A History of Zionism (39 page)

Christian Arabs were again said to be in the forefront of the struggle, inciting the Muslim masses to carry out a full-scale pogrom to destroy not only the whole Zionist colonisation but also the Jewish population in the cities.
†
These fears were exaggerated, as soon appeared, but the alarmist reports received from Jaffa and Jerusalem induced the Zionist leaders for the first time to pay more than cursory attention to the Arabs of Palestine.

What could be done to establish friendly relations with them? It was easier to pose the question than to answer it. There had been some lonely warning voices. Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher and an agriculturist, had said in a closed meeting at the time of the seventh Zionist congress (1905) that the Arab question was the most important of all the problems facing Zionism, and that Zionism should enter into an alliance with the Arabs. The Jews who returned to their country should do so not as conquerors; they should not encroach upon the rights of a proud and independent people such as the Arabs, whose hatred, once aroused, would have the most dangerous consequences. Epstein’s views, and the arguments used by his critics to refute them, are of considerable interest and deserve to be carefully studied. They anticipated in almost every detail the debates which have continued since inside the Zionist movement, and between the Zionists and their critics.
‡

Epstein maintained that there had been not a few cases in which Arab and Druze smallholders had lost their livelihood as the result of Zionist land purchases. In law the Jews were right, but the political and moral aspect was more complicated and they had a clear obligation to the fellaheen. It was easy to make enemies among the Arabs and very difficult to gain friends. Every step had therefore to be carefully considered. Only such land should be bought that others were not already cultivating. At the same time the Jews had to give full support to the national aspirations of the Arabs. While Herzl had aimed at a Turkish-Zionist
entente
, Epstein envisaged a charter between Jews and Arabs (‘those two old Semitic peoples’) which would be of great benefit to both sides and to all mankind. The Arabs had a great many gifts, but they needed the Jews to help them to make economic and cultural progress. The Jews should enter into such an agreement with pure, altruistic motives, without any intention of subjugating the neighbouring people. There ought to be no rivalry between them; the two peoples should assist each other. Hitherto in their political activities the Zionists had not been in contact with the right people. They had talked to the Ottoman government and to everyone else who had anything to do with Palestine. But they had not spoken to the Arab people, the real owners of the country. The Zionists had behaved like a matchmaker who had consulted every member of the family with the exception of the bridegroom. Epstein concluded with several recommendations for improving relations with the Arab neighbours: the most important task was to help raise the living standard of the peasants. Jewish hospitals, schools, kindergartens and reading rooms should be open to them. The Jewish schools should move away from a narrow nationalist spirit. The intention should be not to proselytise the Arabs but to help them find their own identity. The Jews should take account of the psychological situation of the Arabs, something which had been utterly neglected in the past. Once established, high-level educational institutions would attract thousands of students from neighbouring Arab countries, and this too would strengthen the fraternal alliance between the two peoples.

Epstein’s thesis provoked a reply from a colleague
*
who argued that the Arab peasant had been exploited not by the Jews but by Arab effendis and moneylenders. Everyone agreed that the Arab had benefited from the presence of the Jews. If nevertheless one day he were to turn against the Jews, the reason would not be Jewish land purchases but the ‘eternal enmity towards a people which had been exiled from its country’. To buy the friendship of the Arabs was exceedingly difficult, as Epstein himself had admitted. Why then try so hard? History was full of examples showing that the more the Jews tried to ingratiate themselves with other peoples, the more they had been hated. Had not the time come for the Jews to concern themselves at long last with their own existence and survival? But these considerations quite apart, Epstein’s suggestions were said to be quite unrealistic for the simple reason that the Jews did not have the money to carry out such grandiose projects. They were facing the gravest difficulties in establishing their own elementary school system. It was therefore absurd to dream about universities for the Arabs. They themselves hardly knew how to cultivate the soil - how could they teach others? It was all very well to talk about the blessings of modern civilisation which Zionism could bring to the Arabs, but for the time being the Jews had next to nothing to offer. The Arabs had never ceased to be a people, and unlike the Jews, everywhere hated and persecuted, they needed no national revival. It was therefore quite unconvincing to maintain that they needed Jewish friendship. Epstein had argued that what the Jews could give the Arabs they could get nowhere else, and it was at this point that his critic finally lost her temper: ‘To give - always to give, to the one our body, to the other, our soul, and to yet another the remnant of the hope ever to live as a free people in its historical homeland.’

The debate I have briefly summarised contained in essence all the main arguments among Zionists on the Arab question: ‘healthy national egoism’ being urged on the one side and on the other the demand that Jewish settlement in Palestine should be based on the highest moral principles and proceed only in agreement with the Arabs. Epstein’s criticism was justified inasmuch as quite a few European Zionists tended to ignore the presence of the Arabs. Some Zionist reference works published before the First World War characteristically do not even refer to what Epstein in a most striking and meaningful phrase called the ‘hidden question’. When the German Zionists produced a propaganda brochure in 1910, Elias Auerbach, who wrote on the prospects for future development, found it necessary to stress at the very beginning of his article the obvious fact that Palestine was not an empty country and that its character was shaped by the strongest ethnic element in its population.
*

Some of the new arrivals looked down on the Arabs. One observer wrote that on a few occasions he had detected an attitude towards the Arabs which reminded him of the way Europeans treated the blacks.
†
But no one could fairly charge with lack of political caution and moral obtuseness the men who represented the Zionist executive in Palestine at the time, and who were responsible
inter alia
for purchasing land. It is certainly no coincidence that these very people (Arthur Ruppin, Y. Yhon, R. Benyamin) were among the founding members twenty years later of the
Brit Shalom
, the highly unpopular group which regarded an Arab-Jewish
rapprochement
as the main task of the Zionist movement. Undeniably the Zionist executive in Europe is open to criticism for concentrating most of its efforts on Constantinople and the various European capitals, showing little foresight in its relations with the Arabs, though from time to time it did press resolutions stressing the importance of making efforts to gain the sympathy of Palestine’s Arab population. Sokolow wrote after his visit to the Near East in 1914 that ‘the question of our relations with the Arab population has become more acute’.
*
But there was no follow-up, no consistent policy. After the First World War no congress passed without solemn declarations stressing Zionist sympathies for the national movement in the orient and the Arab national movement in particular. But, as Ussishkin said, the Zionists had no power in Palestine, and such declarations were therefore meaningless. Nor was it quite clear to whom they should have talked. There were individual Arab notables, but there was no Arab political leadership in Palestine, certainly not before 1908. The political parties which then emerged were small, consisting of a few dozen members, and not very representative.

The Zionist leaders simply would not consider the presence of half a million non-Jews an insurmountable obstacle, formidable enough to make them give up their cherished dreams about the return of the Jewish people to their homeland. They had tried to carry out some of Epstein’s ideas; they had drained swamps and irrigated desert lands. But the budget of the Zionist executive was small and those responsible for the promotion of agricultural settlement knew that restricting their purchases to poor land would doom the whole enterprise. If the Arabs believed in Herzl’s hints about the many millions at his disposal, the members of the Zionist executive knew better.

Jewish workers, it was thought, should have played a decisive role in improving relations with the Arab population. But it was precisely the influx of Jewish workers into Palestine with the Second Aliya which aggravated the conflict. After a clash between Arab and Jewish workers in Jaffa in the spring of 1908, Levontin, director of the local Anglo-Palestine Bank, wrote to Wolffsohn, the head of the World Zionist executive, that the young men from the
Poale Zion
were largely responsible for the growing tension. They had been walking around armed with big sticks and some of them with knives and rifles, behaving towards the Arabs with arrogance and contempt.
*
On another occasion in the same year Levontin wrote to Wolffsohn that the Zionist labour leaders were sowing hatred against Zionism in the heart of the local population by speaking and writing against giving jobs to the Arabs. Arthur Ruppin, who certainly did not lack sympathy for the Jewish workers, reported to Wolffsohn in 1911 that he too was continually trying to impress on them the need to refrain from any act of hostility in their relations with the Arabs.
†

What made the ‘Moskub’ (as the Arabs called the pioneers from Russia) an especially disturbing factor in Arab-Jewish relations? For they were influenced by the Russian populists and by Leo Tolstoy; they did not come to Palestine as conquerors, but believed with A.A. Aordon that only a return to the soil, to productive labour, would redeem the Jewish people. But when they arrived in Palestine they realised that the great majority of those employed in the existing Jewish settlements were Arabs. This they regarded as a cancer in the body politic of the yishuv. It had not been the aim of Zionism to establish a class of landowners in Palestine whose vineyards and orchards and orange groves were worked by Arab plantation workers. From the outset the pioneers and their trade unions fought for the replacement of Arab by Jewish labour wherever feasible in the face of strong opposition from the Jewish farmers, who naturally preferred cheaper and more experienced Arab labourers. Moreover the young men and women of
Poale Zion
had left tsarist Russia with the memory of the pogroms still with them, and the issue of Jewish self-defence figured high among their priorities. They were Socialists and internationalists, and the lowliest Arab peasant had as much human dignity in their eyes as any prominent Turkish pasha. But they did not take kindly to attacks and molestations, and they were sometimes liable to over-react in their response. These members of
Poale Zion
were not like the liberals of our day - they had no feelings of guilt about the Arabs. Their Socialism was largely (though not exclusively) in the Marxist tradition. Following Marx, they regarded the spread of western ideas and techniques in the east as
a priori
progressive, needing no further ideological justification. They believed in working-class solidarity, but this extended only to workers already established in jobs in industry, not necessarily to those who were competing against organised labour. Since under the centuries of Muslim rule Palestine had remained a desolate, underdeveloped country, they had no compunction about ousting a few landowners and peasants whom they held responsible for its backwardness and neglect. There was nothing in Socialist doctrine, as they interpreted it, which dictated that east European Jewry should remain poor and unproductive and that Palestine should stay backward and infertile.
*

It is one of the tragic ironies of the history of Zionism that those who wanted close relations with the Arabs contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the sharpening of the conflict. Between the two world wars no one strove more actively for a reconciliation between Jews and Arabs than Haim Margalit Kalvarisky. Born in Russia in 1868, he was trained as an agronomist and came to Palestine in 1895. For many years he worked for Baron Hirsch’s colonisation society and had a great many influential Arab friends. He was firmly convinced that Arab-Jewish agreement was the
conditio sine qua non
of a successful Zionist policy. Yet it was precisely Kalvarisky’s activities around the turn of the century - the land purchases in the Tiberias district - which first provoked Arab resistance on a major scale. During the years 1899-1902 about one-half of this district was acquired by Jewish land companies and it was then for the first time that the danger of denationalisation became a political slogan among the Arabs.
†
Under the impact of these events Nagib Nasser, later editor of the Haifa newspaper
Al Karmel
, was converted to anti-Zionism and decided to devote his efforts to the enlightenment of his fellow citizens with regard to the ‘Jewish peril’.
‡

Among the Jewish workers no group was more pacifist and anti-militarist in character than
Hapoel Hatzair.
A.A. Aordon, their chief ideologist, was opposed in principle to the use of violence and justified self-defence only in extreme circumstances. But he and his comrades wanted every tree and every bush in the Jewish homeland to be planted by the pioneers. It was in this group that the idea of Jewish agricultural communal settlements found its most fervent adherents. They were shocked, as has been already mentioned, when they found that the settlers of the first aliya had become plantation owners, and that among the permanent residents of these colonies there were actually more Arabs than Jews. According to a contemporary account, every Jewish farmer in Zikhron Ya’akov provided for three or four Arab families, and the situation elsewhere was hardly different.
*
Ahad Ha’am called Zikhron ‘not a colony but a disgrace’. Few Jewish peasants engaged any longer in manual labour. This state of affairs was not, of course, in keeping with the original aims of Zionism, let alone of Socialism. Yet, paradoxically, as far as Arab-Jewish relations were concerned it was a stabilising factor, whereas the activities of the Socialists, with their fanatical insistence on manual labour (‘redemption through toil’), seemed to confirm Arab suspicions about Jewish separatism and the displacement of Arab peasants and workers.