Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE 185
between the diaspora Jews and the Palestinian fellahin is no more marked
than between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. 118
Borochov was convinced that this kinship would make the local population
more receptive to the new settlers. As theirs was a lower culture, the fellahin
around the Jewish colonies would soon adopt the ways of Hebrew culture, and
would eventually merge with it entirely. The Zionist vision, based partly on
"blood" and partly on history, determined that "a fellah who speaks Hebrew,
dresses like a Jew and adopts the outlook and customs of Jewish common
people would be in no way distinguished from the Jews." 119
Among the Poale Zion membership, the political-ideological movement
led and shaped by Borochov, were two gifted young men whose names would
become famous. In 1918, when David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi were
staying in New York, they wrote a sociohistorical book entitled Eretz Israel
in the Past and in the Present. They wrote it first in Hebrew, then translated
it into Yiddish in order to reach a wider Jewish-American public. This was
the most important work about "Eretz Israel" (which, in the book, consisted
of both sides of the Jordan River and stretched from El-Arish in the south
to Tyre in the north), and it was very successful. It was well researched, and
its statistical material and bibliographic sources were impressive. But for its
passionate nationalistic tone, it might have been an ordinary academic work.
Israel's future prime minister contributed two-thirds of the text, and the rest
was written by the future president. The second chapter, which dealt with the
history and present situation of the fellahin, was composed by Ben-Gurion in
full agreement with his coauthor. They wrote, in complete confidence,
The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured
Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did
not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They
expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local
population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former
habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming ... They did not seek
new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their
whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to
rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes. 120
118 Ber Borochov, "On the Issue of Zion and the Territory" in Works, vol. 1, Tel Aviv:
Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1955 (in Hebrew), 148. The Hebrew text always rendered "Palestine" as "Eretz
Israel," though most early Zionist thinkers, before the First World War, used the former name.
119 Ibid., 149.
120 David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present,
Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi, 1979 (in Hebrew), 196.