A History of Zionism (45 page)

Hans Kohn, the writer and historian, was another who maintained that the Jews had no historical right to Palestine, that their love for Zion was the only basis for their claim. As early as 1919 he denounced the ‘chauvinism of the new immigrants’ and their dependence on British imperialism.
†
Similar views were expressed in the early 1920s by Robert Weltsch, editor of the
Jüdische Rundschau.
Misgivings about the course of Zionist policy were also voiced by those who before the First World War had already been preaching the necessity for closer relations: Kalvarisky, Ruppin, Hugo Bergmann, and some members of the
Hapoel Hatzair.
Brit Shalom was originally meant to be a club for the study of Arab-Jewish relations; only a minority was in favour of political activism. The association had at no time more than a hundred members. Magnes, while supporting it, did not in fact join it. Among its members were university professors, mainly of central and west European origin. A critic of Brit Shalom, referring mockingly to ‘all these Arthurs, Hugos, and Hans’, called them creatures who lacked roots in Palestine.

The principal idea guiding Brit Shalom was that Palestine should be neither a Jewish nor an Arab state, but a binational state in which Jews and Arabs should enjoy equal civil, political and social rights, without distinction between majority and minority. The two peoples should each be autonomous in the administration of their respective domestic affairs, but united in their common interests.
‡
Brit Shalom had no mass basis and its political impact was negligible. Western Zionism, the philosopher Hugo Bergmann wrote in retrospect, was the last flicker of the humanistnationalist flame at the very moment when anti-humanism was triumphant over all the world.
*
Significantly, there were no oriental Jews among Brit Shalom, and few of east European origin. But the real reason for its failure was the total lack of response from the Arab side. ‘What is the point of reaching agreement between ourselves’, Ruppin wrote to Magnes, ‘if there is no one on the other side?’

After the 1929 riots, Magnes demanded a reorientation of Zionist policy on pacifist lines. The Jews should re-enter Palestine not as invaders following the tradition of Joshua Ben Nun, but to conquer the country by peaceful means, hard work, sacrifice and love. Magnes was quite willing to give up the idea of a Jewish majority, let alone a Jewish state, provided only that the three basic tenets (immigration, settlement and Hebrew culture) were accepted by the Arabs.
†
He was writing shortly after the brutal attacks on the Jewish communities of Hebron and Safed and there was little willingness in the yishuv even to listen to him. Public disfavour, however, hardly ever deterred Magnes: ‘We must face this problem’, he said in a speech at the Hebrew university, ‘not because of the pogroms but despite of them; not as a result of violence, but as an attempt to remove excuses for violence, not because of pressure from without but because of spiritual pressure from within ourselves.’
‡
Magnes anticipated some of the arguments of his critics:

We are told that when we become the majority we shall then show how just and generous a people in power can be. That is like the man who says that he will do anything and everything to get rich, so that he may do good with the money thus accumulated. Sometimes he never grows rich – he fails. And if he does grow rich under those circumstances, his power of doing good has been atrophied from long lack of use. In other words, it is not only the end which for Israel must be desirable but, what is of equal importance, the means must be conceived and brought forth in cleanliness.
§

Magnes and the members of Brit Shalom were more acutely aware of the importance of the Arab question than the official Zionist leadership. For most of them this preoccupation was moral rather than political in character, but their predictions about the ultimate consequences of a policy of violence were only too prophetic. Brit Shalom was bitterly attacked. Its views were said to reflect the mentality of the diaspora, and its members were called ‘deep down assimilationists’, men devoid of Jewish national feeling. This was grossly unfair. Their Zionism was as deeply rooted as that of their opponents. But they feared that without an agreement there would be perpetual strife between Jews and Arabs which would lead to a deterioration in Zionism and ultimately perhaps to its ruin.

Their analysis was astute, their sentiments praiseworthy, but they could not point to any practical political alternatives. An anonymous reader of their magazine wrote from Moscow:

You are in favour of a democratically elected legislative assembly. But how do you know that this assembly, with a clear Arab majority, will not spell the doom of Zionism? You are in favour of negotiations with the Arabs, but you also know that the mufti and his party are not willing to negotiate; they regard any talks on the basis of mutual concessions as an act of national treason.
*

Or, as Berl Katznelson put it, this binationalism is a camouflage for an Arab state. Brit Shalom sharply rebuked Colonel Kisch and Arlosoroff (who succeeded him as the foreign secretary of the Jewish Agency) for their inactivity in the field of Arab policy, but they were quite unable to outline any alternative. There was no political force in the Arab camp willing to cooperate on the basis of the minimum conditions outlined by Magnes and his friends. The Brit Shalom ideology was open to criticism on other counts as well. Some of its members went much too far in their nebulous enthusiasm for the spirit of the renascent east, which they contrasted with ‘decadent Europe’. The ‘spiritual reintegration of the Jewish people in the orient’ was a highly problematical proposition, which could perhaps be psychologically explained as a reaction against the horrors of the First World War. But its advocates idealised out of all proportion the ‘wisdom of the east’ – and this at a time when the Asian intelligentsia was rapidly adopting and absorbing European ideas.

It was the main weakness of Brit Shalom that it could not translate its diagnosis into practical politics. For that reason the unceasing efforts made by the indefatigable Magnes and Kalvarisky were all in vain. Magnes met Mussa Alami, an influential Palestinian Arab, and Philby, adviser first to Abdulla of Jordan and later to King Saud, who had himself become a Muslim. Kalvarisky repeatedly went to Beirut and Damascus and also had many contacts with Palestinian Arabs, but whenever encouraging sounds were made by his Arab interlocutors it soon appeared that they were not entitled to speak on behalf of any organised force in the Arab community. The Arabs, on the other hand, claimed that they always found a great deal of goodwill and understanding on the part of the Zionists when discussing general issues, but that this invariably evaporated once the discussion turned to practical politics. The Arabs were not willing to accept the formula used by both Kalvarisky and the official Zionist leadership during that period: that neither people should dominate or be dominated by the other.
*

The Zionist leaders followed the activities of Magnes and Brit Shalom with misgivings, but there is no doubt that they would have felt obliged to take note of them if they had held out any promise at all. Magnes and Kalvarisky asserted on various occasions that their efforts had been sabotaged by the Jewish Agency, but there was usually a less sinister explanation. The Jewish Agency regarded the contacts established by the Brit Shalom as not substantial enough to merit serious attention. There was concern even among the ‘hawks’ in the Zionist leadership about relations with the Arabs. When King (then Emir) Abdulla was reported in 1922 to be willing to accept the Balfour Declaration under a national, i.e. Arab, leadership, even Jabotinsky was in favour of taking up the suggestion. Ben Gurion fully accepted the formula of ‘not to dominate – not to be dominated’, as did the seventeenth Zionist congress. Eliahu Golomb, one of the founders and leaders of Hagana, met Colonel Kisch in 1931 to discuss the possibility of resolving the conflict by an association of Palestine with an Arab confederation.
†
Weizmann’s attitude towards Brit Shalom was by no means unfriendly. In July 1927 he decided to make an allocation (albeit a modest one) to its budget.
‡
Shortly before the establishment of Brit Shalom, Weizmann had said in a letter to Robert Weltsch, one of its founders, that his views on the Arab question coincided with Weltsch’s, ‘but we both know that it will take a long period of education before the Zionists settle down to realities’.
§
He had never watered down his Zionism, but he was equally convinced that present-day Zionism was to a certain extent intellectually dishonest. Nevertheless, while maintaining that he accepted binationalism, and differed from Brit Shalom only in approach, Weizmann criticised Weltsch after the riots of 1929 for advocating negotiations with the Arabs when such a step would be fatal: ‘The Arab mind is not ripe at all for any negotiations, they are not producing arguments but tricks’.
*

The riots of 1929

Brit Shalom had been founded in a relatively calm period when only a few people regarded the Arab question as the foremost in Zionist politics. The year of 1929 brought a radical change, when the problem took on a far greater urgency than ever before but the prospects for reconciliation appeared even more distant. The immediate causes of the 1929 disturbances were trivial, arising from a dispute about the respective rights of Jews and Arabs at the Wailing Wall. The quarrel was by no means new. On the Day of Atonement, 1925, seats and benches had been brought in for old and infirm Jewish worshippers, but these were promptly removed by the police in the middle of the service. This provoked a strong Jewish protest, but similar scenes occurred again on the Day of Atonement, 1928, when the Arabs complained that the Jews had fastened a screen to the pavement adjoining the wall to divide the men from the women, and that several oil lamps and a number of mats had been brought in, in violation of all tradition. On Arab insistence the screen was removed by the police, to the great indignation of the Jews, who claimed that the Wailing Wall was holy to no one but themselves. The Arabs on the other hand maintained that the site was part of the wall of Haram ash Sharif, one of the holiest Muslim places, that it belonged to the Mutawil of the Abu Madian
Waqf
, and that the Jews were there only on sufferance; they had only the right of access through an alley way 28 metres long and 3.6 metres wide.
†

The Arabs categorically refused to allow the Jews under any circumstances to alter the
status quo.
Several months later they began building on and around the wall in such a way as to cause great commotion among sections of the Jewish population.
Doar Hayom
, the revisionist newspaper, summoned all Jewish patriots to ‘wake up and unite’, not to suffer indifferently this terrible catastrophe but ‘to move heaven and earth in protest against this unprecedented and unspeakable injustice’.
‡
‘The wall is ours’ became the slogan. A few hundred young Jews marched to the wall, raised the blue and white flag, kept a two minute silence, and dispersed after singing the Hatiqva. On 15 August two thousand Arabs staged a counter-demonstration, beat up the Jewish beadle at the wall and burned a few prayer books. Two days later a quarrel broke out in the streets of Jerusalem when a Jewish football fell into an Arab tomato garden. A young Jew was stabbed and died a few days later. This was the beginning of a series of attacks. On 23 August widespread rioting started, which lasted about a week. In Hebron sixty Jews were killed, in Safed forty-five were killed or wounded. About the responsibility of the mufti and his party there was no doubt. Sir John Chancellor, the high commissioner, and not a staunch friend of Zionism, denounced in a speech on 1 September the ‘ruthless and bloodthirsty evil doers’ who had perpetrated crimes on ‘defenceless members of the Jewish population, regardless of age and sex, accompanied as in Hebron by acts of unspeakable savagery’.

The riots of 1929 marked a turning point in Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. Throughout the centuries there had always been clashes, sometimes bloody, in the old city of Jerusalem between members of various confessions about their respective rights to the holy sites, but the events of 1929 introduced a new element. On the Arab side religious fanaticism was deliberately fanned for political purposes. This propaganda was part of the contest between the party of the mufti and its rivals, the former trying to outbid the latter with the extremism of its slogans. There was a similar development on the other side. Among the Jews the main outcry did not come from those directly affected, the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews, who had always shown great circumspection in their relations with the Arabs, but from the revisionists for whom the wall was a national rather than a religious symbol.

The revisionist stand on the Arab question lacked neither a certain logic nor consistency. Jabotinsky had early on reached the conclusion that Zionism did not make sense without a Jewish majority in Palestine, for the real cause of antisemitism was that Jews were everywhere a minority. Other Zionist leaders, he argued, also knew this, but preferred not to talk about it openly, on the mistaken assumption that the Arabs could be fooled by a more moderate formulation of Zionist aims.
*
But the Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural. Every people fought immigration and settlement by foreigners, however high-minded the motives for settlement. There was no misunderstanding between Jews and Arabs but a natural conflict. No agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arabs, they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an ‘iron wall’, when they realised that they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement. Nor was Jabotinsky optimistic about the prospects of an agreement with the Arabs outside Palestine. The Zionists could not finance Iraq and Hedjaz, and to support the Arabs in their struggle against the European powers would be both dishonest and national suicide.