The Children of Death Never Die: Specters of the Early Zionist Past

Abstract

Abstract: This chapter considers the curious and perennial recurrence, in Zionist periodicals, memoirs and historiographic literature, of the claim that Palestinian Arabs referred to Jews in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as " Awlad al-mawt " (Children of Death). Invocations of this term are typically paired with ideologically laden statements of Zionists overcoming this characterization by demonstrating their capacity for physical strength and willingness to employ violence. Evoking a legacy of conflict with Palestinian Arabs, a longstanding European trope of Jews lacking vitality, and the promise of Jewish revival, Awlad al-mawt , in multiple dialectical variations and transliterations, became a byword for Jewish transformation but also for a lingering anxiety about its ultimate impossibility. By tracing the usages and context of this term throughout the twentieth century, from its first known appearances just before the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through 1948, it argues that ambivalence about early Zionist strength informs evolving anxieties about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the inherent precarity of Zionism as a settler project, and the attendant militarization of Zionist and Israeli society.