In 1959, the American rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg (1921–2006) published The Zionist Idea, a book that quickly became—and remains—the classic English-language sourcebook of Zionist texts.Footnote 1 Eleven years later, in 1970, two different translations of The Zionist Idea were published in the Middle East. A Hebrew translation, ha-Raʿayon ha-Tsiyoni: Kovets mi-Divrei Rishonim va-Ahronim (The Zionist Idea: A Collection from the Words of the Early and the Recent), was published by Keter Publishing House in Jerusalem. The same year, al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya: al-Nusus al-Asasiyya (The Zionist Idea: The Basic Texts), an Arabic version of Hertzberg's reader, was published about 150 miles north, in the Lebanese capital Beirut, by the Research Center of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Despite the geographical proximity of these two translation projects, the circumstances surrounding them could hardly have been more different. Keter's version was produced in a victorious Israel, a newly confident state, and in a city that had just been united under Jewish rule, correcting the greatest Israeli disappointment of the 1948 war—Israel's failure to capture the Old City of Jerusalem. In other words, it was produced in a time, place, and language in which the Zionist idea had never been more triumphant. In contrast, the Arabic translation was prepared by an institution led by Palestinian Arabs forbidden since the 1948 war to return to their birthplaces, and just three years after another war—the June 1967 war that Arabs widely termed the naksa, a further “setback” beyond the nakba—that cleared Mandate Palestine of Arab rule entirely and drove still more Palestinians into exile. The Arabic translation was produced in a time, place, and language in which the Zionist idea had never been more terrifying.
That Keter's version is a translation of Hertzberg's book is no secret. Hertzberg's name is the only one that appears on the book's cover and Hertzberg wrote a short preface to the translation in which he expressed pleasure at seeing the collection “finally returning to its sources that were mostly in pure Hebrew.”Footnote 2 The Arabic version is a different story. Hertzberg apparently was not invited to contribute a preface; in fact, Hertzberg's name appears neither on the cover nor elsewhere in the book.Footnote 3 The title page lists six individuals involved in the project—all PLO researchers.
The present article analyzes the PLO's fascinating but largely unknown version of The Zionist Idea in order to assess how Palestinian nationalist intellectuals in the early years of the PLO interpreted Zionism and how they presented the movement's theoretical writings to their Arabic-reading audience. Contrasting the Arabic and English editions, I argue that the PLO editorial team tended to present Zionism, especially at its roots, as a Jewish religious movement (in contrast to Hertzberg's conception of the movement). In emphasizing Zionism's religious aspects, the PLO researchers were surely driven by numerous factors, including their careful reading of the movement's primary sources. I propose, however, that the Christian upbringing and education of the PLO Research Center's leadership and of those involved in the translation project also informed their conception of Zionism. More specifically, I argue that the researchers’ concern about the status of Christians as a religious minority among Palestinians (and other Arabs) and certain traditional, deeply rooted Christian ideas about the nature of Judaism together assist in accounting for the particular view of Zionism that the Research Center developed in its—and in the PLO's—foundational years. From this investigation, we learn not only about the PLO's view of Zionism but also about the PLO's view of Palestinian nationalism, for understanding how people conceive of others, not least their enemies, sheds important light on how they conceive of themselves.
This article thus joins two distinct though related discussions concerning Palestinian nationalism. The first involves the nature of the PLO and its relationship to religion. Especially since the advent and rise to prominence of explicitly religiously inflected forms of Palestinian nationalism (e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad), the “secularity” or “secularism” of the PLO has typically been accepted axiomatically.Footnote 4 Though scholars tend to use these terms reflexively, underlying them are two implications: that the PLO's leaders and members have been motivated by a will for national liberation disconnected from religious impulses and that their vision of the fulfillment of national liberation is a state defined by nationality (understood ethnically, historically, or culturally) rather than religion. It is frequently pointed out that the words “Islam” and “Muslim” do not appear in the 1964 and 1968 PLO National Charters,Footnote 5 and that the PLO came to be associated, at least in the West, with the call for a “secular, democratic state” in Palestine. Some recent scholars have complicated this view, arguing that, in their Arabic writings, the PLO and Fatah (the PLO's dominant constituent party since 1969) never actually described the democratic state they sought as ʿilmāniyya (secular or secularist). Moreover, some stress the Islamic connotations of the reverse acronym, Fatah (Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, or Palestinian National Liberation Movement), which carries the sense of conquering for the sake of Islam.Footnote 6 Scholars have also pointed to the earlier involvement of Fatah's founders and leaders (e.g., Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir, Walid Ahmad Nimr al-Nasir, Hani al-Hasan, Rafiq al-Natsha) in the Muslim Brotherhood and to the later use of Islamic imagery and iconography in Fatah and PLO publications and official speeches.Footnote 7 Yet these valuable correctives all assume that, in the context of the PLO, the relevant religion is Islam. By exploring the work of an arm of the PLO in which Christians dominated, and by considering the impact of these intellectuals’ Christian religious background and communal interests, this article suggests that there was a parallel—not to say conflicting—Christian conception of the Palestinian condition and of Jewish nationalism. Like its Islamic counterpart, this Christian conception must be reckoned with for a full understanding of the history of Palestinian nationalism and, especially, of prevalent Palestinian theories of Zionism.
This article also engages two different recent strands of literature concerning Palestinian Christians. First, Palestinian Christian intellectuals and activists (e.g., Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb) have written prolifically, especially since the First Intifada, about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from explicitly Christian, often theologically oriented, perspectives.Footnote 8 Second, scholars such as Laura Robson and Noah Haiduc-Dale have investigated the history of Palestine's Christians during the British Mandate period.Footnote 9 Concerning the PLO, scholars commonly note that its leadership insisted that Christians were legitimate members of the Palestinian nation.Footnote 10 Linking the argument about the PLO's secular nature to discussion of the place of Palestinian Christians within the nation, John M. Owen IV, for instance, contends that “the PLO, itself dominated by the al-Fatah movement, is explicitly secularist, owing in part to its determination to include Christian Arabs.”Footnote 11 Christian Arabs were not, however, just “included” in the PLO; some played prominent, active roles, especially in the organization's intellectual and ideological development. By exploring the contribution of Christians to the PLO Research Center in the 1960s and 1970s, this article offers the beginning of a chronological bridge between scholarship on the Mandate period and the political-theological writings that have burgeoned since the late 1980s and challenges the presumption that the multiplicity of religions within a single national movement necessarily removes theological concerns or religious-communal interests from the national agenda. Uniting multiple religious communities in a single nationalist movement can mean just that, and not the erasure of the relevance or influence of the respective religious traditions.
THE PLO RESEARCH CENTER
In 1965, one year after the establishment of the PLO, the new organization's Executive Committee founded the PLO Research Center to document and analyze the problem of Palestine. Based in Beirut, the center quickly gained the blessing of the Lebanese government, which granted it the status of a diplomatic body and provided it the immunities offered to foreign diplomatic delegations.Footnote 12 Within a decade, the center grew into an impressively large and vibrant institution. It occupied six floors of a building on Colombani Street near the American University of Beirut (AUB),Footnote 13 with two floors devoted to its library of many thousands of books, files, and documents. At its peak, the center employed forty researchers.Footnote 14 Among its many projects, the center printed more than three hundred publications in seven series: Palestine Chronology; Facts and Figures; Palestine Essays; Palestine Studies; Palestine Books; Palestine Maps and Photographs; and Special Publications. Al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya was the twenty-first title in the Palestine Books series.
The center's founding director was Fayez Sayegh (1922–80), a Palestinian intellectual who earned his BA and MA from AUB and his PhD from Georgetown University. A Presbyterian from Tiberias whose family fled to Lebanon just before the city was conquered by Zionist forces during the 1948 war,Footnote 15 Fayez led the center for just one year.Footnote 16 He was succeeded by his younger brother Anis (1931–2009), who earned his BA from AUB and his PhD in political science from Cambridge University.Footnote 17 After working for a couple of years in Cambridge, Anis returned to Beirut to lead the Research Center for a decade (1966–76). It was under his leadership that the center drastically expanded and flourished.
KNOWING THE ENEMY, THROUGH ITS CANON
In his preface to al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya, Anis Sayegh, who supervised the translation project, explained that one of the center's aims was to increase Arabs’ “knowledge of the enemy, its thoughts, and its work.” Two years earlier, the center had published a book of essays by contemporary Israeli figures—including Zwi Werblowski, Shmuel Ettinger, Yehoshafat Harkabi, Shimon Peres, Simha Flapan, Moshe Sneh, and Nissim Rejwan. By 1970, Sayegh had deemed it necessary to publish a translation of the classic Zionist texts, which (without acknowledging as much) his researchers found in Hertzberg's volume, because “the Zionists regularly look toward them as they best express their basic idea.”Footnote 18 Knowing the enemy required knowing the enemy's canon. And in order to know the canon, they had to translate it.
It is, however, only partially accurate to refer to al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya as a “translation” of The Zionist Idea. The original English version opens with an expansive introductory essay by Hertzberg about the intellectual history of Zionism, followed by thirty-seven chapters, each devoted to a different prominent Zionist from the 1840s through the 1940s. Each chapter begins with a brief biography of a Zionist figure, after which Hertzberg presents what he regarded as representative or otherwise important essays, speeches, or articles by that person.Footnote 19Al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya also has thirty-seven chapters devoted to the same thirty-seven Zionist thinkers. The primary source excerpts in al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya precisely match those in Hertzberg's original and their translation is generally (though not always, as will be discussed below) faithful to the original—or, more precisely, faithful to Hertzberg's English versions, most of which were translated from other languages.Footnote 20Al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya leaves out Hertzberg's extended essayFootnote 21 and, though its biographical sketches are generally based on Hertzberg's, some diverge from his substantially.
Aside from Anis Sayegh, the participants in al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya were Lutfi al-Abid and Musa ʿAnaz, who translated the primary sources; Assʿad Razzouk, who authored the introductory biographies; and Hilda Shaʿban Sayegh and Ibrahim al-Abid, who proofread the text. Lutfi al-Abid was a Palestinian from the village of Safuriyya near Nazareth who in 1948, at the age of eight, fled with his family to Lebanon.Footnote 22 His cotranslator, Musa ʿAnaz, wrote his master's thesis at AUB about the Israeli kibbutz, which he published as a book in 1970 under the title al-Kibutz min al-Dakhil: Dirasa Siyasiyya wa-Idariyya (The Kibbutz from the Inside: A Political and Administrative Study) in the PLO Research Center's Palestine Studies series. Hilda Shaʿban Sayegh was a Jordanian-born scholar who several years earlier had translated selections from Theodor Herzl's diaries into Arabic. She was also Anis Sayegh's wife.Footnote 23 Her co-proofreader, Ibrahim al-Abid, was the author of, among other works, A Handbook to the Palestine Question: Questions and Answers, another fascinating text in the Research Center's Palestine Books series.Footnote 24 More relevant for the purposes of comparison with Hertzberg's book is the contribution of Assʿad Razzouk, author of the biographical introductions to each chapter. Razzouk, a Christian from Marjayoun in Lebanon, was a prolific member of the Research Center, having written five books of his own between 1967 and 1970.Footnote 25 These contemporaneous writings will prove useful as we try to understand the conception of Zionism in al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya.
THE RELIGIOUS ZIONIST IDEA OF AL-FIKRA AL-SAHYUNIYYA
A comparison of the biographical introductions presented by Hertzberg and Razzouk reveals that Razzouk conceived of the factors that drove the rise of Zionism differently from Hertzberg in significant and curious ways. To illustrate their distinct approaches, let us begin with the first source in the anthology, the writing of Yehudah Alkalai (1798–1878), a Sephardic rabbi from Sarajevo, and, for Hertzberg, one of the “precursors” of Zionism. Razzouk's introduction to Alkalai generally follows Hertzberg's closely. Like Hertzberg, Razzouk begins with Alkalai's childhood as the son of a rabbi, notes the kabbalistic influences on Alkalai's thought, and explains the two-staged messianic redemption that Alkalai envisioned (the Josephite Messiah followed by the Davidic Messiah). Given the close correspondence between the two texts, divergences are obvious and in some cases appear to reveal the translator's particular understanding of the subject. Importantly, Hertzberg had argued that “the real turning point in Alkalia's life was the year 1840,” when the Damascus Affair saw a modern Middle Eastern Jewish community stand accused of ritually murdering a Capuchin friar and his Muslim servant. The resulting torture of a group of Damascene Jews “convinced Alkalai . . . that for security and freedom the Jewish people must look to a life of its own, within its ancestral home. After 1840 a succession of books and pamphlets poured from Alkalai's pen in explanation of his program of self-redemption.”Footnote 26 In contrast, Razzouk's rendition of Alkalai's biography makes no reference to the Damascus Affair. The excision of a detail Hertzberg identified as “the real turning point” does not seem accidental. Razzouk may have omitted the event because it reflected unfavorably on Christians (and Muslims) in Damascus. Perhaps, though, this change was driven by a perception of Zionism as a religious phenomenon such that antisemitism and other external factors were not prime motivators.
We find a similar omission in Razzouk's presentation of another of Zionism's “precursors,” Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874). Hertzberg begins his biographical sketch of Kalischer by highlighting the political context in which Kalischer was raised. Hertzberg writes that, like Alkalai, Kalischer “was born in a buffer area—not in the Balkans but in Posen,” a province that was “the western part of Poland, which Prussia had acquired in the second partition of that country in 1793.” “Nationalism,” Hertzberg elaborates,
was the major force of European history during the whole of Kalischer's adult life, but he was particularly aware of it because of his geographic position. In 1830–1831 and again in 1863 unsuccessful revolts occurred across the border in the Russian part of Poland in attempts to re-establish the independence of the Poles. [The] Jewish population in this region was numerically significant, and in some places, including Warsaw during the two Polish revolutions, it was of political, and even military, importance whether the Jews would regard themselves as Poles, Russians, or as a separate nationality.
A few paragraphs later, Hertzberg notes that “after completing his education in the conventional modes of the ghetto,” Kalischer “settled in Thorn, where he served as the rabbi of the community for forty years.”Footnote 27 In al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya, all of this information is collapsed into three sentences: “He was born in Posen. At that time, the western region of Poland had been under Prussian rule since 1793. He completed his traditional studies in the schools of the Jewish population and then settled in the town of Thorn, where he remained a rabbi for forty years.” There is no reference to European nationalisms; the acute problems of border regions; the Polish rebellions against Russia; or the identity challenges these nationalisms posed to Jews in particular. As he does with Alkalai, Razzouk portrays Kalischer as a thinker motivated by Jewish religious factors rather than external, non-Jewish political forces.Footnote 28
If Razzouk had stressed religious concerns and minimized political matters only in his biographies of Alkalai and Kalischer, we might suspect he imagined that, as rabbis, they must have been primarily animated by religion—notwithstanding Hertzberg's contentions. Razzouk's emphasis on religion extends, however, also to his presentation of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the paradigmatic ostensibly “secular” political Zionist and founder of the Zionist Organization. Far more than Hertzberg, Razzouk highlights the influence of religion and religious texts on Herzl. Razzouk acknowledges that in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, “German culture was dominant” and thus Herzl's “Hebrew culture was remarkably weak.” At the same time, Razzouk continues, “Jewish traditions influenced him [Herzl] on a subconscious level.” Citing Herzl scholars, Razzouk claims that “until his eighteenth birthday” Herzl's mind was heavily “influenced by the [biblical] book of Exodus and the idea of the awaited messiah.” In contrast, Hertzberg's sketch emphasizes that Herzl's pre-Zionist writings “contained scarcely a dozen lines of passing references to Jews” and that his “early Jewish education had indeed been skimpy,” notwithstanding Herzl's grandfather's friendship with Alkalai. To be sure, in his introductory essay, Hertzberg wrote provocatively that “messianism is the essence of his [Herzl's] stance, because he claimed the historical inevitability of a Jewish state in a world of peaceful nations.”Footnote 29 But when Hertzberg wrote of Herzl's “messianism” or his conception of “Zionism as optimism,” he did not mean that Herzl was specifically influenced by the biblical book of Exodus or by the Jewish notion of awaiting a human messiah. “Messianism” stood in, rather, for “historical inevitability.”Footnote 30 For Razzouk, however, Herzl was a believer in “extreme religious mysticism.”Footnote 31
Herzl is not the only “secular” Zionist whose religious motivations and credentials Razzouk accentuates in his biographical sketches. Whereas Hertzberg's David Ben-Gurion “was born as David Green in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886,” Razzouk's Ben-Gurion “was born in Plonsk, Poland, on 16 October 1886, and studied there in a religious school [madrasa dīniyya].” Hertzberg did not regard Ben-Gurion's early Jewish religious education as critical for an understanding of this towering Zionist politician and ideologue who served as Israel's first prime minister. For Razzouk, however, Ben-Gurion's religious educational background was formative and recognizing it was necessary for understanding his Zionism.
In emphasizing the religious background and motivations of figures such as Herzl and Ben-Gurion, Razzouk did not fabricate biographical data, nor was he necessarily drawing less historically accurate accounts of their lives. What I am pointing to here is neither duplicity nor intentional distortion but rather conscious selection. Among the many facts available to Razzouk about the lives of Zionism's two most influential leaders, Razzouk chose to stress certain religious elements, and we know this was a choice because we have his template—Hertzberg's text—for comparison. In other words, I am not contending that Razzouk was wrong and Hertzberg right in their assessments of this question or that Razzouk's text was biased and Hertzberg's impartial; each was written in a particular historical moment by an individual engaged in the question of Zionism. Nor am I suggesting that Razzouk, writing in the late 1960s, did not have good reason to conceive of Zionism as he did, especially in light of popular religiously inflected interpretations of the 1967 war among many Israelis and Jews. Rather, I am arguing that Razzouk chose to emphasize religious matters in depicting the lives and motivations of Zionists such as Herzl and Ben-Gurion and to deemphasize secular matters in accounting for others such as Alkalai and Kalischer.Footnote 32 The interests and impulses that may have led Razzouk to this view of the fundamentally religious nature of Zionism will be addressed shortly.
Razzouk does at times acknowledge non-Jewish influences on Zionism. Following Hertzberg, his biographical note on Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, for instance, mentions this Hebraist's embrace of “revolutionary ideas that were dominant among the Russian intellectuals and among the Nihilists in particular” and his “attraction to socialism” influenced by “the Russian movement known as Narodniki (i.e., Back to the People).”Footnote 33 Hertzberg also highlights the political context of the 1870s: the revolt against the Ottoman Empire by Bulgarians who were supported by Russians as “Slavic brothers.” The revolt brought “Russian nationalism and Pan-Slavism . . . to the forefront” and, Hertzberg explains, “this new atmosphere evoked thoughts of Jewish secular, political nationalism in Ben-Yehuda.” Razzouk does not provide all of these details but he acknowledges that Ben-Yehuda “tried to copy the Russian nationalist idea and the Slavist movement in calling for a Jewish nationalism on a secular, political basis.”Footnote 34 In other words, Razzouk did not completely excise all such discussions in his rendition of Hertzberg's biographical sketches. But his general tendency was to highlight the “internal” Jewish, especially religious, sources of Zionism and to minimize other factors.
It is not surprising that the PLO research team transformed certain aspects of The Zionist Idea through its translation and editing; unlike Hertzberg, these researchers harbored little sympathy for the Zionist idea. It is the particular form of this transformation that is curious. Simple anti-Zionist polemics could have spurred the PLO researchers to do just the opposite: to emphasize that Jewish nationalism, even in its earliest, ostensibly native, religious form, was merely a reaction to politics in Europe and an import of a European ideology. Whereas many Zionists asserted that their movement was simply the latest expression of the ancient and enduring Jewish desire to return to the Land of Israel, the PLO might have stressed Zionism's modern European political and ideological roots, thus portraying it as a new movement that was as foreign to the Middle East as any other form of European colonialism. And the PLO researchers would have found ample evidence of modern Europe's critical role in the rise of Zionism in the book that sat before them: Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea. Instead, Razzouk portrayed Zionism as a principally religious movement, largely untainted, as it were, by historically contingent political considerations.
ZIONISM AND TERRORISM
Before attempting to deduce what may have led the PLO researchers to this view of Zionism, we should note the subtlety of the PLO team's changes to Hertzberg's depiction of the canonical Zionists. Indeed, al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya generally presents its subject dispassionately. This approach is truly remarkable considering the political context in which the text was produced. Polemics do, however, occasionally rise to the surface. Such is the case, for instance, in Razzouk's presentation of Judah Magnes, the American Reform rabbi who became the first chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a founding member of the organization Brit Shalom, which championed a binational solution to the tensions in Palestine. While he did not mention Brit Shalom by name in his sketch of Magnes, Hertzberg noted that “the only hope that he [Magnes] saw for the implementation of the Jewish aims essential to him was in a binational state.”Footnote 35 Razzouk offers far greater detail:
He created with a group of his supporters “The Covenant of Peace” [ʿahd al-salām], Brit Shalom, in 1926, to strengthen mutual understanding and cooperation between the Arabs and the Jews. And he called for restricting immigration so that the Jews would not become a majority in Palestine. . . . He announced its plan to found an independent, binational state on the basis of equality in law and public services. He presented this goal to [Palestinian leaders] Jamal al-Husayni, ʿAwni ʿAbd al-Hadi, and Musa al-ʿAlami, and established friendships with them.
Until this point in the text, Razzouk's account is neutral in tone. Razzouk's subjective voice emerges in the following paragraph:
He [Magnes] continued his opposition to official Zionist policy . . . He was far-sighted [baʿīd al-naẓar] when he said, in 1931: “I am not prepared to grant justice to the Jew by means of inflicting injustice on the Arab. It is unfair to the Arabs to subject them to Jewish rule without their agreement. If I do not support the creation of a Jewish state, it is because of the one reason I mentioned: I do not want a war with the Arab world.”
Razzouk's editorializing does not end with his laudatory assessment of Magnes's “prescience” in fearing “war with the Arab world.” Despite Magnes's efforts, Razzouk writes, “the majority of Zionists believed in violence and terror [bi-l-ʿunf wa-l-irhāb].” Even as Magnes's “health began to deteriorate . . . he continued his opposition to partition and his criticism of the terroristic activity that spread around him by the Zionist groups and gangs.” Binationalism, however, “collapsed before the events of 1948.” Magnes's Brit Shalom approach was a Zionist road not traveled; the “majority of Zionists” disregarded his calls for peace and cooperation with Arabs and, as Razzouk puts it, elected instead a path of “violence and terror.”Footnote 36
The “terrorism” designation reappears in Razzouk's biographical account of Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the right-wing Union of Zionists-Revisionists. “When the Arabs began revolting against Zionism and its efforts to prepare a secret army under the leadership of Jabotinsky,” Razzouk writes, Jabotinsky “organized Zionist terrorist activities [al-ʿamaliyyāt al-irhābiyya al-ṣahyūniyya] in Jerusalem (1920).” Later, Razzouk notes that
Jabotinsky is like the spiritual father and the nominal leader of the terrorist group called the “Irgun Tsevai Leumi” that Menachem Begin inherited and that became the Herut party after the establishment of Israel. Throughout his life he demanded the establishment of an independent Zionist army, and he repeated the demand when World War II broke out. He is the rightful father of illegal immigration and all the secret movements and military organizations among the Jews of Palestine.Footnote 37
For Razzouk, Jabotinsky's form of Zionism, not that of Magnes, was the version that ultimately dominated the movement and the state it created.
Considering the importance of Jabotinsky in Razzouk's reading of Zionism, it is instructive to note that the excerpt included in the section on Jabotinsky is one of the few instances where the PLO translators (Razzouk's colleagues Lutfi al-Abid and Musa ʿAnaz) made a substantive—and critical—change. As noted above, the PLO's Arabic translations of the primary source excerpts in The Zionist Idea are generally faithful to Hertzberg's English; this is not so, however, for the passage from Jabotinsky's testimony to the Peel Commission, the British commission of inquiry tasked with investigating the origins of the violence that erupted in Palestine in 1936. In this speech, Jabotinsky contended that “there is no question of ousting the Arabs.” Rather, he insisted “Palestine on both sides of the Jordan” should “hold the Arabs, their progeny, and many millions of Jews.” In the process, “the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country of Palestine,” but, he asserted, this is not a hardship:
It is not a hardship on any race, any nation, possessing so many National States now and so many more National States in the future. One fraction, one branch of that race, and not a big one, will have to live in someone else's State.Footnote 38
The PLO's rendering of this passage is a literal translation of the above until the final line. In his testimony, Jabotinsky contended that the Arabs of Palestine, remaining in Palestine, “will have to live in someone else's State,” that is, in the Jews’ state. In the Arabic translation, Jabotinsky instead says: “one fraction, one branch of that race will have to live in another Arab country [fī balad ʿarabiyya ukhrā].”Footnote 39 The PLO translators transformed Jabotinsky's testimony from a defense of making Palestine's Arabs a minority in a new Jewish state into a defense of expelling them from Palestine to Arab countries. This mistranslation was, I suspect, accidental; earlier in the same paragraph, the translators accurately render Jabotinsky's stated desire that “Palestine on both sides of the Jordan should hold the Arabs, their progeny, and many millions of Jews.”Footnote 40 Reflexive as it may have been—indeed because of its apparent unconsciousness—this mistranslation reveals the deeply ingrained sense among those in the PLO Research Center, led by refugees from the 1948 war, that their expulsion was fundamental to the Zionist plan.Footnote 41
HERTZBERG'S CONCEPTION OF ZIONISM AND MESSIANISM
Returning to the question of the place of religion in Razzouk's conception of the rise of Zionism, we must ask what led Razzouk to highlight religion in his biographical sketches. Might the conception of Zionism Hertzberg presented in his extended introduction to The Zionist Idea have been a source for Razzouk's perspective? “From the Jewish perspective,” wrote Hertzberg,
messianism, and not nationalism, is the primary element in Zionism. The very name of the movement evoked the dream of an end of days, of an ultimate release from the exile and a coming of rest in the land of Jewry's heroic age. Jewish historians have, therefore, attempted to understand Zionism as part of the career of the age-old messianic impulse in Judaism.Footnote 42
Hertzberg explains that, because of the apparent link between the modern Zionist movement and the premodern Jewish notion of messianic redemption, many regard Zionism as “secular messianism.” This view of Zionism is embraced by many of the movement's supporters because “it seems to succeed in providing the modern movement with a long history of which it is the heir.”Footnote 43 This conception of Zionism, in other words, is ideologically useful for certain Zionists.
Despite the “neatness and appeal” of understanding Zionism as “secular messianism,” Hertzberg insists that this interpretation “must be subjected to serious criticism.” He undertakes this criticism on a number of levels. First, he contends that the theory that Zionism is the latest phase and realization of Jewish messianism “is really a kind of synthetic Zionist ideology presented as history.” This interpretation also obscures “the crucial problem of modern Zionist ideology,” namely “the tension between the inherited messianic concept and the radically new meaning that Zionism, at its most modern, was proposing to give it.”Footnote 44 Importantly, for Hertzberg, “religious messianism” was a matter between Jews and God whereas in Zionism, “the essential dialogue is now between the Jew and the nations of the earth.” For Zionism, gentiles are not secondary actors serving to fulfill God's wishes vis-à-vis the Jews; rather, gentiles (and their values) are at the heart of the drama. “What marks modern Zionism as a fresh beginning in Jewish history is that its ultimate values”—individual liberty, national freedom, economic and social justice—“derive from the general milieu,” that is “the progressive faith of the nineteenth century.”Footnote 45 In this way, contrary to the view stressing continuity between classical Jewish messianism and Zionism, Hertzberg argues that the discontinuities are particularly significant. For Hertzberg, Zionism “is in essence unprecedented because it is, both in time and in thought, a post-Emancipation phenomenon.”Footnote 46
“EXPLOITATION” OF RELIGION, OR SECULARISM “ON A CONSCIOUS LEVEL ONLY”
Razzouk's presentation of Zionism as a movement that, at its heart, was thoroughly influenced and motivated by traditional Jewish religious ideas is thus at variance with Hertzberg's assessment of “the Zionist idea.” What then led Razzouk to this view? While one cannot be certain, a consideration of Razzouk's larger oeuvre is instructive. In addition to his contributions to al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya, Razzouk, during the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, published numerous books, including al-Dawla wa-l-Din fi Israʾil (Religion and State in Israel), Israʾil al-Kubra (Greater Israel), al-Majlis al-Amriki li-l-Yahudiyya (the American Council for Judaism), al-Talmud wa-l-Sahyuniyya (The Talmud and Zionism), and Qadaya al-Din wa-l-Mujtamaʿ fi Israʾil (The Problems of Religion and Society in Israel). Razzouk was clearly interested in the relationship between Judaism and Jewish nationalism, and he was regularly tapped by the Research Center's director to write on this subject. In other words, his portrayal of Zionism through a religious lens in al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya’s biographical sketches intersected with the other research he was conducting contemporaneously in the PLO Research Center.
In the 1968 volume al-Dawla wa-l-Din fi Israʾil, Razzouk was charged with explaining the relationship between Judaism and Zionism. Israel, wrote Anis Sayegh in his preface to Razzouk's volume, “is one of the very few ‘states’ in our modern world that links its political existence to religion and makes religion a basis for its existence.” Writing just one year after Israel's extensive territorial conquest in the 1967 war, which many Jews understood as a miraculous restoration of Jewish sovereignty over ancient religiously sacred sites, Sayegh notes that “religion did not play a role in the lead up to the establishment, and then in the establishment, of any modern ‘state’ as much as it did in the establishment of ‘Israel,’ then in its expansion, and in all of its past and present schemes to increase its expansion.”Footnote 47 Sayegh asked Razzouk to write this volume to account for this supposed historical peculiarity.
In preparing his 145-page analysis, Razzouk read not only Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea, but also numerous other Arabic, English, and German essays, monographs, encyclopedia entries, and newspapers. Through his readings of these sources, Razzouk offered a complex picture of the relationship between Judaism and Zionism. To understand his conception of this relationship, it is instructive to begin with his presentation of Theodor Herzl's views. Translating from Herzl's landmark 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Razzouk quotes Herzl's expectation that “our Rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire their congregations by preaching it from the pulpit.”Footnote 48 Razzouk argues that Herzl recognized “the importance of the Jewish religion as an active agent in unifying Jews and preparing them psychologically to embrace the Zionist call.”Footnote 49 Herzl perceived Zionism's potential to satisfy Jewish religious needs, explains Razzouk.Footnote 50 But Herzl was not calling for a theocracy, Razzouk is careful to note. “One finds in Theodor Herzl—who was German in culture, language, birth, and upbringing,” writes Razzouk, “both a personal tendency toward humanism and an avoidance as much as possible of the theocratic idea.” Indeed, Herzl proves himself throughout his writing to have been “a passionate advocate for the separation between religion and state.”Footnote 51
Despite Herzl's support for separating religion and state, Razzouk notes that these views did “not prevent him from daring to call upon religious fervor and to awaken zeal for the faith of the ancestors, for the sake of gaining the great masses of religious Jews and redirecting their love of Zion from its spiritual and longing sense and its traditional supplicatory character.”Footnote 52 Razzouk suggests, in other words, that Herzl utilized the religious faith of his fellow Jews to garner their support, even as he himself lacked this faith. At times, Razzouk refers to Herzl's “conscious use” (al-istifāda al-wāʿiyya) and “exploitation” (taskhīr) of religion for the benefit of Zionism.Footnote 53
For Razzouk, however, Herzl's (and the ostensibly secular political Zionist movement's) relationship to religion was not merely one of “exploitation.” On the one hand, Razzouk accepts Israeli scholar Jacob Talmon's claim that “the Orthodox wing of Zionism had little effect on the general movement, for it feared secular nationalism and had deep qualms about forcing the hand of the Almighty” by engaging in actions to precipitate redemption. On the other hand, Razzouk insists that the limited influence of the outwardly Orthodox does not mean that religion's impact on Zionism was equally limited.Footnote 54 “Religious feelings of belonging,” Razzouk contends, played a role “on an unconscious level in the course of the modern Zionist movement.” In this way, Razzouk rejects Talmon's assertion that “most of the Zionist prophets and theoreticians, brought up in the liberal atmosphere of the nineteenth century, gave very little heed to the place of religion in their future state, apart from conventional insistence on religious freedom and inattentive assurance of respect for ancient traditions.”Footnote 55 “Is this claim true,” asks Razzouk rhetorically, “for the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, for example? Does this not mean ignoring the religious motive of the secularists [al-ʿalmāniyyīn]?” Believing that even secularist Zionists had a “religious motive,” Razzouk insists that they were secularist “on a conscious level only.”Footnote 56 Zionists as apparently secularist as Theodor Herzl were motivated by sources they themselves may not have recognized, including, claims Razzouk, Jewish religious and messianic ideas.
ZIONISM AS JEWISH RIDDA
Even as he stressed the religious themes of Zionism and religious motivations (conscious and unconscious) of Zionists, Razzouk recognized that not all modern Jews believed that Judaism and Zionism were compatible or that Zionism emerged naturally or legitimately from Jewish religious sources. On the contrary, Razzouk was keenly interested in Jewish anti-Zionists and especially in Jews who argued against Zionism from an explicitly Jewish religious perspective. “The appearance of the Zionist call as a political movement on the world stage in the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century,” writes Razzouk in al-Dawla wa-l-Din fi Israʾil, “came as an apostasy [ridda] in the context of the modern historical development of the Jewish religion.”Footnote 57 Zionism was apostasy, Razzouk elaborates later in his book, in its “violation of the progressive and developed principles that Reform Judaism had pronounced fifty years before the Herzlian movement.”Footnote 58
Political Zionism, Razzouk explains, was apostasy from the perspective of Reform Judaism, the modernist Jewish religious movement born in the 19th-century German lands. Perhaps Razzouk developed an interest in Reform Judaism while studying in Germany; in 1963, he completed his doctoral dissertation, “Die Ansätze zu einer Kulturanthropologie in der gegenwärtigen deutschen Philosophie” (The Beginnings of a Cultural Anthropology in Contemporary German Philosophy), at the University of Tubingen. Drawing on the early 20th-century Jewish Encyclopedia, Razzouk wrote of the “changes [that] took place in the life conditions of the Jews” at the beginning of the 19th century as they were freed “from the shackles of the medieval centuries and oppressive laws.” The Reform movement, aiming to “keep pace with the development and liberation” of the modern world, sought to “accommodate the beliefs and religious practices” of the Jews with “the requirements of the new age into which the Jews have entered.”Footnote 59 One of these “requirements” was the disavowal of Jewish nationalist aspirations, which the Reform movement undertook in a series of rabbinical conferences in the German lands in the 1840s and in the United States in the second half of the 19th century.
For Razzouk, “the climax of the march of Reform Judaism” was embodied by a principle proclaimed by Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1885. There, the rabbis declared:
We consider ourselves no longer a nation [umma], but a religious community [jamāʿa dīniyya], and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state [Razzouk's emphasis].Footnote 60
In Razzouk's conception of Reform Judaism, this repudiation of an earlier notion of a Jewish “nation” in favor of viewing Jews exclusively as a “religious community” (and, critically, the concomitant rejection of the hope to return to and found a state in Palestine) represented the pinnacle of the Reform movement's enlightened progress toward Jewish integration into the modern world. And it was against this most advanced stage of Judaism that Herzl's Zionist movement constituted ridda (apostasy).
Not all Jews embraced the Zionist “apostasy,” as Razzouk understood it; notwithstanding the worsening conditions of Jews in Europe, some 20th-century Jews held fast to the 19th-century Reformers’ ideals. For Razzouk, these latter-day Pittsburgh Platform devotees were of great interest and importance, despite their small numbers and minimal influence. Indeed, in 1970 (the same year as the publication of al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya), Razzouk published al-Majlis al-Amriki li-l-Yahudiyya, a complete monograph on the American Council for Judaism. This organization had been founded in 1942 to represent Jewish Americans who maintained their faith in the Reform movement's rejection of Jewish nationalism even after the mainstream Reform movement embraced Zionism.Footnote 61 Led by the Reform rabbi Elmer Berger, it played an outsized role in Razzouk's thinking about Zionism.Footnote 62 Introducing al-Majlis al-Amriki li-l-Yahudiyya, Anis Sayegh wrote regretfully that “one of the oft-repeated claims among Arabs . . . is that every Jew is a Zionist and that Judaism and Zionism are two names for the same thing.” The PLO Research Center instead offered “an honest picture of . . . Jewish tendencies, organizations, and movements that oppose or publicly challenge Zionism.”Footnote 63 In drawing attention to the Jewish religious arguments against Zionism, Razzouk, Sayegh, and the PLO Research Center were showing that their opposition to Zionism was not a consequence of any hostility toward Judaism or Jews. On the contrary, they were allied with Jews who defended Judaism against the apostasy of Zionism.
It is worth noting that the conception of the Jews as a “religious community” rather than a “nation” was shared far beyond the small number of intellectuals who participated in the PLO Research Center and the larger, if indeterminate, number of readers of the center's publications.Footnote 64 This view of the Jews is found prominently in the PLO's charter, composed largely by the organization's founder Ahmad Shuqayri. In the charter, ratified first in 1964, the PLO declared Judaism to be a “religion” (dīn samāwī) and not a “nationalism” (qawmiyya), and the Jews to be “citizens of the states to which they belong” and not “a single people (shaʿb) with a separate identity.” These definitions of Judaism and Jews are central to the charter's argument against Zionism and have played an important role in the rhetorical battle against Zionism.
JUDAISM'S “PAROCHIALISM” VERSUS CHRISTIANITY'S “rEVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALISM”
For the purposes of challenging Jewish nationalism, the political utility of the religious-not-national definition of Judaism and Jewishness is manifest, and it was this conception of Judaism, as we have seen, that was widely employed within the PLO. The characterization of Judaism in religious terms, however, may have had particular intellectual dimensions and political ramifications for those producing these scholarly writings at the PLO Research Center, as many of them, including Razzouk and the Sayegh brothers, were raised and educated in Christian communities. Anis Sayegh, the son of a minister, describes in his autobiography the central place of religion in his childhood Presbyterian home in Tiberias, where prayer and church attendance were obligatory and Bible recitation was a regular activity.Footnote 65 “Our main pastime,” recalled his older brother Yusif, “was listening to the Bible and trying to read it . . . every day, every morning and every evening.”Footnote 66 Their parents, according to Anis Sayegh, were “the most faithful believers.”Footnote 67 As the Sayegh brothers relate it, Christianity was not merely a nominal or secondary element of their identity; it was fundamental to their rearing—even if, from an early age, Anis rejected this piety.Footnote 68 While less is known about Razzouk's upbringing, his high school education took place in the Presbyterian mission's Gerard Institute in Sidon.Footnote 69
The fact that the Sayeghs and many of their Research Center associates were Christians is important for this discussion for at least two reasons. Christians represented approximately 10 percent of Palestinians within and beyond mid-20th-century Palestine. As a religious minority, Palestinian Christians—and other Arab Christians in a Muslim-majority modern Middle East—were understandably anxious about the notion of religiously based political identities and nationalisms. The dangers of a one-to-one link between religion and nationalism were especially potent precisely where the PLO Research Center was based, that is, in Lebanon, in this period.Footnote 70 Portraying Zionism, reviled as the ideology was among Palestinians and other Arabs, as a religious nationalism, and emphasizing its religious qualities, could serve to tarnish the idea of religious nationalism generally.
The leadership of the PLO Research Center was deeply concerned about the place of Christians in the Palestinian nation. In his Palestine and Arab Nationalism, Anis Sayegh argued that Palestine's small size accounted for the exceptionally undifferentiated nature and the high level of “accord and harmony” of the land's inhabitants:
The smallness of Palestine throughout the various phases of its history since the Arab conquest in the seventh century, facilitated for its people, the process of accepting and absorbing most of the immigrant peoples and communities (and even the semi-conquering ones). This smallness facilitated also the process of fusion so that no great differences existed between one group and another; when there were differences, whether religious, ethnic, or cultural differences, they did not appear conspicuous. Even when such differences continued to exist, they did not divide the people among themselves.Footnote 71
Sayegh highlights the fact that “Arab minorities (e.g., the Christians) and the non-Arab minorities (e.g., the Armenians and the Kurds) upheld the Arab national aspirations in the area, and participated, as individuals, in political activities.” Palestine's minorities engaged in “armed struggle” and even “martyrdom, side by side with the majority”—in contrast to minorities elsewhere in the Arab world, some of whom “oppos[ed] the national struggle.”Footnote 72
Though Sayegh writes here of a variety of categories of Palestinian minorities, whether religious or ethnic, Christians are of particular concern to him. He explains that the smallness of Palestine was only one factor that helped to unify the communities and to prevent “the usual racial and sectarian divisions so familiar in the history of many peoples, particularly in this area.” The other, equally important, consideration is the fact that:
the largest minority in Palestine, i.e., the Christians (forming 1/10 of the total population for the last seven or eight centuries), are Arabs who came from the Arab Peninsula or the adjacent areas, that is to say from the cradle from which originated the Arabs most of whom migrated to Palestine. The roots of both the majority and minority, therefore, go back to the same geographic and sociocultural background. This has played an important role in bringing together the Muslims and Christians in their daily living, and in their opposition to the political danger that suddenly threatened them in an unprecedented manner. Until a late period in the history of Palestine prior to the disaster [of 1948], scores of the important Palestinian families felt strongly tied to each other irrespective of sect or creed.Footnote 73
Sayegh asserts the common Arab ethnic origin of Palestine's Christians and Muslims to account for their shared political interests. Palestine's Christians and Muslims are different only in religion and, it is implied, religion need not, ought not, and—until 1948—did not divide the communities politically.
Sayegh goes still further in his argument for the integral place of Christians in the Palestinian Arab nation. It is not merely that Christians participated equally, “side by side,” with Muslims in the national struggle. The Christian minority has been at the forefront of the struggle, especially in the development of national ideology. “The fact that the Christians in Palestine were pioneers in transmitting the concept of nationalism from Europe to the Arab world and into Arabic, just as the Lebanese did,” contends Sayegh (in a book written and published in Lebanon), “gave strength to Christian participation in the Muslim national action.” Proudly, Sayegh proclaims that Christian Palestinians were “the first to come in contact with Western civilization, through the European and American religious missions to the East, the student missions to the West and through emigration to America.”Footnote 74 And it was through these encounters that Palestinian Christians learned of and embraced the European concept of nationalism.Footnote 75 They translated the concept into an Arabic idiom and transmitted it into the Palestinian context where it was, only then, imbibed by Muslims. In a work called Palestine and Arab Nationalism (i.e., a book ostensibly about Palestinian Arab nationalism broadly), Sayegh's tenacious emphasis on the critical role of Christians historically is indicative of his apparent concern to underscore the vital place of his fellow Christians in the contemporary Palestinian Arab nationalist movement. The PLO Research Center's stress on the religious nature of Zionism might therefore also be understood in this context. Palestinian nationalism, presented as transcending religion by encompassing both Muslims and Christians, could thus be contrasted with a more parochial Zionism, religious to its core.
There is another way in which the Christian identities and education of important PLO Research Center leaders and contributors may help us understand Razzouk's—and the PLO Research Center's—accentuation of Jewish religious elements in Zionism. The biblical legitimization of Zionism could be, on the one hand, more threatening to Christian Arabs than to their Muslim counterparts; after all, faithful Christians, too, regarded the Hebrew Bible as their own sacred text. On the other hand, Bible-based arguments for Zionism could be more easily and directly challenged as many Christians, like Jews, were biblically literate and could readily engage with the textual and theological arguments on their own terms. And the leadership of the Research Center did just this. In September 1967, a mere three months after Israel conquered the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, the PLO Research Center's founding director, Fayez Sayegh, published a pamphlet entitled “Do Jews Have a ‘Divine Right’ to Palestine?” Sayegh argued against “the Zionist contentions” that “the title to Palestine, claimed by or on behalf of the Jews, rests on certain promises made by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and on certain predictions uttered by the Prophets during the Babylonian Exile.”Footnote 76 Sayegh—who, unlike his younger brother Anis, continued diligently to read the Bible through adulthoodFootnote 77—did not dismiss these Zionist contentions out of hand; because he took them seriously, he confronted them in detail.
Concerning the biblical predictions of a return to Zion, for example, Sayegh insists that these were “predictions of a return from a specific exile,” and “not—nor did they purport to be—predictions of a recurrent act of return.” The biblical prophets foretold the Jewish return from exile in Babylonia and these predictions “were in fact fulfilled,” writes Sayegh, with the reconstruction of the Temple and the institution of a “period of political independence, under the Maccabees.” Because they have already been fulfilled “the prophecies of the return cannot be viewed as still awaiting fulfillment.”Footnote 78 Sayegh, informed at least in part by his Christian religious education, does not question the authentic, divine nature of the Hebrew Bible's prophets in his challenge to Zionism's appeal to these prophecies; rather, he insists that these prophecies, properly understood, were already actualized two millennia earlier and have no implications for contemporary Jews or Palestine.
What of God's biblical promises to grant Palestine to the figures regarded as the forefathers of the Jews? Drawing on Alfred Guillaume's 1956 essay “Zionists and the Bible,” Sayegh cites the passages in Genesis where God promises the Land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants.Footnote 79 These promises, writes Sayegh, “were made to Abraham and his ‘seed’ in the first instance. When they were subsequently made to Isaac and Jacob and their ‘seed,’ no exclusion of other descendants was indicated.” In other words, all of Abraham's descendants can claim God's promise, not just those who descended from Isaac and Jacob. “The inclusiveness of the earlier promises,” notes Sayegh, “was not cancelled by the relative narrowness of the later ones.”Footnote 80
The implication of this assertion is that those other, non-Jewish descendants of Abraham—and these include Arabs, Sayegh reminds the reader—have equal claim to the biblical God's promise of Palestine. “Apart from Muslim tradition,” writes Sayegh, “there is ample evidence in the Old Testament itself that the term, ‘the seed of Abraham,’ includes Arabs.” Citing Genesis 25 and I Chronicles 1, Sayegh notes that “through Abraham's first-born son, Ishmael, who was born to Abraham by Hagar the Egyptian, many an Arab tribe came to be among the offspring of Abraham,” and, through Abraham's second wife, Keturah, “Abraham became the father of other Arab tribes also.”Footnote 81 Moreover, even if one understands the “seed of Abraham” to mean descendants of Jews, these include many Middle Eastern Christians. “A large proportion” of the Jews who had been exiled by the Babylonians in the 6th century bce “preferred to remain where they were,” explains Sayegh, rather than to return to the Holy Land when permitted to. “Those Jews who chose not to return formed the Diaspora,” and, Sayegh contends, they subsequently became “the backbone of the Christian Church and an ethnically indistinguishable component of the population of the Near East.”Footnote 82 Abraham's progeny to whom the Promised Land was promised include Arabs and especially Christian Arabs.
The second prong of Sayegh's challenge to the Zionist claim that all Jews and only Jews constitute the “seed of Abraham” and are thus the rightful inheritors of Palestine is Sayegh's contention that many contemporary Jews are not actual descendants of the biblical paterfamilias. “Throughout the centuries,” asserts Sayegh, “conversion and proselytization have introduced into the ranks of Jews many who were not the offspring of Abraham,” and he cites the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia in noting that “wholesale conversion of the Khazars of Russia to Judaism occurred in the Eighth Century A.D.”Footnote 83 If Zionists rely on biblical promises to Abraham's offspring to legitimize modern Jews’ claim to Palestine, Sayegh retorts that “the over-simplified Zionist contention . . . is inaccurate from the standpoint of both its exclusiveness,” that is, excluding Abraham's non-Jewish descendants, and “its inclusiveness,” that is, including Jews who are not themselves the biological progeny of Abraham.Footnote 84 Finally, citing the American Presbyterian theologian Oswald T. Allis, Sayegh emphasizes the conditional nature of the biblical promise, “that possession of the land was conditioned on obedience” to God.Footnote 85 Even if contemporary Jews were all the progeny of Abraham and were his only progeny, there would be reason to conclude that God's promise had been revoked due to the Jews’ defiance of God's commandments.
If the preceding arguments are remarkable for the degree to which they accept, and engage in, the logic of biblical reading in arguing against the “Zionist contention,” the final section of Sayegh's short pamphlet on whether Jews have a “divine right” to Palestine rests on a different plane—or, rather, Testament—entirely. “It is in the light of the Christian Gospel,” writes Sayegh, “that a Christian must understand the abiding truth and relevance of the promises recorded in the Old Testament.” For Sayegh, articulating a form of supersessionism, the Gospel represents the ascendance of a “world-embracing universalism” over “the parochialism, provincialism, or ‘nationalism’ of the Jewish traditions.”Footnote 86 Judaism was based on a “tribalistic belief in a ‘chosen people,’” while Christianity involved “a revolutionary universalism which emphasized the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”Footnote 87 As Sayegh saw it, Christianity's great innovation was its rebellion against the narrow particularism of Judaism in favor of a broad universalism.
There is nothing novel in Sayegh's contrast between Judaism's particularism and Christianity's universalism. This is a standard Christian critique of Judaism (a discursive tradition that remains relevant even though the PLO Research Center publications were by no means generally anti-Jewish).Footnote 88 Notable here, rather, are the ends toward which Sayegh employs this trope: to argue against Jewish nationalism. Christianity taught the world universalism; the Jews still cling to their religion's particularism and hence to their antiquated nationalism. Jews fail to recognize that “Israel of the flesh” has given way to “Israel of the spirit” and that “within the revolutionary re-interpretation of old concepts which the Christian Gospel introduces, the spiritual importance of places as such vanishes, giving way to emphasis on the spirit; it is the spirit alone that possesses importance.”Footnote 89 Jews, following an anachronistic Judaism, stubbornly persist in seeing spiritual value in physical spaces, whereas Christians, enlightened by the Gospel, understand that earthly locations are of no spiritual import. For Christians, as Christians, writes Sayegh quoting Allis, “the land of Palestine has a sentimental interest. But that is all.”Footnote 90
Underlying part of Sayegh's critique of Zionism is a well-trodden—if innovatively deployed—Christian argument against Judaism. This insight may help us still better to understand why the Sayegh brothers, as successive directors of the PLO Research Center, and contributors to the center's research agenda such as Razzouk, concentrated so heavily on the religious elements of Zionism. Demonstrating that Zionism was motivated by Jewish religious impulses allowed Christian Arabs to link the faults of Zionism to those they already recognized in Judaism. Some Jews—especially the 19th-century Reformers and their 20th-century intellectual successors—effectively embraced the Gospel's universal message and understood that Judaism, as a religion, is a spiritual matter with no political implications or geographic boundaries. Zionists, however, rejected this truth and, instead, held fast to traditional Judaism's particularist obsession with the physical land and the nation.
ACCOUNTING FOR “CHRISTIAN ZIONISM”
Given their proud insistence on Christianity's universalism, the PLO Research Center staff was disturbed especially by Christians who, qua Christians, embraced Zionism. For Razzouk, these Christians were epitomized by James Parkes (1896–1981), a well-known reverend in the Church of England. By the late 1960s, Parkes had published numerous works on Jewish history, antisemitism, Israel, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. Not unlike the PLO researchers studied here, Parkes saw in Zionism an essentially religiously motivated movement—notwithstanding many Zionists’ claims to the contrary. In “Judaism and Zionism: A Christian View,” an essay Parkes contributed to a 1947 symposium on “Some Religious Aspects of Zionism,” he insisted:
Neither anti-Semitism nor the need for a haven for the homeless nor political nationalism lie at the foundation of the Zionist movement, or form the inspiration even of those leaders and settlers who are not openly or even consciously moved by affection for the religious inheritance of Judaism and the Messianic dream of a return to Zion. At bottom lie the historic reality of the Jews as a people, and the nature of Judaism as a religion expressing itself in the life of an autonomous community.Footnote 91
While the advent of increasingly virulent antisemitism and the rise of nationalism are important for understanding Zionism, religious forces, argues Parkes, were at the heart of Jewish nationalism.
If Parkes and the PLO Research Center team shared the view of Zionism as religious, even if “not openly or even consciously” so, the correspondence between their perspectives ends there. Whereas Parkes celebrated this religiously motivated drive for Jewish autonomy, the PLO Research Center challenged it, both from an internal Jewish religious perspective and from a Christian religious perspective. The PLO Research Center therefore saw it necessary to attack Parkes and his views directly. In 1970 (the same year as the release of al-Fikra al-Sahyuniyya), it published Razzouk's The Partisan Views of Reverend James Parkes. In this fifty-page essay, Razzouk argues that “prejudice seems to get the upper hand in the emotional approach pursued by the gentile Zionism of Rev. Parkes.” In fact, Razzouk contends that, “in posing the question of ‘How to seek a proper Christian understanding of the State of Israel?’ Rev. Parkes remains true only to his gentile Zionism, and thereby fails to give the proper Christian element its due credit.”Footnote 92 Because Parkes abdicates true Christian values in his embrace of Zionism, Razzouk insists on labeling Parkes's position “gentile Zionism” rather than “Christian Zionism.” Razzouk acknowledges Parkes's engagement with and contribution to “authentic” Christian theology, but contends that where Zionism was concerned, “Rev. Parkes, the theologian” gave way to “Dr. Parkes, the historian and gentile Zionist.”Footnote 93 Indeed, argues Razzouk, Parkes himself conceded this bifurcation in his writings by publishing his theological works under the pseudonym “John Hadham” and his Zionist compositions under his given name.
But why would an ostensibly religious Christian—indeed a respected Christian theologian—embrace Zionism so “overzealous[ly],” as Razzouk puts it?Footnote 94 Parkes's motivation can only be discerned in the reverend's own self-interest, Razzouk contends. Throughout his essay, Razzouk repeatedly highlights Parkes's financial dependence on Jewish patrons. Parkes's “Zionist discoveries,” alleges Razzouk, are in fact “the passionate and emotional voice of his Zionist masters and mentors,” those “who are always eager and ready to ‘pay the bills’ with great pleasure.”Footnote 95 Parkes considered, but then decided against, writing a book on the causes of the Palestinian refugee crisis, Razzouk contends, so as “not to embarrass his Zionist benefactors.”Footnote 96 Razzouk points to Parkes's references in his autobiography to funds he raised and gifts he received from Zionists.Footnote 97 There is no other way to explain Parkes's Zionism, Razzouk implies, than to understand who was bankrolling him; Parkes's Zionism had no authentic relation to his Christianity.Footnote 98 Moreover, to Parkes's claim that “pro-Arab” Christians are not merely “anti-Israel” but also “both ignorant and mildly or virulently anti-Semitic,” Razzouk retorts: “Apparently Dr. Parkes has met the wrong kind of Christians.”Footnote 99 The right kind of Christians, it would seem, were those, like Razzouk and his colleagues, whose opposition to Zionism was informed by a proper understanding of Christianity, and of Judaism.
POSTSCRIPT
I have argued here that the PLO Research Center presented Zionism as a movement that, no matter the secularist claims of many of its leaders and followers, was principally motivated by religious, messianic interests, values, and myths. Regardless of the precise historical relationship between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a nationalism—a topic that remains a matter of scholarly debateFootnote 100—the PLO Research Center's view of the question contained an important insight: religious backgrounds, educations, and traditions can play a role in how people see the world and engage in contemporary politics, even when they are unaware of these influences. Considering the PLO researchers’ own religious traditions—ones that, as we have seen, animated their research program and the work they published—helps us to understand their own relationship to and critique of Zionism in fuller context.
By exploring the story of the PLO Research Center in Beirut, we bring into focus a part of Palestinian intellectual history that has been blurred by contemporary politics. The current prominence of Islam in Palestinian politics and in the discourse concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, on the one hand, and the significant financial and political support that powerful American Christian evangelical groups bestow upon Israel, on the other, all too easily obscure the place of Christians and Christianity in Palestinian nationalism and in the development of Palestinian conceptions of, and polemics against, Zionism and Israel. Taking seriously the assumptions, concerns, and interests of the Christian minorities engaged in the intellectual battles of Palestinian nationalism reminds us that when nationalist institutions such as the PLO Research Center imagined and set out to present their enemy, they were also constructing a vision of their own nation-in-waiting.
