10.5 Appropriation, Hybridisation And Indigenisation: The Appropriation Of Palestine Place Names By European Zionist Settlers - Palestine A Four Thousand Year History | Quran Course

10.5 Appropriation, Hybridisation And Indigenisation: The Appropriation Of Palestine Place Names By European Zionist Settlers - Palestine A Four Thousand Year History | Quran Course

Secular Jewish Zionism was a classic case of the invention of a people in late 19th century Europe and a project for synthesising a nation. This invented tradition considered the Jews as a race and a biological group, and borrowed heavily from romantic nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Political Zionism mobilised an imagined biblical narrative which was reworked in the late 19th century for the political purposes of a modern European movement intent on colonising the land of Palestine. As an invented late modern (European) tradition, Zionism was bound to be a synthesising project. As Israeli scholar Ronit Lentin has powerfully argued in Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), the Israeli masculinised and militarised nationalism has been constructed in opposition to a ‘feminised’ Other. The founding fathers of Zionism reimagined the New Hebrew collectivity in total opposition to the despised Jewish diaspora unable to resist European anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust. Zionism’s contempt for diaspora Jews and rejection of a ‘feminised’ diaspora and its obsession with synthesising a nation is reflected in the fact that its symbols were an amalgam, chosen not only from the Jewish religion and the militant parts of the Hebrew Bible but also from diverse modern traditions and sources, symbols subsequently appropriated as ‘Jewish nationalist’, Zionist or ‘Israeli’: the music of Israel’s national anthem, ha-Tikva, came from the Czech national musician, Smetana; much of the music used in nationalist Israeli songs originated in Russian folk-songs; even the term for an Israeli-born Jew free of all the ‘maladies and abnormalities of exile’ is in fact the Arabic word sabar, Hebraicised as (masculine and tough) tzabar or sabra (Bresheeth 1989: 131), the prickly pear grown in and around the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948. Even the ‘national anthem of the Six Day War’, No’ami Shemer’s song ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, was a plagiarised copy of a Basque lullaby (Masalha 2007: 20, 39). Seeking to create an ‘authentic, nativised’ identity, the East European Jewish colonists claimed to represent an indigenous people returning to its homeland after 2000 years of absence; in fact Russian or Ukrainian nationals formed the hard core of Zionist activism.

Afula is an Israeli city in the northern district often known as the ‘Capital of the Valley’ due to its strategic location in the Jezreel Valley (Marj ibn ‘Amer).

It was founded in 1925 by Zionist settlers after the purchase of large tracts (60,000 dunums) of Arab land from the Arab absentee landlords of the Sursuk family in Beirut by Yehoshua Hankin (1864–1945), the Russian-born activist who was responsible for most of the major land purchases for the Jewish Colonial Association in late Ottoman Palestine and early Mandatory Palestine. These tracts became the site of numerous new Zionist colonies, including Dayan’s Nahlal, Giva, Ein Harod, Kfar Yehezkel, Beit Alfa and Tel Yosef, settlements which replaced several Palestinian villages that disappeared from the map, some of which are mentioned by Dayan above.

The etymology of the Zionist settler toponym Afula is derived from the name of the Palestinian Arab village al-Fuleh, which in 1226 Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi mentioned as being a town in the province of Jund Filastin. The Arabic toponym al-Fuleh is derived from the word ful, for fava beans, which are among the oldest food plant in the Middle East and were widely cultivated by local Palestinians in Marj Ibn ‘Amer. The Palestinian village of al-Fuleh itself was depopulated during the Mandatory period. The 9500 dunums of land of al-Fuleh, which also became the site of the Jewish settlement of Merhavya, marked the beginning of a bitter struggle between the indigenous Palestinians and Zionist colonists over the rights of Palestine tenant farmers who had been evicted and eventually led to the eruption of the Palestrina peasant-based rebellion in 1936‒1939. Reflecting on the internal Zionist ‘transfer’ debates, Berl Katznelson, one of the most popular and influential leaders of the dominant Mapai party, had this to say in a debate at the World Convention of Ihud Po’alei Tzion (the highest forum of the dominant Zionist world labour movement), in August 1937:

The matter of population transfer has provoked a debate among us:

Is it permitted or forbidden? My conscience is absolutely clear in this respect. A remote neighbour is better than a close enemy. They [the Palestinians] will not lose from it. In the final analysis, this is a political and settlement reform for the benefit of both parties. I have long been of the opinion that this is the best of all solutions ...

I have always believed and still believe that they were destined to be transferred to Syria or Iraq. (Cited in Masalha 1992: 71)

A year later, at the Jewish Agency’s Executive Committee of June 1938, Katznelson reiterated his support for a wholesale and ‘compulsory transfer’ of the Palestinians and added: ‘Regarding the transfer of Arab individuals, we are always doing this’ (cited in Masalha 1992: 114). In the early 1940s Katzelson reminded his colleagues in Mapai that the wholesale evacuation of the Palestinians was the continuation of a natural process that had begun when Zionist settlers had displaced Arab tenant farmers and residents with the establishment of Kibbutz Merhavya on the land of al-Fuleh which had led to a small-scale Arab ‘transfer’ (Masalha 1992: 130).