I come across posts like these often. The issue? They don’t accurately reflect Zionist arguments.
When we refuse to constructively engage with each other as a matter of principle, we can’t understand – or even accurately identify – each others’ viewpoints.
EARLY SEEDS OF DIALOGUE
As per the resolutions at the First Zionist Congress, the Zionist movement, from the very beginning, sought to achieve its goals through diplomatic means. This meant that early Zionist leaders, from Theodor Herzl to Chaim Weizmann, intensely pursued dialogue with a whole host of historical figures: first, with the Ottomans, who ruled Palestine during Herzl’s lifetime, and later, with the British, who eventually took over.
One group, however, was largely missing from the equation: the Arab citizens of Palestine. That’s not to say that there was no communication at all. Herzl famously wrote to Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi in 1899, then the mayor of Jerusalem. Al-Khalidi recognized the Jews’ historic rights to the land, but worried that new Jewish immigrants would dispossess the Arab population. Herzl dismissed his concerns, assuring him that the Zionist movement intended to do no such thing, and insisted that Jewish innovation and industry would ultimately improve the economic conditions for all citizens alike.
"You are well aware that I am talking about Zionism. The idea in itself is only natural, beautiful and just. Who can dispute the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!...But the reality is that Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by people other than only Israelites...To achieve a goal like the one that Zionism must propose, other, more formidable blows are needed, those of cannons and battleships...In the name of God, let Palestine be left alone."
YUSUF AL-KHALIDI, 1899
"The Zionist idea, of which I am the humble servant, has no hostile tendency toward the Ottoman Government, but quite to the contrary, this movement is concerned with opening up new resources for the Ottoman Empire...You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?"
THEODOR HERZL, 1899
Weizmann, too, sought dialogue with Arab leaders, both in Palestine proper and in the territories encompassing Greater Syria, including:
- Emir Faisal I, with whom Weizmann signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement in 1919, in which both parties agreed to cooperation between the Zionist and Arab nationalist movements.
- Riad al-Sulh, the future first prime minister of Lebanon, who agreed to recognize a Jewish national home in 1921 in exchange for Zionist support for Arab nationalist aspirations.
- Prominent Palestinian Arab leaders, including the Husseini family, though these meetings were largely unsuccessful due to “Arab excitement” and growing anti-Jewish sentiment.
HITTING A WALL
Ultimately the productive dialogue between Zionist leadership and Arab leadership would be short-lived. David Ben-Gurion, too, pursued conversations with Palestinian Arab leaders. Thanks largely in part to Haj Amin al-Husseini’s influence (more on that in a moment), these conversations proved unfruitful.
- In the 1930s, Ben-Gurion met with Musa Alami, a close confidant of the British High Commissioner, and discussed cooperation between Arabs and the Zionist movement. Alami brokered a meeting between Ben-Gurion and al-Husseini, which was unproductive.
- In 1936, Ben-Gurion met with George Antonius to discuss the formation of an interim Legislative Council, but the meetings collapsed due to the Arab Revolt.
REJECTIONISM: A HISTORY
n 1920, Haj Amin al-Husseini splintered off from other pan-Arab nationalists and instead set his sights on the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state in the British Mandate’s territory. Al-Husseini was a hardliner, religious fundamentalist, virulent antisemite, and future Nazi collaborator who incited violence against Palestine’s Jewish communities – new and old – by portraying them as a threat to Islam. By the 1936 Arab Revolt, during which al-Husseini assassinated his political opposition, he had emerged as the first undisputed leader of the Palestinian Arab cause.
Al-Husseini, at least publicly, vehemently opposed all forms of dialogue, engagement, and communication with the Zionist movement, often to the detriment of his own cause. Under his influence, the Arab leadership in Palestine boycotted investigators from the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and threatened to execute any Arabs who thought to participate in the investigation. Had they actually engaged with UNSCOP, it’s likely that the partition of Palestine would’ve never even been put on the table.
THE PALESTINE RESEARCH CENTER
For decades, the very idea of even entertaining Zionist thinking was taboo in Palestinian society. But in 1965, under the auspices of the Soviet Union, the Palestine Liberation Organization established the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, which sought, among other things, to “understand” the enemy; that is, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel.
The problem? PRC researchers did not actually engage with Zionists – or with Jews, for that matter. Instead, they analyzed Jewish texts with little historical and contextual understanding, drawing misguided conclusions. For example, the PRC held the Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, which had long been overturned by 1965, as Jewish doctrine. The Pittsburgh Platform expressed that Jews no longer identified as a nation, but only as a religious group, but the Reform movement itself repudiated it in 1937. To this day, the idea that the Zionist movement “invented” Jewish nationhood is common in pro-Palestine discourse, based on a complete misunderstanding of what does and doesn’t constitute Jewish law.
THE SOVIET BOGEYMAN
In the absence of dialogue, in which Zionists could express their views, the Soviet Cold War propaganda machine formulated an image of an imaginary “Zionist” that never accurately reflected the opinions, values, and viewpoints of real Zionists or of the Zionist movement. Through the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public and a secret operation titled Zionist Governments, the Soviets invented the Zionist bogeyman as a genocidal racist imperialist.
Meanwhile, the Soviet-funded Palestine Research Center produced enduring titles, most notably Fayez Sayegh’s “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” based on entirely misguided perceptions of Jewish peoplehood and Zionist thought.
ZIONIST RELUCTANCE
At times, the refusal to engage with each other went both ways. In the aftermath of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Zionist movement virtually stopped engaging with the Palestinian side of the story altogether. Israelis rejected the narrative of Palestinian victimhood, seeing as it was Palestinian Arabs that sparked the civil war in 1947, which ultimately led to an invasion by five powerful Arab armies. All of this just a few years after the Holocaust, as the new fledgling Jewish state struggled to absorb over a million Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world, nearly doubling its population.
By the late 1970s, Israeli resentment had cooled off, and exhaustion with never-ending wars had set in, sparking the beginnings of the Israeli peace movement and an ideological shift. Then, in the 1980s, the New Historians, including figures like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and Tom Segev, began questioning or challenging traditional Israeli narratives, beginning to engage with the Palestinian point of view.
That said, many Israelis have remained unwilling to engage in discussions with Palestinians, especially in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, and now, October 7.
The Israeli peace movement peaked in the early 1990s, with the Oslo Accords, with peace rallies drawing hundreds of thousands of people. Initially supported by the majority of the Israeli public, support for the Oslo Accords plummeted as incidents of Palestinian terrorism increased, rather than decreased, by the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, right-wing Israeli terrorists grew emboldened in carrying out acts of violence to derail the peace process, including the 1994 Hebron Massacre and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
ANTI-NORMALIZATION
Within the context of the Palestinian cause, the principle of anti-normalization is that of opposition to engagement and even dialogue with Israeli individuals, Israeli institutions, and/or Zionist individuals and institutions. It is a core feature of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and traces its origins to the 1967 Khartoum Resolution, also known as the Three Nos, when the Arab League declared that there would be “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”
In 1977, the Palestinian National Council formulated the ath-Thawabit al-Waṭanīya al-Filasṭīnīya (“Palestinian national constants”), more commonly referred to as Thawabit and widely regarded as the “red lines” of the Palestinian national movement. Anti-normalization is considered a key component of Thawabit.
In the 1990s, with the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinian hardliners and Islamist groups declared Yasser Arafat a traitor to the Palestinian cause for conducting talks with Israel.
"Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
HAMAS CHARTER, ARTICLE 13
In 1993, approximately 2/3s of Palestinians supported the Oslo Accords, but extremist factions, particularly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, saw the engagement with Israel as a betrayal to the Palestinian cause and sought to hijack the peace process, leading to a sevenfold increase in terrorism-related Israeli fatalities.
THE POWER OF THE ALGORITHM
Anti-normalization efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict long predate the advent of social media. But due to its very nature, social media exponentially magnifies these rejectionist attitudes.
Social media lends itself to algorithms, so supporters of the Palestinian cause are unlikely to come across pro-Zionist content, and vice versa. There is a caveat here, though: pro-Palestine content vastly outnumbers pro-Israel content on social media, meaning that Zionist posts are less likely to break through an antizionist algorithm, versus the other way around.
- On TikTok, antizionist content outnumbers Zionist content by 17-50x.
- By November 2023, pro-Palestine content outnumbered pro-Israel content on Instagram by 26x.
- On Facebook, pro-Palestine posts outnumber pro-Israel posts by 39x.
When we are not exposed to the other side’s way of thinking, we can’t understand what they’re thinking.
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