92 • cHAPTeR 2
Al- Khalidi treats de Hirsch’s Argentina plan sympathetically, yet he
underscores its ultimate failure. In the end, it helped to sustain “1,200
families, or twenty thousand people,” writes al- Khalidi, “which is
hardly worth mentioning relative to the Jews who remained in Rus-
sia, whose numbers exceeded four million.” Al- Khalidi concludes, “If
we add this example to the earlier examples of colonies in Palestine,
we are able to foresee the destiny of the Jewish kingdom of which the
Zionists dream.”^177
conclusionIn his manuscript, al- Khalidi was struggling with a number of compet-
ing, sometimes contradictory impulses, informed by the various com-
ponents of his complex identity. He was a serious scholar; he had stud-
ied Jewish history from sources written by Jews in multiple languages,
and he did not question the Jewish historical claim to Palestine. He
was also a Muslim, highly educated in his own religious tradition. This
religious heritage brought with it particular perspectives on how reli-
gious systems function as well as ideas (including rather unflattering
ones) concerning Jews. At the same time, al- Khalidi had spent much
time— both during his later education as well as during his professional
life— in fin de siècle europe, where he found yet another prevalent
image of Jews. Indeed, al- Khalidi was in France during the dreyfus
Affair. Though he might well have sided with the dreyfusards, the an-
tisemitic stereotypes he encountered in europe, willy- nilly, appear to
have found their way into his thinking about Jews. Nonetheless, al-
Khalidi was a liberal democrat, and he sympathized deeply with the
suffering of Jews in eastern europe. Finally, he was a patriot of the
Ottoman empire, and he felt enduring loyalty to Palestine and its Arab
population. He desperately sought to protect his homeland and its peo-
ple from foreign domination. All these competing impulses find expres-
sion in al- Khalidi’s manuscript. Though the particular combination or
configuration of these impulses cannot be generalized to the entirety
of the Arab or Muslim population of Late Ottoman Palestine, many of
al- Khalidi’s fellow Arabs and coreligionists would have experienced at
least some of them. In al- Khalidi’s manuscript, then, we are able to
witness how one individual negotiated these competing impulses as he
tried to make sense of his new neighbors in Palestine and of Zionism,
the political movement that brought them there.
(^177) Ibid.