“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 125ha-umot) that are established in the Land of Israel in the process of na-
tional differentiation (ha-proẓesshelha-diferenẓiyaha-leʾumit) that has
begun in our time.”^117 the fellahin, understood here as a mass of people
still lacking national affiliation, might just as easily— and all the more
naturally— join the Jewish nation as they might any arab or Muslim
nation, if only the right efforts were made.
the political interests that inform and motivate this eccentric—
though not unprecedented nor uncommon^118 — theory are sufficiently
clear: if the majority of the seeminglyMuslim arab population of pales-
tine was in fact Jewish in “racial” origin and could consciously become
Jewish by nationality once again, then the Zionist project instanta-
neously attained greater demographic feasibility. But what is most in-
triguing about Ben- Zvi’s theory in this context is not the politics that
may have driven it but what it suggests about this Zionist’s encounter
with the arabs of palestine. Ben- Zvi glanced at his arab neighbors—
not the more politically conscious Christians and Muslims in the cities
but the peasants working the land— and found hidden Jews. Indeed, he
did not merely find hidden Jews; these were the ideal Jews, the proto-
types of the treasured New hebrew, Jews who had never abandoned
the Land of Israel and never stopped tilling its soil. Ben- Zvi identified
only the land- working Palestinian peasants as Jews, explicitly deny-
ing the city- dwelling elites any substantial Jewish heritage. If euro-
pean Jewry was overly bourgeoisie for this socialist, the Zionist project
would not only restore europe’s Jews to their homeland but would
also reintegrate the truly Jewish fellahin of palestine into their natural
nation— the Jewish nation— thereby making this nation natural, that
is, endowing it with the demographic building blocks for its missing
worker class.
Moreover, the fellahin were descendants of the sort of Jews, like
Ben- Zvi and many of his fellow Second aliyah Zionists, who were not
overly concerned with religion. they could nominally adopt or shed
(^117) Ibid., 20– 21. In this sentence, one sees how early twentieth- century Hebrew writ-
ers used the terms ‘am, umma, and leʾum fairly interchangeably, all with the sense of
nation and nationalism.
(^118) tracing the history of this theory and its alternative political uses might yield
intriguing results. Two of its early exponents were Yisrael Belkind and Ber Borochov.
On the earlier versions, see Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs 1882– 1948 , 103; Zerubavel,
“Memory, the Rebirth of the native, and the ‘Hebrew Bedouin’ Identity”; Shavit, The
NewHebrewNation, 123– 24. See also Barnai, Historiyografiyahu-leʾumiyut, 31– 32. Israel
Bartal suggested that “the modern political conflict between the Jews and Arabs put
an end to the possibility of searching for Jewish roots within the local population” in
Palestine. Bartal, “ ‘ʿAm’ ve- ‘Areẓ’ ba- historiyografiyah ha- ẓiyonit,” 132. The search con-
tinues, but now with different political ends. See, e.g., Sand, TheInventionoftheJewish
People, 182– 89.