Summary
Founder figure of political Zionism who enters Kanafani’s essay only through a quotation from his Selected Works, used in the Background: The Workers chapter as evidence of the Zionist programme for land and for the removal of the poor inhabitants.
Details
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Herzl is quoted (footnote 25: Theodor Herzl, Selected Works, Newman Ed., Vol.7, Book 1, Tel Aviv, p.86) to the effect that private land in the areas allocated to the Zionists must be seized from its owners, that poor inhabitants are to be quickly evacuated across the border after jobs have been secured for them in the countries of their destination, that they are to be denied employment in the Zionists’ country, and that large property-owners will ultimately join the Zionists (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.16-17).
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Kanafani places the quotation in his account of the Jewish Labour Only order, immediately before the Histadrut’s policy against allowing Arabs into the Jewish labour market (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.16-17).
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In Sayegh’s account Herzl led the First Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1897, which replaced haphazard colonisation with an organised nationalistic programme under his leadership (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.3 / printed p.208).
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Sayegh notes that even Herzl noted the friendly attitude of the population to the first wave of Zionist colonists, in stage (1) of the Palestinian response (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.221).
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Sayegh lists Herzl, with Weizmann, Ben Gurion and Goldmann, among the leaders who preached that the chief enemy of Zionism is Jewish assimilation, not anti-Semitism (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).
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In Said: in 1895 Herzl noted in his Diaries that the penniless population would have to be spirited across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in the Zionists’ own country, and that both expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.34 / printed p.13).
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Said’s Herzl first conceived Zionism in the nineties as a movement to free Jews and solve the problem of anti-Semitism in the West, with Palestine taken later as the place of its fulfilment after locations in South America and East Africa had been considered and dropped (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.44 / printed p.23).
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In Pappe, Herzl, the movement’s founder, was more ambivalent than his successors about the association of national revival with the colonisation of Palestine, but after his death in 1904 the orientation towards Palestine was fixed and consensual; Nur Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians, as Pappe recaps it, shows that from Herzl to the main leaders of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, cleansing the land was a valid option (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.30, p.34).
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In Pappe, Chapter 12: Herzl had written in his diary in 1895, “We shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it any employment in our own country” — Pappe’s endnote gives the entry for 12 June 1895 in Michael Prior’s translation from the German (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.288, p.324).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Zionism, Jewish Labour Only, Histadrut, Settler Colonialism