284 DESTINY DISRUPTED
and others claimed a nationalist right to the territory they inhabited. The
Jewish people had no territory. They had been scattered around the globe
for two millenia and were now living as landless minorities in other peo-
ple's states. Throughout their two thousand years in Diaspora, however,
Jews had held together, maintaining a sense of peoplehood built around a
Judaism that was as much cultural and historical as it was religious: in
nineteenth-century Europe, it was perfectly possible to be Jewish without
being a practicing or even a "believing" Jew. Still, a core element of the
Jewish religious-historical narrative asserted that God had promised the
land of Canaan to the original Hebrews-Abraham and his tribal descen-
dants-in exchange for their worshipping no other and obeying only His
commandments. According to this narrative, the Jewish people had kept
their side of the bargain and had thus earned the right to reclaim "their"
land, the territory called Palestine, which was now inhabited by Arabs and
ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Many nineteenth-century European Zionists
were secular but this tenet about a Promised Land nonetheless made its
way into the argument for a Jewish nation-state along the eastern Medit-
erannean coast.
In 1897, an Austrian journalist, Theodor Herzl, founded the first offi-
cial organ of political Zionism, the World Zionist Congress, but Zionism
already existed and its ideas went back to the early 1800s. It was amid
all the other nationalist murmurings of that era that Jewish intellectuals
in Europe began to speak of moving to Palestine. Some German proto-
nationalists agreed with these proto-Zionists, and not in a friendly way.
Fichte, for example, held that Jews could never assimilate into German
culture, even if they were German-speaking from birth. If they stayed in
Germany, they would always be a state within a state, and therefore, he
suggested, they should seek their national destiny in Palestine.
Palestine had never been without an indigenous Jewish population,
but in 1800 that population formed a miniscule fraction of the total-
about 2.5 percent as opposed to the more than 97 percent who were
Arabs. By the 1880s, when Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine
began in earnest, the ratio of Jews to Arabs had climbed to roughly 6 per-
cent of the total. About thirty thousand moved to Palestine in the first
aliyah, as waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine were called, and the
ratio changed again. The first immigrants, however, were idealistic urban