Protesting for Peace and Calling for War

While in Israel there were voices who advocated relinquishing lands so that the two people might live side by side, the PLO was hardly open to compromise. Its attitude to Zionism was explicit in its charter: Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations

WHAT TO DO WITH the captured territories now became the most contentious issue in Zionism. In the movement’s early years, Herzl had sought a state, while Ahad Ha’am insisted that statehood would be a mistake and that the Jews should build a cultural center—but nothing more—in Palestine. Later there had been the battle between Ben-Gurion and Jabotin

European Jews, in turn, would find themselves in tension with the insular Jews of Palestine, who remained opposed both to modernity as well as to the Jews from Europe who were importing it into the Middle East. To no small degree, those differing conceptions of nation and society, competing sensibilities regarding honor and memory, and many other m

Much of the world denounced these new neighborhoods and settlements as illegitimate if not illegal, and blamed them for precipitating the Arab-Israeli conflict.