History and Ideology, and the History of Ideology, Matter

10 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation That Zionists Are Motivated By Expansionist Greed For Land

As Jewish immigrants fleeing violence in Europe kept arriving in Ottoman South Sham ( southern Syria, which would became Palestine under the British ), the Arabs of Palestine didn’t want so many outsider Jews on the land, and certainly did not want outsider Jews governing the land, because it conflicted with their own nationalist aspirations and the immigrating Jews would not be subjugated as dhimmi the way the minority of Ottoman Jews had been. When Jewish immigration didn’t stop, in the 1920’s the Arabs of Palestine rampaged through Jerusalem and Hebron and other cities repeatedly.

These first riots culminated in the 1929 riots, when the Jewish population of Hebron was massacred and the entire population ended up evacuated, not to return until after Israel existed ( which is why, today, Hebron is the most segregated and apartheidlike settlement of Israelis and the one most hostile to Palestinians ). Sound familiar? These riots were pogroms. This was exactly the sort of terror happening in Europe, which the Jewish immigrants to Palestine had been running from, hoping to find refuge in their ancestral homeland. It frightened them very deeply, not just on a personal but on a racial level.

Go deeper: The 1929 Hebron massacre, and the 1929 Palestine riots.

Arguably, though there had been Arab riots against Jews throughout the 1920’s, this was the true beginning of the ongoing war between Israel’s Jewish population and the Arab populations of the Middle East ( and their Muslim supporters in Africa ). I say this because this was arguably the point where co-existence began to become truly impossible, by legitimizing the radicalization of the most hardline Jewish paramilitary factions in the eyes of more of the Jewish immigrants. Yes, the conflict did have a beginning, though we have not yet seen its end.

This Arab violence in Palestine supercharged the strains of Jewish nationalism within the Zionist movement. Within a few years, the sentiment became irreversible. The Jewish immigrants were going to make a stand. America had closed its doors to Jewish immigration in 1921, and with Nazism and fascism gaining power in Europe, there was no place else to run to. By 1936, Jewish immigrants had swelled the Jewish population of British Palestine to 30% of the population, fully 400,000 people.

In the 1930’s, the Jewish people responded to the Arab pogroms by splintering into various armed groups to resist the British and the Arabs. This was a period of great violence by both sides and against each side, including violence against the British ( who played both sides according to their own interests ) and the worst of the Israeli groups, though small, used similar terroristic tactics to the Arab groups. Ideologically, the Palestinians sided with the Nazis and called for their aid. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem literally went to Germany to ask Hitler to help them solve their “Jewish problem”.

Despite this ongoing violence, and despite the splintering off from the main Jewish defense of a small, more violent, offensive group named the Irgun, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the much larger Zionist community, continued to look for peaceful ways to allow some form of Jewish autonomy in the land.

Books such as Oren Kessler’s Palestine 1936 document how Ben-Gurion spoke with secondary, more “moderate” leaders than al-Hussayni, such as a man named Musa Alami, and Ben-Gurion proposed allowing a small piece of the land to be a Jewish autonomous zone within an Arab ruled federation. According to Kessler, Ben-Gurion proposed “a Jewish state within an Arab Federation” with “equal executive authority.” Kessler writes, “To Shertok’s contention that Arabs stood to gain from Zionism, [Alami] answered that he would rather the country remain poor and desolate for another hundred years until the Arabs could develop it themselves.”

His proposals were rejected by all Arab parties, leaving the Jewish Zionists convinced the Arabs planned to murder them when they could, and the only remaining option was a nation state in which they could protect themselves. Thus, Political Zionism became the victorious Zionist position among nearly all the Jewish immigrants.

From 1936–1939, the Arabs of Palestine engaged in a massively violent revolt which had as its object to murder the Jews and drive out the British. From their perspective, the Palestinian Arabs were trying to win their freedom from a colonial power while killing and driving out a disruptive mass immigrant population. From the Jewish perspective, they had seemingly fled from the flame ( in Europe ) to the fire ( in Palestine ) and they had little choice but to fight for their own survival.

The British managed to successfully put down this revolt, and in the process trained the Jewish forces how to fight like a professional military force while simultaneously devastating the Palestinian Arab forces. The British launched a Commission to study the situation, named the Peel Commission, and try to resolve the conflict.

By 1937, the British Peel Commission had already concluded co-existence in a single state would be impossible,

An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible. The Arabs desire to revive the traditions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State.

The Peel Commission recommended a partition. Both the Jewish and Arab communities held formal gatherings to consider it. What came out of those gatherings has shaped everything which has happened since. The Jewish congress rejected the Peel commission’s specific border recommendations but accepted the idea of partition in principle, offering to negotiate. The Arab congress rejected the concept of partition or the continued Jewish presence altogether, and vowed to take all the land ( and drive the Jewish people out ) by whatever means was necessary.

The fundamental shape of the conflict has not changed much since. It really has little to do with Palestinian anger at settlements and checkpoints on the West Bank. Anger at those things is real and is hot, but were those issues resolved the anger and desire for “violent resistance” would remain, just rooted in the deeper issues. If you do not believe me, you can hear it from Palestinians themselves by clicking on the Go Deeper link below and watching the video,

Go deeper video: The Ask Project, “Palestinians: Israel exists, shouldn’t you deal with that reality?”

As I’ve described in other chapters, the initial Zionist immigrants were fleeing pogroms or more general anti-Semitism in Europe. They were the first of three waves of Jewish refugees. The second wave came in the lead up to and after WW II, as the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no real options to return to their homes. At least 200,000 of them went for refuge to Palestine/Israel, and most of the rest went to America. This new influx of refugees enraged the Arab population, who could not accept even more Jewish people on “Muslim” land because it made the demographic turn even harder to reverse.

Importantly, the source of this wave of Jewish refugees was neither ‘colonialism’ nor ‘racism’. It was the displacement of Jews from Europe, of a sort that was also happening to other peoples all over the world after the allies defeated the axis and the old borders of the European empires crumbled across the globe. The Jewish refugees who migrated demanded to be allowed to go to their ancestral homeland. They were not placed there as a colonial project by European powers. They were escaping European powers.

Jewish people also took three crucial, permanent lessons from the Holocaust.

Firstly, Jewish people are ridiculously outnumbered, and the Holocaust showed Jewish existence is incredibly fragile, as we came very close to extinction. In the whole world today, there are only 15 to 16 million Jews and there were many fewer in 1948. In contrast, currently there are 450 million Arabs and 2 billion Muslims, a large number of which want to see the Jewish homeland extinguished and the Jews with them. “Never again” for Jewish people means, partly, never again underestimating how fragile our existence is or having to rely entirely on the tolerance and charity of Muslims or Christians for our people to continue to exist.

Secondly, the idea of a permanently safe land for Jews to live in is essential, not just an idealistic dream, because Jews must always have a place where they will be welcome. Jewish people throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s tried to flee the Nazis and found every door closed to them, and ended up dying in the millions because of that. “Never again” means, partly, never again should every door be closed to desperate Jews facing slaughter or oppression. There is no way to guarantee this openness in some land unless Jewish people have political control of a homeland.

Go deeper: The Voyage of the St Louis and doors being closed to Jews fleeing the Nazis

Thirdly, Jewish people learned to believe people when they hear those people say they want to murder Jews. We don’t think it is just talk. We don’t think it will die down or go away on its own. We don’t delay. We don’t dither. “Never again” is a promise the Jewish people made to themselves, not a promise the world made to them. It means fight, fight hard, and fight before the enemy has a chance to gather their strength, so strike first rather than wait to respond. Take no chances.

These three lessons have guided almost every decision Israelis have made in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948, which gets re-cast and re-framed by leftists and Palestinian advocates as racist aggression. In truth, it is simply impossible to understand Israeli actions towards the Arabs in their region without understanding those three lessons from the Holocaust.

In 1948, after the UN voted to recommend a partition of the land, the Arab rejection of the Peel commission played out all over again, but this time with help from outside armies. The internal Arab population launched a siege of Jerusalem before the UN Vote and the Arab League launched a war using the armies of five Arab nations, which they publicly declared was a “war of extermination against the Jews”.

Go deeper: The Holocaust Encyclopedia on Holocaust refugees

This war displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose descendants today number in the millions. As Einat Wilf comprehensively documents in her book War of Return, the ideology of the 1930’s has been incubated in these Palestinian refugee communities, and it has evolved into a kind of violent radicalism in the decades since 1948.

Palestinian radicalism takes a very specific form. It is the belief by the millions of artificially maintained “refugees”, who are really just descendants of the displaced persons from 1948, that “Palestine” is not their home but, rather, the specific village or neighborhood their ancestors lived in before 1948 is their home; that they have an innate, inalienable right of return to that spot inside Israel; that they have an inalienable right to use violence to achieve that right of return; and that the rights they have in this respect are individual rather than collective and cannot be negotiated away on their behalf by any representative or government.

This is what creates the unending violence and hatred on the Palestinian side. It is also what is behind the unreasonable demand that the West Bank be “Jew free”, as if having Jewish people living on land is inherently an unjust thing. There is no cure to this ideology except time and distance. The refugees need to be resettled to Muslim countries which do not border Israel, and dispersed far enough and thinly enough away from one another that it becomes difficult to maintain their ideological identity.

The Jewish radicals mostly cause border violence around the settlement areas. This violence is terrible but it is from a small group concentrated in small locations, and it should not be that hard to control, if there was proper motivation towards peace to do the work. Any peace negotiation needs to force a crack down on that. Perhaps a joint Israeli/Palestinian border police and a jointly run prison which enforces draconian “breaking the peace” laws on both sides could obtain the needed tranquility. There’s no need to dismantle the settlements. Indeed, there’s no reason Israeli Jews should not be allowed to live in Judea and Samaria. What is needed is a serious bi-partisan security infrastructure with a zero-tolerance policy on bad behavior.

The anti-Zionist call to dismantle the Jewish state is a call for murder of a state and millions of people through what would be unending internal warfare. Similarly, any liberal Western call for a two-state “solution” which doesn’t put these ideological issues at the very front of the negotiations, with extremely concrete steps to resolve them, is only setting up a conflagration in the future.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. What about that 1948 war?

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine