What does it take to let go of cherished anti-Zionist narratives lacking historicity?

– “History has vanished.” Alain Finkielkraut ¹

The “bride is beautiful” stories posit that Jewish communities or Zionist organizations sent emissaries to Palestine in the late Ottoman or the British Mandate period, and that these emissaries informed their communities or Zionist leadership that “the bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.” That is, the emissaries sought to caution Jews that the area they sought to settle k already inhabited by another people. Though lacking basis in fact, accounts of these non-events have proliferated.

The ubiquity of the “bride is beautiful” stories, which will be discussed here, presents a troubling illustration of the shoddiness found in Middle Eastern studies and of how scholars, journalists, and filmmakers dispense with accuracy and evidentiary standards when dealing with Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli history. Professionalism is often intentionally put aside to advance political agendas and as part of efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, and this approach has become so entrenched that fictions are relied upon even when documented events could be made to serve such purposes instead.

In some versions of the “bride is beautiful” stories, the First Zionist Congress or the rabbis of Vienna dispatch representatives to Palestine. In others, Theodor Herzl himself or his friend and fellow Zionist leader Max Nordau sends two rabbis and receives their reply.

One of the stories’ frequent tellers, the Egyptian journalist and public intellectual Mohamed Heikal, deployed them in his 1996 Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiation:

Later, Heikal used the stories to portray Zionist Jews as unremittingly opposed to conciliation with Palestinian Arabs, suggesting that just as Herzl was unwilling to give up his plans to form a Jewish state in the Middle East—even though “the two rabbis he dispatched to Palestine” told him by telegram that the land was already possessed by others—it is similarly unlikely that contemporary Zionists will “compromise” (that is to say, agree to no longer have a Jewish state of any size in the Middle East) now that their sought after state already exists.³ In this later telling, it is Herzl, rather than the rabbis of Vienna, who sent “the two rabbis” and received their cable.

An early recorded example of the “bride is beautiful” myth appears in an article by the late Eric Silver, The Guardian’s foreign correspondent and expert on Israel and the Middle East, written on the ten-year anniversary of the Six-Day War, in 1977:

Silver’s language of spying out the land calls to mind the Biblical episode of the twelve Israelite spies sent to the Promised Land in Numbers 13, ten of whom advised Moses against trying to conquer the territory, reporting that “it is indeed a bountiful country — a land flowing with milk and honey … . But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified” (vv. 27–28). How did Silver learn about this interview that “once” took place? What was the ageing pioneer’s name? When was he interviewed on Israeli television? On what program? Who was the interviewer? When did the emissary travel to Palestine? Which Russian Jewish village were the pioneer and the emissary from? Silver disregarded these questions.

In some variants of the “bride is beautiful” stories, the setting is not Western Europe, the lifetime of Herzl, or even the nineteenth century. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, at the time a professor at the University of Haifa, related a version supposedly involving Golda Meir in his 1992 Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel:

As is the case with the two rabbinic representatives from Vienna in other versions, the lone Jewish traveler to Palestine in Beit-Hallahmi’s story is unnamed. The traveler’s town or city of origin is not identified, either, and no specific year is given for his visit to Palestine or return to Poland. Beit-Hallahmi gave a year for Golda Meir’s meeting with Israeli writers, but no specific date or reference, and offered no source for the “famous story.”

The myth especially began to flourish with the publication of Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World in December 1999. In the prologue to this popular and often-cited history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Shlaim—now emeritus fellow of St. Antony’s College and a former professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford—wrote about the beginnings of political Zionism:

Shlaim offered no source for his account of Viennese rabbis, two fact-finding representatives, and a cautionary cable from Palestine, but with the publication of his influential book an assortment of “bride is beautiful” stories quickly proliferated and became more prominent.

Ghada Karmi, for instance—now a former research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and a former Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House)—based the title and thesis of her Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (2007), in which she described Israel as “an alien body implanted in the heart” of the Arabs’ region that they have rejected “just as the human body rejects a foreign organ graft”⁷ and argued for dissolving the Jewish state, on the same “bride is beautiful” story found in Shlaim’s book. Former Swedish diplomat Ingmar Karlsson emulated Karmi with his 2012 anti-Zionist Bruden är vacker men har redan en man: Sionisme—en ideologi vid vägs ände? (The bride is beautiful but already has a husband: Zionism—an ideology at the end of the road?), which was funded and distributed by the Swedish Arts Council.⁸

All versions of “the bride is beautiful” stories—which are often set during the 1890s (in Ottoman-ruled Palestine) and less frequently during the 1920s (in British Mandatory Palestine)—lack primary sources. Nevertheless, they have appeared, and continue to appear, in many books, articles, and films. Often, as with Shlaim and Karmi, no sources at all have been provided for these stories by those who have told them. Sometimes a specious one has been put forward.

In the opening paragraph of his 2011 College Literature article “Cry No More for Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish,” Mustapha Marrouchi—at the time professor and Rogers Fellow in Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas—cited Henry M. Christman’s The State Papers of Levi Eshkol as a source for the version he told, though there is no such story in Christman’s book, published in 1969:

In 2014, Marrouchi was fired from his university for repeated plagiarism¹⁰—but when at a loss for a passage to lift, he was not above making up a citation too. And, of course, in 1897 the Land of Israel/Palestine was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire; the British Mandate for Palestine only commenced in 1920, a couple of decades later.

Rawan Damen’s documentary Al Nakba (Al Jazeera Arabic, 2008/Al Jazeera World, 2013) incorporated a “bride is beautiful” story in which it is Nordau who “sent two rabbis” to Palestine. The Independent’s Joe Sommerlad repeated that version as part of his article “A brief history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” (May 13 and May 20, 2021).¹¹ Of the start of the Zionist movement, Sommerlad (following Damen) wrote:

As a result of my critique of Sommerlad’s online article,¹² The Independent made significant changes to its content. The article was modified to state that the authenticity of the story about two rabbis being sent by Nordau to Palestine to investigate the feasibility of a Jewish state is “contested.” In addition, an italicized editorial note was appended:

But a day after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, The Independent’s editors inexplicably republished what was essentially its same Al Nakba-based June 18, 2021, article—while removing Sommerlad’s name from the byline and replacing it with “Independent Reporters,” and while deleting all acknowledgment that the article had needed to be amended over two years earlier in June 2021.¹⁴ Though an identical URL as for the 2021 article was being used by The Independent, the reworked article’s title was soon changed from “A brief history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” to “The Israel-Palestine conflict, explained.”¹⁵ This kind of erasure is not unique in The Independent’s coverage of Israel, as has been shown by Adam Levick of CAMERA in the context of another article published there by Sommerlad.¹⁶

A version of the stories made its way into Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s 2015 documentary Colliding Dreams. In the film’s second section, “One Land. Two Peoples,” Yaakov (Kobi) Sharett (the eldest son of Israel’s second prime minister, Moshe Sharett) narrated the following over old black-and-white footage from the Land of Israel/Palestine, accompanied by melancholy piano music:

Sharett’s version does not have even the illusion of specificity, such as a decade (the 1890s or the 1920s), a European location (Vienna, Poland, or Russia), the size of the mission to Palestine (a lone traveler, two rabbis, or a larger delegation), or descriptive information about which organizations or individuals sent him/them and received his/their report (village elders, a rabbinic organization, a Zionist organization, Herzl, or Nordau). “Certain groups sent a mission.” Who? When? From where? Sharett believed the mission’s “report” to be “true,” and the filmmakers’ pictorial and musical framing of his story lends it credence, signaling to viewers that this was an event that took place in the early years of Zionism—conveyed by an authoritative speaker, the son of an Israeli prime minister—which sums up the injustice at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Ilan Pappe—professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter—began his 2017 Ten Myths about Israel’s fourth chapter, which focused on discrediting the notion that “Zionism Is Not Colonialism” and in which he argued against what he described as the “myth…that Zionism is a liberal national liberation movement,” ¹⁷ with this account:

Who was in the delegation to Palestine? When was it sent? By which Zionist organizations? Pappe cited Beit-Hallahmi’s Original Sins as the source for the “bride is beautiful” story he told. But Original Sins made no mention of a pre-1882 “delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations” and reporting “back to their colleagues” that “the bride is beautiful but married to another man.” Rather, Beit-Hallahmi wrote of “a Jew from Poland” who “visited Palestine in the 1920s” and who had said, “The bride is beautiful, but she has got a bridegroom already.” How did Pappe come by this anti-Zionist myth he related as historical fact? Why did he alter Beit-Hallahmi’s version involving Golda Meir? Pappe’s use of a “bride is beautiful” story is symptomatic of a broader tendency to misrepresent information and misuse sources. Yet, without a trace of irony or self-awareness, he opened Ten Myths about Israel, which he claimed was meant to challenge Zionist “myths, which appear in the public domain as indisputable truths,” ¹⁹ with these sentences:

By 2020, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan were expounding intersectional gender and racial theories, and semiotics of patriarchy and objectification, around the “bride is beautiful” stories. Abu-Laban is professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of Alberta. Bakan is a professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, cross-appointed to the Department of Political Science, and an affiliate with the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Their section on “Women’s equality, brand Israel, and rebranding” in Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context (2020) began with the following:

According to Abu-Laban and Bakan, Karmi’s Married to Another Man “reminds” readers of the “bride is beautiful” episode, but (as with Pappe’s use of Beit Hallahmi’s Original Sins) the version they told differed from the one found in her book. In Karmi’s account (for which she, like Heikal in his 1996 Secret Channels and Shlaim in his The Iron Wall, provided no source), “the rabbis of Vienna” had sent the “two representatives” after the First Zionist Congress, not before or during it, and their cable was received by these rabbis in Vienna, rather than by Zionists in Basel. Given the specificity of Abu-Laban and Bakan’s version and their attempted feminist/anti-racist interpretation of it, as well as the absence of a source for the story in Karmi’s book and their divergence from her account, they might be expected to have done more to ascertain the episode’s details and to make sure it took place. Moreover, the few early Zionists who used variations of the phrases “a land without a people” or “a country without a people”—alluded to by Abu-Laban and Bakan, and often falsely said to have been widely-propagated slogans coined by Israel Zangwill or uttered by Herzl—did not mean that the Land of Israel/Palestine was then empty or uninhabited, but rather that it did not have at the time, to their minds, a people in it: a population, indigenous or otherwise, that was a distinctly identifiable or self-identifying nation like the Jews.

In June 2012, I published “‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man’: Historical Fabrication and an Anti-Zionist Myth” (Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 30, no. 3: 35–61). I demonstrated that those who tell the “bride is beautiful” stories never provide primary sources for them and often provide no sources at all, and that there is no basis for recounting these stories as historical events that occurred during the early years of the Zionist movement. I also showed that writers using the stories often have not maintained consistency even in their own telling, changing the details as they have told them over time. Perhaps such alterations are inevitable, as in all their variations the core of the stories does not have a primary source to reference and their tellers have been less concerned with accuracy than with advancing political and ideological agendas. Others, such as the blogger Elder of Ziyon, Lisa Abramowicz, and Hadar Sela, subsequently addressed the misuses of these stories too. I followed up my 2012 article with several shorter pieces, including “‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’ The tenacity of an anti-Zionist fable” (Fathom Journal, Autumn 2020). Though I am here updating those previous articles, incorporating additional evidence, and elaborating a different argument about the function of the “bride is beautiful” stories, this much has remained constant: while no primary sources for the stories have surfaced, they continue to be retold more or less uncritically.

What work do these stories perform? Why do so many scholars, journalists, and filmmakers eagerly repeat them, and why is there such reluctance to part with them, despite their lack of historicity? Although Israel’s detractors expend great energy cataloging each of the country’s real and imagined mistakes or wrongdoings, these are often attempts at distraction: many such people do not oppose individual Zionist actions or Israeli government policies so much as the very existence of a Jewish state of any size in the Middle East—which they view as unjust, anachronistic, atavistic, and criminal at its core. The “bride is beautiful” stories neatly communicate that Zionists themselves recognized from the start exactly how it would be immoral for Jews to reclaim the Land of Israel/Palestine, but proceeded anyway, and that the creation of the state of Israel was entirely a willful and premeditated injustice. For this reason, the stories tend to accrue details (such as the direct involvement of Herzl, Nordau, or the First Zionist Congress) that better affix them to the initiators of political Zionism and thus to the original sin of efforts leading to the eventual reconstituting of a Jewish state. A country born and living so iniquitously is capable only of a litany of inhumane crimes and can do no right. Anything negative claimed about this evil entity’s past, present and future, anything that reinforces its culpability—including, circuitously, various connubial-themed stories predicating the primal transgression of its formation—may be believed and reiterated. Historicity is irrelevant.

I received a congratulatory email from historian Benny Morris—now Emeritus Full Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev—after the publication of my 2012 Shofar article in which he cautioned me not to be surprised if the “bride is beautiful” stories continue to be peddled. How right he was. As it happens, Morris had himself penned a mostly favorable review of The Iron Wall when that book was first published, and had written approvingly about Shlaim’s use of these stories:

Morris is perhaps a rare case of a historian of more recent Middle Eastern events who is willing to reconsider and publicly revisit his narratives in the face of new information. In contrast, the anti-Zionist potential inherent in the “bride is beautiful” stories continues to be irresistible to many scholars, journalists, and filmmakers. When Shlaim published an “Updated and Expanded” edition of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World in 2014, he once again, and still without offering a source, included a “bride is beautiful” story. He made, however, one change. Shlaim now, without explanation, cited it as “an apocryphal story”: “After the Basel Congress, according to an apocryphal story, the rabbis of Vienna decided to explore Herzl’s ideas and sent two representatives to Palestine.” ²³ Even so, Shlaim went on to discuss the story as though it were factual and not apocryphal, exactly as he had done in 1999. He has taken the same approach in his latest book (also reviewed by Morris, but far less favorably than The Iron Wall),²⁴ Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, published in 2023:

That now-pervasive “bride is beautiful” story has been too central to Shlaim’s chronicling of Zionism to be treated with the historical rigor that would exclude it.

Though Karmi has acknowledged that she searched hard for a primary source, was unable to find one, and feared the “bride is beautiful” stories she had been telling might in the end be apocryphal, she still presents a version of the story as fact on her website as part of personally promoting her 2007 Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.²⁶ Instead of any public correction about the stories that she had based Married to Another Man’s thesis on and that she had repeated in articles and interviews, in 2023 Karmi and her publisher, Pluto Press (which had also published Beit-Hallahmi’s Original Sins), simply reissued what is many ways the same book under a new title: One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel. The “bride is beautiful” stories are absent from this new iteration. As for Marrouchi’s article “Cry No More for Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish”—which included a “bride is beautiful” story copied from a book review by Jonathan Shainin, and has been retracted by College Literature for plagiarism²⁷—Marrouchi still proudly mentions it among his “several works of literary criticism” in the third-person biography on his website.²⁸

Many Jews were aware in the early years of the Zionist movement that there was a sizable Arab population in the Land of Israel/Palestine relative to its Jewish population. Moreover, Zionists realized that much of the Arab population would not want Jews to immigrate or reestablish a Jewish state there. Herzl anticipated such opposition and wrote about it in 1896 in The Jewish State. Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky addressed it a century ago in his 1923 essays “The Iron Wall” and “The Ethics of the Iron Wall.” However, Jewish visitors and Zionist immigrants to the Land of Israel/Palestine (and traditional Jews who had continued to live and resettle there over the centuries prior to the advent of political Zionism) did not consider the land “married” to anyone but the Jewish nation. Religious Zionists, who prayed multiple times a day for the ingathering of Jews into the Land of Israel, also recalled the words of Isaiah 62:5—addressed to the land and the nation of Israel, and chanted yearly in synagogues—about future sovereignty and redemption: “As a young man marries a young woman, so your sons will marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices over a bride, so your God will rejoice over you.” To them, it was always the Jews’ land, even if others ruled the territory or were dwelling there.

In their efforts to reclaim the Land of Israel/Palestine, leaders of the Zionist movement initially sought assistance from imperial powers (e.g., Ottoman and British) for their endeavors — as Jewish leaders in the sixth century BCE had done in the Persian Empire when facilitating the return of Jews to the Land of Israel and a renewal of Jewish independence following the Babylonian exile—and then aimed to remove those powers from the land when they impeded Jewish immigration and the restoration of sovereignty. Believing the Land of Israel/Palestine to be their national heritage, and confident in the justice of their return to it, most Zionists were undeterred by Arab opposition. In “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” for example, Jabotinsky argued that “It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations [i.e., the Arabs] who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people [i.e., the Jews].” (By “alienate” he did not propose that Arabs would have to leave the Land of Israel/Palestine, but rather that they could not prevent Jews—a third of whose global population had not yet perished in the coming Holocaust—from returning there and becoming the majority.) Jabotinsky contended: “The principle of self-determination does not mean that if someone [i.e., the Arabs] has seized a stretch of land it must remain in his possession for all time, and that he who was forcibly ejected from his land [i.e., the Jews] must always remain homeless.” ²⁹ There is no need to resort to contrived stories to describe this history or to argue how best to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet the “bride is beautiful” stories

The stories efficiently work to situate the rise of political Zionism as a deliberate injustice accountable for the ills of the region’s modern history, and as responsible for producing the space in which ensuing ruinous events in the Middle East have unfolded—with the implication that the Jewish state (the Nazi, racist, settler-colonial, fascist, outpost of Western imperialism, apartheid, genocidal, doing-to-Palestinians-what-was-done-to-Jews, etc. state), which ought never have come into being, should now be dissolved and its replacement become the world’s twenty-second Arab and forty-seventh Muslim-majority country. Others who operate from the same premises but are reluctant to articulate such a stark outcome “pin their hopes on a bi-, multi-, or post-national state that would cleanse the stain, remedy the injustice, and redress the offense to the universal brought about by Israel’s Jewishness, and by Jewishness, period.” ³⁰

The carelessness of scholars, journalists, and filmmakers blends with ideological fervor, and these stories, which confirm their prejudices, multiply and become accepted truths that are difficult to dislodge, ingraining a fiction-based rejectionist discourse.

1. Alain Finkielkraut, “The Religion of Humanity and the Sin of the Jews,” Azure 21 (Summer 2005): 24.

2. Mohamed Heikal, Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations (HarperCollins, 1996), 23.

3. Stephen Moss, “‘There isn’t a target in Afghanistan worth a $1m missile’,” The Guardian, Oct. 9, 2001.

4. Eric Silver, “Decade of Disillusion,” The Guardian, June 4, 1977, 7.

5. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (Pluto Press, 1992), 74.

6. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 3.

7. Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007), 4.

8. Cnaan Liphshiz, “Swedish government body funding book on Israeli ‘apartheid’,” Jewish Telegraphic Association, Oct. 12, 2012.

9. Mustapha Marrouchi, “Cry No More for Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish,” College Literature 38, no. 4 (2011): 1.

10. Peter Schmidt, “UNLV Fires Professor for Repeated Plagiarism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 2014.

11. See Shai Afsai, “Plagiarism and Misinformation about Israel at The Independent,” Jewish Boston, June 7, 2021.

12. See, for example, note 11 above.

13. See Afsai, “The Independent Amends its Brief History of Israel,” Jewish Boston, Aug. 2, 2021.

14. The Oct. 8, 2023 version of the article is viewable here: https://www.aol.com/brief-history-israel-palestinian-conflict-093317209.html.

15. See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-palestine-conflict-history-map-b2443579.html.

16. See Adam Levick, “Hey Indy! 2018 Called, And They Want Their Biased ‘Nakba’ Article Back,” CAMERA-UK, May 18, 2020.

17. Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel (Verso Books, 2017), xi.

18. Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, 41.

19. Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, x.

20. Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, ix.

21. Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 182.

22. Benny Morris, “Shlaim: The Iron Wall,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 4 (2000): 109.

23. Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), 3–4.

24. Morris, “Avi Shlaim’s Fantasy Land,” Tablet, Sept. 26, 2023.

25. Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld Publications, 2023), 34–35.

26. See https://www.karmi.org/Books/index.html.

27. See College English’s retraction notice at the Project MUSE link in note 9 above.

28. See https://mustaphamarrouchi.com

29. See here for an English translation of “The Iron Wall” and “The Ethics of the Iron Wall” from the Jabotinsky Institute’s archive. I have quoted from pp. 7–8.

30. Finkielkraut, “The Religion of Humanity and the Sin of the Jews,” 29–30.