlightenment France). In 1896 the first Zionist Congress met in Basel "to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." Himself not committed to Palestine as the location of the state, Herzl seriously considered such places as the Sinai Peninsula, Kenya, and Cyprus.

Nowadays the present situation is not blamed on Christian anti-Semitism, but on intrinsic hostility between Palestinians and Jews. Some serious students of the problem hesitate to offer religious intolerance as a fundamental explanation of current events. Muhammad considered himself to be the last in a series of Jewish prophets, including Jesus, and his mission to be to renew the Jewish prophets' mission to Jews, Christians, and the whole world. Jews and Christians have special status in the Quran as believers in the Torah and the Gospels. But he did reject those Jews who did not accept him as their prophet, and he regarded the Christian belief that Jesus was the son of God to be a form of polytheism. There were instances where Jews and Christians fared badly in areas ruled by Moslems, but there were other cases, such as Cordoba, Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived at peace together and even created a remarkably unified kind of community.

From Greek and Roman times, Palestine was often combined administratively with Syria to form Syro-Palestine. At the start of the 19th century, a weakened Ottoman Empire was forced to accept a semi-autonomous Egypt, which then captured the area now known as Palestine. Egypt returned it to the Ottoman Empire in 1840. Between 1854 and 1869 Egypt built the Suez Canal, but in so doing drove itself into bankruptcy and in 1882 became a British protectorate

At that time events in Russia and western Europe were leading toward the development of a Zionist movement and the start of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From then on proximity to the canal and to British power was to have a profound influence on Palestinian-Jewish relations. The Jewish community began small and grew slowly during the years leading up to World War I. Immigration was funded mainly by a small number of wealthy European Jews. Initially the land was owned by a few rich, mainly absentee landlords who lived in or near urban areas and was occupied and worked by many poor peasant farmers (fellahin). Usually the fellahin were driven off the land so that Jewish immigrants could occupy it.

"Initial Arab peasant opposition subsided when peasants realized that Jewish landowners would maintain the tradition of permitting them to work the land and keep their income," say historians I. J. Bickerton and C. L. Klausner. "Interestingly, public opposition to Zionist settlement was led by the Greek Orthodox Christians of Palestine." Some immigrants gave up and emigrated from Palestine. By 1914 there were still only about 40 Jewish settlements in Palestine, owning about 100,000 acres. The total population of Palestine was about 722,000, of which only 60,000 (8 percent) were Jews.

After World War I, however, a radical change took place, Schafer points out. The British presence in India and the Far East depended increasingly on control of the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. Britain strengthened its long-term position in the Middle East by courting support from Jews and especially Arabs, many of whom had long chafed under Ottoman rule. In 1915 Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, offered independence to the Arabs who would support the British war effort. The following June, led by Faisal, the son of Hussain, Sharif of Mecca, the Arab revolt began, a romanticized version of which is depicted in the film Lawrence of Arabia. Faisal, T. E. Lawrence, and General E. H. H. Allenby took Damascus and forced the Turks to sign an armistice in 1918. This effort was aided by a Jewish spy ring. The British now had a commanding position over this region during the ensuing peace negotiations.

Meanwhile the British had signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France in 1916, which gave France control of present-day Syria, southeastern Turkey and the upper Tigris-Euphrates valley of Iraq. The area corresponding closely to modern Palestine would be governed by an "allied condiminium." Lord Arthur James Balfour sent a "declaration" to Lord L. W. Rothschild, head of the British Zionist Organization, which affirmed that Britain viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and promised "to facilitate the achievement of this object." It also provided that nothing would be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status of Jews in any other country. At the request of the British, Faisal and the Russian Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann negotiated a tentative agreement in an effort to find common ground between the Jews and the Arabs, only to find out that everyone had underestimated the growing opposition of local Arabs, now becoming fearful of Zionist expansion. The British and French then settled Middle East divisions by agreeing that France would have a "mandate" including Lebanon and Syria and the British a mandate that would take in modern Palestine, Jordan and Iraq.

Neither the Jews nor the Arabs were happy with this outcome, the Jews because they would be prohibited from immigration in Jordan. A Jewish military group was formed, which later became the terrorist organization Irgun. Later outgrowths were the rise of Menachem Begin and the Likud party. Many Arabs felt betrayed by the possibility of an eventual Jewish state within Palestine. The British government tried to manage Jewish population growth by limiting or prohibiting Jewish immigration between 1922 and 1939. Enforcement of this policy was finally abandoned when opposition to it mounted to an unacceptable level. Immigration reflected conditions in Europe with the approach and reality of World War II. Between 1922 and 1936 the population of Palestine grew by almost 600,000, with the percentage of the annual population increase who were Jews being 12% in 1922, 16% in 1931 and 28% in 1936.

This alarmed the Arabs. William Cleveland comments, "It is little wonder that in a region of limited agricultural potential, the ownership of arable land became a matter of contention." He concludes, "The cumulative effect of land transfers, British policy, and Arab notable attitudes was the increasing impoverishment and marginalization of the Palestinian Arab peasantry. Alienated from their own political elite, who seemed to profit from their plight; from the British, who appeared unwilling to prevent their expulsion from the land; and the Zionists, who were perceived to be at the root of their problems, they expressed their discontent in outbreaks of violence against all three parties."

All the troubles of the present situation are latent in the story told thus far. The September-October edition of the Humanist explores the rest of the story that leads to the present situation.