In Defining Neighbors, Jonathan Marc Gribetz seeks to examine how Arabs and Zionists—particularly Arab and Zionist intellectuals and writers—conceived of each other during the last years of the Ottoman era, before the solidification of the Zionist project in Palestine and the consequent emergence of an apparently intractable political and national conflict. Making use of a variety of textual sources, Gribetz has produced an intellectual history arguing that Arab and Zionist writers during this period viewed each other not primarily as competing nations with oppositional political goals but as representatives of “deeply familiar” religious and racial categories.
After setting the stage with a chapter on Jerusalem's and Palestine's place within the broader Ottoman Arab sphere, Gribetz begins his analysis with a detailed look at Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi's unpublished manuscript Zionism or the Zionist Question, written just before al-Khalidi's death in 1913. In this manuscript al-Khalidi, a member of the prominent and politically active Jerusalem family and a representative in the Ottoman parliament from 1908 to 1913, expounded not only on the secular nationalist tenets of Zionism but also on Jewish theology and history, with an extensive and broadly sympathetic (though sometimes rather eccentric) recounting and interpretation of Jewish biblical history in Palestine.
The remainder of the book takes up an analysis of various press sources. In a chapter on Hebrew Zionist newspapers published in Palestine, Gribetz argues that Zionist writers tended to differentiate between Christian Arabs, whom they saw as hostile not only to Zionists but to Jews, and Muslim Arabs, whom they described as adherents of a tolerant faith who would be willing to accommodate Zionist settlers in Palestine. Gribetz goes one step further here, making the case that Zionist writers sometimes described this distinction between Muslims and Christians as not only religious but racial, categorizing Muslims and Jews as racial “brothers” distinct from Christians. This theme carries over into the next chapter, which explores Arabic press attention to Zionism outside of Palestine. Looking at journals published in Beirut and Cairo but also read in Palestine, Gribetz argues that Arab writers and thinkers described Jews not as “a foreign, unfamiliar group of European colonists . . . [but rather] relatives—racial or otherwise—of the Arabs” (p. 133). This chapter features a detailed examination of how Egyptian/Syrian writers such as Rashid Rida, Jurji Zaydan, and Shahin Makaryus sometimes wrote sympathetically (or at least in mixed terms) about biblical narratives of Jewish history, the political and economic trajectory of Jews in Europe, and the racial and religious commonalities between Jews and Muslim and Christian Arabs.
The final chapter turns back to the Zionist press, focusing on Zionist efforts—particularly by Arabic-speaking Sephardi Jews—to spread a positive view of Zionism among educated Palestinian Arab readers, especially following increasing hostility from the Palestinian Arab media after the post-1908 liberalization of Ottoman press censorship laws. These writers sought to improve perceptions of Zionism among elite Palestinian Arabs not only by providing positive perspectives on the Zionist settlement project but also through “translating” Judaism and Jewish histories for an Arab audience. Shimon Moyal's and Nissim Malul's works The Talmud and The Book of the Secrets of the Jews, respectively, were intended to render Jewish history and Zionism sympathetic by placing them within a specifically religious discourse comprehensible to Arab Muslims and Christians.
Gribetz's analysis is praiseworthy for its careful attention to texts, its thoughtful framing of the category of religion as an important aspect of the prewar Arab–Zionist encounter, and its detailed delineation of the multiple subcategories of identity within both Zionist and Arab communities in late Ottoman Palestine. Nevertheless, there are some problems with his account. The claim that “race” constituted a major category of analysis for both Zionist and Arab actors examining the other during this period is much less well supported than his parallel examination of the role of religious discourse. Gribetz's exclusive focus on journals coming out of Beirut and Cairo (where the Jewish community was largely non-European and operating at a distance from events unfolding in Palestine) as sources for partially sympathetic Arab approaches to Jewish history and Zionist claims obscures the fact that the vibrant Arabic press in Palestine itself tended to take a less religiously oriented and generally more hostile view of Zionist settlement. Further, the book includes almost no discussion of Ottoman citizenship or alternative visions of Osmanlilik—which, as Michelle Campos among others has recently demonstrated, were strong among some Jews in Palestine as well as Muslims and Christians—and makes little use of the wave of relevant recent scholarship examining questions of ethnicity, religion, and race across the Ottoman Empire, including greater Syria, in its final decades.
More significantly, though, this book's broader framing reflects more general and longstanding problems with the historiography on Palestine. Gribetz, like many other historians, presents perception and depiction as primary movers of the Arab–Zionist struggle, going so far as to suggest that the less hostile descriptions of the “other” he finds on both sides in the late Ottoman period offer hope for the future of the Arab–Israeli conflict. “Zionists and Arabs imagined one another in very different terms in the Late Ottoman period from the ways their descendants look at one another today,” he writes, adding, “Just as perceptions can worsen, however, it stands to reason they can improve as well” (p. 247). Such a perspective elides the root causes of the conflict. The flexible, uncertain, potentially sympathetic relations between Arabs and Zionists in late Ottoman Palestine emerged in the context of a very limited Zionist movement seeking viability for a relatively small number of local settlements and unsupported by imperial authority. With the transformation of Zionism into a settler colonial movement backed by the British Empire, and the consequent radical shift in the balance of power between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine, “perception”—friendly or otherwise—was no longer the fundamental question for Zionist–Arab relations. This is not to suggest that studies of perception are not important or relevant to the historiography; but it is to suggest that historians of Palestine would do well to consider carefully the specifics of the imperial power dynamics in which such perceptions were constructed before assigning them explanatory (or, worse, prescriptive) power.
