Neither Jews nor Palestinians are “Indigenous” to the Land

At the conflict's outset, neither Jews nor Arabs adopted this term

Today, both Palestinians and Jews argue that they are “indigenous” to the land. The Palestinians increasingly claim that they are descendants of the ancient Canaanites, who have remained on the land ever since, changing their identity only due to foreign conquest. Jews, meanwhile, often draw a direct line between the ancient Jewish inhabitants of the land and the Israeli-Jews of today. Both are wrong.

How did they view one another more than a century ago, before the conflict developed in full force? The historian Jonathan Marc Gribetz attempts to answer this question in his fascinating book Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter. He argues that the two groups viewed one another in terms of two main categories: religion (Jews, Christians, or Muslims) and race. As he puts it:

these communities understood one another not as complete strangers, engaging with each other for the first time in a modern nationalist struggle over a contested piece of land, but rather as peoples encountering deeply familiar, if at times mythologized or distorted, others.  

The Palestinians didn’t think they were descended from the Canaanites, nor did they deny the Jewish connection to the land. As the writer and politician Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi wrote to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda:

We conquered this land, not from you [the Jews]…we conquered it from the Byzantines who ruled it at the time…we owe nothing to the Jews…[who] were not here when we conquered the land.

As Gribetz notes, this phrasing implicitly acknowledges that the Jews “had been in Palestine before.” Moreover, “for al-Khalidi, history, even that of remote time, was of real importance in the modern period. The Arab conquest of Palestine occurred over one thousand years earlier (638 CE), and yet al-Khalidi does not discount the contemporary relevance of the details of this historic conquest.” His uncle Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi even famously said: “The idea [Zionism] in itself is only natural, beautiful, and just. Who can contest the rights of the Jews on Palestine? My God, historically it is your country.”

Al-Khalidi wrote an unpublished book, Zionism or the Zionist Question, which described the history of “the Israelites” from the Bible to the present. In it, he accepts the link between the Israelites and contemporary Jews:

The captives in Babylonia demonstrated their abundant yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. No nation among the nations reached their height of grieving over their homelands and the degree of their longing for it. They wandered along the banks of the Euphrates crying over Jerusalem and bewailing her in poems and psalms.

He continues: “The mystical part of the Talmud is loaded with Zionist aspirations on the model of that which appears in the books of the Old Testament.” Along the way, he mentions Bar Kochba, Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Halevei, Judah Halevi, and the seventeenth-century Jewish migration to Palestine.  “The rabbis of the Jews repeatedly predicted this time, and the Jews repeated in their prayers and at the end of every one of their Zionist congresses the holy Hebrew phrase the Arabic translation of which is: “Next year in Jerusalem [al-Quds].”

Despite this, al-Khalidi was an opponent of Zionism. While acknowledging the nationalist theme of Jewish history, he argued that this had been abandoned in the modern era:

Whoever looked upon [western European Jews]…saw nothing other than Frenchmen or Englishmen, for example, without regard to their being Jewish or Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, due to the great degree of similarity between them…it is not permitted for a Jew who was born in Prussia or Austria or France, for example, to consider himself anything but a Prussian or Austrian or Frenchman…he does not have the right to call for Jewish nationalism…It is not permissible to consider his nationality to be Jewish nationalism, nor his homeland Palestine.

These ideas were reflected to varying degrees in Arab publications like Al-Hilal, al-Muqtataf, and al-Mnar. As Gribetz explains:

For the editors, contributors, and readers of these Arabic journals, Zionists were not a foreign, unfamiliar group of European colonists; in fact, as we shall see, even those from Europe were generally not considered “European” at all. Rather, as Jews, the Zionists were known from the Bible and the Qu’ran, and they were often viewed as relatives – racial or otherwise – of the Arabs.

Even Haj Amin al-Husseini acknowledged the fact that Jews had settled Palestine before the Arabs.

How, then, did the Jews view the Arabs living in Palestine? Here the picture is a bit more complex. Gribetz writes:

while Ottoman Sephardic Zionists and First Aliyah Ashkenazim often conceived of their neighbors in religious terms, the socialist nationalist ideologues of the Second Aliyah were apparently less comfortable doing so…they were engaged in a national-class encounter; as in their own self-conception, religion for these materialist-secularists could not be a “real,” defining feature.

Thus, Jewish newspapers tended to refer to “Christians” and “Muslims,” and only “Arabs” when describing violence towards Jews (or sometimes “Christian Arabs” or “Muslim Arabs”). Perhaps surprisingly from our vantage point, it was often assumed that Christian Arabs were more hostile to Zionism than their Muslim counterparts:

The former, owing to their “religious and racial hatred” of Jews, were deemed instinctively antagonistic; the latter, because of their feelings of common race with Jews, were regarded as welcoming and supportive. Only on the instigation of the “Christian Arab enemies” and the deception they perpetrate might otherwise naturally sympathetic Muslim Arabs turn against Zionism.”

The Arab population was also understood in racial terms. As Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote in his book The Arab Movement, the Bedouin were the only group in Palestine that is of

pure Arab racial origin…The same cannot be said of the rest of the elements – the fellahin and the urbanites – who are, of course, Arabs in terms of language and culture, but by origin and race are mixed and composed from different elements…The Arabs who conquered the Land of Israel did not destroy the earlier settlement, nor did they themselves engage in colonization. They simply seized lands and levied taxes upon the residents.

Who, then, are the fellahin? According to Ben-Zvi, they

are the descendants of the laborers of the land who remained in Palestine from before the Islamic conquest…The primary source of this agricultural settlement was the ancient Jewish agricultural settlement…[This settlement] certainly absorbed a mix of blood from all of the conquerors of Palestine who left their traces within it: among them the Byzantines, the Mongols, the Syrians, the Bedouin, and the Crusaders. However, the core of the present agricultural settlement has its source in the fellahin, Jews and Samaritans, the ‘people of the land’ (am ha-aretz) then and always, who remained connected to the land and did not go into exile.

Ironically, this position is closest to that of those who today claim that the Palestinians are “indigenous” to the land. He even goes as far to suggest trying to attract the fellahin to the Jewish nation instead of the Arab/Muslim one, and to create a ‘Hebrew Bedouin’ identity. As the Israeli historian Israel Bartal writes, however: “the modern political conflict between the Jews and Arabs put an end to the possibility of searching for Jewish roots within the local population.” Meanwhile, Gribetz’s explanation for Ben-Zvi’s theory is:  

if the majority of the seemingly Muslim Arab population of Palestine was in fact Jewish in “racial” origin and could consciously become Jewish by nationality once again, then the Zionist project instantaneously attained greater demographic feasibility.

Most importantly, though, the early Zionists didn’t see the Arabs in Palestine as some “generic, nondescript indigenous population wrongfully living in the Jews’ rightful homeland. Rather, these populations were communities with which Jews had long and complex histories, as members of interconnected religious civilizations or as members of the same race.” Gribetz concludes:

Given later events, I was surprised by much of what I discovered in this study; Zionists and Arabs imagined one another in very different terms in the Late Ottoman period from the ways their descendants look at one another today. The perceptions have changed, if generally not for the better. Just as perceptions can worsen, however, it stands to reason that they can improve as well.

In the next part, I’ll discuss how this might be achieved.