Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

The Zionist settlement (moshava) of Kfar Tavor was founded in lower Galilee in 1909 by the Jewish Colonisation Association for a group of Ashkenazi settlers from Eastern Europe. The origin of the Hebrew name is neighbouring Mount Tabor (the name taken from Psalm 89:12).

Throughout the Mandatory period this settlement was better known to the Zionist leadership of the Yishuv as Mescha, which was the Ashekenazi rendering of the Palestinian Arabic toponym, Masha. The nearby Zionist settlement Sejera (later renamed Ilaniya) was established a decade earlier, in 1900‒1902, by the Zionist Colonisation Association. This too was an Ashkenazi rendering of the Palestinian Arabic name Sajara (Palestinian dialect for ‘tree’) for one of the earliest and most important Zionist settlements in Palestine.

The issue of Hebraicising Arabic toponyms such as Masha was not always a top priority of some of the fiercely secular early Zionist settler leaders in Palestine. The establishment of the Technikum in Haifa – now the Technion – by a secular German Zionist organisation at the beginning of the 20th century and the controversy about the language of instruction (German or Hebrew) marked the ‘War of the Languages’ (Margalit, S.

1994) in the Zionist colony (Yishuv) in Palestine. Some leaders of the leftwing secular Po’ale Tzion Zionist movement, such as Ya’akov Zerubavel (born Ya’akov Vitkin in the Ukraine, immigrated to Palestine in 1910), who was a Zionist writer, publisher and editor of a Yiddish newspaper, were strong proponents of Yiddish – a German dialect spoken by the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe – shared the view of many left-wing secular Zionists that Hebrew was the language of only a few Jewish intellectuals and therefore not suitable for the party’s goal of reaching the primarily Yiddish-speaking masses in Eastern Europe (Chaver 2004: 97). Yiddish is the historical and literally the ‘mother language’ (mame-loshn) of the Ashkenazi Jews, distinguishing it from the ‘holy tongue’ (loshn koydesh), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. Yiddish takes most of its syntax and vocabulary from German but has loans from Slavic languages and Hebrew and Aramaic. However, for most early Zionist settler leaders Yiddish was closely associated with the despised and feminised diaspora Ashkenazi Judaism, while modern Hebrew represented the new masculinised settler-colonising Hebrew Man. Even Ya’akov Vitkin changed his family name to Ya’akov Zerubavel. Thus the ‘War of the Languages’ in the early Yishuv ended in victory for the ‘new Hebrew’, whose ascendancy was central to the formulation of the ‘politico- social myths’ of Zionism (Azaryahu 1995), of political Zionism and the construction of the militant Zionist Jewish ‘national’ identity of the Yishuv colony.

Among the early Zionist workers in Sejara was David Grün, who immigrated to Palestine from the Polish part of the Russian empire in 1906 and who later became known as David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), the founding father of Israel and its first Prime Minister. The early Zionist settlers, workers and leaders of Sejara and Mescha, mostly Russian or East European nationals, created a Jewish defence organisation in Palestine: Hashmor (Hebrew for ‘the Guard’), which was organised in 1909 by socialist Zionists.

This was disbanded during the Mandatory period after the founding of the Haganah (Hebrew for ‘defence’) in 1920 from which the Israeli army emerged in mid-1948. The indigenising and nativising strategies of early settlers and leaders of Hashomer included dressing up like local Palestinian Arabs and cultivating an image of the Sabra, the ‘new Jew’ or the New Hebrew Man, rebranded as a ‘native’, self-reliant and armed Jew ‘rooted’ in the land of Palestine.

Throughout the British Mandatory period Sejara, like Mescha, remained better known to the settlers and the entire Zionist leadership of the Yishuv by its Arabic toponym (not its new Hebrew toponym Ilaniya), a place name which was based on the Arabic dialect of the adjacent Palestinian Arab village al-Sharaja (‘tree’ in Arabic). The Palestinian village al-Sharaja was subsequently destroyed by Haganah forces in 1948 and the Zionist colony of Sejara is known in Israel today as Ilaniya, which is also the Hebrew rendering of the Arabic toponym for ‘tree’.