Beginning the story of Jewish nationalism with the forerunners of the Zionist movement or the First Aliyah or the arrival of Herzl already grants Palestinian Arabs their greatest moral argument.

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This is so because if the Jewish nationalist starting point is, say, 1890, then there were already large numbers of Arabs living in the Land of Israel. The exact numbers aren’t known, but the standard demographic estimate is that there were probably close to 500,000 Muslims and Christians who were living in the land by 1890, with ten times more Muslims than the 43,000 Jews. It is those numbers that seem to present Zionism’s founding with a moral problem.

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Of course, the Zionists were completely and presciently correct about the principal moral reasons why a state for the Jews was needed. There was a deadly "racial" hatred of the Jews charging through history and aiming right at them. The Zionists were frighteningly correct in their assessment of the dangers the Jews faced. Not only was hatred of the Jews loose in the world, but soon there would be no escape from it. After the 1924 immigration act in the United States, there would be no remaining haven for Jews in trouble. That was less than a decade before the rise of Hitler. Herzl was in a race against Hitler, although neither of them knew it.

And the Zionists were also correct about non-ultra-Orthodox Jewry being lured away from Jewish traditions by the charms of assimilation. The Zionists knew there needed to be a Jewish nation to provide those who weren’t ultra-Orthodox Jews with a place to live a completely Jewish modern life. It was this spiritual need as well that provided Zionists with a moral foundation for their difficult and bold enterprise.

But with all the accuracy of their vision of the Jewish future, with all the urgency they could muster, with all the historical and emotional connections to their ancient land to propel them, the Zionists encountered what at least some believed to be a moral roadblock standing in the Zionist’s path to foundational justification: the Arabs already living in the land. There have been, in Zionist history, other moral challenges such as the Palestinian Arab refugees, the status of the West Bank after 1967, and various Israeli policies towards the minority Arab population. These are separate moral issues, however, from the moral question at Zionism’s birth, about whether Zionism itself was a morally legitimate movement.

It is that basic question that needs to be answered.

The fellahin living in the land in 1890, the peasants, the agricultural workers, the farmers, were there before the new Zionist movement. They eventually charged the Zionists with usurping Muslim land, the very land on which the Muslims had lived for a thousand years. The Christian Restorationsists claimed that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land, but they were wrong. The fellahin may not have owned the land, but they worked on it, and they lived there, at the very least temporarily.

However, this standard historical story lacks the appropriate political perspective. Jewish nationalism culminates in Zionism but does not begin with it. Zionism was a specific political movement, the first successful manifestation of what was a long effort by Jews to restore their national status. The story of Jewish nationalism doesn’t commence with its successful outcome but with its genuine beginning. That beginning occurred right after the fall of the Second Commonwealth. The Bar Kokhba revolt, which lasted from 132 to 136 CE, was the Jews’ third and final rebellion against Roman rule. After the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and this final revolt, the Jewish state was no more. Half a million Jews had been killed. Some Jews were able to stay, so it is inaccurate to claim that the land was ever emptied of Jews.

Conflict with Jewish nationalism

It is from this moment that Jewish hopes for a restored kingdom began. This is the true beginning of Jewish nationalism. Although devastated by Roman murder and destruction, the Jews maintained a majority or plurality of the population in the Land of Israel for half a millennium. The Jews lost their majority in the seventh century to Muslims who conquered the land. That moment requires greater scrutiny.

The Arabs’ conflict with Jewish nationalism doesn’t begin with the emergence of Zionism, but in 637 when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem. Seen from that historical distance, we can look at the fellahin there at the beginning of Zionism in a new way.

Perhaps the fellahin were the descendants of Muslims who conquered the land, or people who lived in the land who were converted to Islam. But in any case, the Muslim attachment to the land is associated with a violent attack on the Jews. It was the Muslims who took the land by force. It is they who established the rules of the game that no matter how long the Jews had lived on the land, no matter if they had been the majority for well more than a thousand years, that land and those Jews were still subject to be conquered.

Having established those rules, the modern Palestinian Arabs couldn’t then morally complain if the Jews wished to reclaim the land, even by force. However, the Jews were not doing it by force the way the Muslims did. The Jews did it by building homes, reclaiming swamps, and by employing Arab labor. They didn’t conquer the land. They moved back to their old neighborhood and were willing to live beside their new neighbors. If the Arabs living there in 1890 were the descendants of the Muslim invaders, they had less of a moral claim to the land than the Jews and they had no moral basis to deny the Jewish return. Indeed, it should be noted that whoever the Palestinians are descended from, the moral case for Zionists is secure precisely because the Muslims forcibly conquered the land. The Zionists held the moral high ground.

Zionists typically begin their historical narrative with their own success. That is understandably emotionally attractive. The Palestinian Arabs also start with the beginning of Zionism because that beginning gives them their strongest moral claim to be the legitimate inhabitants of the land. If both started the story of the land at the right moment, the Jews have the deeper moral claim to the land. Combined with their efforts to save Jews, some of whom were endangered physically and some spiritually, the Zionist moral claim to the Land of Israel is airtight.

Lawrence J. Epstein served as an advisor on the Middle East for two members of the United States Congress