It is now nine months since the outbreak of the second Intifada against the longest official military occupation of modern history—currently entering its thirty-fifth year. The conflict over Palestine, of course, goes back much further. The first clashes between Arabs and Jews date from the twenties of the last century. Since 1948 five wars have been fought by Israel, and two civil wars unleashed by side-effects in adjacent states. Whatever the battles in the Middle East, however, there are few divisions today in the West. Here, it is safe to say, there is no major international issue on which there is such consensus and so much cant as the question of Palestine—where a ‘peace process’ unanimously applauded by respectable opinion has supposedly been unfolding for a decade, whose progress can only be jeopardized by resort to violence. It is in the interest of all parties, so the official wisdom runs, that the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza be brought to an immediate stop. To cut through the massif of obfuscation that surrounds relations between Israelis and Palestinians, of which this notion is an end-product, is a task beyond any brief review here. But a few basic considerations can be set down.

The conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is a clash between two nationalisms, a kind of which the last century has been full. Its peculiarity has lain in an asymmetry between its antagonists. Palestinian national consciousness crystallized late, out of a wider Arab identity, after the disaster that befell the community when it was overwhelmed by Jewish arms in 1948—the Nakba. The Jewish nationalism that forced its Palestinian counterpart into being had, by contrast, taken organizational shape by the turn of the century. The Zionist movement founded by Herzl was a variety of the ethnic nationalism of nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe, where it found the mass of its adherents—a typical example of the awakening of divided or oppressed peoples of the region, in the epoch before and after the First World War. Two traits, however, marked off the position of the Jews. On the one hand, they occupied no common territory (and spoke no common language), but were scattered in pockets across the continent. On the other, they possessed a religious tradition of great antiquity which furnished an alternative basis—mediate or immediate—of identity, linked to a sacred homeland beyond Europe. In taking for its goal the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, Zionism could draw on mobilizing reserves of theological and cultural energy more than capable of compensating for its lack of a conventional land or linguistic base.

Still, the obstacles to creating a nation-state thousands of miles away from the location of its constituents, in a terrain long inhabited by others, under the rule of a vast state representing another religious faith, would have been insurmountable save for a further factor, which was to make Zionism more than just another nationalist movement of the time. Sociologically, the Jews of Europe were sharply bifurcated. In Eastern Europe—above all, Poland and Russia—most of them were poor and downtrodden, exposed to humiliation and danger from every hostile prejudice of Christian anti-semitism: in a position worse than that of even the most oppressed of other nationalities in the region. In Western Europe, on the other hand, they included not only many members of the prosperous middle-class—Besitz and Bildungsbürgertum—but some of the greatest fortunes of the continent. At one end of Europe was the shtetl of Chagall or Martov; at the other, the haute finance of the Rothschilds and Warburgs, or the career of Disraeli. The shadow of anti-semitism fell on all Jews, whatever pinnacle of wealth or power they might reach, linking the highest to the lowest ranks of life, as the Dreyfus affair—the detonating episode of Zionism—made clear. But in the Belle Époque the top end of European Jewry nevertheless enjoyed an entrée to ruling circles of an imperialist Europe beyond the dreams of any other oppressed nationality of the time. Without this paradoxical double determination, from above and below, Zionism could never have realized its goals.

The First World War gave the movement its breakthrough with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced British support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, coming on the heels of earlier French promises. London’s decision to back Zionism was an unambiguous product of inter-imperialist calculation. Its immediate aim was to mobilize Jewish opinion in Russia and America behind the Allied War effort at a difficult moment—after the February Revolution, and before US entry into the conflict—while putting down a marker against French designs on Palestine. Behind it, however, also lay a long-standing ideological disposition within Protestant culture, with its powerful attachment to the Pentateuch, that favoured the return of the Jews to the Holy Land.footnote¹ This strand of Christian Zionism, boasting a distinguished pedigree going back to the seventeenth century, formed an essential background to the shield extended by the British imperial elite to the build-up of Jewish settlements in Palestine, once Britain had made sure of its control of the region at Versailles. In 1918, there were some 700,000 Arabs and 60,000 Jews in Palestine. Twenty years later, there were 1,070,000 Arabs and 460,000 Jews.

Zionism thus acquired its peculiar dual nature. A movement of European ethnic nationalism became, inseparably, a form of European overseas colonialism. The settler colony created by Zionism in pre-war Palestine was sui generis. Unlike the English colonists in North America or Australia, the Yishuv did not confront scattered hunter-gatherers but a dense peasant population which could not be shoved aside or wiped out. Unlike the French colonists in Algeria, or former Dutch colonists in South Africa, it could not afford to exploit native labour on a major scale without risking the creation of a pied-noir society in which it would become a minority. The task of constructing an ethnically homogeneous nation-state in a hostile environment could only be carried out by creating a separatist community bonded together by ideological belief, and undivided by any class chasm. That meant the kibbutzim: subjectively socialist in inspiration, in practice the only available solution to the problem of colonization without native labour, empty land, or extensive venture capital.footnote² Apartheid was a mystification in South Africa, where there was never any ‘separate development’ of the races, and the term was no more than a euphemism for the most extreme forms of exploitation of blacks by whites; but something like it was the provisional objective of inter-war Zionism.

The Jewish enclave in Palestine was distinctive in another respect too. From the start it was a settler society without a home country—a colony that never issued from a metropolis. Rather, it had a proxy imperialism behind it. British colonial power was the absolute condition of Jewish colonization. Without the mailed force of the British police and army, the Arab majority—90 per cent of the population—would have stopped the Zionist build-up in its tracks after the First World War. Zionism depended completely on the violence of the British imperial state for its growth. When the Arab population finally realized the extent of Jewish penetration, it rose in a massive revolt that lasted from April 1936 to May 1939—historically, the first and largest Intifada. London deployed 25,000 troops and squadrons of aircraft to crush the rebellion: the largest colonial war of the British Empire in the whole inter-war period. The counter-insurgency campaign was aided and abetted by the Yishuv—Jews supplying a majority of Wingate’s death squads. By the outbreak of the Second World War, British imperialism had broken the back of Palestinian political society, clearing the way for the post-war triumph of Zionism.

Nestling within the British Empire, the Jewish colonists were never completely at one with it. Friction between overseas settlers and their metropolitan base is a constant of colonial history, from the Boston Tea Party and the cabildo of Buenos Aires to Ian Smith and the OAS.footnote³ Unlike any other, the relationship of the Yishuv to Whitehall was without sentimental ties of kinship or culture. Whatever the Anglophilia of brokers in London like Weizmann, for the tough-minded leaders of the settler community itself the pact between British colonialism and Jewish nationalism was purely instrumental.footnote⁴ Tensions rose as soon as London, seeking to curb Arab discontent, tried to taper Jewish immigration, amidst gathering Nazi persecution in Germany. But the Second World War offered an opportunity for the armed wing of mainstream Labour Zionism to gain military experience and equipment under British command, and to secure Churchill’s backing for an independent Jewish state in Palestine once hostilities were over.footnote⁵ The more radical, and much smaller, Irgun wing of Zionism led by Begin did not wait for peace, launching an insurrection against Britain in 1944—to the fury of Ben-Gurion, whose forces collaborated with the British to hunt it down. Continuing immigration controls after 1945, when the full enormity of the fate of European Jewry under the Nazis was known, forced the Haganah to rally to the Irgun strategy. For a year, Britain was confronted with a fully-fledged settler revolt; and though Labour Zionism, cowed by the British crack-down, called off the struggle in August 1946, the Irgun and LHI never let up. By the spring of 1947, Britain had turned over its Mandate to the United Nations.