population living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss.
Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist Movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "iron wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.17
When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he
replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and therefore their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.
Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.
Thus started the long quest for justifications-with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.
The first justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We would redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We would teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything-except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, whom we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.
When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: it was not the Arabs who opposed us, but only the effendis. The rich Arabs, the great landowners, were afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors.
That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same effendis and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.
The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936.18 Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution