Ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism partly because it illegitimately claimed Arab land

Evidence

First and foremost, De Haan was supremely useful to the Haredim. There was no other individual with anything remotely resembling his credentials and skills. Yet there were other reasons why De Haan was tolerated and extolled in his prudish cohort and their succeeding generations. It may be because his communion with the Arabs was a stark illustration that the Haredim, as opposed to the Zionists, knew and appreciated Arabs as the true possessors of Palestine, and the key to Jews living harmoniously in their Holy Land. The Haredim had no illusions of wresting control of the country for themselves, but instead wished to prove it was they, not the Zionists, who were the appropriate guardians of Jewish interests in their ancestral land from which redemption would come. It was, after all, they who most revered God’s law, and they who respected the facts that the Arabs were the dominant inhabitants of the land, while official control was dictated by the British. Although the Zionists had claimed, as a rationale for settling Palestine, their essential kinship with their Semitic brethren—the Arabs—which would lead to more fruitful relations with non-Jews than those that reigned in Christian Europe, the Haredim wished to expose this dimension of Zionism as a sham. The Zionists, the Haredim alleged, wished to oppress and dominate Arabs as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews, both of whom perceived the Zionist territorial claim as illegitimate. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 508

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the pre-1948 Arab-Jewish alliance of convenience between Haredim and Arabs against the shared rival of Zionism — a counterintuitive historical axis rarely taught.
• CANDY: Punchy dinner-party fact: the Haredim once favored Arab rule over Palestine as protection against their actual rivals, the secular Zionists.