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Abstract
The first significant clash between European Jewish agricultural colonists and Arab peasants in Palestine, a conflict over peasant grazing rights in Petah Tikva, took the life of one Jewish person, an older woman named Rachel Halevy. This article traces the commemoration history of the event in Zionist sources, particularly local Petah Tikva sources, between its occurrence in 1886 and the mid-1960s. It looks at both the evolving ghostly presence of the central Jewish female victim, who disappears, reappears, and lurks on the margins of the story, a,nd Halevy's son, Sender Hadad, who becomes increasingly prominent over the years as he is configured as an archetypal Zionist guardsman and hero. Through the commemoration history of these figures, the article traces shifting Zionist narratives about heroism a,nd victimhood in Petah Tikva; the construction of Petah Tikva, founded before the Zionist movement, as a locus of foundational Zionist bravery; and the gendered notions by which men and women are remembered and forgotten.
Key words: First Aliyah, Zionism, collective memory, gender
On March 29, 1886 (22 Adar II 5646), Arab peasants from the village of Yahudiya attacked the new Jewish colony (moshavah) of Petah Tikva (founded in 1878) and injured five Jews. One of them, Rachel Halevy, died several days later, possibly from an underlying condition aggravated by shock from the attack. The culmination of reciprocal and building tensions over land and grazing rights in the wake of the first Jewish purchases of agricul[2] tural land in Palestine, this event was the first significant physical clash between Jewish agricultural settlers and local Arab peasants Jewish. in Palestine.1 Moshe Smilansky, the head of the Jewish Farmers Social Studies Federation and one of the most important chroniclers and commen? on these early colonies, called it "the first [violent clash] in the Vol 23 history of the Yishuv."2
No. 1 Historians have discussed the significance of the 1886 incident, as they have the early colonies in general, in terms of its relationship to ongoing grazing conflicts and disputes over land ownership in late Ottoman Palestine and as a perceived initial test of Jewish settlement in Palestine in the years just after deadly pogroms in the Russian Empire.3 The incident is largely absent, however, from studies of Zionist memory and commemoration...