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"A Question That Outweighs All Others": Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue
THE 1907 PUBLICATION OF YITZHAK EPSTEIN'S "A Hidden Question"(1) is generally regarded as the beginning of serious debate in the Zionist movement about relations with the Arab population of Palestine. Closer examination of the article -- translated here into English for the first time -- reveals that it is indeed remarkable in several respects: as a more sensitive analysis of Arabs in Palestine than previous Zionist writings, as a projection of the ultimate dimensions of the issue decades before these dimensions took final shape, and as a provocative statement that was instrumental in framing the debate within the movement.
Epstein was a Russian-born teacher and writer who immigrated to Palestine/Eretz Israel in 1886 and settled in Rosh Pina, the first Zionist settlement in the Upper Galilee. Most of his public activity was in the educational arena rather than in politics; he was active, in particular, in the movement to teach Hebrew in Hebrew.
Zionists of the First Aliyah (wave of immigration to Palestine, from 1882 to 1905), did -- contrary to some claims -- "see" the Arabs there, but they did not see an Arab problem. They also paid remarkably little attention to the Arab population, simply noting their presence as one facet of the new environment with which they contended. For their own sanity, the new settlers needed to minimize the difficulties they faced and, in the case of the Arabs, it was also ideologically crucial to avoid any suggestion that they were simply replicating the Diaspora pattern of a Jewish minority existing at the sufferance of a majority non-Jewish host population.(2) The first to challenge this complacent mindset was Ahad Ha'am, Zionism's most prominent internal critic, whose report on his first visit to Palestine, in 1891, included a sharp reminder of the obstacle posed by the Arab presence.(3) Ahad Ha'am confuted the notion that Palestine was "empty" or "abandoned," credited the Arabs with a collective identity that others had ignored, and condemned overbearing and sometimes violent Jewish behavior toward Arabs. In basic respects, however, his perception of the problem still fit the First Aliyah pattern: the Arabs were not a political problem, in that the success of the...