Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...COURSE, there were millions of Arabs whose country was already Palestine. Most of them were peasants, in many cases working for absentee Turkish or Arab landlords. For awhile, it seemed as though Jewish settlers would just try to acquire Arab tenants or laborers and replace the Turks, much as other colonists elsewhere replaced native exploiters of labor, even though the first stirrings of Arab nationalism--directed against the Turks--were beginning to be felt in Palestine. Baron Edmond de Rothschild poured considerable amounts of money into buying up land and settling Jews on it, with Arab peasants continuing...
...early years of this century, though, the issue of Jewish exploitation of Arab labor didn't even arise very much because a second wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe--fleeing a new wave of pogroms and especially the suppression of the Russian Revolution of 1905--consisting mostly of Zionists determined to be productive themselves and convinced that if they didn't exploit Arab workers, there wouldn't be any conceivable obstacle to unity with them...
...heroic efforts, these new immigrants succeeded in creating almost a whole-new separate Jewish sector of Palestine's economy. Jews who'd been city workers or intellectuals in Europe set up the collective farms and co-operatives, the kibbutzim and moshavim, that helped drain swamps and make things grow and became, for awhile, in the case of the kibbutzim, the wonder of socialists around the world...
...same time, the success of the Jewish sector of the economy--traceable partly to remarkable dedication but more importantly to the modern ways of doing and thinking about things the immigrants had brought with them from Europe--made the Arab majority of Palestine's population less and less sure that the future belonged to them, and more and more restive with their prospects...
Most Zionist leaders wanted to win the Arabs' friendship, and following the lead of Ber Borochov, a Russian Marxist who had taught that the Arabs' lack of an economically distinct culture would lead them to accept Jewish settlement easily, many of them thought it wouldn't be too difficult. Nearly all of them found it hard to realize that there were two separate nations in Palestine, that they had divergent concerns and nationalisms, and that economic separatism, though it kept one nation from directly exploiting the other, was making them more separate all the time...