"Much of Israeli media and academia have characterised the Palestinian resistance movement as a key factor in the global history of terrorism. The role of the academics was to validate this depiction with ‘scientific’ research..."

These images of the Palestinians are deeply rooted in Zionist history and go back to the period of the Second Aliyah (1904–14). For these settlers, the Palestinians were either not there or, when they were, appeared as aliens who should not have been there.

The participants in the Second Aliyah numbered between 20,000 and 40,000 and came mainly from Russia. It was not a success story. The vast majority of them (some 90 per cent) left quickly, mainly for the United States.

...they expelled the Palestinian workforce from the old Jewish colonies – Kibbush Ha’avoda (conquest of labour), they called it – and lay the foundations for the future state. Most of them encountered the Palestinians for the first time under similar circumstances.

The new arrivals were compulsive diarists and letter writers – they did not miss a single mosquito bite and, in true shtetl style, did not stop complaining. The first anti-Arab entries were written while they were still being hosted by the Palestinians...

In order to survive, they needed to work shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or labourers, and through this intimate contact, even the most ignorant and defiant settlers realised that Palestine was in fact an Arab country, with an Arab human landscape.

It was a process of recognition of an unpleasant reality, intertwined with early thoughts of how to change it. The subsequent production of knowledge in Israel – and in particular the assigned attributes of the Palestinians... – was strongly influenced by these first impressions.

In many letters, Hebrew workers appear as the healthy blood that would immunise the nation from rottenness and death... With regard to the land of Palestine, the settlers talked about it as a nechar, a foreign land, or worse, as yam nechar, a sea of foreignness and alienation.

References to Palestine as barren land were accompanied by descriptions of the Palestinians as savages roaming this wilderness. These references appear in their diaries or in angry letters lamenting that the homeland had become a shemama, a desert.

Wherever there were Palestinians, there was a sense of barrenness, which caused some of the settlers to rethink the settlement venture and contemplate a return from, as one of them put it...

...this ‘land of nothingness’, because the empty land was full of strangers – ‘people who were stranger to us than the Russian or Polish peasant’, so that ‘we have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here’.

it looked foreign because of the foreigners who were living in it, endowing the place with an alien character...these people were not simply aliens; they were aggressive aliens, and in the terms of this narrative, the aggression was directed at the Jews from the first encounter.

Like all foreigners, the Jewish settlers sailed first to Alexandria, took a ferry to Jaffa, and were taken ashore by small boats. This mundane arrival at the shore appears in the settlers’ statements as aggressive and alien treatment:

Aravim Hetikifu Ottanu’ – ‘the Arabs assaulted us’ – is the phrase used to describe the simple act of Palestinian boys helping settlers to small boats on the way to Jaffa; they shouted because the waves were high and asked for baksheesh because this was how they managed to live.

But in the settlers’ narrative they were assailants. Noise, presumably a normal feature of life in the Jewish townships of Eastern Europe, becomes menacing when produced by Palestinian women wailing in the traditional salute of joy to the sailors returning safely home.

For the settlers this was the behaviour of savages, ‘with fiery eyes and a strange garrotted language’. Whether the topic is their language, their dress or their animals, reports back to Europe concerning the Palestinians were all about unpleasantness and weirdness.

In the jewel of the Zionist crown, Rishon LeZion, Natan Hofshi (whose family name, meaning ‘free person’, was invented on arrival) reported back home to Poland how appalled he was to see many Arab men, women and children crossing through the colony.

‘Nehradeti’ (I was flabbergasted), he commented, and suggested, ‘Maybe it was a terrible mistake and this was a foreign country?’ In a later writing he noted that once ‘the Arabs were not allowed to pass [through Rishon LeZion] it became home’.

The presence of Palestinians in or near Jewish colonies is often referred to as Kalon (shame) which is accentuated by the laag (contempt) and buz (scorn) shown by the Arabs, who according to this depiction somehow understood how pathetic the situation was.

The solution for Kalon was kavod (honour). At the time, the early Zionist Orientalists were explaining how to manipulate the centrality of honour in ‘Arab culture’ for the sake of the project’s success. Again and again, Zionist settlers behaved as a people who had been insulted..

Zionist settlers instituted retaliation for ‘theft’, which was how they characterised the rural tradition of cultivating state land, a practice that was legal under Ottoman law. Picking fruit from roadside orchards became an act of robbery only after Zionism took over the land.

The words shoded (robber) and rozeach (murderer) were flung about with ease when Palestinians involved in such acts were described. After 1948 these terms would be replaced with ‘terrorist’ and ‘saboteur’.

Very soon the ‘Arab way of cultivating and dressing and behaving’ was presented as a necessary initial evil that had to be abandoned as quickly as possible. This became the principal declared mission of the Second Aliyah.

Although the appropriation of local habits in order to get rid of the locals was regarded as an indispensable but temporary evil, sometimes that evil was prolonged to assist with the Zionist project.

Such was the idea conceived by someone named Arthur Ruppin, who proposed that they build a madafa, the traditional guest tent or hall, for settling with local notables the final transition of land from absentee landlords to Zionist hands.

The notables represented the tenants of the land, and had to be convinced to expel the tenants so as to allow actual Zionist settlement of the land that had been purchased.

Cleansing the land of its farmers and tenants was done at first through meeting in the Zionist madafa and then by force of eviction in Mandatory times.

The ‘good’ Palestinians were those who came to the madafa and allowed themselves to be evicted. Those who refused were branded robbers and murderers.

Even Palestinians with whom the settlers sometimes shared ownership of horses or long hours of guard duty were transformed into villains once they refused eviction.

Later on, wherever Israelis would control the lives of Palestinians, such a refusal to collaborate would be the ultimate proof for Palestinian choice of the terrorist option as a way of life.

Urban Palestine, especially the town of Jaffa, triggered a different sort of impression. As David Ben-Gurion and others, reported, the town had ‘a large number of Christians’. They were educated, they were nationalist, and they more or less grasped what Zionism was all about.

They were impertinent and overly assertive. One settler, Israel Kadishman, asserted that ‘our wits’, and not only power, would be needed to combat the Arabs of Jaffa. Jaffa symbolised everything the members of the Second Aliyah dreaded and detested.

In 1967, Jenin; in 1987, Nablus; in 2000, Hebron; in 2008, Gaza; in 2011, Nazareth – all would be similarly depicted as hubs of self-assertive, nationalist Palestinian sentiment and hotbeds of terrorist activity.

In a bizarre way, there was very little the Second Aliyah did for the Palestinians, whereas one could at least say that the first wave of immigrants had offered employment, albeit of an exploitative sort. Yet the sense was that the Palestinians were ungrateful.

The need to exclude the Palestinians in order to make Palestine a safe haven for the Jews is the strongest and most frequent message coming from the voices of the Second Aliyah.

Yosef Aharonowitz was...against the employment of Palestinians, whom he defined as ‘this evil’ (hara hazeh): ‘We are only few and if they uprise against us this is our end.’ He also says...he met decent farmers but knew they were potentially ‘raa hola’ (malignant evil).

During the years of military rule, the phrase ‘raa hola’ was used often in discussions about the future of the Palestinians in Israel. At that time, the possibility of expelling them was seriously considered...

The metaphor of the Palestinians as a disease that had to be cured continued to feature in the official discourse in the 1970s. ‘A cancer in the heart of the nation’ was a common reference and was commonly and wrongly associated with the Koenig Report.

As in the diaries of the Second Aliyah, the Koenig Report treated the Palestinians as a disease that threatened to kill a healthy body.

‘Palestinian terrorism’ was depicted as having been present from the very beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine and still being there when academic research into it began in earnest.

This characterisation...assigned almost every chapter in Palestinian history to the domain of ‘terrorism’ and absolved hardly any of the organisations and personalities that made up the Palestinian national movement from the accusation of being terrorists.

The government, academia, the media, the army, and the NGOs of civil society all took part in constructing the negative image of the Palestinians.