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are still wandering in this gradually- expanding colony [istiʿmār
tadrījī] on the lookout for opportunities to achieve a large colony,
such as the purchase of the Beisan Valley or taking a conces-
sion in the colonization of the Jordan Valley and the nearby vast,
fertile lands and plains that resemble the land of egypt and the
Nile Valley, or the colonization of the district of Beer Sheba to
the egyptian borders and the Sinai Peninsula. They have already
purchased substantial land in Beer Sheba and they are trying to
purchase the Wadi Hawarith . . . and Kfar Saba in order to link
these two colonies and take possession of all of the coasts from
Haifa to Jaffa and the border of egypt.^165In this passage, one observes al- Khalidi’s sense of gloom as he consid-
ered the predicament of Palestine. The Jews are engaged in a process
of “gradual colonization,” and with boundless financial resources at
their disposal, they will continue to acquire the most fertile and stra-
tegically valuable areas of the country, first in isolated locations, but
eventually with expansive territorial contiguity. If Zionism’s efforts are
not checked, so al- Khalidi implies, there will be no room for Palestine’s
Arabs.^166
Just as al- Khalidi raises the traditional Islamic polemical attack on
Judaism concerning Jews’ lack of faith in the afterlife to account for
their obsession with Palestine, so too does he employ the common
european- christian charge of Jewish money- hunger^167 to explain to his
reader how Jews have succeeded in advancing Zionism despite the
(^165) al- Khālidī, “as- Sayūnīzm, ay al- masʾala aṣ- ṣahyūniyya” [copyist version], 5.
(^166) In europe, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there devel-
oped the “myth of the powerful Jewish Landfresser (landgrabber)” as fear spread that
Jews were “descending on indebted peasant holdings and wresting them from their right-
ful owners.” Penslar, Shylock’sChildren, 46. While the Landfressermyth is similar to al-
Khalidi’s claims about Jews in Palestine, Zionists were indeed engaged in a systematic
effort to purchase land in Palestine.
(^167) In labeling this charge christian (and not merely european), I follow derek
Penslar’s understanding of the christian element of european economic antisemitism.
Penslar argues that “in europe, where culture was profoundly influenced by christianity,
economic antisemitism was in part the product of the representation of Jews in christian
texts as the embodiment of avarice. This representation began with the Gospels, in which
the critique of the Pharisees as legalistic and hypocritical is undergirded by accusations
of greed and materialism. Through certain stories, such as that of Jesus driving the
moneychangers out of the Temple compound, or of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for thirty
pieces of silver, not only the Pharisees but the Jews as a whole were associated with a
stifling and pernicious materialism.” Ibid., 13. Of course, christianity was not the only
factor involved in the common economic antisemitism, and it may be argued that the
christian religion and its sacred texts were manipulated, misconstrued, and misused for
antisemitic ends. Nonetheless, whether or not christianity served any sort of causal role
in creating european economic antisemitism, it was certainly important in this discourse.