Progress in Palestine: How Zionist Approaches to Development Hindered Peace

In his inaugural address, David Ben-Gurion, the founder and first prime minister of Israel, stated his aim to “strive to develop the land for the good of all its residents.” Long before official Israeli statehood, though, the Zionist project had already placed an emphasis on land development and a sense of constant improvement. The “Holy Land” itself required careful stewardship and necessitated the seemingly benevolent authority of Zionist leaders who intended to ensure the lasting stability of the Palestinian people along with their own settlement. Despite these claims, though, the region soon erupted into all-out war and has, ever since the 1890s, been one of the most contested pieces of land across the globe. Scholars have presented a variety of interpretations of the conflict’s origin, ranging from foreign intervention to mere territorial dispute to clash of civilizations, yet no one approach seems to fully encompass the scale and the nature of the issue at hand. While conflict over the land of Palestine often appeared religious or ideological in nature, it fundamentally revolved around not only the parcel of land itself but also more basic notions of land use. In short, beginning in the late nineteenth century, varying conceptions of development undermined the validity of the existing Arab Palestinian society, laying the foundation for Zionism and further confusing the broadly arbitrary distinction between modernization and so-called “Westernization.”

The conflict is often defined as largely a problem of “real estate” (as scholar James L. Gelvin so succinctly describes it), yet this is a flawed perception: it frames the issue as a rational and practical disagreement, overlooking its ideological complications. However, it was in many ways a land-based conflict, and specifically one that arose from incompatible notions of land development and the myth of an empty and almost primitive Palestine. Long before the establishment of Mandate Palestine or the initial outbreak of armed conflict, early purchases of Palestinian land by Zionists began taking place as the ideology surfaced among the intellectual elite of Europe in the late nineteenth century, and historian Mark LeVine describes these changes as setting the stage for the ongoing “conflictual nature” of Israeli-Palestinian relations. This land appeared to the first Zionists barren and in need of development––“a poor and backward agricultural country,” as one 1928 bulletin reflecting on nineteenth-century Palestine described it––yet LeVine empirically disproves this myth, instead citing Ottoman-era sharika practices as evidence of prosperity prior to Zionist occupation of the land. The near-feudal sharika system, which stemmed from Tanzimat-era census reform, formed a successful structure of economic development that directly refutes the idea that Palestine lacked the organization or the capacity to remain prosperous. Palestinian land had long been inhabited and farmed under the control of the Ottoman Empire, displaying consistent development in keeping with modern agricultural innovation. Even the Zionists initially recognized the presence of Palestinian institutions, aiming to achieve “conquest of land” and “conquest of labor” in their early settlements by taking direct control of existing Palestinian institutions (Gelvin 209). The theft of preexisting labor structures from Arab Palestinians functioned as a tacit acknowledgment of the region’s prosperity, and any such implication served to directly negate a Zionist founding myth that rested upon the assumption that Jewish settlement would economically benefit the people who already lived on the land. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which added Western imperial legitimacy to the Zionist cause, included explicit provisions for the well-being of “existing non-Jewish communities” in the land; this stipulation forced Zionists to portray their cause as mutually beneficial and obscure the reality of an uprooted Palestinian people (Balfour 1). In the hidden dispossession of Palestinian jobs, land, and institutions, Zionists constructed an arbitrary distinction in ideologies as they pertained to the use of the land itself, rendering it undeveloped in the eyes of the foreign public and depicting their aims for the territory as benevolent aid to the Palestinians. Ultimately, the Zionist movement of modernization and land development fueled the misconception of an empty Palestine in need of development, eventually sparking conflict between two national movements that each championed their own approaches to land and labor.

The conflict, initiated by both the reform of the late Ottoman Empire and the rise of early Zionist ideology, resulted from a misunderstanding of modernization: by viewing that which was “Western” as that which made for the most forward-looking society, European powers and Zionists pushed for a form of semi-imperial progress that directly imitated Western societies. Zionism, a revolutionary movement that would bring sudden change to the region, appeared exceedingly modern, especially in contrast to the seemingly archaic systems and technologies implemented in Palestine at the time. For example, technocracy, a term coined by scholar Derek Penslar referring to the intertwining of science and politics that caused the Zionist implementation of agricultural innovation and enforcement of development, became a “weapon” in the Zionist struggle for independence. Thus, Zionism was portrayed as a harbinger of modernity in the Middle East, bringing opportunities for “progress” through “technology… electricity… [and] better farm machinery,” among other improvements (Penslar and Bazelon, 8). “Modernization,” however, often represented the pervasive and hidden influence of Western powers. In pursuing innovation and development at all costs, Zionists echoed previous movements that had conflated “modernization” and “Westernization.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tanzimat reformers and Young Turks advocated for the increase of Western influence on a declining Ottoman Empire, marketing the Gülhane Decree (a piece of 1839 doctrine that would dictate mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman reform) for “European consumption.” Profoundly Eurocentric ideals of modernity, which viewed progress through the lens of conformity to standards of Western democracy, technology, and industrialization rather than recognizing the subjectivity of such an idea, led to a struggle between the old and new, the East and West, that brought about the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Zionism reflected similar struggles in its expectation to modernize Palestine and bring stability and salvation to its people–a naïve and ill-advised goal if ever there was one. Its imposition of Western values and ideals onto Palestine framed the conflict as, in many ways, an imperial one. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl presented the modern Zionist movement, which resulted in the first aliya, or wave of settlement, decades prior to the Balfour Declaration–one which Gelvin compares to that of the French in Algeria. In modeling itself after Western imperial projects, early Zionism set itself up for ongoing conflict and confirmed the impossibility of peace to come.

Late-nineteenth-century ideological developments and the early displacement of Palestinian labor began a conflict that has lasted into the present day, one that ultimately sprouted from two diverging understandings of land development and modernization. Modern criticisms of the state of Israel often describe the country as an example of settler colonialism, invoking comparisons to European colonization of the Americas. While such terminology presents a somewhat incomplete picture of a complex story, Zionist settlements did display an Orientalist view of Palestinian society that laid the groundwork for the territorial and ideological disputes to come. Orientalism, a term coined by Palestinian-American critic Edward Said referring to simplistic and stereotypical ideas of Asian and specifically Middle Eastern culture, denigrated existing society and civilization in Palestine and led to its portrayal as backwards and undeveloped. These misconceptions not only caused a series of wars (at least five, depending on how one chooses to define the word) but also defined Western understandings of the Middle East. Stereotypical mischaracterizations of Middle Eastern societies brought about the mandate system, which was framed by the infantilization of its Arab subjects and the creation of a Western imperial savior complex, and have since influenced both scholarship and public perception surrounding the independence and self-determination of nations that, since the beginning of Western rule, have never possessed total agency. In its near-colonial logic of development and improvement, the early Zionist movement succumbed to the same tantalizing ideology of superiority, as its proponents saw Palestinian land as empty, open, and theirs for the taking. This so-called barren terrain, inhabited by a population that might as well have been invisible, would become the Promised Land of which Zionists had long dreamed, but only at the cost of Palestinian power and freedom.