Bookshelf: Some myths about Israel

Allan C. Brownfeld, Portside

A few excerpts from a review of the book “Ten Myths About Israel’ by Ilan Pappe that will appear in the Winter 2018 Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. The book is published by Verso.  

The first myth which is confronted is the Zionist claim that Palestine was an empty land.  There is a consensus among scholars that it was the Romans who gave the land the name “Palestine.” During the period of Roman and, later, Byzantine, rule it was an imperial province.  Various Muslim empires aspired to control it, since it was home to the second holiest place in Islam and was also fertile and in a strategic location.  The Ottoman period began in 1517 and lasted 400 years.  When the Ottomans arrived, they found a society that was mostly Sunni Muslim and rural, with small urban elites who spoke Arabic.  Less than 5 per cent of the population was Jewish and probably 10 to 15 per cent Christian.


... At the end of the 19th century, Palestine had a sizeable population, of which only a small percentage was Jewish.  Those Jews who did live in Palestine at this time were opposed to the ideas promoted by Zionism. 

The second myth considered is that, “The Jews Were a People Without a Land.” Asking whether the Jewish settlers who arrived in Palestine could be considered “a people,” Pappe cites Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which shows that the Christian world, in its own interest, adopted the idea of the Jews as a nation that must one day return to the holy land.  This return, in their view, would be part of the divine scheme for the end of the world, along with the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of the Messiah.

... Another myth which Pappe confronts is, “Zionism Is Not Colonialism.” When the first Zionist settlers arrived in 1882, the land of Palestine was not empty. In fact, he writes, “This fact was known to the Zionist leaders even before the first Jewish settlers arrived. A delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations reported back to their colleagues: ‘The bride is beautiful, but married to another man.’ Nevertheless, when they first arrived, the early settlers were surprised to encounter the locals whom they regarded as invaders and strangers. In their view, the native Palestinians had usurped their homeland. They were told by their leaders that the locals were not natives, that they had no rights to the land. Instead, they were a problem that had to, and could, be resolved.”

... A just solution to the dilemma of Palestine will, Pappe concludes, only be achieved if we stop treating the mythologies he sets forth as truths: “Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not ‘redeemed’; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily. Colonized people, even under the U.N. Charter, have the right to struggle for their liberation…and the successful ending to such a struggle lies in the creation of a democratic state that includes all of its inhabitants.”