It is silly to discuss the Middle East and the Middle Eastern diaspora and not discuss the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. If the aftermath of world war two instilled a sense of calmness and stability in Europe, it led to an upheaval in the Middle East. But the story begins much earlier, precisely in 1897 when Rt. Honorable Herbert Bentwich led a Zionist pilgrimage to Palestine. Mr Bentwich and his colleagues traveled from the port of Jaffa to Ramallah and all the way to Jerusalem with the company of 21 Zionists. He saw the barren land with scattered native Palestinians villages which were infested with Malaria but for some reason he did not see the natives. He made his mind that the jews must go back to their historical homeland, Judea. Meanwhile, Theodor Herzle, the spiritual father of Israel, was interested in the report to be written by Bentwich mainly because he wanted to learn more about the inhabitants of Palestine and the prospect of having the Jews of Europe immigrate and establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The report turned out very romantic and empty of important details on the native population and how such an immigration can unsettle a whole nation.
It is very important here to understand why a group of wealthy and comfortable European Jews would fantasize about building a state in a desert land in the most dangerous place on earth that has no oil. The answer to that question lies in Eastern Europe. Jews lived in ghettos and were systemically discriminated against. From time to time there would be a pogrom in Russia, Austria or Poland and WWII would prove the extent of such discrimination. They had no liberty and no sovereignty. Another factor was that the Jewish identity was being erased by modernization. The whole western world was in a transition to secular modern states. Herzle saw those dangers to the Jews and Jewish identity and decided that the solution is to restore the past.
The initial approach was to have an organic introduction of the Jews in Palestine which fell in the territories of the Islamic Ottoman Empire (yet controlled by Great Britain). Indeed, many Jews started buying lands from Egyptian Jews, Palestinian villagers and others. They started building kibbutzim with the first kibbutz, established in 1909 in Degania. However, one person in the pilgrimage of 1897 saw the Arabs of Palestine and he believed a peaceful co-existence was not possible. By 1897 there was at least half a million Bedouins, Arabs and Druze in Palestine. There were twenty cities and town and hundreds of scattered villages and agricultural communities. Unlike Bentwich who thought the land was big enough to be home to both Arabs and Jews, Israel Zangwill sees the Arabs. He sees the Palestinian cities of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramallah and he sees the villages of Abu Shusha and Abu Kabir. Seven years after the pilgrimage he delivers a speech in New York and states that Palestine is populated and the only way the Jews can go back to their “Promised Land” is by force. He argues that no populated country was taken without force. He concludes that if the Sons of Israel want to make a come back to their lands they have to “To drive out by sword the tribes in possession, as our forefathers did”. This was the moment two streams of Zionism emerged: a stream that pushes for an organic introduction of European Jews and the creation of a melting pot for Jews and Arabs and another stream that is determined to cleanse the promised land of the Jews from all “Arab Impurities”.
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