Why Only Art Can Save Us by Santiago Zabala

Author:Santiago Zabala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

2.12 Jane Frere, Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project, 2007–2008. Al Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem, June–July 2008. Photograph by Abdo Nawar at the Beirut exhibition in Balad al Shams Theatre, September 2008.

“Zionist thinkers claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of their new nationalist movement.”273 According to Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, Palestine was occupied by “strangers” who had to be evicted, but by “strangers” he did not mean foreigners but was referring to people who had been living there since the Roman period. Even before the first Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, Herzl, like other colonialist leaders in the past, described (in his diaries) the two methods by which the poor and wealthy populations would be expelled. The former had to be pushed “across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country”; the latter was to be bought out with the illusion that “they are cheating us, selling things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”274 Herzl thought of Zionism both as the creation of a Jewish theocracy (that is, the nationalization and secularization of Judaism) and as part of Europe’s overseas colonial project; he planned to form there “a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”275

This latter reason is probably why Zionism enjoyed great sympathy among Western policy makers. Many leading politicians, including Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and Prime Minister Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, supported the Zionist movement, and others, such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, also held strong anti-Arab views. As Ilan Pappé explains in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, although the British did not treat Palestine as a colony but as a state within the British sphere of influence, preference was always given to the Jewish people who lobbied from abroad. For example, in 1928 when the British put in place a political structure that would represent both communities equally in the state’s parliament as well as in the government, they “advantaged the Zionist colonies and discriminated against the Palestinian majority,”276 which was between 80 and 90 percent of the total population. As Ahmad H. Sa’di recalls,

The British supported Zionism until at least 1940, blocking Palestinian efforts to halt Zionist immigration and settlement. Under British rule, the size of the Jewish population grew more than tenfold—from 56,000 in 1914 to about 650,000 in 1948. Their share in the population soared from a mere 9 percent to about 34 percent. Under the British, the Yishuv had established an underground military force that was larger and stronger than anything the Arab states and Palestinian community were able to put up.277

Although no significant outbursts of violence were reported between Jews and Palestinians before the British announced their intention to leave Palestine in February 1947, there were several signs of an imminent conflict.

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