"There were no Arabs and Jews..."

Interview with Salim Tamari

Salim Tamari is the director of the Institute of Palestine Studies and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

DM: Perhaps we could start with the case of the lepers...

ST: The story comes from a man named Tawfiq Anan, who was both a dermatologist and an ethnographer. He was the head of the leper house in Bakr, West Jerusalem. He records that in the War of 1948 when the Haganah occupied the southern part of Jerusalem, they separated the Arabs from the Jews, and that included nurses, doctors and the patients. They sent the Arabs towards the Eastern Side, which was controlled by the Jordanians, and they kept the Jewish lepers and the Jewish medical staff on the Western side. And that's how the leper house was separated. It is a very minor incident, but to me it is emblematic of the issue of how nationalism became dominant, and a city which was multiethnic and multinational became divided.

DM: This occurred in the aftermath of mass Zionist immigration to Palestine...

ST: Yes. It is a consequence of the waves of the immigration which eventually, through the Zionist movement, established the Jewish state...

DM: Was the division of Palestine inevitable, or did it occur incidentally?

SL: I wouldn't use either term. In this particular case, Zionism actually was on the way to decline, because the earlier waves did not solidify themselves properly. There was an economic crisis. The Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia were having a hard time getting involved in agriculture, the country was too hot. So many of them had begun going back, or going on to America. But then Nazism took power, the immigration of the Jews to the United States was blocked by an Act of Congress, and Jewish immigration to Canada, and to Western Australia was also limited. So the only place left to escape to was Palestine, and this revitalized the Zionist movement..

DM: I know you have researched the history of Palestine under the Ottomans. What was the situation of Zionism in this period?

ST: Zionism and the Ottomans were involved in the sense that Zionists and Jewish Nationalists kept petitioning the Sultan to give land to the Movement, but they were not very cooperative,  They welcomed Jews as immigrants but they were not cooperative with the idea of a separate Jewish homeland, because they were afraid of secessionists. The Bulgarians, and the Greeks and the Armenians were also trying at this time to have their autonomy, and to separate. And they treated the Zionists in the same manner as they treated the Greeks and the Bulgarians.

DM: But then the state collapsed...

ST: In 1914, the Ottomans entered into the war on the side of the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans, against the combined enemy of Russia, Britain, France and Italy. And because of that the front collapsed in Gaza, in Southern Iraq, and on the Russian front, and then Gallipoli. So the State collapsed, and had to withdraw its presence from the Arab countries, including Palestine. The British Mandate came, and with the Mandate came the Balfour Declaration, which legalized the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine.

DM: Was Jewish nationalism in Palestine inevitable?

ST: You are preoccupied with the question of predetermination? Remember that also in our case there is the spectacular point that if the Ottomans had not entered the war on the side of the Germans, and the Austrians, but on the side of the British and the French, which was very possible, then ... the Ottoman state would not have disintegrated, and Palestine would have remained an Arab province together with Syria in the Ottoman State. And there would be no Balfour declaration. And there would be no Jewish state today. And this could have easily happened....

DM: Zionism originated in Europe. Do you think it can be seen as introducing European principles of politics into the Middle Eastern region?

ST: Ideas about nationalism, social democracy, and socialism had all had existed in the Middle East prior to the arrival of the Zionists. What they introduced was settler colonialism. The French had introduced it in Algeria. And the Zionists then introduced it the Middle East. This created a major issue for the Jews, because initially most Jews did not like the idea of being separated from the natives. Because they were themselves natives. And many were Arabic speakers. The point I am trying to make is that there were no Arabs and Jews. There were Christians, Muslims and Jews.   And then these Europeans come, and say: ''We are a separate nation. We should separate from the Syrians and the Palestinians and the Lebanese.'' And they brought a large number of people who were speaking a foreign language, Yiddish. So that is what they introduced. This idea of ''seperatedness'' and exclusivity.

DM: There were also alternative conceptions of Zionism. People like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt had a different conceptions of what a Jewish homeland in Palestine could mean, and it didn't mean a Jewish State. It meant something less exclusive, and less separatist. Why didn't that happen?

ST: Both Magnes and the Beit Shalom group wanted a joint state, which would include both Jews and Arabs, and which they defined it as a confederacy. Today, it would be called binationalism. It did not happen because the Zionist movement was not only in control of the Jewish population in Palestine, but had a mandate from the British to establish a separate Jewish state. The idea of confederacy implied independence from Britain, and a Jewish minority, in which the idea of a Jewish state would be abolished. So it did not happen because the principle of one man, one vote would have sabotaged the Zionist movement, and would have undermined the Balfour declaration. Both the British, and the Zionists, would much rather go to war. And the Arabs would of course prefer to go to war to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. And that is exactly what happened. But... eventually, of course, binationalism is what we have today, we have a binational community, if not a state.

DM: The state defines itself as Jewish...

ST: Yes, the state is definitely not binational, but the country is made-up of two national communities...

DM: Was Palestinian nationalism created as a reaction formation to Zionism and to the nationalist Jewish project in Palestine?

ST: To some extent this was the case. Previously, in the Syrian provinces you had a larger Syrian nationalism which was contending with Turkish nationalism within the Ottoman Empire, a Lebanese identity that was related to Mount Lebanon, and a Palestinian identity that was situated in the Holy Land. This identity already existed in the eighteenth century, and was formalized after the Egyptian campaign of 1830, when a separate Palestinian administrative entity was created under the control of Muhammed Ali, the viceroy of Egypt. So there was already a strong Palestinian self-consciousness in the Holy Land as Syrians, as Arabs, and as Palestinians. But the coming of the Jews to separate Palestine from Syria was an important element in making this identity much more pronounced and much more assertive...

DM: How do you think that Zionism, and the community of Jews which now exist in Palestine, has changed as a result of their presence in the area...

ST: That is a very broad subject. You can schematize it by saying that a Hebrew identity was created that did not exist before. Previously, the Jews had Yiddish, East European, North African, Iraqi identities... a series of sort of disparate ethnic groupings, which were then molded into something more integrated by Hebrew nationalism. The army and the schooling system were instruments of that. The second aspect is the decline of Social Democracy as an ideology in Israel, and the triumph of the Revisionists under Begin. That has created a nationalist state which is hostile to social democracy, which affirms a very rabid form of capitalism, and hatred of social democracy, and has dismantled all the instruments the Labor party had established.

DM: And then you have the Russians...

ST: And then you had the Russians, who injected the state with a new Jewish identity, which was full of non-Jews. Who were welcomed to Israel because they were not Arabs. The idea was to dilute the number of Arabs by bringing in a large number of people who identified with the Jewish state, because the Israelis are obsessed with demography, and with the fear that they will be overtaken by the high Arab birthright. So that is a very significant development since the 1980s. And it has created a new Israeli culture which is Slavic, and distant from its North African component, the Misrahi community. This division in the cultural identity of Israel between a North African Arab Jewish culture, and a Slavic, East European modernist culture has been a dividing line throughout the six decades of Israel's existence, and it continues to today. It has been highly contested, but somehow the Ashkenazim always had the upper hand in defining what is Israeli, what is Israeli culture, how you pronounce the Hebrew language, the standard dress code, the education system, and so on.

DM: You have also seen the development of a much more religious element in the state...

ST: True... it's an important development. It used to be that religious groups were not nationalistic: Shas began as a movement of rather peaceful leadership which called for territorial compromise. This is not the case anymore. Most of the religious groups, with a few exceptions, now tend to be rabid nationalists, and they are upping the ante with the radical secular nationalists on not giving up territory, or agreeing to a territorial compromise...

DM: There has been a rise in religious extremism across the whole region....

ST: Yes... the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran gave a huge boost to fundamentalist Muslims all over the area, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Jordan, and especially in Egypt. And the Muslim and Jewish religious revivalists feed each other... Because they speak the same language, but they don't talk to each other. They actually hate each other. So it is a very important development, and one that will be with us for some time...

DM: So the current situation is an Israeli state which is increasingly defined as non-Arab. Which has an increasing religious component to it, and which is anti-social democratic in political ideology.

ST:  There are many ways of looking at the Israeli state. But you can say that it is moving in a manner in which one third of the population is religious, one third is secular, and sort of liberal, and one third Arab. So maybe the solution is to have three states instead of two states. You give the Galilee to the Arabs, you give Tel Aviv and the coast to the Jewish secular, and you give the center to the fundamentalists. The other way of dividing it is that now, within the historic country, there is 48% Arab population, and 52% non-Arab, because not all the Russians are Jews. So there is almost 45-44% Jews, 8% Russians, and 48% Arabs. So you can also divide it into Russian State, Arab State, and Jewish State... But of course that will not happen. I am just playing with numbers.

DM: What about a pan-Arabism which could include Israel within it?

ST: Yes, that is possible. You could say that we create an economic union in the Middle East in which Israel is a component, it would like be the European Union. Turkey is fighting for that, and sometimes they use Neo-Ottoman language. They say: We ruled this region for five hundred years, until 1917, and we have historical roots, and we created this system, which was like the Roman system, multiethnic, multinational, and it worked. But today it is archaic, we have to revive it in a different form. And... maybe it could work.. It would allow the Israelis to eat their cake and keep it at the same time. They would be part of a large unit, they will keep their own Jewish national identity, but it will remove, or at least make borders very soft, so people would have the freedom to go back to their homes, to live in peace with their neighbors and so on... So it's a very interesting idea, and I support it.

This interview was conducted over Skpe between New York and Georgetown on April 16, 2012 by Daniel Miller, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.