1 THE ORIGINS OF ZIONISM: HERZL, AHAD HA'AM, AND GORDON     If you had been alive in the mid-nineteenth century and visited the land that would become Palestine and then Israel, you would have found few signs of the conflict that would later tear the country apart. You would have heard references to "Palestine," but you wouldn't have found a nation with its own laws and government that corresponded to Palestine or Israel. The Turks, who ruled the region, divided the land into three parts for purposes of collecting taxes. The West Bank was part of the province of Syria; northern Palestine was part of the province of Beirut; and Jerusalem and its environs had their own district. According to one estimate, the area corresponding to Palestine had about 340,000 people, of whom 300,000, or 88 percent, were Muslims or Druze, 27,000, or 8 percent, Christians, and 13,000, or 4 percent, Jews.1 Many of these Jews lived in Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron. A few were well-to-do descendants of Sephardic émigrés from Spain, but many were more recent émigrés from Europe who devoted themselves to religious study and prayer and survived off donations from abroad. The Jews of Palestine suffered religious persecution, but no different from that inflicted on Christians in a society dominated by Muslims.

For instance, both Jews and Christians were officially prohibited from building new houses of worship, but both groups were able to use bribes to get around the law. There was nothing like the wave of anti-Semitism that would sweep Europe during the late nineteenth century. "Jews enjoyed a higher standing in Muslim society and enjoyed a greater affinity with the culture of their surroundings than the Jews in Eastern Europe," wrote the historian Yosef Gorny.2 There was also little of a Western presence in the region. Americans were preoccupied with the Civil War and its aftermath. The great powers of Europe were just beginning to divide up Asia and Africa. The British had an interest in allying themselves with the Turks against the Russians, they were about to gain a foothold in Egypt, and they had begun to consider Palestine and its environs as a path eastward, but they had not done anything about it, and would not do so for the rest of the century. There were rabbis and some notable Christians in Europe and the United States who thought the Jews should return to Palestine.

The Christians were called "restorationists," and in Britain they were able to attract support for their views among high officials who saw a Jewish Palestine in commercial or imperial terms. But most Jews accepted the Diaspora as an enduring condition. The Orthodox thought that the Jews would eventually return to Zion, but by a Messianic act of God rather than by an organized mass migration. Jews declared "Next year in Jerusalem" annually during Passover dinners, but few took these words literally. Then, over the next forty years-from the 1880s to the end of World War I and the early 1920s-the region was utterly transformed. The Ottoman Empire was dissolved, a casualty of Turkey's alliance with Germany during World War I. Through a League of Nations mandate, Britain assumed control of Palestine, an area that initially included what became Transjordan and later Jordan, but it administered the two areas separately. As a result, the western part of the mandate, administered through Jerusalem, became known again as Palestine, the name the Romans had originally given the country, but that also had a more ancient root in the seafaring Philistines who were contemporaries of the Old Testament Jews.

By 1922, according to a British census, Palestine's population had grown to 752,048, of which Jews accounted for 83,900, or 11 percent. The sevenfold increase in the Jewish population had been spurred by the development of a Zionist movement in Europe, particularly in the Russian Pale of Settlement, which was in response to the simultaneous growth of nationalism and anti-Semitism in Central and Western Europe. Zionism was Jewish nationalism, but unlike German or Romanian nationalism, it was not centered on an existing homeland but on one that Jews had once inhabited and now wanted to return to. The outward logic of Zionism was impeccable. The nations of Europe, where Jews had dwelt for hundreds of years, were treating them as a nation in their midst. Nationalist politicians and intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe called for purging their countries of this alien nation. In response, Jews wanted a genuine nation of their own where they could be secure from persecution and oppression. The trouble came when Zionists specified where that nation should be.

Two thousand years before, most Jews had lived in Palestine, and a few thousand still did. But other peoples had also inhabited Palestine over the millennia, and Arabs had lived there for 1,400 years. If Zionism's objective was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, that meant ruling over or driving out the Arabs who already lived there. In justifying their attempt to colonize Palestine, some Zionists-who cited the influence of the Russian Zionist Ahad Ha'am-tried to come to terms with the Arab presence in Palestine. But many Zionists, following the example of Theodor Herzl, the Viennese author of The Jewish State , fell back on the same kind of rationalizations that the great powers had advanced in attempting to extend their reach over Asia and Africa, and that Christian Europe, and that Christian restorationists, and even before them, the Crusaders, had used to justify the conquest of Palestine. They promised to reclaim Palestine for the religion of the Bible, to civilize the Arabs, and to revive the land that, they claimed, the Arabs had allowed to become a desolate wasteland. Most American Zionist leaders would trace their lineage back to Herzl rather than to Ahad Ha'am and would adopt a distorted understanding of Palestine and its Arab inhabitants. Anti-Semitism and Zionism The idea of a Jewish return to Zion (which originally referred to Jerusalem) goes back to the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.

C.E. and was promoted over the centuries by a succession of Jewish rabbis and mystics. The English Puritans, including those who settled in New England, believed on biblical grounds in a Jewish return to the region of Palestine. Napoleon advocated a Jewish state during his eastern campaign in 1799. And in the early nineteenth century, British officials, led by the Christian revivalist Lord Shaftesbury, called on Britain to promote a Jewish return to the Holy Land. By midcentury, there was some stirring among Jewish intellectuals. In the 1860s, the German Socialist Moses Hess, a former comrade of Karl Marx, and the Polish rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, both of whom were deeply impressed by the Italian movement for national unification, Il Risorgimento, advocated the gradual creation of a Jewish state.

But the birth of a Zionist movement-and the beginning of emigration-had to wait until the 1880s, till the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe and its spread westward. This turned Jewish Zionism from a religious fantasy into a political movement. Jews, of course, had suffered persecution for centuries, but much though not all of it was based on their beliefs and what they were reputed to have done to Jesus Christ. It was religious persecution. By contrast, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anti-Semitism was primarily a toxic blend of nationalism, racism, and imperialism directed at Jews as an alien national group within nations or empires rather than as a religious group among other religions. It coincided with the rise throughout Europe of the unified nation state and of national rebellions against empires. In the nineteenth century, Italians and Hungarians sought to free themselves from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Romanians and other Balkan peoples from the Ottoman Empire; the Poles from the Russian Empire; and Germans from the Hapsburgs and from the legacy of defeat in the Napoleonic wars. They defined their national aspirations along ethnic and quasi-racial lines that led them to see Jews as an alien nation.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a father of German nationalism, described Germans as a race that nature "joined to each other in a multitude of invisible bonds" and Jews as "a state within a state." Fichte infamously declared that he could only imagine granting civil rights to Jews if one were "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea."3 In Austria and Russia, defenders of the empire invoked their own brand of nationalism against the secessionists and against Jews, whom they blamed for the unrest. In Austria, George Ritter von Schönerer built a pan-German movement based on the premise that Austria had to rid itself of Jewish influence.4 In Russia, the Black Hundreds swore loyalty to the czar and Russian absolutism while leading violent assaults against Jews. This fusion of religious intolerance, national chauvinism, and what the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker called "demonopathy" inspired new laws threatening Jews' livelihood and led to a succession of violent pogroms in Russia and the Russian Pale of Settlement-the western edge of the Russian empire to which the czarist regime restricted Jews. In the spring of 1881, massive anti-Jewish riots took place in response to false rumors that the Jews had assassinated Alexander II. These riots, in which Jews were killed and homes and synagogues destroyed, spread to 160 cities and villages in the Pale and recurred over the next.