“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 123as ideological secularists and materialists,^108 the socialist ideologues
of the Second aliyah tended to perceive themselves and others in a
way that minimized categories and phenomena, such as religion, that
they regarded as nonbasic cultural superstructures. a most extreme
example of this approach, to which I briefly alluded above, is a theory
held by Ben- Gurion but articulated most clearly by his senior partner
in the leadership of Poʿalei Ẓiyon, Yitzhak Ben- Zvi. Ben- Zvi (originally
Shimshelevich) was born in 1884 in Poltava in the ukrainian region
of the russian empire. a socialist Zionist from an early age, he immi-
grated to Palestine in 1907, during the Second Aliyah. In his first years
there, Ben- Zvi founded the Bar Giora (1907) and ha- Shomer (1909) de-
fense organizations as well as the socialist Zionist newspaper ha-Aḥdut,
which he coedited with his wife Rachel Yanaʾit and Ben- Gurion.^109 In
1913 Ben- Zvi and Ben- Gurion relocated to Istanbul to study law in
the university, though they were soon to return to palestine upon the
outbreak of the Great War. Suspicious of all nationalist movements in
their midst, the Ottomans imprisoned and then deported the two, and
by 1915 they were in new York. There they cowrote a Yiddish book,
Eretsyisroelinfargangenheitungegenvart (the Land of Israel in the past
and the Present), to which we shall return shortly.^110 toward the end
of the Great War, the pair joined the Jewish Legion and returned once
more to palestine, where they soon resumed leadership of the Zionist
community.
Shortly after the war, Ben- Zvi published a small booklet of his own
about the arabs of palestine, ha-Tenuʿahha-ʿarvit (the arab Move-
ment). Like Ruhi al- Khalidi in his conception of his Jewish contem-
poraries, Ben- Zvi turned to distant history in seeking to understand
his Arab neighbors. While he devotes much of his analysis to the var-
ious nationalist movements among arabs in the Middle east, it is his
ethnographic survey of palestine’s arabs that is most relevant here.
He divides the Palestinian Arabs into several different categories. The
Bedouin, in Ben- Zvi’s view, are the only element in palestine that is of
“pure arab racial origin” (she-moẓʾomi-gezaʿʿarvinaki).^111 “the same,”
he asserts, “cannot be said of the rest of the elements— the fellahin
and the urbanites— who are, of course, arabs in terms of language
and culture, but by origin and race (moẓʾamve-gizʿam) are mixed and
(^108) For an influential revisionist reading of the place of socialism in socialist Zionism,
see Sternhell, TheFoundingMythsofIsrael.
(^109) For an english translation of the founding statement of ha- Shomer, see Kaplan and
penslar, eds., TheOriginsofIsrael,1882–1948, 54– 56.
(^110) On the joint composition of this text, and for related correspondence, see Mintz,
“Beyn David Ben- Gurion le- Yiẓḥak Ben- Ẓevi.”
(^111) Ben- Ẓevi, ha-Tenuʿahha-ʿarvit, 1:19.