Class 4: Arab and Jewish nationalisms: an overview

Announcements:

• Actors and issues - see your excel spreadsheet - any additional issues for discussion, such as US aid to Israel?

Thoughts about nationalism

• its modern origins - yet Smith starts his book in circa 3000 B.C. - why?
• why, under what conditions does a people become aware of itself as a people wanting self-government?
• "Arabs"?
• "Jews"?
• "Palestinians"?
• "Israelis"?

What is Zionism?

• Jews in Europe after 1789: from ghetto to assimilation
• Russian ghettos and pogroms: the aliya of 1882
• anti-Semitism in France: the Dreyfus Affair 1894-99...1906 pardoned (Alfred Dreyfus, 1859-1935)
• Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, and First Zionist Congress, 1897, in Basle, Switzerland.
• a Jewish territory? Ottoman Palestine? Cyprus? Sinai? Kenya?
• "a people without land for a land without people"
• Zionism vs. assimilation

Palestinian nationalism

• Ottoman "Palestine"?
• Jewish settlers 1882-1908 expanded the Jewish population from about 25,000 (many/most of them anti-Zionist) to 75,000 or so
• Mandate Palestine 1920-1948 - some demographics (Abel's course pack) and in brief
• Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997)

Questions of timing and political organization

• Histadrut, the Jewish trade union federation, founded in 1920
• Jewish Agency (British Mandate)
• Mapai (Labor) Party founded 1930
• Fatah founded in 1958
• PLO 1964
• not a people without land for a land without people but an organized people joining a disorganized (well organizing as you can see from online NGOs ) population

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Discussion of Readings (and New Resources)

• Was there a Ziuonist plot to colonize all of Palestine? - Dershowitz online) - Second Aliyah (1904-1914)
• Was the Balfour Declaration binding international law?
• Were the Jews unwilling to share Palestine? p 39 cf Edwatd Said about 1947-48 wheras Dershovitz 1920-1929, focusing on Haj Amin Husseini "close ally and adviser to Adolph HItler"?
• Have the Jews always rejected a two-state solutrion? Again, Dershovitz discusses1937-1939, not responding to "accusers" concerning 1947-48 period.

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11 Sept. 2008

Department of Government, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin.

Questions, Comments, and Suggestions to chenry@mail.utexas.edu