Zeal
I later found out that 1987 witnessed the convergence of certain historical lines, a convergence that would change the Middle East and (for an indefinite period) change the world…
On May 27 of that year there was a gala dinner in New York, organised by the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim (‘Crown of the Priests’). In his address the leader of the movement, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, summarised its aims:
We must settle the whole land of Israel, and over all of it establish our rule. The Arabs are squatters. I don’t know who gave them authorisation to live on Jewish land. All mankind knows that this is our land. Most Arabs came here recently. And even if some Arabs had been here for two thousand years, is there a statute of limitations that gives a thief a right to its plunder?
The main speaker at the event was the Israeli Ambassador to the UN (a successor of the redoubtable Abba Eban), Benjamin Netanyahu, destined to oust David Ben Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
Eight months later, on December 9, after several violent incidents (the precipitant was a car crash that killed four Gazan workmen), the First Intifada began. Intifada: literally ‘a jumping up in reaction’; ‘to shake oneself’, ‘to shake off’. Over the following five years, Israeli deaths numbered 185; as always in these intramural conflicts, Palestinian deaths were very roughly ten times higher (estimated at 1,500). And of course the First Intifada, compared to the Second, now seems implausibly tame.
On February 11, 1988, a new political party was established in the Holy Land. Drawing on the inhabitants of the twenty-seven refugee camps within Israel and the million-strong population of Gaza, it called itself the Movement of the Islamic Resistance, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, and was soon known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas, or zeal; it was thus a key element in what some call the Islamic Revival, and others call political Islam, or Islamism, and yet others call takfir. This was a movement that was reaching critical momentum, and this was its founding idea: Islam huwa al hali – Islam, far from being the problem, is the solution.
Islamist policy on Israel was maximally rejectionist and maximally Judaeocidal. Hamas itself quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – that long-exploded Tsarist fabrication – in its charter, if you can believe. Yes, but if you can believe…
Is believing seeing, or is it not seeing?
Ninety years earlier, in April 1897, a man called Herbert Bentwich, accompanied by twenty other Zionists, went on an exploratory pilgrimage to a certain province of the Ottoman Empire. Bentwich and the group he led were not from the ghetto or the shtetl; they were unbuffeted by White Guards and Black Hundreds. Affluent professionals, they sailed in style from London (the trip was catered by Thomas Cook, with carriages, horsemen, guides, servants). Their mission, assigned to them by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was to assess the feasibility of settling in Palestine, and to submit a report to the first Zionist Congress (November 1897). Herzl’s Zionism was secular, even atheistic; but Bentwich was a believer.
Ari Shavit is a modern Israeli, an author and veteran Haaretz columnist; he is also a great-grandson of the Right Honourable Herbert Bentwich. In My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013) Shavit retraces that Cook’s Tour. We remember Bentwich’s task: to decide whether the Jews should spurn this land or settle on it. Shavit feelingly but unsparingly interjects:
My great-grandfather is not really fit to make such a decision. He does not see the Land as it is. Riding in the elegant carriage from Jaffa to Mikveh Yisrael, he did not see the Palestinian village of Abu Kabir. Travelling from Mikveh Yisrael to Rishon LeZion, he did not see the Palestinian village of Yazur…And in Ramleh he does not really see that Ramleh is a Palestinian town.
And so it continues, as Bentwich trundles on, crisscrossing the entire region:
There are more than half a million Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze in Palestine in 1897. There are twenty cities and towns, and hundreds of villages. So how can the pedantic Bentwich not notice them? How can the hawkeyed Bentwich not see that the Land is taken?…My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back. But my great-grandfather cannot turn back.
He believes, so he cannot turn back. He believes, so he does not see. As a case of selective blindness this would be sufficiently remarkable. But Bentwich is in the vanguard of something far more extraordinary.
One member of his group was Israel Zangwill, the internationally celebrated writer known as ‘the Dickens of the Ghetto’, who at the turn of the century would popularise the Zionist slogan, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. By 1904 Zangwill had changed his mind (or regained full consciousness); he delivered a speech in New York which startled his audience and scandalised world Jewry (and for this ‘heresy’ he was pressured out of the movement for a decade). Palestine, he let it be known, was populated.
Zangwill added, again controversially, that the Jews would have to learn the arts of violence, and claim the land with fire and sword.
The spirits of the shady night
And I went on reading
