TRAVELLING ZION

Abstract

This essay considers the political import of the hike or walk (ha-tiyul; plural, tiyulim) among Jewish settlers in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century. Situating this travelling practice within the broader Zionist discourse of which it was a part, I will suggest that the tiyulim conducted by Jewish settlers were important technologies of settler nation-making which helped to rewrite Arab Palestine as a Jewish geography. Drawing on postcolonial arguments about imperial travel, this essay presents both a condensed history of such travelling practices and a close reading of some of the travelogues they spawned. I focus on two divergent itineraries: (a) accounts of travel within the borders of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) replete with classic colonial tropes of conquest, the empty landscape, and Palestinian-Arab culture qua ethnographic object; and (b) accounts of Jewish travel to neighbouring Arab countries (Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon) from which colonial tropes are frequently absent. I suggest that these postcolonial readings of Zionist travel and travelogues advance the scholarship on Zionist coloniality by suggesting the role of everyday culture within the settler-national project.

Keywords:

• Jewish
• Middle East
• Orientalism
• Palestine
• travel
• Zionism

Notes

¹See Lockman (1996) for a reading of Ben Zvi's 1921 essay ‘The Arab movement’, which Lockman calls ‘one of the most serious and authoritative’ attempts to ‘come to grips with the ideological and political dilemmas that Arab … demands for self-determination posed for left-wing Zionism’ (58).

²On the complex role assigned to Sephardic Jews within the Yishuv discourse about Palestine's Arab population, see Eyal (2006). Much of my essay focuses on two collections of travel writing from the new Yishuv: Itzhak Ben Zvi's Impressions En Route (1971) and David Benvenisti's The Magic Lantern (1994), the latter compiled posthumously by his son, Meron Benvenisti. It is difficult to date David Benvenisti's writings with precision given the ways the collection was edited.

³Exceptions include Abu El-Haj (2001) and Almog (2000). For discussion of the national implications of such travel practices, see Ben-David (1997), Katriel (1995), Naveh (2002), Zerubavel (2004).

⁴Exceptions include Abu El-Haj (2001), Lavie (1990), Shohat (1997), Eyal (2006).

⁵During the 1920s the Zionist movement was also beginning to explore ways to harness its tourist industry to the national political struggle. See Cohen-Hattab (2006).

⁶Author interview with Sara Novaplansky, Jerusalem, May 2007.

⁷On the role of songs sung on such hikes, see Eliram (2000: 62).

⁸Ben Zvi (1971: 275) adopts a similar instructional tone in a 1936 discussion of the Bedouin of the Dead Sea region, originally published in the Hebrew newspaper Davar.

⁹In Ben Zvi's travel diaries, see discussions of his trip to Jericho in 1921 (1971: 173–83).

¹⁰A parallel challenge existed for Labor Zionists within the political sphere, that of ‘demonstrate[ing] explicitly that there was no contradiction between Zionism and the object interests of the indigenous Palestinian people’. See Lockman (1996: 60).

¹¹On the ideology of early Zionist textbooks, see Almog (2000: 26–9).

¹²Ben Zvi tells a similar story about the Palestinian landscape in his discussion of a visit to Tel Arad in 1921. See Ben Zvi (1971: 185–91).

¹³Israeli archeologists have used a parallel strategy. See Abu El-Haj (2001).

¹⁴For a detailed discussion of the Committee for the Designation of Place Names in the Negev Region (NNC), see Benvenisti (2000: 11–54). There is some disagreement among scholars as to the initial date of this cartographic project. Benvenisti argues that although the NNC was founded in 1949, ‘as far back as 1920, two [members of the NNC] had been appointed advisers to the British Mandatory government on all matters related to the assignment of Hebrew names’ (2000: 12). Mansur and Kassim (2003: 5) date its establishment to 1925. Also see Pappé (2004: 139).

¹⁵For a discussion of the ways that men and women of ha-Shomer (The Guards) and ha-Palmach emulated Bedouin cultural practices, see Almog (2000: 187–8).

¹⁶See Khalidi (2004), Sakakini (1987) and Tamari (2005) for such a portrait.

¹⁷For a discussion of Ben Zvi's political writings to this effect within the larger context of Labor Zionist ideology of the 1920s, see Lockman (1996: 58–101). On the political role of this typology within the post-1948 state, see Lustick (1980).

¹⁸The subject of Bedouins is frequent in Ben Zvi's travel writings. See, for example, his extended essay on the subject entitled ‘Bedouin in Eretz Yisrael’ (Ben Zvi 1971: 236–46), originally published in Ha-‘Olam (1932).

¹⁹On Benvenisti as a photographer, see Benvenisti and Benvenisti (1994: 8, 15).

²⁰On ha-Mahanot ha-Olim's history of tiyulim, see Almog (2000: 174).

²¹In keeping with the typology explored above, Druze and Bedouin were typically exempt from this category of ‘bad Arab’. In the Druze case this was due to their status as potential allies of the Zionist movement. Since the early 1930s, the Zionist leadership aimed to cultivate good relations with the Druze in Palestine in an effort to undercut the Palestinian national movement – efforts that depended on the exploitation of communal tensions between Muslims and Druze in Palestine. As Kais Firro (2001: 41) has noted, Yitzhak Ben Zvi himself spoke of his desire to ‘“acquire the friendship of this community” in the emerging struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jews’.

²²In his 1935 writings about Baghdad, Ben Zvi cites the imperial travels of Gertrude Bell as a precedent, noting that ‘it's not enough to read the diaries of Gertrude Bell … you need personal experience’ (1971: 256).

²³On the notion of the antonym in this context, see Shohat (1997).

²⁴For a brief discussion of the Zionist youth movement ha-Halutz in Damascus, see Zenner (2000: 83–4). Concurrently, vocal elements within the leadership of the Syrian Jewish community were actively distancing themselves from the Zionist project, proclaiming their ‘total loyalty to the Arab cause with anti-Zionist demonstrations and public statements’. See Stillman (1987: 356–7).

²⁵Translated literally, the text reads: ‘cries out … to your arms and your souls’ – the former referring to the labour imperative of Zionist socialism.

²⁶Marches differed from the institution of the tiyul in destination, duration and associated ardour.

²⁷Elsewhere, I have cautioned about the ways that the postcolonial rubric fails to adequately address the historical particulars of the Israeli case; see Stein (2005).