“Colonialism means living
by exploiting others,” Yehoshofat Harkabi
has written. “But what could be further
from colonialism than the idealism of city-dwelling
Jews who strive to become farmers and laborers
and to live by their own work?”1
Moreover, as British historian
Paul Johnson noted, Zionists were hardly tools of imperialists given the
powers’ general opposition to their cause.
“Everywhere in the West, the foreign
offices, defense ministries and big business
were against the Zionists.”2
Emir Faisal also saw the
Zionist movement as a companion to the Arab
nationalist movement, fighting against imperialism,
as he explained in a letter to Harvard law
professor and future Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter on March 3, 1919, one day
after Chaim
Weizmann presented the Zionist case to
the Paris conference. Faisal wrote:
We Arabs, especially the
educated among us, look with deepest sympathy
on the Zionist movement....We will wish
the Jews a hearty welcome home....We are
working together for a reformed and revised
Near East and our two movements complete
one another. The Jewish movement is nationalist
and not imperialist. And there is room
in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that
neither can be a real success without the
other (emphasis added).3
Sources: Yehoshofat Harkabi, Palestinians And Israel, (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), p. 6; Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, (NY: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 485; Samuel Katz, Battleground-Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, (NY: Bantam Books, 1977), p. 55.