THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY 321and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in
Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted
a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant. By
1945, the Jewish population of Palestine almost equaled the Arab popula-
tion. If one were to translate that influx of newcomers to the American
context, it would be as if 150 million refugees flooded in within a decade.
How could that not lead to turmoil?
In the context of the European narrative, the Jews were victims. In the
context of the Arab narrative, they were colonizers with much the same atti-
tudes toward the indigenous population as their fellow Europeans. As early
as 1862, a German Zionist, Moses Hess, had drummed up support for po-
litical Zionism by proposing that "the state the Jews would establish in the
heart of the Middle East would serve Western imperial interests and at the
same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East."^4 The sem-
inal Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote that a Jewish state in Palestine would
"form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civi-
lization as opposed to barbarism."5 In 1914, Chaim Weitzman wrote a letter
to the Manchester Guardian stating that if a Jewish settlement could be es-
tablished in Palestine "we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews
out there .... They would develop the country, bring back civilization to it
and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal."^6 Arabs who saw the
Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing
a fantasy out of whole doth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least
represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed.
In 1936, strikes and riots broke out among the Arabs of Palestine, serv-
ing notice that the situation was spiraling out of control. In a clumsy effort
to placate the Arabs, Great Britain issued an order limiting further Jewish
immigration to Palestine, but this order came in 1939, with World War II
about to break out and the horrors of Nazism fully manifest to European
Jews: there was no chance that Jewish refugees would comply with the
British order; it would have been suicidal. Instead, militant organizations
sprang up among the would-be Jewish settlers, and since they were a dispos-
sessed few fighting the world-straddling British Empire, some of these mili-
tant Jewish groups resorted to the archetypal strategy of the scattered weak
against the well-organized mighty: hit and run raids, sabotage, random as-
sassinations, bombings of places frequented by civilians-in short, terrorism.