The late Russian empire was notorious in the West for policies discriminating against its large Jewish population and for outbursts of anti-Jewish mob violence known as pogroms. As the country descended into revolution and civil war, antisemitism served the ideological purposes of both the Russo-centric counterrevolution and the anti-imperial nationalist mobilization, with fatal consequences for the Jews.

This chapter explores how Jews and the indigenous inhabitants came to see themselves as members of national communities. It begins with a description of “culture of nationalism” –– a collective belief in society that the assumptions that undergird nationalism are part of the natural order. It then describes how the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and the Jews of mainly Eastern Europe, embedded within empires undergoing transformations that imbued them with structures associated with modern states, came to see themselves as a homogeneous grouping. In the case of the indigenous population of Palestine, that grouping was imperial in scope. The Jews of Eastern Europe, however, were “othered” by the majority community, and thus came to see themselves as a people apart.

This chapter traces the emergence of the Zionist movement and the colonization of Palestine from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. It begins with two Zionist pioneers. The first, Theodor Herzl––the father of political Zionism––was important both for his approach to Jewish colonization (he sought the backing of a Great Power for the project) and for his organizational skills which created structures in Europe that nurtured the movement. The second, Leo Pinsker––the father of Practical Zionism––believed the Jews of Europe could not wait, and thus organized Jewish emigration to Palestine. While the first attempts at colonization failed, the chapter goes on to discuss three more waves of immigration. The second and third wave were inspired by socialism and Romanticism, and the structures they created––which lasted well into the statehood period––reflected this. The fourth wave, however, was mainly made up of economic refugees who were attracted to a rightwing, petit-bourgeois ideology. They and their descendents became influential in Israel beginning in the late 1970s.

This chapter explores patterns of violence, particularly domestic jihad, that emerged during the comprehensive crisis of the late Ottoman sultanate-caliphate and which have continued to this day after the latter’s end in the early 1920s. Rooted in ethno-religious inequality, conflicting eschatology and the experience of superior power in the West, these patterns of violence are often controlled by, or go in tandem with a type of partisan state characteristic of the late and post-Ottoman Middle East. Put generally, they are part of war in the name of religion, nation, and eschatology; target non-Sunnites; and encompass pogroms, show executions, coerced circumcisions, demographic engineering, and, more recently, serial suicide attacks and globally mediatised atrocities. The chapter understands the persistence of such violence in the post-Ottoman societies as an ongoing lack of effective supra-religious social contracts. Also, it scrutinizes the failure of attempts to achieve them and argues that negotiating them is nowhere more demanding than in a geography where the historical claims of all revealed monotheisms meet, and where religious or confessional mobilisation is crucial. Given the force of diverging eschatologies claiming supremacy for their groups and projecting the future in absolute terms, it is hard to see an end to polarisation in the present Levant.