25. Actually, the most extreme Zionist leader, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, was almost alone in having recognized by the 1920s that the Arab resistance to the Zionist settlement was an
inevitable, natural, and, from its own point of view, just reaction of a "native" people defending their country against foreign invaders. Jabotinsky also recognized that the Arabs in the country were a distinct national entity and derided the attempts to bribe the leaders of other Arab countries in order to put an end to the Palestinian Arab resistance. However, Jabotinsky's solution was to erect an "iron wall" against the Arabs and to crush their resistance by force.
26. These completely contradictory perceptions of the facts permeate every single aspect of the conflict. For example, the Jews
interpreted their struggle for "Jewish Labor" as a progressive social effort to transform a people of intellectuals, merchants, middlemen, and speculators into one of workers and farmers. The Arabs, on the other hand, saw it as a racist effort by the Zionists to dispossess them, to exclude them from the labor market, and to create on their land an Arab-free, separatist Jewish economy.
27. The Zionists were proud of their "redemption of the land." They had purchased it at full price with money collected from Jews around the world. Olim (new immigrants, literally pilgrims), many of whom had been intellectuals and merchants in their former lives, now earned their living by hard manual labor. They believed that they had achieved all this by peaceful means and without dispossessing a single Arab. For the Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: the Jews acquired lands from Arab absentee landowners living in the cities of Palestine and abroad, and then forcibly evicted the peasants who had been farming this land for generations. To help them in this effort, the Zionists engaged the Turkish and, later, the British police. The Arab masses looked on in despair as their land was taken from them.
28. Against the Zionist claim of having successfully "made the desert bloom," the Arabs cited the testimonies of European travelers who had, for several centuries, described Palestine as a
comparatively populous and flourishing land, the equal of any of its regional neighbors.
29. The contrast between the two national versions reached a peak in the war of 1948, which was called "the War of Independence" or