CHAPTER TWO THE ISRAELI INCORPORATION REGIME Colonizing the Land of Milk and Honey The four great powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land …. Memorandum by Mr. Arthur J. Balfour, August 11, 1919 (Woodward and Butler 2005a, 208). Modern political Zionism is, in both thought and practice, a product of a colonial world order. The depiction of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project is neither new, nor was it a characterization that Zionist ideologues shied away from.1 Even Altneuland (“Old-New Land”), a novel written by the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, which aimed at propagating his utopian vision of a Jewish Palestine, openly adopts the language and logic of colonialism. While not a direct blueprint for Herzl’s Jewish state, nor a manuscript that can be brought to the level of reality, Altneuland is one of the first and most comprehensive literary accounts of a Jewish society in Palestine. Unlike Herzl’s more famous publication, Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”), which served as the ideological bedrock and outlined the organizational structure of Zionism, Altneuland does depict an existing Arab population in Palestine. However, in its representation of Arabs in Palestine, it too places them within a hegemonic colonial order. Indeed, there is a connection between the bedrock of modern Zionism (including its liberal-Zionist variant) and that of the colonial 1 One of the most lucid and thorough readings of the Zionist movement as a colonial project was written by Maxime Rodinson. Arguing that the Zionist movement to create the State of Israel effectively corresponds into the European-American project of colonialism, Rodinson concludes: “Wanting to create a purely Jewish, or predominantly Jewish, state in an Arab Palestine in the twentieth century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and to the development (completely normal, sociologically speaking) of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis to a military confrontation between the two ethnic groups” (2004, 74). Important insights into studies of the Zionist colonization of Palestine can also be found in Piterberg (2008).