PROLOGUE
HOSTILE ALIENS IN THEIR
OWN HOMELAND
THE EARLY ZIONIST settlers were compulsory diarists. They left the
historians mountains of travelogues, journals and letters, writing from
almost the moment they landed in Palestine, at the very beginning of
the twentieth century. The land was unfamiliar and their journey from
Eastern Europe was quite often harsh and dangerous. But they were
well received, first in Jaffa where small boats took them ashore from
their ships and where they looked for their first temporary abode
or piece of land. The local Palestinians in most cases offered these
newcomers some accommodation and advice on how to cultivate the
land, something about which the Zionists had little to no knowledge as
they had been barred for centuries from being farmers or landowners
in their home countries.
1
The settlers did not reciprocate in kind; at night, when they wrote the
early entries in their diaries by candlelight, they referred to the native
Palestinians as aliens roaming the land that belonged to the Jewish
people. Some came with the notion that the land was empty and assumed
that the people they found there were foreign invaders; others, like the
founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, knew that Palestine
was not a land without people but believed that its native inhabitants
could be ‘spirited away’ to make room for the Jewish return to, and
redemption of, Eretz Israel.
2
To quote the late Ibrahim Abu Lughod,
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6x
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
36x