Masalha Nur. Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion

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Imperial Israel and the

Palestinians

The Politics of Expansion

Nur Masalha

Pluto PPress

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2000 by Pluto Press

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and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,

Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

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The right of Nur Masalha to be identified as the author of this work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1620 4 hbk

ISBN 0 7453 1615 8 pbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Masalha, Nur, 1957–

Imperial Israel and the Palestinians : the politics of expansion,

1967–2000 / Nur Masalha.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 0–7453–1620–4 (hbk.)

1. Arab–Israeli conflict—1973–1993. 2. Arab–Israeli conflict—1993–

3. Zionism—Israel. 4. Israel—Politics and government. 5. Israel–Arab War,

1967—Occupied territories. 6. Israel—Boundaries. I. Title.

DS119.7 .M31395 2000

956.04–dc21

00–027698

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton

Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow

Disclaimer:

Some images in the original version of this book are not

available for inclusion in the eBook.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 Labour Zionism’s ‘Activists’: New Territorial Maximalism

and the Whole Land of Israel Movement, 1967–77 28

2 Zionist Revisionism and the Likud: From Jabotinsky to

Netanyahu 55

3 Jewish Fundamentalism, Greater Israel and the

Palestinians 105

4 The Secular Ultra-nationalists: Parties and Movements

of the Far Right 163

5 The Public Opinion Debate: Evolving Jewish Attitudes,

the Palestinians and Greater Israel 196

Epilogue 219

Notes 230

Select Bibliography 260

Index 269

Acknowledgements

The support of the Palestine Studies Trust, UK, and the Institute for

Palestine Studies (IPS), Washington, DC, is gratefully acknowledged.

At IPS, I am particularly grateful to Walid Khalidi, Philip Mattar and

Mahmud Swaid, all of whom encouraged me to undertake the

project of Zionism and the Palestinians. Among the institutions that

made this work possible by helping with source material were the

Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the

Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies Library in

London. Many friends and colleagues have helped me greatly with

logistics, ideas, criticism, material and discussions. Among them I

would like to thank Elias ‘Edey, Edward Said, Sa’id Khouri, Ahmad

Khalidi, Ahmad Khalifa, Roger van Zwanenberg, Zein Mayasi, David

McDowall, Hasib Sabbagh, Peter Colvin, ‘Abbas Shiblak, Israel

Shahak, Ghada Karmi, Tim Niblock, Uri Davis, Leila Mantura,

Michael Adams, Michael Prior, Sharif Kana’ane, Anis al-Kassim, As’ad

Ghanem, Ilan Pappe, Naseer Aruri, Farouq Mardam-Bey and the late

Saliba Khamis. Needless to say that I alone am responsible for the

book and its shortcomings, as well as translations from Hebrew.

Finally, I owe an invaluable debt to my wife, Stephanie, for her

insightful comments while this work was being written.

vii

Introduction

Land and territory have always been at the heart of the struggle

between the Zionist immigrants/settlers and the native Palestinians.

To a large extent, the political history of Zionism and the Israeli state

has been a description of an ongoing debate over territorial

aspirations and concepts of frontiers. The territorial/boundaries issue

has also been the most concrete expression of Israeli expansionism.

Since its establishment, Israel has been defining and redefining its

territorial ambitions. What are the final boundaries of the Israeli

state? In May 1999, Israel’s pragmatic expansionists, led by Ehud

Barak, returned to power in Israel, with a pledge to maintain, further

consolidate and ultimately annex to Israel the Jewish settlements on

the West Bank together with large parts of the occupied territories.

Barak’s commitments to a united Jerusalem under exclusive Israeli

sovereignty and the expansion of Jewish settlements in ‘Greater

Jerusalem’ were affirmed in his election victory speech in Rabin

Square, Tel Aviv.

Israel’s physical border, he stated during the 1999

election campaign, will always be the Jordan River. It was the Labour

government which had taken the lead after 1967 with the creation

of a string of military kibbutzim and civilian settlements along the

Jordan River.

However, although territorially expansionist ambitions are deeply

rooted in mainstream Labour Zionism, the primary focus of this

book is on Israel’s territorial maximalists and their concepts of state

frontiers. The work mainly deals with the supporters of Greater Israel

who believe that mandatory Palestine (in Zionist terminology: ‘the

western Land of Israel’), or the area between the Mediterranean and

the Jordan River, is the irreducible minimum for fulfilling the

purpose of Zionism. These include Labour Zionism’s ‘activists’,

Zionist Revisionists and other supporters of Greater Israel (both

secular and religious fundamentalists). Concentrating on the period

from June 1967 to the present, the book covers a whole range of ter-

ritorially maximalist parties and right-wing groupings, while

comparing them with both pragmatic and radical expansionists of

Labour Zionism. The focus on Israel’s territorial maximalists should

not underestimate the current threat posed by Israel’s pragmatic

expansionists to the Palestinians. However, it does make perfect

sense to explore the theme of territorial expansionism, especially in

connection with the rise of Neo-Zionism and the supporters of the

‘whole Land of Israel’ in the post-1967 period and the implications

of their demand for the whole Middle East for maximum territorial

expansion. It is the fundamental premise of this work that ‘Greater

Israel’ is both a territorial concept and an ideology aimed at

achieving maximum territorial expansionism and imperial

domination in the region.

Land ‘redemption’, settler colonisation and statehood have been

the permanent themes of modern Zionism. Jewish nation-building,

ever-expanding settlement, territorial ambitions and the effective

use of myths/legends/epics of the Bible went hand in hand. The

Zionists claim that events described in the Old Testament establish

the right of twentieth-century Jews to establish an ethnic Jewish state

in Palestine. For the Zionists, although the term Eretz-Yisrael (the

Hebrew for the ‘Land of Israel’) was always vague as far as the exact

boundaries of the territory were concerned, it clearly defined

‘ownership’. The narratives of Genesis and Exodus present the

origins of the traditions that connect the Hebrew and Israelite tribes

with the land of Canaan (modern Palestine); however, the enormous

efforts of several generations of scholars have not been able to

uncover any historical or archaeological evidence for the existence

of the events and personages referred to in these texts. There is no

concurrence between biblical stories and demonstrable historical

facts before about the eighth century

BC.

The archaeological

findings blatantly contradict the biblical picture. Zeev Hertzog,

professor of archaeology and ancient studies at Tel Aviv University,

has reported recently that, following decades of intensive

excavations in Palestine/Israel, archaeologists have found that the

patriarch’s acts are legendary; that the Israelites did not sojourn in

Egypt or wander in the desert; they did not conquer the land of

Canaan in a military campaign, and did not pass it on to the twelve

tribes. Neither is there any evidence of the empire of David and

Solomon. The united monarchy under David and Solomon, which

the Bible describes as a regional power, was at most a small tribal

kingdom (Haaretz, 29 October 1999).

However, contrary to the actual evidence, the view that the Old

Testament Scriptures provide for the Jews’ title-deed to expand

throughout the ‘Land of Israel’, for the alleged moral legitimacy of

the establishment of the state of Israel and for its policies towards

2 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

the native Palestinians since 1948, is still pervasive not only in

Jewish Zionist circles but even within mainstream Christian theology

and university biblical studies.

The link between Israeli territorial

conquests and the Old Testament is also reflected in the propagan-

distic claim of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and secular prime

minister: that the Bible is the ‘Jews’ sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine

... with a genealogy of 3,500 years’.

In fact, the term Eretz-Yisrael is

used only once in the Old Testament Scriptures (1 Samuel 13:19);

there is no exact historical or even religious map of the scope and

boundaries of the ‘Land of Israel’, and no precise Jewish religious

definition of the borders. However, as we shall see below, in modern

times the ‘Land of Israel’ and other related biblical terminology have

been invested with far-reaching historical, geo-political and

ideological connotations in both Israeli rhetoric and Western

scholarship.

The reconstruction of the past by Zionist authors has

often reflected their own political and religious ideologies. Both

Zionist authors and biblical scholars have based the historical claims

of modern Zionism to Eretz-Yisrael on the biblical (mythical)

narrative of the twelve tribes that conquered and lived on the land

during the Israelites’ premonarchical era; other Zionist claims have

been based on the Davidic or Solomonic kingdoms, the subsequent

southern and northern kingdoms of Judea and Israel, the early

Second Temple period, the Hasmonean era, or the Kingdom of

Herod.

Following in the footsteps of nineteenth- and twentieth-

century biblical scholarship, Israeli scholarship has employed an

array of terms for the region of Palestine and its surroundings: ‘Eretz-

Yisrael’, ‘the biblical Land of Israel’, ‘Greater Israel’, ‘the whole Land

of Israel’, ‘Judea and Samaria are as the heart of the Israelite nation’,

‘the land in which the Israelite tribes had their settlements’, ‘the

promised land’, ‘the land of the Bible’, ‘the Holy Land’.

To the casual reader of many standard works on historical

geography or studies of the history of the region, these terms may

appear interchangeable or even neutral. But these concepts and

imaginary maps are also about power relations. Benedict Anderson,

in Imagined Communities, has shown how the seemingly neutral map

played a crucial role in conceptualization and control of European

colonial territories.

More recently, in his seminal work, The

Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (1996),

Keith Whitelam has examined the political implications of the

terminology of biblical scholarship chosen to represent this area and

has shown how the naming of the land implied control and

Introduction 3

possession of the land; how the terms Eretz-Yisrael, ‘the land of

Israel’ and Palestine have been invested with, or divested of,

meaning in both Western and Israeli scholarship. Despite the fact

that Western biblical scholarship has continually employed the term

‘Palestine’, Whitelam argues, the term has been divested of any real

meaning in the face of the search for the ancient ‘Land of Israel’.

Palestine has no intrinsic meaning of its own, no history of its own,

but instead provides a background for the history of Israel.

Commensurate with the lack of history is also the absence of the

inhabitants of the land. The history of Palestine and its inhabitants

in general is subsumed and silenced by the concern with, and in the

search for, ancient Israel.

Many biblical scholars in Israel and the West assume (erroneously)

that biblical narratives which purport to describe the past are in fact

accurate records and that both the ancient and modern history of

Israel have been conditioned by the geographical setting of the ‘Land

of Israel’ to such an extent that knowledge of the geography of the

region is one of the preconditions for a proper understanding of its

history. When discussing the history of Israel, many biblical scholars

and Israeli publicists begin with a section entitled the ‘Land of Israel’.

The land, until the arrival of European Jewish settlers, is virtually

barren, desolate and empty, waiting to be made fertile and populated

by Israel; it is the rightful property of Jews (a divinely ‘chosen

people’), and their superiority is defined in military power. In

October 1991, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in his address to the

Madrid Peace Conference, resorted to quoting from Innocents Abroad

by Mark Twain. (Twain visited Palestine in 1867 and his description

of its natives was either marked by invective or was humorously

pejorative.) The aim of Shamir (who regarded the Madrid Conference

as purely ceremonial and treated it as a propaganda platform) was

to prove that Palestine was an empty territory, a kind of civilisational

barrenness that (in Shamir’s words) ‘no one wanted’: ‘A desolate

country which sits in sackcloth and ashes – a silent, mournful

expanse which not even imagination can grace with the pomp of

life’.

The same myth of a ‘ruined’/‘desolate’/‘empty’ country was

used by Shamir and his successor, Likud Prime Minister Binyamin

Netanyahu, to justify Zionist colonisation of Palestine and

indifference to the fate of its native inhabitants.

Moreover, this

(mythical) continuum between the ancient and the modern means

that this is a difficult land, resisting agriculture, which can only be

‘redeemed’ and made to yield up its produce by the extraordinary

4 Imperial Israel and the Palestinians

effort of Jewish immigrants, Zionist pioneers and Israel’s genius. It

mattered little that in reality most of Palestine, other than the Negev,

was no desert but an intensely and successfully cultivated fertile

land. The Zionist propaganda – that only under Jewish cultivation

did Palestine become a productive country with the help of Jewish

labour and capital, that only Israel can make the land (and desert)

bloom, that most Palestinians arrived in the area only within the

past century – have long been part of the Zionist justification for

Jewish immigration to Palestine, the founding of the state of Israel,

its territorial expansion and the dispossession of the Palestinians.

With regard to the territorial scope of the ‘whole Land of Israel’,

the entire spectrum of Zionist opinion believed, and still believes,

that Eretz-Yisrael extends to the east of the River Jordan; in Zionist

terminology, Eretz-Yisrael is basically separated by the Jordan River

into two major parts: ‘the western Land of Israel’ (Eretz-Yisrael

Hama’ravit), which includes Israel proper and the 1967 occupied

territories, and ‘the eastern Land of Israel’ (Eretz-Yisrael Hamizrahit),

situated mainly in the modern state of Jordan. The founder of

political Zionism, Theodor Herzl – an intensely secular and

assimilated Jew – was in fact less concerned with the location of the

Jewish state and the scope of its boundaries than with the fact that

sovereign control over territory would provide Jews with guarantees

against discrimination. However, the Zionist movement

subsequently laid claim to Palestine and Transjordan at the Paris

Peace Conference – which opened in January 1919 to dispose of the

territories captured from the defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary

and Ottoman Empire during the First World War – and at Zionist

Congresses in the 1920s. Although certain sections of the Zionist

movement (particularly right-wing Revisionists) insisted that the

modern Jewish state should be established in ‘the whole of Eretz-

Yisrael’, the majority came to terms with the parameters of the

Palestine Mandate and focused its territorial aspirations on these

boundaries. Yet, while the majority believed that the state of Israel

could realistically be established only in part of Eretz-Yisrael, it

remained committed to the ultimate vision of ‘the whole Land of

Israel’. Furthermore, the concept of Jewish ‘historic rights in the

whole land of Israel’ was never only confined to the territorial

maximalists of Zionist Revisionism or Israel’s radical right. At the

Paris Peace Conference, Chaim Weizmann, then leading the Zionist

Commission that was to put forward Zionist political and territorial

claims, called for the imposition of a British Mandate over an

Introduction 5