Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Studies in Jewish History) [Hardcover]

Anita Shapira (Author), William Templer (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195061047 | ISBN-13: 978-0195061048 | Publication Date: July 23, 1992 | Edition: First English Edition, First Printing

No other issue so dramatically demonstrates the deep change which occurred during the last century in the image of the Jew, as the attitude toward the use of force. A people who were characterized as averse to violence and all forms of fighting, adopted military might as its identity symbol. Shapira traces the road along which the Zionist movement discarded its early mission of peaceful settlement in Palestine, to the incorporation of the use of force as a legitimate tool for realizing the idea of Jewish national sovereignty there. The emergence of a new, "Israeli" national ethos, accompanied by its particular symbols, myths, and norms, is the topic of this book. The evolution of a "defensive ethos" in the early decades of the century neglected the scruples and inhibitions of first generation socialist Zionist settlers. The appearance in the 1940s of an "offensive ethos" coincided with the coming of age of a new native-born generation, unfettered by their fathers' sensitivities. Shapira argues that it indicated that the barriers of ideology, moral norms, and mental restraints constructed by the founding fathers, proved unequal to the impact of social and political realities of colonization.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A rich and sophisticated work that nicely complements more conventional political-historical studies of the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . A landmark book that is an outstanding contribution to the history of Zionist political thought and culture.”—American Historical Review

“This is a superb book . . . well-researched, detailed, and scholarly.”—The Historian

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hebrew

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First English Edition, First Printing edition (July 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195061047
• ISBN-13: 978-0195061048
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,557,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly, balanced, important, March 27, 2008

By 

Peter Pan (Philly, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C) (Paperback)

Finally, a work on Zionism that avoid polemic and engages in truly important question on the changing nature of Zionism over the course of the twentieth century and the reasons and means by which the movement felt the need to resort to force.

As both a Jew and Zionist, I am often disappointed by the simplistic books that come out supporting Israel and naturally disgusted by the mass of anti-Israel trash that is produced. Shapira's work, however, is something different from both. One gets that impression that Shapira has no axe to grind but truly is seeking the answer to a question.

I think every Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora should read this book as we need to understand how our culture uses (and sometimes abuses) myth and history. Is is through honest works like Land and Power that Jewish culture can only become stronger and Israel can continue on as a land of hope and promise.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly and informative, August 2, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C) (Paperback)

In spite of the extreme popularity of the subject, there are surprisingly few scholarly works about Zionism. Much of the material that has been produced has paid more attention to political correctness than historical accuracy.

I am glad to say that this book is a serious and scholarly work.

The book starts by explaining the extent to which the Jews of the early nineteenth century had spent centuries as non-belligerents and pacifists. This was due in part to an aversion of war and to an even greater extent on the fact that the Jews were a defeated people who were not permitted to hold weapons. The book then examines how such a humiliated people finally acquired the willingness, ability, and nerve to defend itself and finally even attack its enemies.

Shapira starts with the development of a "defensive ethos" in the Levant, from 1881 to 1921. The next segment of the book tells of the defensive ethos at work from 1921 to 1936. The remainder tells of the trials of the Jews in the Levant from 1936 to 1947 that led at first to use of force by irregulars and finally to military offenses approved of by the representatives of the population at large.

As Shapira explains, at first, this use of force against the Arab pogroms of 1936 was confined to the Irgun, which represented a small minority of the Jews of the Levant, and an even smaller splinter group from the Irgun, namely the Stern Gang. The majority had a policy of "self-restraint." This continued even after the perfidious British White Paper of 1939 shifted the Jewish population to almost total insistence on the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. However, after World War 2, when British policy became even more unbalanced in favor of Arab aggression, the majority started to approve of counterattacks, starting in October, 1945. While the counterattacks by the majority ended in 1946, the stage had been set for military action. In April, 1948, that action was taken, and what became the Israeli army the following month went into action to actively relieve the siege of Jerusalem. As Shapira points out in her introduction, in 1982 Israeli forces even went into action in Lebanon as a matter of "choice." For the first time in many, many centuries, Jews had fought an offensive military action as Jews without believing that they needed to do so at once simply to survive. The transition from a humiliated people that neither was able to fight nor wished to do so to one that was willing and able to fight was finally accomplished.

One interesting point that Shapira makes has to do with the Shoah or Holocaust. The slaughter of millions of European Jews was a disaster for the Jews of the Levant. It was also an embarrassment that so many Jews appeared to go to their deaths "as sheep to the slaughter." Shapira discusses the effect of having the Jews appear so weak and hapless on this occasion, and how this helped to catalyze the transition of the Jews to a people that were willing to fight. But Shapira shows that the establishment of Israel was not a direct result of the Holocaust. "It is possible to imagine," says Shapira, "that if the Holocaust had not occurred, the pressure of many more millions of living Jews would not have been inferior to the moral weight of the martyred dead."

23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine background, October 21, 2001

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C) (Paperback)

This book differs from many histories of Israel by reaching into 19th century to examine and explain the roots and context for the Jewish nationalism that preceded Israel's 1948 establishment as a state.

Shapira's first chapter explains the plight of Europe's oppressed Jews, which led to Theodore Herzl's convocation of the first Zionist meeting in Switzerland in 1896. Although periodic slaughters never reached the level of the Chmielnicki pogroms in 1648 and 1649, which left more than 100,000 Jews dead, as the 20th century began, anti-Semitism in Europe remained a terrible force. The 19th and early 20th century were meanwhile an era of universal nationalism. Peoples around the globe reached into their respective pasts, bolstering identities and calling for national borders. For the Jewish people, nationalism was heightened by a threat to existence that few if other people (except the Turkish Armenians) experienced.

Shapira shows admirably that hope and self-preservation, not belligerence, drove the first and second waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East to Palestine. From 1881 through 1914, Jewish immigrants joined the families of co-religionists who had lived in Palestine since before the destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD. Some sensed hostility among young Arabs of Jaffa. Others, like David Ben Gurion and Berl Katznelson, remarked on little about Arab inhabitants except their extreme poverty, illiteracy and the diseases by which they were afflicted. The immigrants had no complex ideology or political structure; They merely wanted to live in Zion, which the Jewish people had for 2,000 years considered their homeland. Funded by Jewish organizations and philanthropists such as Baron Rothschild, they began buying land in quantity.

While some Jewish settlers developed a chauvinistic attitude, Shapira also shows that they had no plans to conquer resident Arabs. On the contrary, they adapted local customs and culture--wearing kaffia headdresses, riding horses and carrying weapons.

From 1905 on, as pogroms against Jews in Russia intensified, Jewish settlers arrived understanding the need for self-defense. Yet, no discernable confrontation between Arabs and Jews took shape until the Young Turk revolution rocked the Ottoman empire in 1908, bringing Arab nationalism to Syria in particular. Even then, disputes in Palestine remained local and concerned grazing rights and water. Buying land, Jews learned, did not always entitle them to water sources on it. Where Arabs considered grazing pastures public domain, Jews who had purchased land expected it to be theirs' alone. As they had in Europe, Jewish settlers optimistically hoped for peaceful relations with non-Jewish neighbors.

As World War I approached, however, moods crystallized. Zionist immigrants burdened their new situation with their previous outlook. As in Europe, they attributed the animosity of others to agitation and incitement, in this case, by Christian and urban Arabs. Here, as in Europe, incitement definitely existed. As the Ottoman grip on Palestine gave way to anarchy, anti-Jewish hatred increased. Jewish land purchasers were constantly beset by sellers' fraud: Claims and counterclaims, violence and counterviolence arose. Worse, legal purchases often displaced fellaheen--tenant farmers.

Based on their European experience, when violence arose against the Jews, they assumed the authorities would not protect them. Jewish settlers who had arrived hoping for peace and security in their ancient land discovered that they had exchanged one "existential threat for another." Jewish defensive thinking gelled after the Yom Kippur 1928 and August 1929 riots and lasted until 1936, when the Arab Rebellion--during which Jews were murdered with abandon--stimulated a Jewish offensive strategy.

This was followed by the most traumatic 9 years in Jewish history--1939 through 1947, during which the spontaneous response in Palestine was to go to the aid of Europe's Jews. Jews came, rightly, to believe that they could rely only on themselves. This ethos was celebrated by poets like Nathan Alterman and Hannah Senesh. The Nazis murdered the latter, then 26, after she parachuted behind enemy lines to aid her fellow Jews. In Palestine, Jewish self-preservation was directed at the British, whose grotesque 1939 White Paper, Shapira shows, locked Jews out of the National Home that the League of Nations approved for them in 1922.

---Alyssa A. Lappen