Political Zionism was initiated by Theodor Herzl in 1896, with the publication of his pamphlet, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat). Inspired by the Dreyfus Affair in France a few years earlier, when Herzl was reporting on the case for a Viennese newspaper, this pamphlet argued that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe necessitated the forming of a new state, to provide security for Jews in the diaspora.
The ideal location for this state was Palestine. ‘Palestine’, Herzl wrote, drawing on biblical sources for support, ‘is our ever memorable historic home’. He died eight years later. By 1917, supported by Britain in the Balfour Declaration, an ever-growing Jewish population had come to settle in Palestine. And then, in 1947—in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which went some way toward legitimising Herzl’s initial fears—the State of Israel was formally recognised by the newly created General Assembly of the United Nations.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that a large population of Arabs already lived in Palestine. In fact, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, a census accounted for 760,000 people in Palestine, of which only 97,000 were Jews. The rest were Muslims and Christians. These proportions changed dramatically, with Jews accounting for almost a third of the population by the time Britain withdrew from the area in the 1940s.
Relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the area were never amicable, and were becoming increasingly violent. Within one year of the UN’s 1947 resolution, the first official Arab–Israel war had already occurred. The violence has escalated ever since, reaching a dramatic peak during the 1967 Six Day War, which saw Israel treble the land under its control. This level of violence has persisted to the present day.
Peter Rodgers, former Australian Ambassador to Israel, examines this situation in his new book, Herzl’s nightmare: One land, two people. In a clear demonstration of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim ‘Disputes would not last long if only one of the parties were in error’, Rodgers writes:
‘The story of Palestine in the past century has its share of political and military and human triumphs. But too often the dominant, recurring themes are those of lies and hypocrisies, myth-making and mutual demonisation; of a determined, energetic refusal to contemplate what it must be to be the other.’
Rather than simply cataloguing the violence and bloodshed which has been the consequence of this refusal, Rodgers’ book attempts to clear