Natives and the blessings of progress – Mondoweiss

"School parades in Tell Aviv [Tel Aviv] in honor of Lord Balfour, 1925. (Photo: Library of Congress)

Before there were Israelis, there were Zionists and Zionism. Heirs of the project are living out the literal foreignness of the Zionist nationalityoverlaid on the human Palestine map.

The secular, Ashkenazi theoreticians of the pre-state Zionist movement contrast with their progeny, Naftali Bennett and hilltop youth, Hebrew-speaking religious Zealots, looking to cast adrift from the democratic tradition in favor of an atavistic Jewish kingdom.

Its a wise child that knows his own father. The state of mind of Israeli Zionists is now such that they feel Zionists of the wider world are alien to them.

Equal suffrage is obviously inadvisable in so backward a civilization as that of the Arab

So pioneer American Zionist, Jerusalem Post founder and future Tel Aviv Mayor Gershon Agronsky (later Agron) observed in a 1927 report on Jewish reclamation of Mandate Palestine.

The occasion of Agronskys report was an extraordinary international conference -under United States sponsorship, improbably enough in Honolulu in 1927, The First Pan Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, Reclamation and Recreation.

(Presumably, Mandate Palestines touching of the Gulf of Aqaba made it a territory of the Pacific.)

Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki. (Photo: Lantern slide/The University of Hawaii at Manoa Libraries)

That conference, which opened at the newly built landmark Royal Hawaiian Hotel, gives us a view of the times, and a valuable picture of the role that advanced nations were seen to play in the lives of the native.

For Agronsky, personally attending the conference was an occasion to share the story of Zionist settlement of Palestine, with steady advances in dunums irrigated and number of Jewish schools and hamlets.

For appointed Hawaii Territorial Governor Wallace R. Farrington and the Japan government representativesin their lights advanced partiesit was an opportunity to discuss indicators of progress for indigenous Hawaiians and Koreans.

The Japanese proudly reported improved education and rice production since the 1911 annexation of Korea by Japan, and the Hawaii Territorial government representatives described the efforts to educate and set native Hawaiians in homes on land in trust for them.

For Agronsky, the Jewish Agency representative, his theme was Jewish Reclamation of Palestine, and mention of non-Jews in Palestine was less than secondary.

In the pioneering pre-state period, a portion of the Zionist intelligentsiapersonified by Judah Magnesunderstood the danger of what was being constructed.

Jewish settlement-building followed Ben-Gurions principles of Jewish self-sufficiency and Hebrew Labor, and had the effect of building two societies at odds with each other.

Herzlian philosophy was that Jewsin the main Jews of Eastern Europewould become a normal people by doing all the functions that a people do, such as tilling the soil, in a Jewish land.

Jewish agriculture is the base for the reconstruction of Palestine, and a Jewish peasantry the foundation of a new Jewish Commonwealth, said D. Arthur Ruppin, a Zionist presence in Palestine since the First Aliyah.

To the Zionist pioneers, this meant minimizing interdependence with non-Jewish Palestinians. There was an unavoidable European sense of superiority.

In a February 1918 American Jewish Committee board meeting, AJC board member Cyrus Adler illustrated the all-too-frequent contempt for Arabs that poisoned foreign plans for Palestine, when he observed that, to him,

Itis difficult to imagine how Jews, who have lived in the great world, in the great modern cities of Europe and America, and who should go back to Palestine, could take a place side by side with the Arabs who are 2,000 or 3,000 years behind the Jews in civilization.

That FebruarycommentisechoedinaMay1918letterfromChaim Weizmann in Tel Aviv-Jaffa to British Foreign Secretary ArthurBalfour, complaining that British administrators of Palestine were ignoring the

fundamentalqualitativedifference between Jew and Arab.The present system tends on the contrary to level down the Jews to the status of a native, and in many cases the English Administrator follows the convenient rule of looking on the Jews as so many natives.

Weizmann was pointing out the special status that Jews were to have in Mandate Palestine, as living in their intended homeland by a right and not on sufferance, as Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill put it in 1922.

(In a theme that recurs in discussions of Zionism, Churchill said in 1920, The struggle between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. In this case, redeeming the land is saving the Jews for the good of the nations.)

In the periods of Zionist settlement in Palestine before statehood, the management and force of the Zionist movement was from the technological, advanced, European world.

When waves of Mizrahi (eastern/Arab Jewish) olim arrived in Israel, in the trauma to the Arab world of the partition of Palestine, the civilizing mission was felt by the arriving backward Arab Jews, the Mizrahim, in contempt and tutelage.

The Mizrahim experienced the phenomena of children stolen for adoption, and forced Western education, as experienced by Aboriginal Australians and North American First Peoples.

Arabs do appear in Israeli self-conception when convenient. Constitutional and human rights lawyer Mazen Mazri comments that in Israels May 1948 Declaration of Independence, In the tradition of thecivilising mission, the settlers also brought the blessings of progress to all the countrys inhabitants. The motifs of immigration, settlement, building and benefits for the other inhabitants reverberate throughout the Declaration.

Crucially, the Jewish nation that was created was based on the idea of separation from other inhabitants of Palestine in culture, language, labor, and economy. Even when geography and demographics did not support it, the notion of a separate Jewish society was essential to the political Zionist conception of returning to Palestine.

Now, in really what should be noted is a short time, an Israeli nationality exists fully formed, with ananthem and a founding origin story. Its culture has very much its Mizrahi component a fact of Arabness with little acknowledgment. Even public speaking of Arabic is a suspect activity threatening societal status and personal safety.

We approach the 100th anniversary of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British Foreign Secretarys expression of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

New York Herald, Dec. 11, 1917; Gen. Allenby entering Jerusalem, Dec. 11, 1917. (Photo: Library of Congress)

It will be interesting to see how and whether the Israeli nationality endures. Ministers now in power openly tout Arab expulsion plans. Likud eminence Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is proposing a radical rethinking of the occupation, with Israel taking Arabs in as citizens along with the land it covets.

From the time of the November 1947 UN General Assembly vote in Palestine, sectarian Jewish militias began the removal of the half of the residents of the proposed Jewish state, and land beyond, who were not Jews, beginning the Nakba (catastrophe).

It is frequently asked whether, if the Jewish return to Palestine had been conducted in a different spirit, the situation would have developed as poisonously.

It may not have made a difference. As the whites in Hawaii could not accept being equal citizens in a Kingdom of Hawaii ruled in part by native Hawaiians, would the emigrating Jews have accepted the same with Arabs of Palestine?

The doctrines of Zionist state-building and Jewish self-sufficiency argued against that, and waves of new immigrants from Europe who imagined, to repeat Cyrus Adler, Arabs 2,000 or 3,000 years behind the Jews in civilization.

Now, central to many Jewish Israelis is the belief that they are home. Literally, permitting citizenship of Arabs remaining in Israel is seen as an example of Zionist magnanimityor, as Israeli New Historian Benny Morris expressed it, failure to finish the job of expulsion.

This article was originally published on Feb. 17, 2017by the LA Progressive here.

See more here:

Natives and the blessings of progress - Mondoweiss