BOOK REVIEW: Zionists And Anti-Zionists: The 88 Year (And Growing) War

BY RABBI ALLEN S. MALLER

A recent book by Oren Kessler “Palestine 1936” treats the Palestinian side respectively, yet still receives a prestigious Jewish prize. The book is “Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict,” by the American-Israeli author Oren Kessler. His book relates in great detail how the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli Zionists drifted into what would become an 88 year (so far) political and violent conflict. But did it have to be that way?

If the rulers of the Ottoman Empire had taken advantage of the Zionist leader Theodore Herzl’s offer of massive investments into the Ottoman Empire by European Jews like the Rothschild’s in return for expanded Jewish settlements in Palestine, the Ottomans would not have joined World War 1, and George Antonius’ book ‘The Arab Awakening’ would have been about the Christian, Jewish and Muslim nationalists in Bagdad, Damascus, and Jerusalem verses the Turks.

If the Christian, Jewish and Muslim nationalists in Bagdad, Damascus, and Jerusalem had to fight the Ottoman Turks for independence; there would have no British Mcahon-Hussein letters, nor any Balfour Declaration or British Mandate.

European and American Jewish Zionists would have supported the Arabs and Zionists against the Turks; and an independent Jewish Allied state might have become the outcome. Ali Maher Pasha, an Egyptian prime minister and chief adviser to King Farouk said, “in a better atmosphere they (the Zionists) might be able to advance further, not by force, but with Arab goodwill.” (Page 205)

But by 1939 Nationalistic secular politics had made even Arab governments rivals and Hajj Amin Husseini had already poisoned the possibility that Arabs could have offered their well respected traditional welcome of guests to their cousins who were desperate to return home.

The earlier Ben-Gurion’s meetings with George Antonius (pages 57-58) and Muse Alami (pages 38-42) would more likely have led to a more peaceful outcome for both sides. Millions of European Jews would not have died in the Nazi holocaust; and millions of Palestinians would not be living in refugee camps.

The book focuses on the period between 1936 and 1939, when several thousand Palestinians living under the British Mandate rose up violently against a growing Jewish population and the Brits who were in charge. Kessler cites estimates that about 500 Jews, 250 British servicemen and at least 5-8,000 Arabs died in the British crackdown, of whom at least 1,500 of the Palestinian Arabs likely died at the hands of fellow more extreme national Arabs (page 211).

In the wake of the violence, Britain’s “Peel Commission” proposed partitioning the mandate into Jewish and Arab states, while placing major limits on Jewish immigration. Most Zionists led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, accepted the proposal.

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem and de facto leader of the Palestinian community, rejected the idea and called for jihad. He later went to Nazi Germany. The Palestinians emerged from the revolt weakened politically, economically and militarily. Since then more than 100-200,000 lives have been lost.

However, they did accomplish their goal of substantially slowing the growth of the Jewish populations. If the Palestinians had accepted Britain’s “Peel Commission” proposal partitioning the mandate into Jewish and Arab states, hundreds of thousands of European Jews could have been rescued and brought to the Jewish state in the years preceding the Nazi’s Final Solution.

And the failure of the revolt set the stage for what the Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) when they lost the next anti-Zionist war in 1948.

The book came out on the eve of October 7, 2023 and inevitably offers fuel for the debates central to the protests and counter protests that followed the Hamas attack on Israel; and the Israelis’ subsequent war in Gaza. So are the Palestinian Arabs victims of a “settler colonial project,” or their own failed leadership? Can two people so at odds share the land, by dividing it? And might knowing this history bring both sides closer to a resolution?

Kessler said “I think my book and this chapter in history is full of ‘what if’ questions. The idea that things could have indeed gone differently and that we weren’t fated for endless conflict suggests maybe they still can go differently in the future.”

What if, he asks, Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner for Palestine, had appointed a moderate instead of al-Husseini as grand mufti? What if the two-state solution offered by the Peel Commission report in 1937 had gone through?

“Jews would have gotten less than 20% of the country and there would have been no Palestinian refugee crisis. There would have been no Nakhba in 1948. The Gaza Strip would not be teeming with refugees today,” Kessler said, describing what he knows are unknowable but still strong possibilities.

As a counter to the mufti, who would later line up with Adolf Hitler and further discredit the Palestinian cause, Kessler offers an extensive treatment of Musa Alami, a Palestinian nationalist known for his relationships with the British and the Jews.

Alami met several times with Ben-Gurion during the 1930s, suggesting ways in which Jewish national ambitions might coexist within a regional majority of Arabs, with both sides gaining from the economic and public health progress being made by the Jews.

“Despite diametrically opposed political aspirations they met in an atmosphere of real candor and respect, and they really tried to reach a modus vivendi, to reach some kind of agreement that both sides could live with,” Kessler explained. “Alami was not a peacenik. He does his part for the Arab Revolt, and then some. He’s not opposed to violence, nor is Ben-Gurion.

“But I do think his personality was kind of the polar opposite of the mufti’s in his ability to hear the other side, to understand the other side and to try to reach a solution. And it gives a glimpse I think of perhaps what could have been had things gone a bit different.”

In the book Kessler strives to view the emerging Jewish state from the Palestinian perspective. “It’s not that difficult to understand that people who were living in a certain land and whose ancestors have lived there for centuries wouldn’t look all that kindly on another people coming in en masse,” said Kessler. “We don’t need a very active imagination to understand that.”

But the question, he continued, “is how they responded, how they registered their opposition. And with every rejection by the Arabs in Palestine, their position got worse and worse and it continues to this day.”

Kessler mostly leaves it to readers to decide if the lessons of the 1930s are useful in 2024. He’d also like his book to be seen as a lens on a time period that hasn’t gotten its due, at least in English, and one that has “so many fascinating, complex and compelling characters on all three sides of the Palestine triangle: the Jews, the Arabs and the British.”

But at the end of the book Kessler returns to Musa Alami, who lived most of the rest of his long life (he died in 1984) exiled from his native Jerusalem, raising money and international support for Arab refugee youths living in Jordan.

In an interview after the Six-Day War, Alami offered both sides a prescient warning that sounds like what Kessler calls “a note of hope”: “You are not considering the future — you are only considering the present,” he told the Israelis. “And we are not considering the future — only our present suffering. But I do believe, still now, that this country has the makings of peace.”

The Qur’an states: “Glory to He Who carried His servant by night, from the Holy Sanctuary (in Makkah) to the distant Sanctuary (in Jerusalem), the precincts of which We have blessed, so that We might show him (Prophet Muhammad) some of Our signs. Surely He (God) is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing One.” (Qur’an 17:1)

The slogan: “From the river to the sea” could truly be aspirational by making it focus on both people first and the land itself second. “From the river to the sea Palestinians and Israelis should be freed of hatred and suffering by ‘a two state for two peoples sharing of the land peacefully solution.'”

On October 27, 1978, only five years after Egypt started the Yom Kippur War with a surprise attack on Israel, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their progress toward achieving a Middle East accord. The Yom Kippur War was followed six years later by a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Could the same process follow the defeat of Hamas, and its opposition to a two state solution? The only possible chance for avoiding more wars is the two state solution. To establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. That will not be possible with the current leaders on either side.

Extremists, both Israeli and Palestinian, will do all they can to sink the idea, as they have done since 1937.

If fourteen months of war does not deliver enough of a shock to break deeply-held prejudices and to make the idea of two states viable, nothing will. And without a mutually acceptable way of ending the conflict, more generations of Palestinians and Israelis will be sentenced to more wars.

Although it might seem impossible now, I do believe that within a decade or two Muslims will visit Jerusalem and pray together with Jews as Prophet Zechariah predicts: “Then everyone who survives from all the nations that came against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to celebrate the Feast of Booths.” (14:16)

For almost nine decades political nationalist leaders in Israel and Palestine have failed to find a way to end the conflict between their two peoples. Perhaps religious leaders who understand the religious importance of repentance, humility, forgiveness, compromise and hope for peace in overcoming almost nine decades of pain and anger.

Recently a BBC reporter Rushdi Abualouf, reported that Prof. Dr. Salman al-Dayah, former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, had issued a fatwa condemning Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, triggering a devastating war.

Dayah’s fatwa criticizes Hamas for “violating Islamic principles governing jihad. If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.”


Dr. Salman al-Dayah, argues that the significant civilian casualties in Gaza, together with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure that have followed the Oct. 7 attack, means that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Islam. Hamas, he says, failed its obligations of “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenseless civilians…and saving enough supplies for them.”


Dr. Salman al-Dayah points to Quranic verses that set strict conditions for the conduct of jihad, including the necessity of avoiding actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent. He also stresses that Muslim leaders are obligated to ensure the safety and well-being of non-combatants, including by providing food, medicine, and refuge to those not involved in the fighting.” (BBC News)

I very much admire Professor Dr. Salman al-Dayah who must be a brave and compassionate man to issue a Fatwa Criticizing the Hamas October 7 attack on Israel. This is a very courageous time to choose reconciliation rather than retribution between Jews and Muslims in this world. The time for enmity must be over.

The Qur’an also refers to Prophet Abraham as a community or a nation: “Abraham was a nation/community [Ummah]; dutiful to God, a monotheist [hanif], not one of the polytheists.” (16:120) If Prophet Abraham is an Ummah then fighting between the descendants of Prophets Ishmael and Isaac is a civil war and should always be avoided:,”Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

If all Arabs and Jews can live up to the ideal that ‘the descendants of Abraham’s sons should never make war against each other’ is the will of God; we will help fulfill the 2700 year old vision of Prophet Isaiah: “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt, and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will join a three-party alliance with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing upon the heart. The LORD of Hosts will bless them saying, “Blessed be Egypt My people, Assyria My handiwork, and Israel My inheritance.”…(Isaiah 19:23-5)

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