When my father went to police headquarters to give notice of our departure, as required by law, the police officer exclaimed: "But Mr Ostermann, what has entered your head? After all, you are a German like me!"
I tell this story frequently, in order to warn my Palestinian friends not to be tempted to consider the anti-Semites as their allies. On the surface it seems logical: the anti-Semites hate the Jews, the Jews are the majority in Israel, Israel oppresses the Palestinians, so the anti-Semites must be the friends of the Palestinians.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Without anti-Semitism, Zionism would never have been born. True, the Zionist myth asserts that in every generation the Jews were longing for Palestine, but any such longing was limited to prayers. As a matter of fact, throughout the centuries, the Jews made not the slightest effort to gather in Palestine.
A small example: 511 years ago, half a million Jews were expelled from Christian Spain. Most of them settled somewhere in the Muslim Ottoman empire, which received them graciously. They settled down in countries like Morocco, Bulgaria, Greece, and Syria. But only a tiny handful of Rabbis settled in Palestine, then a remote corner of the Turkish Sultan's domains.
Muslims turn in prayer to Mecca, Jews turn in prayer to Jerusalem. But that has nothing to do with the Zionist idea of a Jewish state.
Modern political Zionism was clearly a reaction to the modern anti-Semitism of the national movements in Europe. It is no coincidence that the term "anti-Semitism," which was coined in Germany in 1879, was followed only a few years later by the word "Zionism," which was first used by a Vienna-born Jew, Nathan Birnbaum.3
It was a response to the challenge. If the new national movements in Europe, practically without exception, did not want to have anything to do with the Jews, then the Jews must constitute themselves as a nation in the European sense and found their own state.
Where? In the land of the Bible, then called Palestine.
Thus started the historic conflict between our two peoples, the people of Sari Nusseibeh and my people, a conflict that is today-in 2003-more vicious than ever.4 It began when the Zionists wanted to realize their aim, to save the Jews from Europe, and the Palestinian Arabs wanted to realize their aim, to achieve freedom and independence in their homeland, in the same little country, without having any idea of each other.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist Movement,
wrote in his diary, after the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897: "In