A History of Zionism (47 page)

Jacob Klatzkin, one of the more original Zionist thinkers, wrote in 1921 that the movement had to decide between an orientation towards British imperialism, which would lead automatically to an armed conflict and pogroms, and an alliance with the exploited Arab fellaheen against Arab and Jewish effendis and eventually (though this was not spelled out at the time) against British imperialism.
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The idea that Jews should come as friends and that the existence of the yishuv should not be based on British support had no doubt much to commend it. But would it have been possible to maintain immigration and settlement without British help? The Arabs would not even have permitted Magnes to settle in Jerusalem, as Ben Gurion once reminded the president of the Hebrew university. The Marxist Zionists continued to claim all along that the Jewish national movement had nothing in common with imperialism, that it was predominantly working class in character, and that they had sown the first seeds of Arab-Jewish proletarian unity. The Arab national movement, on the other hand, was reactionary because it had imposed a despotic, fascist régime on the entire community.
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They argued that any restriction of Jewish immigration was fatal to the Jewish masses and at the same time objectively harmful because it impeded the growth of the only revolutionary forces capable of combating fascist tendencies in Palestine.

Poale Zion reminded its revolutionary friends abroad that various congresses of the Socialist International had reached the conclusion that any limitation on immigration was a reactionary measure from the Socialist point of view, unless the new immigrants were willing to work for lower wages, thus endangering the standard of living of the native working class - which clearly was not the case in Palestine. The Arab national movement, under feudal and clerical leadership, was being used by imperialism (and fascism); but it was also indifferent to the social and economic needs of the people, it was reactionary in character.
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The Arab revolt, according to this interpretation, was provoked both by the British policy of divide and rule and by the clerico-fascist Arab exploiters who feared Jewish working-class immigration because it heralded social and economic change. The spokesmen of the Zionist left proclaimed that the Jewish revolutionary working-class movement was the only fortress of progress and Socialism in the Middle East, and promised that with its help a strong Arab proletarian movement would emerge, leading eventually to a Jewish-Arab workers’ state in Palestine.

These attempts to adjust their ideology to an unforeseen political situation were neither convincing nor effective. But psychologically they were intelligible, for any justification of the Arab terror would have negated their own cause, their very existence in Palestine. It was difficult enough to provide a realistic appraisal of the Arab national movement on the basis of Zionist ideology and Marxism in this context was a source of further misinterpretations. To put the blame on British imperialism and the effendis was not even a half truth. The Arab movement of 1936 had broad popular support: the ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois’ national leaders could never have succeeded in inciting a major revolt but for the deep resentment against Zionism among the Arab people.

Moshe Sharett (then Shertok) was more realistic and fair in his appraisal of the Arab movement than those to the left of him. On 22 July 1936 he noted in his diary that the participation of young Arab women in its activities proved that it was revolutionary in character, and that the Arab intelligentsia supported the ‘gangs’ in the same way the Jews sympathised with the Hagana.
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As for its social character, the second stage of the rebellion (1937-8) was anything but ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois’. In fact the leading Arab families left Palestine post haste, and of those who stayed many were killed. The Marxists thought, quite erroneously, that by organising joint Arab-Jewish strikes they were laying the groundwork for an understanding between the toilers of the two nations. But the Arab fellaheen and workers were in fact less inclined to cooperate with the Jews than the Arab merchants in Haifa or the Arab citrus growers in the south.
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The problem facing the Zionist revolutionary Left was, very briefly, that according to their own doctrine any national revolutionary movement was
a priori
progressive, since workers and peasants could do no wrong - for any length of time at any rate. The fact that the Arab toiling masses did not accept Borokhovism and refused to behave according to the canons of proletarian internationalism (as the Zionist Left understood them) put them in a quandary from which there was no ideological way out.

Vis-à-vis
the world revolutionary movement, dominated by the Communists, Hashomer Hatzair and the left-wing Poale Zion were in a weak position: the argument that the Jewish masses had to leave Europe under threat of physical extinction did not cut much ice with the Comintern. The Communists told the Jewish workers - if they had any message at all - to join the revolutionary struggle wherever they lived and wait for the world revolution which would eradicate antisemitism and solve the Jewish problem once and for all. Like the Brit Shalom, the Zionist Left realised that without Arab-Jewish understanding the yishuv would have to live in a state of permanent warfare with its neighbours. But since they were even less inclined than the Brit Shalom to compromise on the issue most vital to the Arabs - immigration and settlement - the prospects of reaching agreement with any representative Arab circles were virtually nil. In the eyes of the Arabs, ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ alike, the Zionist Left was part of the enemy camp just as much as Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky. For the Arabs, the Jews’ very existence, and their insistence on further immigration, was the root of the evil; the revolutionary programme of the Zionist Left was irrelevant, a mere smoke screen.

Throughout the late 1930s meetings between individual Zionist and Arab leaders continued, and with the outbreak of the Second World War the climate again became more propitious for a
rapprochement.
Among those with whom contact was maintained were Arab leaders abroad, such as Shekib Arslan, the old Syrian national hero, Dr Shahbander (killed by political enemies in 1940), and Emir Abdulla of Jordan, as well as several Palestinian Arab leaders. Nuri Said, the Iraqi prime minister, was approached at one stage, and so once more was Philby. The Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians were on the whole somewhat more conciliatory, and even the mufti was on one occasion reported to have hinted that he would on certain conditions permit Jewish immigration until the Jews numbered 80 per cent of the Arab population. But there was, as Magnes reluctantly concluded in 1941, ‘no possibility of reaching an agreement with any responsible Arab on any other basis, for the next ten to fifteen years, except on the basis of a minority in this country.’
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When Magnes made this remark, he was speaking at a meeting of the League of Jewish-Arab
Rapprochement
, which had been established in the late 1930s and was in some ways a successor to Brit Shalom (which had ceased to exist in 1933). Its political basis was broader and its programme less specific. Those who attended the meeting faced the old familiar problems: Kalvarisky was convinced that a compromise acceptable to both sides could be worked out and that Arabs could be found to sponsor this cause. Kalvarisky, it should be added in parentheses, was a great believer in
baksheesh
- a common practice in eastern politics. Some of the money came from Kalvarisky’s own pocket, most from a Jewish Agency subsidy, which was cut off when the Agency decided to discontinue some of these payments and to make others directly. On the other hand, Michael Assaf, one of the leading Mapai experts, poured cold water on any such hopes. Magnes, he said, was living in that world of liberalism and humanism which was now a thing of the past. The treatment of minorities in Arab countries was enough to deter anyone. Could one expect the Arabs to behave any better towards their minorities than, say, the Poles? Assaf accused Kalvarisky and his friends of being at bottom contemptuous of the Arabs if they thought they could cajole them by flattery. The Arabs were not stupid; in their eyes Jabotinsky was an honest man while Weizmann was a liar. It was the old confrontation between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ all over again, both equally incapable of preventing further aggravation of the conflict.

A great many plans for partition and cantonisation were discussed after 1936 by the Zionist leadership, a bi-national state being no longer considered practical politics. During the Second World War the Biltmore programme, envisaging the establishment of a Jewish state, became the official aim of the movement. The case against partition found its advocates among
Ihud
(Union), which reunited some of the leading members of the old Brit Shalom and, with somewhat different argumentation, of Hashomer Hatzair. Magnes opposed partition on principle. He did not rule out the possibility that the Jews could ‘lick the Arabs’ in a war, but he predicted that this would create so much hatred as to put the whole Jewish future in the Middle East in question. ‘Satisfactory national boundaries, if the object is to promote peace’, he wrote, ‘cannot be drawn. Wherever you draw those boundaries, you create an irredenta on either side of the border. An irredenta almost invariably leads to war.’
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Hashomer Hatzair in its memorandum predicted that partition, and thus the establishment of a Jewish state, would not eliminate the conflict between Jews and Arabs but perpetuate it, ‘project it into the future by fixing and amplifying its causes’.
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Magnes and some of his friends, much to the dismay of the official Zionist leadership, gave evidence before the Anglo-American Enquiry Commission in 1946 and before the Special United Nations Commission the year after. A great deal of courage was needed to defend bi-nationalism in the face of the hardening of attitudes among the Jewish community and the total lack of response from the Arabs. Magnes maintained to the end that establishing a state was an act prompted by despair (‘Partition is going to create war’), and that a bi-national state was in the long run not only the ideal but the sole practical solution.

There was a quixotic streak in Magnes. His naïveté seemed to disqualify him from active politics altogether - Ben Gurion, not unjustly, called him a political child. Yet precisely because he was so remote from political realities he sensed some of the long-term dangers facing the yishuv more acutely than the professional politicians. But he could not provide any answer to the problems besetting the yishuv as the Second World War came to an end. The
status quo
could not continue, the remnants of European Jewry were knocking on Palestine’s doors, the whole problem had assumed a new and desperate urgency.

The attempts to find ‘reasonable Arab leaders’ continued. During the war a ‘Committee of Five’ had been established, which included some of the most respected members of the Jewish community. With the blessing of the Jewish Agency they made contact with leading Arab personalities in yet another effort to find a common language. They met and talked and prepared more blueprints, only to realise in the end that in spite of all the outward civilities there was no common ground. There were occasional rays of hope: at one stage Ihud found Fawzi Darwish Hussaini, a respected Arab personality and a cousin of the mufti, willing to sign an agreement with his Jewish friends providing for a bi-national state based on the principle of no domination of one nation over the other. He suggested the immediate establishment of political clubs and a daily newspaper to combat the influence of the Arab war party. On 11 November 1946, five members of Young Palestine, Fawzi’s group, signed an agreement concerning common political action with Ihud representatives, but this promising initiative came to a sudden and tragic end. Twelve days later Fawzi was killed by Arab terrorists and his group dispersed. ‘My cousin stumbled and received his proper punishment’, Jamal Hussaini, one of the leaders of the extremist party, declared a few days later.
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In September 1947, Sami Taha, a prominent Haifa trade union leader, was killed; his society had declared itself in favour of a Palestinian, not an Arab state, acknowledging that the Jews too had certain rights. He never pressed the point very strongly, but the mere suspicion of such lack of patriotism was sufficient to make him a target for the extremists. With these and other murders, the few hopes for a Zionist-Arab dialogue were buried and the stage set for a direct military confrontation.

The few Jews who devoted so much thought and effort to relations with their Arab neighbours were a source of bewilderment and irritation to their less self-conscious brethren. Berl Katznelson, who was both the conscience and
éminence grise
of the Zionist labour movement, relates how shocked he was to discover that the question which preoccupied German halutzim was not the plight of their brothers left behind, not the Jews facing extinction in Hitler’s expanding Reich, but the problem of the Arab workers. Was it right to insist on Jewish labour, they asked, after having set foot on Palestinian soil? Such atrophy of the will to live, such negation of the right to existence of the Jewish people by its own sons and daughters, was monstrous to men like Katznelson.

The men and women of the second and third aliya were less affected by such moral and intellectual scruples.
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The question whether the Jewish people had a right to exist did not occur to them. Bitter experience in eastern Europe had taught them that decisive issues in the history of peoples were not resolved according to abstract principles of justice, and that as long as Jews were a minority they would always be persecuted and permanently in danger of destruction. Before 1933 the question had not arisen so acutely. It was generally believed that there was enough room in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs. But as Arab resistance grew stronger, and simultaneously the pressure of immigration increased, conviction grew among the Zionists that if the national aspirations of Arabs and Jews could not be reconciled, their own case was the stronger, if only because European Jewry was in danger of extermination. The Jews had nowhere to go but Palestine. The Arabs could be absorbed if necessary in the neighbouring countries.