In the first of five excerpts from Benny Morris' new book on Israel's founding, the author explains the roots of the conflict between Jews and Arabs

The War of 1948 was the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict that began with the arrival in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), or Palestine, of the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s.

These "Zionists" (Zion, one of Jerusalem's hills, was, by extension, a biblical name for Jerusalem and, by further extension, a name for the Land of Israel) were driven both by the age-old messianic dream, embedded in Judaism's daily prayers, of reestablishing a Jewish state in the ancient homeland and by European anti-Semitism, which erupted in a wave of pogroms in the czarist empire. The 19th-century surge in national consciousness, aspiration and development in Italy and Germany, Poland, Russia and the territories of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire provided an intellectual backdrop, inspiration and guide to Zionism's founders.

The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for 13 centuries, between 1,200 BCE and the second century CE. The Romans, who conquered and reconquered the land and suppressed successive Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries CE, renamed the land Palaestina (derived from the country's southern coastal area, named Pleshet, in Hebrew, or Philistia, in Latin, after its second millennium BCE inhabitants, the Philistines) in an effort to separate the Jews, many of whom they exiled, from their land. Among the Gentiles, the name Palestine stuck.

By the early 19th century, after centuries of Byzantine rule and successive Persian, Arab, Crusader, Arab and Otto-man conquests, Palestine was an impoverished backwater. But it had religious cachet for the three monotheistic faiths: It was the divinely "promised land" of the Biblical "chosen people," the Jews; Jesus was born, preached and died there; and the Muslim prophet Muhammad, according to an early interpretation of a line in the Koran, had begun his nighttime journey to heaven from Jerusalem, though the land was conquered for Islam only by his mid-seventh-century successors. Jews and Christians and, later, some Muslims, especially those living in Palestine, designated the country "the Holy Land."

But neither before the 12th-century defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of the Muslim general Saladin, nor after it, was Palestine administered or recognized as a distinct and separate province by any of its Muslim rulers. The Ottoman Empire, which controlled the area from the early-16th century, divided Palestine into two or three sub-districts (sanjaks) that were ruled from the provincial capital of Damascus.

In 1881, Palestine had about 450,000 Arabs -- about 90% Muslim, the rest Christian -- and 25,000 Jews. Most of the Jews, almost all of whom were ultra-Orthodox, non-nationalist and poor, lived in Jerusalem, the country's main town (population 30,000). About 80% of the Arabs lived in 700-800 agricultural villages, the rest in about a dozen small towns, including Gaza, Hebron, Nablus, Tiberias, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre. Many rural inhabitants, especially in the lowlands, were tenant farmers, their lands owned, in a semi-feudal relationship, by wealthy urban landowners.

The first wave of Zionist immigrants -- the First "Aliya" (literally, ascent) -- brought to Palestine's shores between 1882 and 1903 some 30,000 Jewish settlers. Their aim was to establish a gradually expanding core of productive Jewish towns and agricultural settlements that would ultimately result in a Jewish majority and the establishment of an independent, sovereign Jewish state in all of Palestine (defined usually as the 10,000-square-mile area lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River).

The integrity of the Ottoman imperial domain was not the only obstacle to Jewish statehood. There were also the native inhabitants, the Arabs. Often, the Zionists depicted Palestine as a "land without a people" awaiting the arrival of the "people without a land," in the British philo-Zionist Lord Shaftesbury's phrase from July, 1853. But once there, the settlers could not avoid noticing the majority native population.

Initially, the Zionist settlement enterprise was haphazard and disorganized. But in the mid-1890s, at last, an organizer -- and prophet -- arose. He was an unlikely saviour. Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1860 to an assimilated, German-speaking Jewish family. He was a doctor of law but quickly changed professions and became a successful journalist and playwright. The coffee shops, theatres and salons of Vienna were his milieu.

Herzl knew no Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian or Polish and had no contact with the poor masses of Eastern Europe. The pogroms and the anti-Semitic discrimination in the czar's empire may have niggled at his conscience. But the eruption of the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894 converted Herzl to Zionism. He reached a dismal conclusion: There was no hope and no future for the Jews in Europe; it could not and would not assimilate them. And in the large, multi-ethnic Continental empires, Jews would eventually face the hostility of the various minorities bent on self-determination. Ultimately, the Jews of Europe faced destruction. The solution was a separate, independent Jewish state to be established after a mass migration of Jews out of Europe.

Herzl dashed off a political manifesto, The Jews' State (1896), and spent his remaining years organizing the "Zionist" movement. He died (possibly of syphilis) in 1904, a broken man at the head of a poor, unsuccessful movement.

But Herzl's was a success story. He had generated enough noise to place the Jewish problem, and his preferred "Zionist" solution, on the international agenda and to hammer together the rudiments of a world-embracing Zionist organization. In Basel, in 1897, the First Zionist Congress, organized by Herzl, had resolved to establish a "publicly and legally secured home [Heimstatte]" for the Jewish people in Palestine.

For most of Palestine's impoverished, illiterate inhabitants at the end of the 19th century, meanwhile, such forms of "nationalism" remained alien, meaningless concepts. These Arabs identified themselves simultaneously as subjects of the (multinational) Ottoman Empire and as part of the (multinational) community of Islam; as Arabs, in terms of geography, culture and language; as inhabitants of this or that region and village of a vaguely defined Palestine; and as members of this or that clan or family. There was no Arab national movement and not even a hint, in 1881, of a separate Palestinian Arab nationalism.

But European ideas had begun to penetrate the Levant, via commerce, tourists, missionaries and books and newspapers. Perhaps the first expressions of a dawning Arab national consciousness are to be found in their, at first hesitant, later vociferous, appeals to Istanbul, from 1891 on, to halt the Zionist influx. They warned that Zionist immigration and settlement threatened to undermine the country's "Arab" character and perhaps, ultimately, to displace its inhabitants. "The Jews are taking all the lands out of the hands of the Muslims, taking all the commerce into their hands and bringing arms into the country," complained a group of Jerusalem notables. They called on the sultan to halt Jewish immigration and to bar Jewish land purchases.

These petitioners were vaguely aware of the anti-Semitism that was propelling the Jews to Palestine (indeed, some of them shared the prejudice). But they saw no reason why they should host Europe's expellees or pay any price for the plight of Europe's Jews. And they failed to acknowledge the Jews' historic ties to the land, denying these Russian-speaking, strangely appareled immigrants any innate rights or just claims.

In 1905, an exiled anti-Semitic Lebanese Arab nationalist, Negib Azoury, voiced what was probably on the minds of Palestine's politically conscious notables when he wrote that the Jews were bent on reconstituting their ancient state in the whole territory stretching from Mount Hermon to the Arabian Desert in the south and the Suez Canal in the west.

The Jews, he added, were destined to clash, in a fight to the finish, with the emergent Arab national movement.

Nevertheless, the Zionists encountered little Arab violence in the first two-and-a -half decades of settlement. The Arabs lacked political, nationalist awareness and were thoroughly disorganized. The Turks ruled the land and, though generally sympathetic toward their coreligionists, often backed the settlers in disputes over land or settlement. Intercession by local Western and Russian consuls with Ottoman administrators and by ambassadors in Istanbul also benefited the settlers.

But there were occasional acts of violence. Until 1908-1909, they were mostly of a "criminal" nature or appeared to be routine feuds between neighbours. An Arab with a knife, bent on robbery, would waylay a settler on an isolated footpath, as happened to David Ben-Gurion in August, 1909, near Sejera in the Lower Galilee (Ben-Gurion emerged with a wound in the arm and a deep-seated suspicion of "the Arabs"); or a group of Arabs would harass a Jewish couple strolling along the beachfront, as happened in Jaffa in March, 1908, (the attack triggered a wider Jewish-Arab melee in the town center).

But in 1909-1914 the violence increased and took on a clearer "nationalist" flavour. During those six years, Arabs killed 12 Jewish settlement guards -- the preeminent symbols of the Zionist endeavour -- and Jewish officials increasingly spoke of Arab nationalist ferment and opposition. Already in 1907 Yitzhak Epstein, a Zionist educator, had published an article, The Hidden Question, in which he acknowledged the emergence of a national conflict between Zionism and the Arabs.

"We have forgotten one small matter," he berated the Zionist leadership. "There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it." Zionism, he warned, would have to face, and solve, the "Arab Question," and he urged the settlers to get to know the Arabs, their culture and their language to facilitate dialogue.

Arab anti-Zionist rhetoric flourished. The Zionists were now regularly charged with aiming to "kill, pillage and violate Muslim women and girls"; explicitly anti-Semitic images were mobilized. The blind Muslim cleric and politician Sheikh Suleiman al-Taji al-Faruqi in November, 1913, published a poem in the recently-founded Arabic newspaper Falastin, declaring:

Jews, sons of clinking gold, stop your deceit;

We shall not be cheated into bartering away our country!

... The Jews, the weakest of all peoples and the least of them,

Are haggling with us for our land;

How can we slumber on? - Excerpted, with permission, from 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris, published by Yale University Press. Copyright 2008 Benny Morris.

TOMORROW

On the eve of full-fledged war, the British wash their hands of Palestine

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