Israel and the Palestinians
Résumé
The goal of the early advocates of Zionism was to found a state in order to "normalize" the lives of Jews. However, in seeking to resolve the "Jewish questions," they paradoxically created an "Arab question." Jewish immigrants did not arrive on virgin land: through both its population and culture, Palestine, where the first Russian Jews landed in the early 1880s, was actually an Arab country, administratively integrated within the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, one of the reasons why many Jews thought that Zionism was entirely utopian at the dawn of the twentieth century was that il called for the Arab majority of the population to accept a competing national project. In the end it was an unswerving political will, the support of imperial Great Britain and the nameless catastrophe suffered by European Jews that enabled Zionism to achieve its goal. While the birth of Israel marked the triumph of Zionism, it was an abysmal defeat for the Arabs of Palestine, who for many years totally refused this new state of affairs. An Israeli denial of Palestine was the response to this Palestinian denial of Israel, and this dual refusal lasted until the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO in the 1990s. While the peace process has made it possible to escape partially from a reciprocal denial, until now it has failed to produce its logical conclusion: the peaceful coexistence of two states.