Lodewijk van Oord. History & Anthropology. Volume 19, Issue 3, September 2008.
This essay analyses the Western perception of Palestine in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It elucidates how the way the West looked at Palestine and its population was deeply influenced by the anthropological invention of “primitive society”. This lens through which to view the Holy Land was not the result of an objective description of the subject matter; on the contrary, it was a narrative carefully constructed and designed to suit the narrators’ purposes. Driven by religious and political motifs, Western scholars, travellers and religious writers set out to describe the land and people of Palestine in terms of historicized difference. Not only did this allow Christian scholars to demonstrate the reliability of the biblical narratives, but even more did it offer an intellectual justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Introduction
When Sir Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, was asked to write an introduction to The Handbook of Palestine (1922), he decided to invite his readers to come and experience the newly established mandate for themselves. According to the High Commissioner, one could pick the century one preferred in Palestine, a country characterized by its “diversity of religions, diversity of civilizations, diversity of climate, diversity of physical characteristics”. The traveller, argued Samuel:
… may find among the Beduin of Beersheba precisely the conditions that prevailed in the time of Abraham; at Bethlehem he may see the women’s costumes, and, in some respects, the mode of living of the period of the Crusades; the Arab villages are, for the most part, still under mediaeval conditions; the towns present many of the problems of the early nineteenth century; while the new arrivals from Eastern and Central Europe, and from America, bring with them the activities of the twentieth century, and sometimes, perhaps, the ideas of the twenty-first. (Luke & Keith-Roach 1930: xv)
Edward Keith-Roach, co-editor of the handbook, held various positions in the British government of Palestine, but he was also a writer for The National Geographic Magazine. In 1934 he contributed an article called “Changing Palestine”, a jubilant narrative of the progress and developments under way in the country: “The last decades have shown greater changes in Palestine than have occurred since the beginning of the Christian Era” (Keith-Roach 1934: 493). In their perceptions of Palestine, both Samuel and Keith-Roach reveal themselves as children of their time. Their descriptions fit well in Europe’s prevailing communis opinio with regard to Palestine before the establishment of Israel in 1948. This widely accepted narrative held that the “Holy Land” had since time immemorial been a backward country where virtually nothing had changed since Abraham, King David and Jesus Christ trod the soil. This conception of a timeless Palestine fuelled the argument that only active Western involvement would be able to modernize and “redeem” the Holy Land.
This essay analyses the Western description of Palestine in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It elucidates how the way the West looked at Palestine and its people was deeply influenced by the anthropological invention of “primitive society”. This lens through which to view the Holy Land was not the result of an objective description of the subject matter; on the contrary, it was a narrative carefully constructed and designed to suit the narrators’ purposes. Driven by religious and political motifs, western scholars, travellers and religious writers set out to describe the land and people of Palestine in terms of historicized difference. Not only did this allow Christian scholars to demonstrate the reliability of the biblical narratives, but even more did it offer an intellectual justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine.
Historicizing Difference
Publications such as Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) triggered the development of a new paradigm of human difference, a transformation which has been described as the “epistemologically violent eruption of time into space” (McGrane 1989: 89). New sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology changed Europe’s chronological perspective and allowed for the development of anthropology as an academic discipline. Edward Tylor, often seen as the father of British anthropology, stressed the importance of this transition when he wrote in his Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881):
Thus geology establishes a principle which lies at the very foundation of anthropology. Until of late, when it used to be reckoned by chronologists that the earth and man were less than 6000 years old, the science of geology could hardly exist, there being no room for its long processes of building up the strata containing the remains of its vast succession of plants, and animals. These are now accounted for by the theory that geological time extends over millions of years. (Tylor 1913: 33)
Geological time gave anthropologists the space to envision the slow evolutionary development from prehistoric primitivism to modern civilization. “The leading idea which is present in all our researches”, wrote geologist George Scrope in 1858, “the sound which to the ear of the student of nature seems continually echoed from every part of her works is—Time! Time! Time!” (in McGrane 1989: 88).
The new time perspective and notion of evolution not only made anthropology possible, it also led to a new paradigm for the understanding of difference between Europe and the non-European Other. This transformation consisted of two elements: first, human differences were more and more perceived as historical differences, and, second, human history came to be understood as a process of evolution and progress. As Bernard McGrane puts it, beyond Europe became before Europe. He gives the credit for this development almost entirely to Tylor, who made “difference historical, and history evolutionary” (1989: 93). Non-European societies came to be perceived as earlier manifestations of “our” own, and the Other could therefore offer valuable insights into our own past. The very first link in this chain of human development was formed by so-called “primitive man” who lived in a “primitive society”. As McGrane, once more, wrote:
It’s as though Taylor saw the whole world as a huge museum-drama: on one stage, in the Amazon, for instance, we can see act one. Simultaneously, on stage two, in New Guinea, we can see act two, etc. The people of the world act out the story of our history, and the only audience who can understand the play is, of-course, “us”. We have the benefit of hindsight: we know how the story ends, we are how the story ends. In this sense Tylor assumes there is a purpose in the world and that purpose is “us”. (McGrane 1989: 95, emphasis in the original)
However, stresses Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other (2002), primitive society is not an identifiable object but a category of the European mind, solidly connected to the notion of human progress and development. In similar vein, McGrane argues that faith in evolution produces “primitivism”:
The very possibility of the conception of “primitive” presupposed the prior commitment to a conception of progress. It was not the factual “discovery” of “primitive peoples”— “primitive people” are not the sort of thing that can be “discovered”: “primitives” are made, not found. (McGrane 1989: 99)
The nineteenth-century development of historicizing difference had further implications. If time constituted the difference between “us” and “them”, this also meant that the Other no longer resided outside the European timeframe, but within it. The Other was no longer a distant savage, a barbarian or a madman, but a representation of ourselves in a more primitive state. The historicized understanding of human difference thus contributed to the discourse on human development and progress. It was held that all societies generally progress, yet some were perceived as huge slabs of time ahead of others. Past and present coexisted alongside each other, and the student of man could leapfrog through history as he or she wished, and, in the High Commissioner’s words, pick the century of choice.
With the construction of primitive man, the Western world not only gave itself a new field of enquiry but also a new responsibility. The conception of primitive man not only provided the possibility of self-discovery through observation of the Other, but in return the object of study had to be cultivated and developed until it was seen fit to become part of Western modernity. The creation of primitive society, in other words, also fostered the doctrine of the white man’s burden.
Depicting Biblical Palestine
Legend has it that the first photograph of Palestine was taken on 11 December 1839 by the French photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet. In his wake, numerous Western photographers followed, some offering their services to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, with others working commercially for the growing European and North American markets (Howe 1997; al-Hajj 2001). In the meantime, Palestine was becoming a popular destination for scores of European scholars, tourists, pilgrims and artists. Relatively quick and affordable transportation made the journey to Palestine feasible for the middle and upper classes. Numerous travel guides became available in the 1830s, often published by respectable publishing houses such as John Murray in London.
Biblical research in Palestine started simultaneously with the rise of geology and evolution theory. The archaeologist Edward Robinson and his assistant Eli Smith had published their Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea in 1841, with Later Biblical Researches appearing in 1856. These books set the standard for biblical archaeology and would be scholarly points of reference for decades to come. Robertson would be one of the first to describe Palestine as a timeless country outside of history, where the clock stood still and human progress failed to make an appearance. As his writing clearly demonstrates, Robinson felt like moving around in biblical times. On several occasions he refers to the conditions of Palestine as unchanged from the days of Abraham. This narrative of timelessness came to dominate Western writings on the Holy Land, and features in virtually every popular and scholarly publication on Palestine until the establishment of Israel in 1948. As the reproduction of photographs became cheaper, pictures more and more replaced drawings and paintings to illustrate the point (Moors 2001).
The Land and the Book; or Biblical Illustrations Drawn From the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (1868) by William M. Thomson is a relatively early example of such a publication. For Thomson, one could not understand the Word of God without having an understanding of the Land of God. He even argued in his introduction that the Holy Land had to be seen as part of God’s revelation to mankind:
The land where the Word made-flesh dwelt with men is, and must ever be, an integral part of the Divine Revelation…. In a word, Palestine is one vast tablet whereupon God’s messages to men have been drawn, and graven deep in living characters by the Great Publisher of glad tidings, to be seen and read of all to the end of time.
The Land and the Book—with reverence be it said—constitute the ENTIRE and ALLPERFECT TEXT, and should be studied together. (Thomson 1868: xvi, small caps in the original)
Therefore, the author continued, the one should be read by the light of the other, and his book was meant to assist those who were not fortunate enough to travel to Palestine themselves. For Thomson too, the Levant of the 1860s was identical to the Holy Land in the time of the Bible. On passing one of the gates of Beirut, he exclaimed:
Stop a moment. A city gate is a novelty to me, and I must examine in detail an apparatus so often mentioned in the Bible…. [N]early every other city in Syria and Palestine is still protected by these venerable safeguards.
And thus it was in ancient days. (Thomson 1868: 26)
The fact that these city walls were all built in Ottoman times, some fifteen centuries after the days of Christ, did not bother the author. If “the Land” and “the Book” formed one integrated “all-perfect text”, they could not at the same time be asynchronous. Thomson took much effort to discuss the customs, manners and lifestyle of the Arab populations of Palestine and Syria. Although he at times suggested that things might have changed slightly since biblical times, these changes were never seen as significant: “although customs have changed in this respect, there is still enough remaining in this country to remind us of the older times” (1868: 26).
Even more folkloristic in nature was Robinson Lees’s Village Life in Palestine (1897), a little volume purposefully written to be used in Sunday Schools and Bible classes. His rationale for writing the book echoed the words of Thomson:
The Peasants or Fellaheen of the villages of Palestine are so intimately connected with the Holy Land of the Bible that it would be impossible to adequately describe their condition, manners and customs, without some special reference to the land in which they live. (Robinson Lees 1897: 1)
The peasants of Palestine, argued Robinson Lees, were living witnesses to the truth of God’s Word (“though walking in the light they know it not” [1897: 134]). This Truth is illustrated in Village Life in Palestine by the linkage of pictures to biblical references. A picture of Arab women grinding grain is accompanied by the text: “Woman’s first duty every morning is to take a supply of grain from the corn bin and call a neighbour of friend and grind it at the mill. St Matt. xxiv., 41, ‘Two women shall be grinding at the mill’” (1897: 50). This explanation is followed by a lengthy discussion of the process of bread baking, from the grain to the finished product, accompanied by references from Ecclesiastes, 1 Corinthians, Exodus, Malachi, and the Gospel according to Matthew.
Robinson Lees took much effort to describe the way the peasants of Palestine lived, adding descriptions of the village houses, their interiors, furniture and so forth. The authors stresses time and again that these descriptions are useful for an understanding of biblical times. Discussing the use of clay pottery, he explained how the Fellaheen were “in no way gifted with a creative or artistic faculty” (1897: 46-47). This explained why their pottery remained primitive:
These very elementary features present to us an intelligence that does not far exceed that of the rudest savage. Clay is of such a nature that the art of working it might be easily discovered, and the baking of it in an oven is but one step in the development and improvement of the crudest mind, and represents only the first effort in the art of manufacture. Thus we see what very primitive minds are now in the possession of the peasants compared with the maturity of the rest of mankind in civilised countries. It is the same in everything else connected with the Fellaheen of Palestine. They are old world people and belong to a period very remote from this. (Robinson Lees 1897: 47-48).
More than three decades later, this view is endorsed by a scholarly publication on the Palestinian house by the folklorist Taufik Canaan. “It may be assumed”, he wrote, “that, in general, the present people of Palestine are housed in a manner not greatly different from the manner usual in ancient times”. A detailed study would therefore “throw direct or indirect light on earlier conditions” (Canaan 1932-1933: 231).
The description of Palestinian village houses and domestic utensils as primitive (or ancient, at best) has been scrutinized by various modern scholarly inquiries into Ottoman Palestinian architecture. Ron Fuchs concluded that Palestinian vernacular architecture “does not hark back to biblical antiquity or prehistoric cultures…. Its origins do not go back to time immemorial, but probably to the Middle Ages” (1998: 172). He convincingly demonstrated how the architecture of Palestine developed over time, and had reached a remarkable level of sophistication by the mid-nineteenth century.
The method of linking photographic views to biblical passages also underpins Earthly Footsteps of the Man from Galilee, a photo album published in 1894. This collection of 384 photographs and explanatory captions was meant, in the words of one of its authors, to provide the reader with “fresh and first-hand views accompanied with descriptions from personal observations”. Therefore, the authors set out to “invade Palestine”, Egypt and Syria with “scientific instruments” in order to trace “the footprints of the Man of Galilee from Bethlehem” (for all references from this title: Vincent et al. 1894: n.p.).
Although the authors were well aware that Palestine was not identical to the biblical Holy Land, it was still perceived as largely similar:
It is the old land, the same to-day as in the past yesterdays.
The manners and customs of this Eastern country have not been changed. People dress and eat and sleep and live and labour as they did two thousand years ago. The scenes of the Bible are reproduced with startling fidelity to the old record…. The old customs and costumes remain.
This conception is reiterated in the captions accompanying the photographs. The first picture, for instance, depicts the tents used by the photographer and his team, and has the following caption:
THE PILGRIMS—TENTING IN THE CITY WHERE CHRIST WAS BROUGHT UP. [Genesis, iv: 20.]— … Many people continue to live in tents in Palestine, and the tents used by the natives to-day do not vary much from such as were used in the early history of the country…. The picture given above is of the travelling tent used by the parties who were sent to Bible lands to get the pictures of Bible places which illustrate this work. This modern tent … is as far from the tents of the Bedouins in Palestine, as Western civilization is from the primitive civilization of the crude sons of the desert. (Emphasis added).
Places in Palestine, Egypt and Syria are consistently designated as the location of biblical events, and the people of Palestine are depicted as the contemporaries of biblical figures, as the following two captions illustrate:
THE DRAWER OF WATER FROM THE NILE—THE METHOD OBSERVED IN THE DAYS OF MOSES. [Leviticus, xxii: 1.]—We give this picture [of an Egyptian irrigation system] simply because it illustrates a scene in the land of Moses, and the view we have is a characteristic scene. It is not modern; it is just the very method of drawing water observed in the days of Moses.
TRAVELING IN GALILEE. [Mark, iii: 7, 8.]—Jesus Christ was brought up in Galilee and often travelled through it. This scene [of a family travelling on a donkey and a horse] is one common to the country…. Things never change in Palestine. As they travel to-day, they have always travelled, and there is no doubt that our Saviour witnessed many such scenes as the one here photographed.
Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee did give credit to some aspects of modernization in Palestine, but the authors were not impressed by its speed. “[W]e saw the only steam mill that we observed in Palestine. It is rather a crude affair, but shows that the material elements of modern civilization are gradually penetrating this, one of the oldest countries”. In the view of the authors, Palestine was moving tragically slowly, and the past centuries had mostly been characterized by regression. They even argue that civilization of Palestine in the times of David and Salomon was of a higher state than in the late nineteenth century: “It was not only arrested by Moslem religion, but has been set back and degraded to a degree lower almost than any other civilization in the world, above that of the barbarian”.
When Robinson travelled through the land of Palestine in 1838, he was not surprised to find it unchanged and timeless; it was exactly as he had expected. Some of the things he observed, such as the villages and nomadic life, could be moulded in his expectations and were recorded. Other Palestinian realities, such as the social and cultural life in the cities, the first signs of modern industry, or the steamers along the coast, were left out. The narrative of a timeless Palestine was constructed, not found, as it suited the purposes of the scholars and popular writers who set out to show the reliability of the biblical narratives. Palestine became the Land of the Book, a land which not only harboured the locations where biblical events had once, in the distant past, taken place, but more so the space where one could see them happening at the very moment. If one looked carefully one could still see the footsteps of the biblical figures in the soil. Although the patriarchs, kings and prophets were gone, the inhabitants of Palestine were still their contemporaries. Their “customs and costumes” were perceived as manifestations of the biblical world. For Western observers, Palestine was, to return to McGrane’s analogy, “stage 1: the Holy Land”, and the population of Palestine were extras and silent characters in the story of human history’s first act as envisioned in the Christian mind. In this sense, Palestine became a quintessential example of a primitive society, which the West could study in order to learn more about the context of the biblical stories. Palestine’s inhabitants became the guides of Western Christians, helping them to strengthen their faith through knowledge of the Holy Land. These Arab peasants had no intrinsic value in themselves, and observers noted that if it were not for the graves of the biblical kings, prophets and holy men, there was no reason to visit Jerusalem’s “gloomy, half-ruinous streets and poverty stricken bazaars” (in Howe 1997: 18). In a time when the Bible became, in Robinson Lees’s words, “the object of severe textual criticism” the “confirmatory evidence of the truth of the Bible supplied by the life of the people in the land of the Bible” (1905: v) was more than welcome.
Claiming the Holy Land
British geopolitical interests in Palestine were triggered by Napoleon’s unsuccessful attempt to conquer the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt all the way up to Syria, in 1799. Napoleon was hardly interested in Palestine’s religious heritage; on his way from Jaffa to Acre he did not even bother to visit Jerusalem. Yet he did publish a somewhat bombastic statement encouraging the Jewish people, “the rightful heirs to Palestine”, to re-establish themselves in their promised land.
The British government was mildly suspicious about Napoleon’s stirrings in Palestine, and plans were developed to establish a British connection to the Holy Land. It would take until the 1830s before this intent materialized. A British consulate was set up in Jerusalem in 1838, the first Protestant bishopric in 1841. Religious, scientific and political interests in Palestine came together in the establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865. Although the interests of the Fund were primarily scientific, the first presidency of the Fund was held by the Archbishop of York, William Thompson. “We are not a religious society”, he said at the foundation meeting, “we are about to apply the rules of science … in investigation by the Fund concerning the Holy Land”. However, towards the end of his speech the Archbishop justified the aims and objectives of the Fund in religious terms:
This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me. It is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: “Walk the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee”…. We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it because the land has been given unto us. It is the land from which comes the news of our redemption. (In Moscrop 2000: 80-81)
Thompson would repeat the statement ten years later, again in an address to the Fund: “Palestine is our country. I have used that expression before and I refuse to adopt any other” (in Howe 1997: 16).
The Archbishop’s claim to Palestine is remarkable, but by no means exceptional. Driven by a mixture of evangelical millennialism and imperial vanity, British Protestants strongly identified with the Jewish people of the Bible, and started to associate themselves with the biblical promise of a Chosen People. The covenant of the Old Testament (“I give it unto thee”—Genesis 13: 17) was more and more applied to Europe, and, in particular, to the British Empire.
This notion features abundantly in the work of Robinson, for instance when he compares European missionaries in Jerusalem with “the Hebrews of Old who made the journey to the city during Passover (Robinson & Smith 1841, I: 327). “The identification of the Protestants with the Jewish people”, concludes John James Moscrop (2000: 20), “is a constant theme throughout the work of Robinson as of so many other nineteenth-century biblical writers and Bible historians”. For many of them, travelling to Palestine was a sort of homecoming.
The European identification with the biblical covenant had serious ramifications for Palestine’s indigenous, largely Islamic population. If it was held true that Jews and Protestant Christians were given the title deed to the Holy Land, the Muslim Arabs were consequently an invading people who held no religious or natural rights to the country. This assumption is implicit in many publications of the time. An explicit statement of this kind is given in Earthly Footsteps of the Man from Galilee. Reflecting on the Mosque of Omar and the “Turkish Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City, the authors ponder: “Every Jew and every Christian who makes a visit to Palestine resents in his own feelings the presence of an alien people in the land of the Hebrews and of the Christians”. They attribute the Muslim presence in the Holy Land to the Jewish and Christian failure to observe God’s law:
But we are all forced to admit that this land would have belonged to Jews and Christians forever had they been true to the ten commandments and to the Son of God, the embodiment of the ten commandments in living form.
Asynchronous Palestine
The doctrine of the white man’s burden, a phrase coiled by Rudyard Kipling in 1899, entailed that Western civilization, as the torchbearer of human progress, had a moral responsibility to involve itself with the lesser civilizations of the world, and by doing so, to push them into the realm of modernity. The primitive Other was not able to pull himself out of the swamps of primitivism; this would only be possible under Western guidance and governance. The doctrine would become a primary apology for Western imperialism, in both Europe and the United States, at it turned colonialism into a righteous enterprise. Conquest became charity, as long as the conquered was in some way positively affected by the white man’s touch.
British intellectual interests in Palestine accumulated in the years prior to the First World War, when it became evident that the Ottoman Empire was likely to collapse and European control over the Middle East became a realistic prospect. In March 1915, James Bryce, a former British ambassador to the United States, contributed an article to The National Geographic Magazine. According to Bryce, Palestine was still a land of the past, offering the Western visitor little more than memories. His article followed the clichéd pattern of contemporary pictures as illustrations of the days of old. Bryce observed the primitive nature of Palestine and its people, but he also, somewhat romantically, pondered about a future for the Holy Land: “Under a better government … Palestine might become a prosperous and even populous country and have its place in the civilization of the present” (Bryce 1915: 308-310).
The previous year, the same magazine had featured a more lengthy and detailed article on the people of Palestine written by John D. Whiting, a member of the American Colony in Jerusalem. He too observed the unchanged nature of Palestinian customs “which prevailed there in Biblical days … even after an interval of 3,000 years” (Whiting 1914: 249). The paradigm of Palestine as a primitive society outside of time remained firmly embedded in western discourse well into the first half of the twentieth century. The British theologist Leslie D. Weatherhead still speaks of the “destitute Arabs” (1936: 43) and their “wretched and squalid little village[s]” (1936: 216) which have “scarcely altered since the day of Jesus” (1936: 238). In similar vein, Leonard T. Pearson starts his Through the Holy Land with the remark that the Holy Land is still “the best present-day Guide Book” to the Bible, although two thousand years old (Pearson 1939: 1).
As British imperial aspirations in Palestine grew, observers started to focus on modernization as well. Whiting’s National Geographic contribution is a good example of this development. After stressing the primitive nature of Palestine’s rural population, he continued by arguing:
With the advent of civilization the townspeople are fast losing their ancient customs and quaint costumes, but the villagers adhere to both far more tenuously. Still, no one knowing the country can fail to see that a time is not far distant when many of their interesting and long-lived habits of life will be things of the past. (Whiting 1914: 249)
With the identification of progress in the Holy Land, the paradigm of Palestine as a primitive society began to crumble. Instead of a solely primitive society, Palestine is slowly transformed into an asynchronous country where different historical eras can be found simultaneously. Palestine is no longer acting out our “act 1” on the stage of human history, but several acts are now performed in parallel tracks. The aforementioned description of Palestine by Herbert Samuel is clearly underpinned by such an understanding: the desert Bedouin form act 1, villagers such as the women of Bethlehem act 2, the townsmen act 3. The final act is played by the European and North-American migrants, who represent the activities of today and the ideas of the future.
In this conception, realities of Palestine which were most similar to the West were seen as more modern than those realities that were more obscure. The semi-nomadic Bedouins were more remote from the Western “customs and costumes” than the settled villagers, who were again more remote than the townsmen. Whiting identified these groups as “three distinct classes” (1914: 249). Especially the coastal cities such as Jaffa and Haifa became to be seen as modern towns, connected to the major ports of Europe. Following the same process, Christian Arabs were perceived as more Western and therefore more modern than the Muslims of Palestine. Especially the Christian women of Bethlehem were admired, for their “proverbial beauty” and “social freedom”, which formed a stark contrast with the “oppression” and “stern and gloomy morality” of the Muslim customs (Kelman 1904: 223). Occasionally, the Arab Christians of Palestine were even depicted as non-Arabs. Town versus village and Christian versus Muslim became frequent dichotomies through which difference in Palestine was elucidated.
Progress and its Discontents
The doctrine of the white man’s burden taught that non-European societies could only become modern through direct contact with the West. Lesser civilizations could only become like Europe through Europe. A society’s level of civilization was measured by its resemblance to the West, and the credit for all progress was given to Western involvement.
Laurence Oliphant, a British traveller who settled in Haifa in the 1880s, fully endorsed the paradigm of Palestine’s primitive timelessness in his Middle Eastern diary, published under the ironic title Haifa or Life in Modern Palestine: “When I last visited Jericho … it consisted of a miserable village of mud huts, containing a population of mixed negroes and Bedouins, amounting at most to three hundred souls” (Oliphant 1887: 309). During a second visit six years later, he observed some changes in the town:
I was astonished now to find that, of all places in the world, it was going ahead. There was a sort of boom going on; a very minute boom, it is true, but still it was progress, and there is no saying where it may lead to. (1887: 309)
Oliphant hastens to attribute this progress to European involvement: “any change which implies progress, implies also the increase of foreign influence”. The developments in Jericho, then, are “due entirely to the Russians, and I think that a progressive Jericho, owing to Russian enterprise, is a phenomenon worthy of remark” (1887: 325).
Oliphant became an early supporter of Zionism (Moruzzi 2006), the Jewish national movement which envisioned Jewish return to Palestine. The Zionist idea emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a response to anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe. The first Zionist settlements in Palestine were established in the early 1880s, yet as a colonial programme Zionism took root only in 1897. In that year, Theodor Herzl’s first Zionist congress drew up the Basle Programme, promoting “the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers” (in Smith 2004: 53).
With the start of Zionist migration to Palestine, Christian writers started to emphasize the biblical prophecy of Jewish return to the Promised Land. Theological debate on the restoration of the Jews had started much earlier, as part of the Protestant millennialist movement of the early 1800s. Then, Jewish return to Palestine was an eschatological idea; now, a century later, it became a living reality with growing momentum. As Robinson Lees wrote just before the close of the century:
During the last few years thousands of Jews have returned to their Fatherland, and colonies have been promoted in many parts of the country. Even the [Ottoman] Sultan is taking an interest in the development of the land…. Here, then, is the promise of a change in the aspect of the country. (Robinson Lees 1897: 136)
For Robinson Lees, the peasants he described in such detail had a valid role to play in his future projections of Palestine, once raised to a higher level. Zionism was condoned by scripture, and a further justification for Jewish colonization was found in the fact that the indigenous Arabs would benefit from the fruits of modernization brought in by the settlers.
Imperial support for the Zionist programme followed in 1917, when the British government spoke out for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and promised to “facilitate the achievement of this object” (in Smith 2004: 72). Jewish migration to Palestine continued as Britain obtained the Palestine Mandate from the League of Nations in 1922. In this new reality, Jew versus Arab becomes the new opposition through which levels of civilization and progress are described.
This perspective is present in Samuel’s introduction to The Handbook of Palestine cited at the start of this essay. Referring to Jewish immigration, he argued that “the activities of the twentieth century, and sometimes, perhaps, the ideas of the twentyfirst” were brought to Palestine by “the new arrivals from Eastern and Central Europe, and from America”. More elaborate is the contribution in The National Geographic Magazine by Keith-Roach, then Palestine’s Northern district commander. Keith-Roach starts with a description of Palestine’s asynchrony, where “modern tractors, drawing a dozen plowshares at one” can be observed besides “the camel and the ass, dragging the primitive nail plow of Biblical times” (1934: 493). Progress is the main theme, and he consistently uses the Jew-Arab dichotomy to illustrate his point. The Jews represent modernity while the Arabs represent primitive stagnation. On Jewish and Arab fashion he observed: “Modishly clad Jewesses from the boulevards of central Europe jostle the comely [Arab] women of Bethlehem clad in the flowering robes and peaked headdress of Medieval Times” (1934: 493).
The opposition returns when discussing harvesting methods:
The Arab growers still pile the golden [citrus] fruit into immense heaps and picturesque clad Moslem workers pack the boxes, hand grading the fruit by eye and touch. Jewish growers, with a higher standard of wages, use more advanced methods. (1934: 512)
The British administrator is ultimately convinced that the progress of Jewish settlement will have a favourable impact on the Palestinian Arabs: “For centuries the Arab cultivator has carried on the primitive methods traditional throughout the East”, he wrote, but the Arabs were beginning to learn: “Impressed by the development created by Jewish and German agricultural methods and aided by Government agricultural inspectors, he is beginning to stir” (1934: 493).
The religious undertone of his narrative become apparent when he argues that scientific methods were now helping to fulfil the biblical prophecies with regards to the Holy Land, a glorious situation both Arab and Jew would appreciate:
From Dead Sea to mountaintop, from Dan to Beersheba, there is a communication of ideas unparalleled before. West is meeting East. They may not mingle, but wine and water are found in the same glass.
May the shepherd’s pipe and the muffled roar of the turbine join forces to create a Greater Palestine, Holy Land of three faiths! (1934: 527)
Keith-Roach’s overly optimistic narrative is but one way of describing the reality of Palestinian affairs in the early 1930s. His belief that the Arabs would benefit from Jewish modernity was not based on an observation of the facts on the ground. The year 1929 had been characterized by ethnic riots and violence, leaving more than 250 Arabs and Jews dead. The years that followed saw the continuation of tension, characterized by numerous violent clashes between the Palestinians and the British army. In response to the 1929 riots, the British government set up a number of committees to investigate the causes of the disturbances. One of these, the Shaw Committee, concluded that Jewish immigration and land acquisition was turning the Arabs into a “landless and discontented class”, who rightly feared that their national aspirations were jeopardized and their economic future endangered. A second enquiry by the Hope-Simpson Committee concluded that the Zionist endeavour had negative effects on the Arab population of Palestine, who as a result were losing their livelihood and employment (Smith 2004: 127-128). These conclusions confused the British Government, as they did not fit in the dominant narrative of progress associated with the Jewish national home in Palestine. Although Jewish immigration was temporarily limited, it essentially continued at varying speeds throughout the mandatory period.
That Jewish settlement in Palestine would almost certainly lead to a confrontation with the indigenous population had been anticipated by Ahad Ha’am, an influential Zionist who visited Palestine in 1891. In Truth from Eretz Israel, published that year, he wrote: “Outside Palestine we are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going on around it”. This could not be further from the truth, he argued: “Should the time come when the life of [the Jewish] people in Eretz Israel imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they will not easily step aside” (in Dowty 2000: 162; Segev 2002: 40).
In Europe and North America, the Arabs were almost unanimously blamed for the eruptions of violence. A prototypical analysis of the 1929 riots is offered by John Haynes Holmes, whose Palestine To-day and To-morrow: A Gentile’s Survey of Zionism was published that same year. He points the finger at the “prevailingly savage tribesmen” and their political leaders “who see in the advancement of Jewish culture under the sanctioning of English law … a menace of Western against Eastern civilization” (Holmes 1929: xi-xii). Politicians would not be able to prevent the inevitable armed confrontation, Haynes concluded, and therefore “prophets and not the kings must prevail” (1929: xiv). To his mind, the Zionist endeavour was more than the culmination of Jewish history; he placed it among the grandest achievements of humanity: “What we see is a deep-founded, full-rounded civilization, reared in a inhospitable country, amid a primitive people, by the labor of men’s hands and the sacrifice of their heroic hearts” (1929: xiv).
Even though tensions between Jews and Arabs dominated the 1930s and 1940s, this hardly changed the Western climate of opinion concerning the need and feasibility of Jewish settlement. In this climate, the Arabs were regarded as the spoilsports of progress, and any change in British policy in favour of the Palestinian Arabs was perceived as regressive, even immoral. One of the fiercest attacks was launched by the American author William B. Ziff, who accused Britain of squandering both biblical prophecy and its commitment to the Zionist movement. In The Rape of Palestine (first published in 1938), he argued that Britain failed to see how Jewish settlement had made the deserts of Palestine bloom. He attributes this failure to Britain’s fear of the “ninety million Mohammedans in their Empire” and its sympathy for militant Arab radicalism (Ziff 1946: 43-44). In the struggle between the interests of God and the interests of Downing Street, God was clearly on the losing side, concluded Ziff (1946: 90-109). The Rape of Palestine was quickly banned by the British government of Palestine, but was highly acclaimed in the United States. Its analysis of British policy was later endorsed by various American diplomats and officials, among them James G. McDonald, the first American ambassador to Israel.
Land of Promise
The narrative of progress in Palestine was further embedded in Western discourse with the arrival of American soil experts, who surveyed the Middle East in terms of its agricultural merits and potential for development. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, a leading land conservationist, forestry engineer and hydrologist employed by the American Department of Agriculture, travelled to the area in 1939 to study the quality and potential of the soil. Lowdermilk argued that Palestine had two primary needs: water and power. In order to address the first issue, he proposed to develop a modern water irrigation system in Palestine’s Jordan Valley. The water of the Jordan River, he predicted, would be able to irrigate 300,000 acres of land. Power could be generated through the channelling of sea water from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, situated some 1200 feet below sea level. The “fall” of sea water could in effect be used to generate hydroelectric power (Lowdermilk 1944: 122-123). He predicted that his irrigation and power scheme would “in time provide farms, industry and security for at least four million Jewish refugees from Europe, in addition to the 1,800,000 Arabs and Jews already in Palestine and Trans-Jordan” (1944: 122).
It is hard to overestimate the influence of Lowdermilk’s thesis on the formation of public opinion in the United States in the early 1940s. While it had little impact in Britain’s political arena, the American public enthusiastically adopted the author’s scientific endorsement of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Zionist leaders were keen to disseminate his proposals to a wider audience, and urged him to publish his findings in popularized form (Miller 2003). This led to Palestine: Land of Promise, published in both the United States and Britain in 1944. This little book would be used extensively by the advocates of Jewish settlement, who could now build their case on the objective observations of a non-Jewish scientist. Lowdermilk claimed that the Arabs of Palestine and Trans-Jordan would benefit greatly from Jewish migration, as it would “enlarge the market for their produce and provide them with new opportunities for investment and labour” (1944: 127). In a time when the British Government was more and more worried about the negative effects of Jewish immigration and settlement on the indigenous Palestinians, this conclusion was hugely appreciated by the Zionist lobby.
More controversially, and hardly in line with his main argument, Lowdermilk suggested that those Palestinian and Trans-Jordanian Arabs who “found that they disliked living in an industrialized land” could easily resettle elsewhere in the Arab world “where there [was] land enough for vast numbers of immigrants” (1944: 127-128). With this statement, Lowdermilk explicitly advocated the idea of Arab transfer from Palestine as one way of solving the communal tensions. This element of Lowdermilk’s scheme, which was well known by the early 1940s, infuriated Arab leaders. An American-Palestinian, Francis Kettaneh, wrote that Lowdermilk was propagating the “the forcible expropriation and expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, transforming the country into an independent Jewish State, capable of absorbing between four and six million Jews” (in Miller 2003: 58). The Palestinian notable Hussein Fakhri Al-Khalidi rejected Lowdermilk’s thesis as “cheap journalistic Zionist propaganda for the … opening of the gates of Palestine for mass immigration” (in Miller 2003: 67). Western residents of Palestine were also unimpressed. Frances E. Newton, who had lived in Palestine for more than five decades, also interpreted Palestine: Land of Promise as a quintessential Zionist presentation of the situation, “which implies that very few Arabs were, in fact, dispossessed of their lands” (Newton 1948: 270).
Lowdermilk’s study was of a scholarly nature, and he was indeed a non-Jewish scientist not officially connected to the Zionist movement. Yet reading the book one cannot escape from the impression that the author’s thesis was to a large extent driven by motifs of faith and political allegiance. Most chapters in Palestine: Land of Promise begin with a Bible text, and his personal identification with the ancient Israelites at times bounces off the pages:
In February, 1939, we, like the Children of Israel, left the land of Egypt before daylight…. We crossed the southern part of the Land of Goshen, which Joseph had given to his brothers…. Finally, we entered the Sinai Desert, where the Israelites and their flocks and herds wandered for forty years. (Lowdermilk 1944: 12)
Lowdermilk’s use of photography is also of interest, as the combination of views and captions resembles nineteenth-century publications such as Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee. Presented in pairs, a number of photos were meant to visualize the dramatic progress Jewish settlement had achieved in Palestine. A picture of the Mediterranean sand dunes before the establishment of Tel Aviv is linked with an aerial picture of the modern all-Jewish city in 1939. A picture of “bare, rocky hills outside Jerusalem” is contrasted with a picture of a modern residential suburb, with the caption: “the same spot to-day, transformed by evergreens, gardens and modern dwellings” (1944: between 100 and 101).
It becomes evident from reading Palestine: Land of Promise that Lowdermilk desired the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and fully sympathized with the objectives of Zionism. Therefore, his scholarly enquiry also functioned as a political pamphlet, urging the British government to allow unlimited Jewish migration to their land of promise. To his mind, only the Jews would be able to cultivate and modernize Palestine, and, in the process, the Arab world at large would benefit from it:
If the forces of reclamation and progress Jewish settlers have introduced are permitted to continue, Palestine may well be the leaven that will transform the other lands of the Near East. Once the great undeveloped resources of these countries are properly exploited, 20 to 30 million people may live decent and prosperous lives where a few million now struggle for a bare existence. Palestine can serve as an example, the demonstration, the lever, that will lift the entire Near East from its present desolate condition to a dignified place in a free world. (Lowdermilk 1944: 161)
Not all experts agreed with Lowdermilk’s prophetic and optimistic prognosis. The English economic historian Doreen Warriner did not believe the Jewish agricultural settlements could function as a template for the Arab peasantry:
[A]lthough their technical and social achievement is undeniably great, it is important to point out that from an economic standpoint they are not really a model, since they depend on investment of very large capital resources, far beyond what can ever be made available to the Arab community. (Warriner 1948: 69)
Her analysis was correct: many of the early Jewish settlements were established with the financial support of Western Jewry, and would not have been able to flourish without an often long initial phase of Zionist charity. For the Arabs of Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries, such financial injections were unlikely to materialize. Refuting the perception of the Arab world as a primitive society, she argued that a reorganization of land tenure and agricultural planning would be able to significantly raise the standard of living in the rural areas of the Middle East. Warriner’s more nuanced picture did not have a significant impact on the Western appreciation of the Arab condition and the feasibility of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Lowdermilk’s description became the consensus, and his line of argument was followed as the Jewish state of Israel came into existence in 1948.
The Russian-American political analyst and former New York Herald Tribune correspondent Maurice Hindus travelled through the Middle East in the 1940s. The reflection of this journey, In Search of a Future (1949), opens as follows:
This is a book about Persia, Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine—countries in search of a future…
It is the author’s judgment that Jewish Palestine, now known as Israel, provides a workable blueprint for the development of the other nations with which this book is concerned. Indeed, unless, in one way or another, to suit the character of their peoples and the physical conditions of their lands, the Mohammedan nations in the Middle East avail themselves of the example Israel has set in pioneering for a new way of life in desert and neglected country, their future is weighted with dire consequences. (Hindus 1949: ix)
He continued citing a number of like-minded sources, and acknowledged the role Lowdermilk played in his perception of progress in the Middle East. Referring to T. E. Lawrence’s 1909 comment that “the sooner the Jews farm [Palestine], the better”, he concluded: “Had there been no Jews in Palestine, they would have had to be invented” (1949: 265).
Redeeming This Sick Old World
In the introduction to a photo book by Herbert S. Sonnenfeld called Palestine: Land of Israel (1948), the Dutch-Canadian Christian author Pierre van Paassen argued that the nineteenth-century visitor to primitive Palestine must have concluded that nothing less than a miracle could save the Holy Land:
Well, that miracle has happened. In less than thirty years’ time the Land of Israel has undergone a transformation which is indeed nothing less than wondrous in the full mysterious sense of the word; a marvel of human energy and devotion…. The curse has been lifted. The disease has been conquered. The heart of Palestine pulsates again as the healthy organ in the breast of a youthful athlete. (Sonnenfeld & Van Paassen 1948: 8)
Van Paassen then follows the narrative of the Jew who would bring progress to the Arab, and although the gap is huge “[i]t will all be done in time” (1948: 117). The Jews alone would have to redeem Palestine, he stresses, not to fertilize the land, but to be the fertilizers themselves:
Jews came from all over the world … to fertilize the land of their fathers with their tears and sorrow and happiness. It had literally to be loved back to health and productiveness as careful and patiently as a sick child is sometimes recalled by its mother’s devotion. (Sonnenfeld & Van Paassen 1948: 9)
As noted, the gentile-surveyor John Haynes Holmes did not believe in a political solution in Palestine, and therefore argued that “the prophets and not the kings” had to prevail. With the rise of Nazism in Germany and growing Jewish migration to Palestine, Western endorsement of the Zionist cause reached new heights. Zionism came to be seen as much more than just the accumulation of Jewish history, or as a template for Arab development. In Holmes’s words:
The Jew is seeking to redeem Palestine, his country, his home, his altar. But also, in redeeming Palestine, he is seeking to redeem himself. And therewith—who knows!—he may be redeeming this sick old world as well. (Holmes 1929: 83)
In similar vein, Van Paassen interpreted the merits of the Jewish State in the Holy Land in universalistic terms: “Israel is a laboratory, the pilot plant where mankind’s problems are being tested and tried out, and settled in principle” (1950: 234). This, in his view, was the main reason why Israel remained of central significance in the history of Western civilization (1964: 385). With these statements, Van Paassen revealed himself as an able representative of the Western communis opinio in 1948 with regards to Palestine’s past and future.
The rediscovery of the Holy Land and the anthropological conception of historicized difference in the nineteenth century fostered the idea that Palestine was a primitive society, which could be claimed, mapped and modernized by the Western world. With the start of Zionist colonization in Palestine, this role was more and more subcontracted to Jewish immigrants, who were seen to redeem the land through settlement and agricultural labour. As I hope to have demonstrated, a combination of the imperial white man’s burden and a Protestant interpretation of biblical prophecy formed the intellectual justification for this process.