The Nakba and the Zionist Dream of an Ethnonational State

Abstract

Dream was a key word with which Jews expressed their sentiments in the historic year 1948. It described the improbable turn of events of Jewish history from Auschwitz to independence. Binyamin Etzioni grew up in Tel Aviv. Born in 1926, he was eighteen when he joined the Palmach, the elite troops of the Haganah, the primary militia in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine). On 12 May 1948, just two days before the British departure from Palestine and the declaration of the State of Israel, he wrote: ‘Independence for Jews – this is after all a visionary idea that is almost ungraspable, something we could experience [in the past] only spiritually. . . All the time the Biblical verse echoes in my ears: “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like unto dreamers”. How suitable are these ancient words to our own time’. But this dream of Jewish political independence was tied up with another dream – that of the Jewish state with fewer Palestinians. Avraham Riklin, a commander who fought in the battle of Tiberias, described in his diary on 18 April 1948 his emotion as he entered the city’s deserted Arab quarter following the forced departure of the Palestinians: ‘The joy was enormous. I could not believe my eyes. The fleeing of the Arabs from the city seemed to me like a dream. There was a sense of elation among all [the soldiers]’. We should take Zionist dreams seriously, both the dream of national independence and that of a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians. The argument of this paper is that between 1936 and 1947 the idea of a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians took root politically, socially, and culturally among mainstream Zionists. This idea was articulated in institutional plans for a future state, in discourse about transfer, in settlement and security practices, and last but not least in a Zionist cultural imagination that made a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians as normal as the air Zionists breathed. For mainstream Zionists, I claim, the violent removal of Palestinians was imaginable and legitimate before the ethnic cleansing; under what circumstances it would take place no one knew, but creating a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority by removing Palestinians seemed obligatory, conceivable, and justifiable. Casting the net wider, this essay makes an argument about Zionism and settler colonialism: that while Zionism was (and is) a settler colonial movement, its history is shot through with an element that is the essence of history – contingency. There was no predetermined, direct way from Zionist early settlement to the