The Origins of the Conflict in Israel, 1881 - 1915
Notes from Righteous Victims by Dr. Benny Morris
Was Zionism legitimately pursued?
No. Zionism displaced and meant to displace the local population by buying land from them. The Zionists themselves admit this. Jews used Arab labor but made no effort to learn local customs. Jews were also foreigners from European (Russia is not European) countries like Russia – most immigrants had Russian passports, not Ottoman ones. Jews did not know how to live in the land. For example, they used a camel to pull a cart. They were thus immigrants who took advantage of a poor and illiterate local population to push them out.
Displacing the local population is wrong. Zionism displaced and meant to displace the local population. Therefore, Zionism was wrong.
Yes. Everything that the Jews did, they did legitimately. They bought all of the land that they settled from Palestinian landowners who were happy to sell it to them because the land was expensive. They employed local Arabs when working their fields. They bribed the Ottomans to immigrate to Palestine and buy land before the British Mandate.
Jews were not colonizers because they didn’t come from one colony. They were a diaspora reclaiming their indigenous homeland. The proof of their non-Europeanness was the ethnic cleansing that many European countries were happy to take a part of. The reason why the great powers supported a Jewish homeland was because they wanted Jews out of their own countries. This certainly was one of the reasons why the British wanted to help the Jews move to Palestine.
Displacing the local population was not wrong because the locals themselves were selling the land that the Jews were buying. It was a lack of national self-awareness, an underestimation of Jews and their ability to settle the land, and most of all a willingness to sell the land that facilitated the displacement of local populations. It was not done through force. It was done commercially.
Did Palestine exist pre-1947?
No! Palestine was not a legal entity or even an administrative region. Neither was Israel. It was simply the name given to the region. Before the British, the local Arabs, Jews, and Christians all had Ottoman passports. Furthermore, there wasn’t such a thing as The Palestinians. They were just Arabs living in the Ottoman empire with nascent ideas of Arab self-identity. The British gave the Arabs ALL of Arabia and Greater Syria via The Balfour Declaration. The Jews would be getting a very small part of this bigger map. Thus, maps of “Palestine” vs Israel from pre-1947 are false. It needs instead to be seen as Arab land, not as land separated by borders that didn’t exist, or by nations that didn’t yet exist.
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