Settlement In Palestine Research Articles

Kantian Rights and the Zionist Settlement in Palestine

Abstract Zionism aimed to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine. It involved settlement of Zionist Jews in the region, despite facing resistance from many local Arabs. Was the unilateral Zionist settlement morally permissible, or was it an instance of wrongful colonialism? Three objections will be discussed here and they all stem from the Kantian ethics of state-building and the minimalistic conception of statehood that follows from it. According to the ‘neutralist objection’, the establishment of a national home is not a just cause for a state building project. The ‘cosmopolitan’ objection argues that unilateral settlement is permissible only in extreme circumstances and that typically, it violates the locals’ right to self-rule. Finally, the imperialist objection argues that Zionist unilateralism exploited the wrongful colonial rule to which Arab Palestinians were subject. I will show that no Kantian objection to Zionism is decisive.

Rashid Rida, the Zionist Movement, and the Jewish Settlement in Palestine

One of the most prominent religious scholars of Sunni Islam in the first third of the twentieth century, Muhammad Rashid Rida was a reformer who sought to rehabilitate the Muslim world by means of a return to its origins. In this sense, Rida was a predecessor to the Muslim Brethren and other fundamentalist movements. A lesser-known facet of Rida’s thought is his attitude towards the Jewish settlement in Palestine and the Zionist movement – an attitude that began with appreciation if not admiration, continued in attempts at cooperation (in the face of common enemies and in general), and ended with antisemitic remarks and unequivocal rulings against the Zionist enterprise. The article traces the evolution of Rida’s approach to the Zionist movement and the Jewish settlement in Palestine, including texts of religious rulings (fatwas) issued by Rida in the 1930s on the sale of land to Jews in Palestine.

آليات إنفاذ قرارات الأمم المتحدة المتعلقة بالمستوطنات الإسرائيلية في الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة طبقاً لقواعد القانون الدولي

This study sheds light on the attempt to find appropriate mechanisms to implement the United Nations’ resolutions related to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, following the rules of international law. This is prompted by Israel’s failure to comply with international resolutions, the most recent being Security Council Resolution No. 2334 issued on December 23, 2016. The study aims to highlight the concept of Israeli settlement in the West Bank and its motives, as well as to examine ways and means of prosecuting Israel, holding it responsible for the settlements before the International Criminal Court. The researchers adopted a descriptive-analytical approach for this study, which is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the nature of the settlement crime and the legal status of the occupied Palestinian territories. The second section discusses the most important United Nations’ resolutions regarding Israeli settlement in Palestine and the mechanisms for enforcing these decisions in accordance with the rules of international law. The study concludes with a set of results, the most important of which emphasizes the necessity of using diplomatic and popular means to implement UN resolutions related to settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Filistinli Arapların Sultan II. Abdülhamid Döneminde ve Sonrasında Yahudi Siyonistlere Yönelik Tutumları

With the end of the Ottoman Empire in Bayt al-Maqdis a new page in history was being turned, ending centuries of peace in the Holy Land. This study concentrates on Palestinian Arabs and their attitudes towards Jewish Zionist settlement and their land purchase activities in Palestine, particularly under the British occupation. There are two divergent ideas concerning Palestinian and Jewish Zionists relations. While some scholars claim that Arab Muslims were passive and submissive towards Jewish Zionists and they did not put forward reactionary attitude towards Jewish Zionists and they even further state that those Arabs sold their lands to them willingly and earned huge sums of profit and hence they were contented with Zionist settlement. However, contrary to this claim evidence shows Arab Palestinians helped and supported the Ottomans against Jewish Zionism in restricting Zionist settlement and land purchase activities in Palestine. In this respect, this study argues that Palestinian Arab Muslims from the outset foresaw expansionist Zionists and put forward their resistance in different means. They clearly did their best to stop the Zionist influx and thus altered the attitude of the British Mandate. Therefore, throughout the study it can be clearly seen that even after the end of the Ottoman rule in the region, Palestinian Arabs tried their best to preserve their presence and status in Palestine against the British and Jewish Zionists.

De-colonising the right to housing, one new city at a time: Seeing housing development from Palestine/Israel

The right to housing is generally understood as a local struggle against the global commodification of housing. While useful for recognising overarching urbanisation processes, such understanding risks washing over the distinctive politics that produce the housing crisis and its ostensible solutions in different contexts around the globe. Situated in a settler-colonial context, this paper bridges recent comparative urban studies with Indigenous narratives of urbanisation, to re-think housing crisis solutions from the point of view of the colonised. Based on in-depth interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the paper compares two cases of state-initiated, privatised housing developments, one in Israel and one in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the new cities Tantour and Rawabi. Each case is examined as a singularity, distinctive formations of the spatialities of Zionist settlement in Palestine, which are now being transformed through privatised housing development. The paper presents these developments as mutually constituted through a colonial-settler project and Palestinian sumud resistance, the praxis of remaining on the land. The paper utilises comparison as a strategy, exploring each new city in turn, to reveal the range of directions in sumud. Thus, by seeing housing development as site for negotiating de-colonisation on the ground, the paper contributes to recent debates over the power of comparative urbanism to re-think global phenomena through treating urban terrains as singularities.

Rashīd Riḍā, Jews, and Zionism

ABSTRACT Muhammad Rashīd Riḍā was one of the most prominent religious scholars of Sunni Islam in the first third of the twentieth century, a reformer who sought to rehabilitate the Muslim world by means of a return to its origins, a strategy later followed by the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist movements. This article deals with a lesser-known aspect of Riḍā’s thought – his evolving attitude toward the Jewish settlement in Palestine and the Zionist movement. It began with appreciation if not admiration, continued in attempts at cooperation (in the face of common enemies and in general), and ended with anti-Semitic remarks and unequivocal religious rulings (fatwās) against the Zionist enterprise. All the same, even when Riḍā came to believe that the Zionist movement was an enemy that had to be fought, he still appreciated its abilities and continued to hold that Arabs and Muslims should take it as a role model both in fighting it and in general.

Perceptions of the Committee of Union and Progress in the press of the Yishuv, 1909-1914

ABSTRACT The policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) towards Zionism and Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine have already been considered in the scholarly literature. The other side of the issue, however, namely how the Yishuv itself regarded the CUP and its policies in general, has not been the subject of a systematic examination. The present study attempts to explore this question by a reading of five different Hebrew newspapers published in Palestine during the period 1909–1914. The findings indicate that the newspapers of the Second Aliyah immigrants and the Orthodox Ashkenazim were more supportive of the CUP than those of the Sephardim and especially the First Aliyah immigrants, depending on the different priorities of each sector within the Yishuv. Regardless of these differences, however, and in spite of the Yishuv’s growing disillusionment with the Unionists already observed by the existing literature, all the newspapers considered here ultimately gave preference to the CUP over the opposition. Among their reasons for this preference were its lack of overt hostility to the Jews and the Yishuv, its identity as the mainstay of the constitutional regime, and its relative superiority in terms of qualified staff, coherence, and socio-economic programmes.

Reforming identities: Jews’ experience of German colonial expansion

ABSTRACT This essay investigates German Jews’ conceptualization of colonialism, and its consequent meanings regarding their identity formation in the years between 1884 and 1919. The discussion tackles the intersections and disjunctions of identities among German Jews of various orientations, as inspired by the colonial venture and within globalization process. The analysis reveals the interplay between the endorsement of colonialism by Jews as part of their German national identification, and the impact of growing antisemitism and racial attitudes nourished by the encounter with other ‘inferior races’ in the colonies. It explores the ideological parallels that Jews perceived between German and European colonization, and the Zionist settlement in Palestine. The article also demonstrates how Jews’ increasing exposure – real or imagined – to different places and cultures as part of the colonial experience stirred ideas of Jewish racial superiority and distinctive nationalism, alongside transnational perspectives that encouraged a broader sense of Jewish solidarity.

Anniversaries of ‘first’ settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration

ABSTRACT This article centres on stylized commemorative events staged in Israel in 1962 and 1982 to mark, respectively, 80 and 100 years since the consensual beginning of the “First Aliyah,” the first wave of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine. Focusing on protocols of 1962 and 1982 Knesset sessions, commemorative medals, military parades, summer camps, and local commemorations, it shows that multiple completing Zionist parties used the rhetoric of “firstness” to negotiate and redefine primacy in light of the political present. Drawing from scholarship on settler memory in other settings, it also positions the settlement event as not a onetime historical occurrence but a sacralized referent used to frame and justify ongoing settlement and participate in historical erasures.

The Ottoman Response to Laurence Oliphant’s Project of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (1879-1882)

This paper focuses on Laurence Oliphant’s efforts to organize a Jewish settlement in Palestine between 1879 and 1882 and the Ottoman response to these efforts. After giving due information about Oliphant’s Restorationist (Christian Zi- onist) background in order to understand why he was so deeply interested in the question of Jewish settlement in Palestine, his proposal to the Ottoman government in 1879 on this issue is explained in some detail, based primarily on Ottoman ar- chival documents. This is the only instance in which the Ottoman government was officially faced with the issue of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and was also the first instance in which it was discussed at the highest level, resulting in a response that guided Ottoman policies during the rest of Abdülhamid II period.
 The following part of the article examines Oliphant’s second attempt at obtaining permission for a Jewish settlement in Palestine in 1882. In this part, American sup- port for Oliphant’s efforts, as well as the Ottoman reaction to this support, will be explained. The Ottoman response to the question of Jewish settlement in Palestine constitutes an important component of the article.

Poradnictwo zawodowe dla żydowskiej młodzieży szkolnej w Polsce w okresie międzywojennym

This article presents the beginnings of vocational counselling for school-attending adolescents in Poland. Vocational counselling developed in Poland in the Interwar period as a sub-discipline of applied psychology. The Jewish minority largely contributed to the development of this movement with Lvov at centre of it. Jews established a vocational counselling and psycho-technical institutes, putting the emphasis on school-attending adolescents and apprentices in craft companies, as well as developing new tools for psycho-technical measurements. Zionism was one of the reasons for the development of Jewish vocational counselling for young people. Zionists believed that young Jews should acquire a profession that would allow Jewish settlement in Palestine. This article also presents Zofia Lipszyc, Adolf Berman, Lea Fejgin-Gartensteyg, Jakub Kessler and Józef Weinbaum, unknown Jewish psychologists and psychotechcians.

Typology as situatedness: the architectural dialectics of modern vernaculars in British Mandate Palestine

This article examines the ways in which several key figures in Jewish architectural circles sought to create an appropriate style that would reflect their emerging national identity in British Mandate Palestine. I analyse the 1930s texts by two architects and educators at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion Polytechnic, Yohanan Ratner and Julius Posener, whose efforts were motivated by a notion of belonging. Belonging or affirming a connection to a specific place, and creating architecture that reflected this connection, was a pressing question for architects in the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine, which was mainly populated by new immigrants. The article argues that Ratner (who immigrated to Palestine in 1923), and even more so Posener (who did so in 1935), addressed the notion of belonging by articulating a ‘local bearing’ for modern Israeli architecture. Stemming from a critical historiography of interwar modernism, ‘local bearing’ refers to the process of situating modern architecture, and claiming its historic and vernacular sources. I show that typological reflections, or the examination of architecture’s cultural and disciplinary history, became the means through which these architects sought to localise modern architecture.

Władza, przywództwo i siła polityczna w amerykańskim ruchu syjonistycznym w latach 1914-1920. W stulecie ustanowienia Brytyjskiego Mandatu Palestyny

World War I marked the beginning of a significant role of American Jewry in global affairs. Both the emergence of the United States as the new world power and the financial status of the Jewish American community contributed to a considerable participation of American Jews in the councils of world Jewry. The war and its aftermath brought fundamental changes to the Zionist movement, which offered the pragmatic approach to the actual problems of Diaspora Jews. There appeared both the necessity and possibility for uniting all the American Zionist factions into a powerful organization with an efficient party apparatus and prominent leadership which revitalized the Zionist movement and made it responsive to its main aim, i.e., the establishment of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine. Louis D. Brandeis’s leadership marked a turning point in the history of American Zionism through a combination of his potent personality with a coherent ideology that reflected the American conditions. All those developments helped create the most powerful American Zionist organization in the world, with the sole aim to effectually implement the idea of a home for the Jewish people. The Americanization of Zionism, based on practical work in building up Palestine, was a direct reason for a bitter conflict between Brandeis and Weizmann, the leader of European Zionism, that is between fostering Jewish settlement in Palestine through a systematic and methodical economic process on the one hand, and through implementing a synthesis of socio-ethical and cultural values that Zionism in Weizmann’s view should represent, on the other. The article discusses the circumstances which triggered the American Zionist movement to assume power, prestige, and large following; it also analyzes the reasons for an orchestrated and determined diplomatic action on the part of both the Zionist Organization of America and the World Zionist Organization to articulate and achieve their direct aim first through the Balfour Declaration and then through the San Remo Conference decision of entrusting the Mandate over Palestine to Great Britain. They both proved to have been the indispensable prerequisites for the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine.

Songs That Young Gershom Scholem May Have Heard: Jacob Beimel's Jüdische Melodieen, Jung Juda, and Jewish Musical Predicaments in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin

Published in Berlin in 1911 and edited by the Eastern European cantor-composer-musicologist Jacob Beimel (1875–1944), JüdischeMelodieen [sic] is a songster containing music for forty-five songs in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Hungarian by a diverse array of composers and poets. It was intended as a musical companion to the Vereinsliederbuchfür Jung-Juda (first published in 1901 without music), the songster of the Zionist-leaning youth movement Jung Juda with which Gershom Scholem sympathized for a period in his early youth. Taking JüdischeMelodieen both as a product of modern Jewish agency and as a reflection of how Jewish identities were performed in late Wilhelmine Germany, this essay explores a complex web of existential questioning regarding the past, present, and future of the Jews through a deep analysis of the songs and the human network they entailed. JüdischeMelodieen contains the earliest musical evidence of the momentous encounter between German and Eastern European Jewish songs with the repertoire stemming from the incipient Jewish settlement in Palestine. As such, it evinces a rooted Jewish identification with German values, aesthetics, and education, destabilized by growing antisemitism and forced alienation leading to the adoption of alternative models of Jewish modernity. The Eastern European option of a more authentic Jewishness and, more forcefully, Jewish nationalism and Hebraism emerges from the musical selections in JüdischeMelodieen as alternatives to the German Jewish social construct that was still prevalent in Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Nationalism and Monolingualism: the “Language Wars” and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism

With the establishment of a Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early 20th century, and a Hebrew culture with it, furious debates arose among Jewish writers about the future of Jewish literary multilingualism. Until this period, the idea that Jewish monolingualism was a preferred mode of cultural existence or that a writer would have to choose between the two primary languages of European Jewish cultural production was a relatively new one. Polylingualism had been characteristic of Jewish culture and literary production for millennia. But in modernity, Jewish nationalist movements, particularly Zionism, demanded a monolingual Jewish culture united around one language. Nonetheless, polylingual Jewish culture has persisted, and despite the state of Israel’s insistence on Hebrew as the national language, Israeli multilingualism has surged in recent years. This article surveys a number of recent developments in translingual, transcultural, and transnational Israeli literary and cultural forms

The Relations Between the Ottomans, Zionists and Palestinian Jews as Refl ected in Israeli History Textbooks

Israeli history textbooks published since 1948 dwell at length on the Ottoman government's relations with the Zionists and its policies toward the Palestinian Jews. Explaining the Ottomans' opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine, the textbooks acknowledge their concern that a non-Muslim majority could emerge there to demand autonomy or independence, as had happened earlier in the Balkans. However, they sharply criticize the wartime policies of Jamal Pasha against the Jewish community in Palestine. Although they concede that the majority of the community remained loyal to the Ottoman government, they mainly attribute this to their fears of a harsh retaliation from the part of the government. In contrast, they consider the pro-British activities of Nili and the Hebrew Battalions as the right kind of investment for the future of the community.

Zionist Frontiers: David Ben-Gurion, Labor Zionism, and transnational circulations of settler development

ABSTRACTThis article examines how settler colonial narratives, structures and relations constitute development. The article offers a new concept, settler development, to show how development, as a colonial template of liberal rule and economic improvement, and settler colonialism, augment and imprint each other. To understand how settler development works, I present a case study that analyzes settler texts that circulate between Zionists in the United States and in Palestine before 1948. In particular, David Ben-Gurion, leader of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and writers in the Jewish American magazine, Jewish Frontier, sought to justify settlement based on economic productivity to appeal to the British to hand over the Mandate to settlers, not indigenous Palestinians. These circulating discourses valorized the ‘pioneer’ as the quintessential subject of settler development who is assumed to have a right over indigenous land through their ability to improve economic productivity. The article combines settler colonial and critical development studies to suggest creative analyses of the way that development is epistemologically linked to the networks of settler colonialism.

Michael Brenner. In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 392 pp.

Reviewed by: In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner Anita Shapira Michael Brenner. In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 392 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000369 Brenner is a serious scholar who writes elegantly and dispassionately, attempting to present a balanced, scholarly book on what he defines as "the history of an idea." The idea he ventures to explore is what he describes as a contradiction between the desire of Zionism to return the Jewish people to normality, to be achieved through the establishment of a state in Palestine, and the goal of this state to be "a light unto the nations." There exists a difference between themes that interest scholars of Israel outside Israel and Israeli scholars, namely that Israelis prefer to write about the history of the Zionist movement, Jewish settlement in Palestine and Israel, and Jewish-Arab relations, and are much less interested in the history of Zionism as a concept. In contrast, scholars abroad are interested in the history of ideas and tend to unearth marginal or forgotten thinkers and scholars, usually those whose works illuminate an alternative Zionist or non-Zionist approach to Jewry and its history in the past 150 years. Brenner belongs to this trend. What is normality, and how are we supposed to measure it? Was normality the elimination of the Jews' pariah status, or was it the creation of a rejuvenated people that would shed anomalies that were the result of life as a despised and persecuted minority? One of the major assumptions of Zionism was that the creation of the Jewish state would end antisemitism. This assumption was wrong; antisemitism is thriving, sometimes camouflaged as anti-Zionism. According to some of the scholars and polemicists Brenner mentions, the existence of Israel is endangering Jews in the Diaspora because they are identified with the Jewish state. Is antisemitism the result of Jews being unique, or is it the result of Jews being a weak and vulnerable minority? I believe it is the latter. Brenner thinks it is the former. The categories are not contradictory, but when they are juxtaposed, as they are in this book, the question arises of whether there is an inherent clash between the idea of normality and the idea of uniqueness. Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaims the natural right of Jews, "like all people," to a state of their own. It does not say anything about a unique state. The state was built by immigrants who came from all over the world, not by a native people. This is not unique, as all immigrant states were created by nonnatives. The problem of the Jews was that ownership of this land was and is still claimed by two peoples. But even in this, Israel is not unique. Territorial disputes and conflicts exist in other countries as well. In what way should Israel be unique? At one time, the ideal was social justice, then it was liberalism, and today many Israelis embrace Messianism, an idea supported by Christian evangelicals. However, every state is unique in its own way and has its own conflicts. The mix of religion and secularism, of ethnicity and nationalism, can be found all over the world, and in this regard, Israel is very "normal." An additional claim to uniqueness is that Israel considers itself responsible for the Jewish Diaspora. In this, too, Israel is not unique. The [End Page 254] Greeks, Armenians, and today Syrians, Palestinians, and even Russians have a Diaspora. Israel is unique in the attention it draws and the criticism it evokes. Is this the result of its uniqueness, or maybe of old antisemitism that denies Jews what is permissible to other people? I have stated all this not so much to contest the uniqueness of Israel, but to contest the claim that there is an inner tension between the ideal of "a light unto the nations" and the yearning for normality. While Brenner's book soundly presents the changes in the character of Israel's so-called uniqueness, Brenner accepts the yearning for normality as static. What does "normality" mean in the twenty-first century? The wandering...

Shifting Sands: Zionism & American Jewry

The current willingness of major American Jewish organizations and leaders to dismiss the threat from white supremacists in the name of supporting Israel represents a new stage in the shifting relationship of U.S. Jews toward Zionism. In the first stage, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of U.S. Jews did not take to Zionism, as its goals seemed antithetical to their aspirations to join mainstream American society. In a second stage, attitudes toward Zionism grew more positive as conditions for European Jews worsened, and Jewish settlement in Palestine grew substantially. Following Israeli statehood in 1948, U.S. Jews began gradually to support Israel. Jewish groups and leaders increasingly characterized criticism of Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic and attacked Israel's critics. In a third and most recent stage, many major Jewish organizations and leaders have subordinated the traditional U.S. Jewish interest in combatting white supremacy and bigotry when it comes into conflict with support for Israel and Zionism.

Foreign Means to Local Ends: Bialik, Emerson, and the Uses of America in 1920s Palestine

Author(s): Evron, Nir | Abstract: In 1926, Haim Nachman Bialik, the premier poet and leading intellectual light of the Zionist movement, sailed for New York on a five-month-long fundraising mission on behalf of the yishuv, the pre-statehood Jewish settlement in Palestine. After his return, the poet gave a long speech in Tel Aviv, recounting his impressions of the United States before an audience of thousands. The America that Bialik presented to his listeners, this essay begins by arguing, should be read as tissue of widely circulating tropes and mythemes, which the poet had absorbed during his formative years in Europe as well as in the course of his 1926 tour. The essay then proceeds to discuss the uses to which the poet puts this (largely borrowed) narrative of American difference, focusing in particular on Bialik’s ambivalent response to the futural (largely Emersonian) ethos to which he returns time and again in his speech, and which he seems to simultaneously endorse and reject. The main part of the essay’s argument is devoted to making sense of this ambivalence, which I attribute to the diverging “temporal imaginaries” that underwrite Zionist and American exceptionalisms.