Preface to a Tragedy

By MYRA NOVECK

JERUSALEM 1913
The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
By Amy Dockser Marcus
225 pages. Viking. $24.95.

Early in Jerusalem 1913, Amy Dockser Marcus describes the work of Noah Sokolovsky, who came to Palestine from Russia in 1913 to make a film about Jewish settlements. Sokolovsky’s film was shown at the 1913 Zionist Congress. While popular and well-discussed at the time, the documentary was erased from popular memory by the fickle sifting of history—until the film’s negative was rediscovered in the French national film archives in 1997. Marcus watched the reconstructed film in Jerusalem in 2000, and her impressions of Sokolovsky’s work and her dogged research are the kind of stuff that make this book a good read.

Marcus has collected a museum of lost treasures of people, places, and artifacts of a forgotten era that is now enjoying renewed historical attention. She lovingly develops her almost-famous characters and the events that shaped their lives. Combining secondary sources and historical archives, she has produced a sensuous portrait of the final decades of Ottoman rule of Palestine.

It is in the last days of that empire that Marcus—who was a correspondent in Israel for the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s—seeks the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which she saw played out in her years in Israel, during the Oslo process and the waves of suicide bombings. Marcus rightly points out that by the time of the British Mandate, a period which has received great historical attention, the sides of the conflict had already been defined. By going back to Zionist activity in Ottoman Palestine beginning with Theodore Herzl’s one and only trip to Palestine in 1898, Marcus looks to answer the question, “How did a place with such a rich history of ethnic diversity become so divided by sectarian conflict?”

With this question always in the back of the author’s and reader’s minds, the central theme becomes the lost Eden, the lost opportunity, for Jews and Arabs to come to a peaceful solution for their shared land and shared city. For Marcus, the seminal year, when the paths were chosen that put the Middle East on the course we see today, is 1913. It was that year that the speakers at the Zionist Congress argued for “cultural and demographic domination of Palestine.” It was the year that the organizational infrastructure of the state-in-the-making would be formed, and that Jewish military groups began to coalesce into a nascent army. And it was that year that the Arab Syrian Congress met in Paris as an expression of Arab nationalism in the Ottoman Empire.

There were also, in 1913, a series of secret negotiations between Zionists and Arab nationalists. Their negotiations were meant to lead to serious peace talks in which the sides would achieve entente, but the grand meeting never happened. Each group found trouble finding suitable delegates. They feared their positions were too far apart. The Zionists wanted a Jewish entity, and the Arabs wanted an Arabic-speaking multi-faith entity (an Arab-American proposal akin to the American model of confederated states did not pick up steam). As Arthur Ruppin, head of the Zionists’ Palestine Office, wrote, “We would have rejected the Arab demands to move towards assimilation with the Arabs and would probably have received hardly any concessions of any consequence from them.” Once World War I began the talks were quietly abandoned.

And so the talks fizzled. The sides perhaps lacked the maturity—or the weariness of bloodshed—to make concessions. More likely they were too absorbed in the Zeitgeist to think outside the nationalist box.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the watershed towards which Marcus has been building since page 1. These talks were part of a process and mindset running through the whole period Marcus describes. The Zionists bought land out from under Arab peasants who had not properly registered their holdings. They insisted on Jewish-only labor, further limiting the peasants’ livelihood. They sought to buy contiguous tracts for a state in the making. They built separate Hebrew-speaking schools unsuitable for Arab children. They preferred to build a Hebrew culture and ignored calls by local Arabic-speaking Jews for greater attention to local language and custom. For better or worse, the Zionists aspired to create a cultural and political entity for the Jews, not to become Jewish Arabs. The Arab nationalists, for their part, set preconditions for the negotiations. They refused to talk to any Zionist involved in land deals. They refused to lay out their own demands until the Zionists clarified their aims regarding Palestine.

And even if the peace talks had taken place, and the Zionists had agreed to adopting Arabic and the Arabs had agreed to their continuing to buy land, would it have survived the Ottoman collapse, or the mass aliyah that followed Hitler’s rise to power? The end of empires, the rise of nation states—these were forces beyond the control of those who sat in Jerusalem and thought about keeping their city together.

Marcus tries too hard to convince the reader of the portentousness of 1913 and its relevance to the conflict today. The buildup is unnecessary. Her story is good enough to be read without the make-or-break melodrama. Unfortunately, Marcus’ effort to convince has been laid out in an introduction that is overlong and also seems to be written in haste—as opposed to the careful craft shown in the rest of the work—and suffers from historical errors. The suicide bombing did not begin, as Marcus states, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s term as prime minister. The first mass murder by suicide bombing occurred in Afula on April 6, 1994, at the conclusion of the 40-day Muslim mourning period for the victims of massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs when a Jewish settler shot and killed 29 Palestinians as they bowed in prayer. Also, the book’s map of Jerusalem in 1913 shows the Western Wall Plaza, which was actually only created after the ‘67 war.

All this is too bad because it might discourage readers from reading this rich and thought-provoking book. The year 1913 may not have been the fall from grace but is indeed essential for understanding today’s ongoing tragedy.