The Making of Primitive Palestine: Intellectual Origins of the Palestine–Israel Conflict

Abstract

This essay analyses the Western perception of Palestine in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It elucidates how the way the West looked at Palestine and its population was deeply influenced by the anthropological invention of “primitive society”. This lens through which to view the Holy Land was not the result of an objective description of the subject matter; on the contrary, it was a narrative carefully constructed and designed to suit the narrators’ purposes. Driven by religious and political motifs, Western scholars, travellers and religious writers set out to describe the land and people of Palestine in terms of historicized difference. Not only did this allow Christian scholars to demonstrate the reliability of the biblical narratives, but even more did it offer an intellectual justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Keywords:

• Primitive Society
• Palestine
• White Man’s Burden
• Restoration Prophecy
• Zionism

Notes

[1] Quotations from historical sources follow the original spelling and grammar, and I have avoided the distracting addition of numerous [sic]s to indicate misspellings and other inconsistencies.

[2] I use the second edition, which appeared as Luke & Keith‐Roach (1930), p. xv. I owe this reference to Moors & Machlin (1987).

[3] I owe this and other references in this section to Dr Harry van den Bouwhuijsen, who introduced me to this debate.

[4] As Robert Marrett, Tylor’s successor at Oxford, argued: “Reject the Darwinian point of view, and you reject anthropology also … for anthropology stands or falls with the working hypothesis derived from Darwin, of fundamental kinship and continuity amid change betweens all the forms of human life” In McGrane (1989: 90).

[5] As Henry Maine wrote, “That wonderful succession of events, which has brought the youngest civilizations in the world to instruct and correct the oldest” In Kuper (1988: 18n.2).

[6] Fabian (2002: 17–18, emphasis in the original): “Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time. A discourse employing terms such as primitive, savage … does not think, or observe, or critically study, the “primitive”; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object, of Western thought”.

[7] Howe (1997: 22) asserts that up to forty travel guides for Palestine appeared annually during the 1830s. See also Moscrop (2000: 9–13) and Coleman (2002).

[8] See for example, Robinson & Smith (1841, I: 312): “Yet it must be a fine grazing country as is proved by … its having been from the days of Abraham onward a place of resort of nomadic herdsmen”.

[9] See also Amiry & Tamari (1989).

[10] Cf. Moscrop (2000: 19): “Robinson, like so many travellers, went to the Holy Land expecting to find a time capsule of the lands of the Bible.”

[11] For a history of the “modernization” of Palestine in the course of the nineteenth century, see Pappe (2004: 14–42) or Kimmerling & Migdal (2003: 3–37).

[12] For an analysis of the white man’s burden, see Nandy (1994), especially part one, “The psychology of colonialism” (1–63).

[13] For a more elaborate analysis of visual representation in Whiting (1914), see Moors (2001).

[14] Weatherhead notices the modernization of Palestine, which, to his mind, is spoiling the Holy Land (1936: 20).

[15] For a more nuanced analysis of change and continuity in Palestine’s rural areas, see Reilly (1981).

[16] For example St John (1949: 67): “Jerusalem … was a city of 100,000 Jews, about 32,000 Arabs and 32,000 Christians”. He continued by saying that the Arabs and the Christians lived in the Old City. Although there were Armenians and other non‐Arabs among these groups, most Christians in Jerusalem considered themselves Arabs.

[17] See also p. 517: “The “shorts” worn by [Jewish] colonists of both sexes contrast with the trailing robes in which Arab women walk like queens”.

[18] “From Dan to Beersheba” is a biblical phrase (e.g. 2 Samuel 24: 2) demarcating the area inhabited by the Israelites at the time of King David. See Biger (1990: 9).

[19] Although Holmes (1929: xiv) suggests that it might be comparable to “the early settlement of New England”.

[20] Ziff (1946: 110). McDonald’s memoirs are published as McDonald (1951). Another American diplomat influenced by Ziff’s pamphlet was Bartley Crum, a member of the Anglo‐American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine, established by President Roosevelt in 1946 to advice him on the Palestine question. See Crum (1947).

[21] The assumption that the Jews could guide the Arabs towards modernity never disappeared, and can for instance still be found in Peres (1993), in which the current president of Israel argued for Arab‐Jewish economic cooperation. In his scheme, the Jews would provide innovation and expertise while the Arabs were responsible for providing cheap labour.