Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

CONCluSION • 245

the mandate, the Arab Office called on the Western powers to comply
with their own ostensible values, and thus insisted that communities
should not be treated differently based on the categories of race and
religion. Throughout the years of the mandate, distinctions based on
religion and race were delegitimized, requiring the parties— at least
rhetori cally— to stress other categories of difference. In this interwar
political- ideological context, nationalism seems to have replaced reli-
gion and race as the category of legitimate intercommunal distinction.

Religion, Race, and the Contemporary

Israeli- Palestinian Encounter

In the years after the 1948 war, ostensibly secular nationalism emerged
as the dominant language on both sides of the Israeli- Palestinian con-
flict.^33 Secularists among Israelis and Palestinians, representing the po-
litical elites in both societies, sought to define their respective move-
ments as national struggles to restore a nation to its homeland. And yet
any observer of the contemporary, early twenty- first- century conflict
recognizes the central role religion plays in each society as well as in

(^33) If from 1922 to 1946 the terms of the League of Nations mandate set the tone and
fixed the boundaries of the discourse on difference— removing the race- religion- language
triad from the realm of legitimacy— united Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 in
1947 on the partition of Palestine delegitimized an additional fourth term, namely, sex.
The resolution read: “no discrimination of any kind shall be made between inhabitants
on the ground of race, religion, language or sex.” The inclusion of sex in this list is, of
course, a consequence of significant changes in the realm of gender equality in the West.
As in the case of the mandate, this resolution set the terms that all parties would have
to consider in articulating their own positions. In the 1948 Israeli proclamation of inde-
pendence, the state’s founders were willing to agree to “complete equality of social and
political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion [dat], race [gezaʿ], or sex.”
Language, however, is notably absent from the list, a sign of the sensitivity of the issue
of language in the Zionist enterprise. (The proclamation nonetheless ensures freedom of
language.) In contrast, the Palestinian National Charter, drafted in 1964 and approved in
1968, insists that with “the liberation of Palestine,” freedoms of worship and visit would
be extended “to all, without discrimination of race [al- ʿunṣur], color [al- lawn], language,
or religion [ad- dīn].” The absence of “sex” in this list may reflect different gender con-
cerns in the Palestinian national movement of the mid- twentieth century; the inclusion,
instead, of “color” was meant to ally the Palestinian cause with other anticolonial, anti-
imperialist, and antiracist movements of the period. Whatever ambivalences may be
discerned concerning sex discrimination in 1968 appear to have been overcome within
two decades. The Palestine National Council’s Declaration of Independence of November
1988 ensures that “governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality, and
non- discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color
or sex.” The texts of the documents cited here are found in laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-
Arab Reader, 75, 82– 83, 119, 356.