[Penn]

Even as he attempted to allay the fears of the non-Jewish population of Palestine, Samuel systematically employed a schematic vocabulary that obscured perceptions of the situation. For him, the “Jewries of the world” were simply attempting to establish their home “in the land which was the political, and has always been the religious, center of their race.” Several years later, the political secretary of the World Zionist Organization, Conrad Stein, castigated the “few mischief makers” who were “doing their best to keep the two races in Palestine apart.” (my italics)

In 1926, an anonymous “Friendly Visitor” wrote in the magazine Living Age about the “racial situation” in Palestine stating that “up to the present the two races are living side by side without intermingling” explaining that such exclusiveness was good because the Zionist policy was not to exploit Arab labor, but rather to encourage Jews to work in all sectors of the economy. The idea was that separate development, avoiding ethnic segmentation of the work force, would lead to more rapid improvement of Arab living standards: “as soon as the Arabs' standard of living has risen and the wages of the two races are equalized such discrimination will automatically disappear.” In addition, Jews must be encouraged to do agricultural labor, for “[n]othing but agriculture can change the Jews from a nation of traders into a nation with a normal distribution of its people into all branches of productive labor. The movement to the farm is the corner stone of racial regeneration.”

Zionist spokespersons incessantly emphasized that the Jews were a separate and distinct people or race. At the same time, the Muslim and Christian Palestinians were also referred to as a racial group: the “Arabs”. Less and less were the different participants in the drama designated as Europeans and Palestinians, or Jews, Muslims, Christians or Druzes. Increasingly, only two groups seemed to be present: the “Jews” and the “Arabs”. In only a few years, non-Jewish representatives of the region would also begin to speak in terms of “race” when referring to the different ethnic groups in Palestine.

Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, raised a related question in The New Republic in 1922. For him, the trouble in Palestine lay in the imposition of a western idea — nationalism — in a region culturally unprepared for it. Palestine, regardless of its religious complexity, was in fact “a comparatively homogeneous country”. But a western political idea called “nationality” and the rise of national feeling in Palestine has “produced two effects. On the one hand, the Moslem and Christian Arabs began to feel themselves one with their Arab neighbors, especially with those of Syria, from which Palestine is divided by no physical boundaries. On the other hand, the Palestinian Jews, especially the agricultural colonists, and, still more, a majority of the Jewish ‘Dispersion’ all over the world, began to look forward to making Palestine eventually their own in the sense in which the United States belongs to the American people or France to the French.” Toynbee observed that the commitment of the British, United-Statesian, French and Italian governments to the “hazardous experiment” of the implantation of Zionism in Palestine would lead to more and more explosions of violence.

By the end of 1922 the future of social conflict within Palestine, and the uses of Palestine by powerful states, had been thoroughly discussed. The nature of Zionism as a nationalist political movement, its uses by the governments of the major western countries, the determining events in the creation of an almost intractable political situation, all of these dimensions of the “question of Palestine” were well known by educated readers. The way towards the eventual creation of a Jewish state seems to have been traced out well in advance of the actual event.

By the late 1920s, outbreaks of ethnic violence in Palestine tended to reinforce the idea that the population was divided into two irreconcilable camps.