94 • CHAPTER 3
In this chapter I explore the various ways in which Zionists of Late
Ottoman palestine conceived of their non- Jewish neighbors,^4 primarily
through a study of three Zionist newspapers in the five years preced-
ing the Great War. I read these newspapers with an eye to the ways
in which their respective editors and authors identified and classified
the Zionists’ non- Jewish neighbors. My analysis reveals that, in these
years, there was no clear consensus among Zionist writers about whom
Zionists had found in palestine; there was no agreement, that is, about
the natives’ defining characteristics and how they might best be clas-
sified and conceptualized, and, in turn, how Zionists ought to relate
to them. While for some the category of “Arab” was meaningful, even
central, for others religious divisions (between Muslims and Christians)
were more consequential and thus the primary way in which to perceive
their neighbors. Many of radler- Feldmann’s Zionist contemporaries per-
ceived his “arab Question” as actually a “Christian and Muslim Ques-
tion” or even two separate Christian and Muslim questions. Zionist
authors, in other words, often deemed religion to be the relevant social
category to describe the non- Jewish natives of Late Ottoman palestine.
In other cases, the non- Jews of Palestine were characterized in “racial”
terms— terms that linked some of those non- Jews to the Jews while
further distancing others. toward the end of the chapter, I will discuss
a racial theory concerning the natives of Palestine that first emerged
during the prewar years but began to be articulated most clearly in the
period immediately following the war by none other than the leaders
of palestine’s Zionist community. this theory, we shall see, questioned
both the arab and the Muslim nature of those who were generally
viewed as Muslim arabs and asserted that the majority of these were,
in fact, Jews.
We will discover in this chapter that the boundaries between the
various categories— indeed, the ways in which the categories them-
selves were to be defined— were contested and in flux. Zionists were
struggling, sometimes explicitly and at other times implicitly, with the
questions of what it meant for one to be an arab or a Muslim or a
Christian— even with what it meant to be a Jew or a Hebrew. Where did
these categories overlap and when did one exclude another? I contend
that Zionists’ varying conceptions of themselves— as Jews, Zionists,
Hebrews, Ottomans, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and so on— were often
(^4) I ask the reader’s forbearance with the awkward locutions I have employed in this
discussion (e.g., “non- Jewish neighbor,” “non- Jewish natives of palestine,” “whom the
Zionists found in Palestine”). I use these phrases so as not to prejudice my analysis of
how Zionists conceptualized these communities, even as I recognize that the phrases are
themselves problematic and would certainly not have been the way the communities
described themselves.