Cause of Arab-Israeli animosity eludes writer

THE title of this lively book, “Jerusalem 1913,” is a little misleading because less than a quarter of its pages actually deal with the city in that year. Rather it is a focal point for its author, Amy Dockser Marcus, to examine the inevitability of the clash between Jewish and Arab nationalisms in Palestine. This takes her from Theodore Herzl’s espousal of Zionism in his seminal work, “Der Judenstat” (“The Jewish State”) in 1896 and the first Zionist Congress he called the following year in Switzerland to the present fraught state of affairs between Israelis and Palestinians.

Along the way, Marcus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, shines a light on many colorful characters. She looks on a multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith Jerusalem that in 1913 was a flashpoint and symbol but also a functioning city where Jew, Muslim and Christian coexisted peacefully in a small space.

At the time, Jerusalem was an outpost of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, which was nominally ruled by a despotic sultan but actually governed by the so-called Young Turks, whose reforms were stirring up conflicting nationalisms among the empire’s many ethnic and religious groups. This was a confusing time for Zionism, which was not originally linked to Palestine: Indeed, a decade earlier, the Zionist Congress of 1902 had seriously debated then rejected Britain’s offer of a homeland in East Africa. Nor was Hebrew an integral part of the movement, whose meetings were largely conducted in German.

Marcus points out that a considerable number of Jews began settling in Palestine in the late 19th century. By 1896 Jews constituted a majority of Jerusalem’s population, and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s campaign to create an everyday spoken Hebrew language was well under way. Zionism’s contribution was the notion of a political entity for the Jewish people -- a Jewish commonwealth or state.

This notion put the Zionists not only at odds with the Arab population of Palestine but also with some Palestinian Jews, most notably Albert Antebi, a pillar of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Antebi, Marcus writes, believed it “was critical that Jews forge strong relationships and partnerships with Muslims, rather than live separately.... [T]he Jews’ continued presence and safety in Jerusalem was dependent on their ability to coexist peacefully with their Muslim neighbors.”

But Arthur Ruppin, the chief Zionist representative in Palestine before World War I, came to believe that only by becoming the majority through immigration and land purchase could Jews assure their right to live there. The third man on whom Marcus concentrates, Ruhi Khalidi, exemplifies the attitudes of many Palestinian Arabs then and now: The very fact that the Zionists wanted to establish a Jewish state made him implacably opposed to their enterprise and the consequent immigration and land acquisition. Indeed in the year Marcus sees as so crucial, the Zionist Congress in Vienna endorsed increased settlement in Palestine, authorizing a worldwide fund-raising campaign, and the Arab-Syrian Congress in Paris crystallized its opposition to Zionism. And so 1913 saw the establishment of an unfortunate pattern that endures nearly a century later.

Marcus hopes that reading her book will enable people to “better understand how the Jerusalem of ‘then’ became the Jerusalem of ‘now.’ ” Does it do so? Only in the sense that it underscores the long-standing hostility of Arabs to a Jewish state in their midst. But her book is a relief from all those that trace the roots of this hostility to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Britain’s simultaneous promise of Arab nationhood in the Middle East and its decades-long mandate over Palestine.

If “Jerusalem 1913” accomplishes one thing, it is to show clearly that when the Ottoman Empire still held sway, the irresistible force of Zionist aspirations was already on a collision course with the immovable object of Arab nationalism.

Marcus is a diligent researcher, and her wish that things could be otherwise is as sincere as it is admirable. But she is no deep thinker, nor does she have sufficient grasp of the historical and political to make this book a substantial contribution to the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There should have been more attention given to just how distinctly Palestinian was this resistance to Zionism or whether it was a part of a general Arab unwillingness to tolerate a non-Muslim, non-Arab state in the region. After all, as a result of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, there would soon be many Arab nations where there had been none. But Marcus convincingly demonstrates that the Arab determination to prevent the Zionist enterprise rather than recognize what a boon one small Jewish state at peace with the rest of the region would be was already entrenched in 1913.

Her book thus shows the region’s propensity for emphasizing the negative and destructive over the positive and enriching. And the real tragedy is that all in the region -- Israeli and Palestinian alike -- have been the losers for it.

Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”