A History of Zionism (84 page)

Whatever had been decided in London, the army command in Cairo and Jerusalem was in no mood to suffer gladly any civilian intrusion. When Weizmann arrived on his second visit in 1919, General Congreve, deputising for Allenby, did not even want to permit him to land, for he had been informed that the Zionist leader was likely ‘to cause trouble’. He had never heard of Weizmann, he knew nothing about Zionism, and he cared less. The general changed his mind only when the War Office and the Foreign Office intervened.

This incident highlighted the precarious nature of the whole Zionist enterprise one year after the end of the war. There was no recognition in Jerusalem and no progress in Paris. Once the peace treaty with Germany had been signed, in June 1919, the heads of governments no longer concerned themselves with the details of the negotiations. The hardening of isolationism in America, and Anglo-French rivalry, delayed the peace settlement with Turkey. It was only towards the end of 1919 that some progress was made with regard to the future of Syria and Palestine. The French were no longer opposed in principle to the idea of a British mandate for Palestine but they did not want to be excluded altogether. They demanded a say in the arrangements for the Holy Places and opposed the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration in the terms of the mandate. Eventually, at the San Remo conference in April 1920, the French dropped their more extreme claims. A compromise formula was found which, while accepting in substance the British view, made it possible for the French to retreat without loss of face. Thus Great Britain at last became the mandatory power.

The task of drawing up the charter of the mandate was left to the mandatory power. The first draft was disappointing from the Zionist point of view because, among other things, it made no mention at all of a Jewish commonwealth. After some lobbying another draft was prepared which, while not meeting all Zionist wishes, seemed more in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration. It defined Britain’s responsibility towards building a Jewish national home but did not define what kind of national home was envisaged; nor was a Jewish commonwealth promised in so many words. On the other hand, there was no specific safeguard for the political rights of the Arabs. In fact the term ‘Arab’ did not appear in the document.

From the Arab point of view this was of course altogether unsatisfactory and it was resisted, unsuccessfully, by the Arab spokesmen. They claimed that whereas Syria and Iraq, the other mandated territories, were temporarily placed under the tutelage of the powers, to become fully independent in due course, the Palestine administration (in which the Arabs would have no say) was pledged to carry out a policy abhorrent to the majority of the population.
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Of particular importance to the Zionists was article four of the mandate which stated that an ‘appropriate Jewish Agency’ should be recognised as a public body ‘for the purposes of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country.’

The mandate was said to have been ‘framed in the Jewish interest’, its primary purpose being to promote the establishment of a Jewish national home.
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The Zionist leaders received it therefore with great satisfaction, as they did the appointment of Herbert Samuel, whereas the Arabs considered it a major defeat. It seemed only fitting that a Jew should be the first governor of the Holy Land and it was taken as an affirmation of the promise previously given to the Jewish people in the Balfour Declaration. But not many months were to pass before it was realised that the mandate had left some of the most important questions unanswered and that Samuel, in his attempt to be just and fair to all sections of the population, was leaning over backwards to win the confidence of the Arabs, to the detriment of the Zionist aspirations.

An indication of this trend was the publication of a White Paper in July 1922, defining the term ‘national home’. Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, had been to Palestine and, after meeting both Arab and Jewish leaders, issued a statement which was mistakenly interpreted by some observers at the time as yet another victory for Zionism. Churchill had told Arab representatives that the British government did not intend to halt immigration, as they demanded, and that the establishment of a Jewish national centre was a good thing – good not only for the Jews, but for the British and Arabs as well.

But there was another aspect to the 1922 White Paper. While not explicitly opposing the idea of a Jewish state, it ‘redeemed the Balfour promise in depreciated currency’, to quote a contemporary British source. Its aim was to appease both the Arabs and the opposition in Westminster, made up largely of right-wing Tories. It stated that His Majesty’s government had no intention of Palestine becoming ‘as Jewish as England is English’ and that the special position of the Zionist executive did not entitle it to share in any degree in the government of the country. Immigration, moreover, was not to exceed the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals. Churchill promised that the mandatory government would move towards representative institutions and self-government. A legislative council with a majority of elected members was to be set up immediately, but full self-government was a long way off; ‘Our children’s children will have passed away before this is completed.’ Lastly, and almost unnoticed at the time, Transjordan was separated from Palestine and became a semi-independent state under Emir Abdullah.

The White Paper placated the opposition at home, but the Arabs were not appeased, and continued to refuse to cooperate with the mandatory authorities. A year later London went one step further and proposed the establishment of an Arab Agency analogous to the Jewish Agency. But the Arab aim was independence, an Arab state in which the Jews would be a minority without any special rights, and they therefore rejected the offer out of hand. The Zionists very reluctantly, and under considerable pressure, accepted the new policy as a basis of cooperation with the British government. Even Jabotinsky, who was a member of the Zionist executive at the time, did not dissent.

Some Zionist leaders were violently critical of Samuel as immigration was temporarily stopped in May 1921 following the Arab riots. The fact that Jews engaging in self-defence had been arrested, whereas the Arab attackers were quickly released from prison, provoked a storm of indignation. Later, the Zionists came to think more highly of the first high commissioner. After 1921 there was no major unrest, and ‘peace and order and good government’ were brought to Palestine, to quote an official Zionist statement. The first and most difficult stage in the Jewish national home was successfully completed, and the high commissioner acquitted himself ‘by common consent with dignity and distinction, carrying with him in his retirement the enduring gratitude of the Zionist Organisation’.
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Samuel had had the good fortune to retire at the right moment; for Zionism, 1925 was an excellent year, a year of unprecedented immigration and of a major economic boom.

With British acceptance of the mandate and the establishment of a mandatory administration, a new chapter opens in the annals of Zionist history. Between 1918 and 1921 the future of Palestine was still wide open, decisions were not yet final. A general statement of policy had been made in 1917, but it was by no means certain how, if at all, it would be implemented. By 1921 the pattern had been set for many years to come. The process of whittling down the mandate began early on but proceeded slowly. It was still believed in London that the national aspirations of Jews and Arabs were not incompatible. The Arabs adopted a policy of non-cooperation, occasionally with some effect, but in the long run with results detrimental to their cause. The Zionist movement did reasonably well, following up its earlier political successes. It did not commit any major mistakes and it is doubtful even in retrospect whether it could have obtained any better results. The Zionists were over-optimistic about their own long-term prospects. At the time most of them believed that a long period of peaceful construction was ahead as a result of which a Jewish commonwealth would gradually come into being. They assumed that there was no particular urgency and they also overrated British willingness to stick to the terms of the mandate in face of growing Arab opposition. But the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had figured prominently in many speeches did not materialise and this was the great source of Zionist weakness during the years to come. Could they have come if they had wanted to? In the immediate postwar period frontiers had not yet been finally drawn and the political future of the Middle East was still in the balance. There is no certainty that the Arabs would have accepted mass immigration and settlement during that interregnum. But in fact only a few thousand immigrants came, not enough to affect the balance of power inside Palestine, but more than sufficient to irritate the Arabs and arouse their fears. A massive transfer of Jews to Palestine within two or three years of the Balfour Declaration might well have failed in view of the enormous practical difficulties that would have faced such an enterprise. But there was such a chance, however small, and it was not to recur.

New tasks for Zionism

With the end of the war the world Zionist movement resumed its political work within the Jewish community. During the war its activities had largely ceased, either because they had been illegal (as in the Russian empire before the overthrow of the tsar) or because so many of its members were on military service. First off the mark were the German Zionists, who in a conference less than two months after the war discussed at great length, and in considerable if somewhat abstract detail, the future of immigration and settlement in Palestine, including even such issues as the nationalisation of the land.
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Among the main topics of discussion was the form and rate of settlement. Ruppin envisaged a yearly immigration of twenty thousand families, half of whom were to be employed in agriculture. This was the lowest of the estimates at the time and, as subsequently emerged, the most realistic. Ruppin’s main antagonist was Davis Trietsch, who had developed various highly original, sometimes splenetic colonisation schemes at the prewar Zionist congresses. For many years he continued to submit detailed programmes for mass immigration, all of them ignored by the experts or treated with disdain. In retrospect, however, Trietsch’s arguments seem weightier than most of his contemporaries were ready to acknowledge: he advocated intensive agriculture in contrast to the advice given by most other experts at the time. Moreover, in view of the lack of agricultural experience among the Jews as well as other obstacles, he insisted on the paramount importance of developing industry for the absorption of mass immigration. Whereas Ruppin and the other experts thought that an investment of £1,000-£1,500 was needed for the absorption of one family, Trietsch argued that since funds of such magnitude would never be available, they should develop cheaper methods of settlement. The weakness of Trietsch’s argument was, of course, that while industry would no doubt have absorbed more immigrants, it also involved substantial investment, and he was no more able than anyone else to point to potential donors.
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After 1918 German Zionism was no longer the force it had been in the world movement. The Berlin central office and the Copenhagen bureau ceased to function with the end of the war and the Constantinople agency also stopped its work in October 1918. In December 1917 a provisional London bureau was established under Sokolow and Chlenov, who was later replaced by Weizmann. While London thus became the centre of power, the constitutional situation was confused. It was the London office which convened the first meeting of the Action Committee in February 1919. This was followed by several other meetings and, also in London, the annual conference in July 1920 (also called ‘the little congress’). All this may not have been strictly constitutional, but someone had to take the initiative and no one seriously disputed the authority of these meetings.

The post war executive consisted at first of Weizmann, Sokolow, Jacobson, S. Sevin (all in London), and Warburg and Hantke of Berlin. In 1920 Ussishkin, Julius Simon and de Lieme were appointed to the executive. Weizmann, who was elected president of the organisation, also headed the political department together with Sokolow, who was named chairman of the executive. They were later joined for a time by Jabotinsky. The organisation department was managed first by Jacobson, later by Hantke and subsequently by Lichtheim; the Palestine department (also called the Palestine office) was headed by Julius Simon. The composition of the executive fluctuated widely in these early postwar years but it remained the supreme decision-making body, for the Action Committee, on which all local groups and parties were represented, counted more than eighty members and was much too unwieldy to be an effective instrument of policy.
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The 1920 London conference was not fully representative of the federations and trends which made up the world movement. The right-wing and religious parties were much more strongly represented than the Left. American and German Zionism had only relatively small delegations. Since it was the first major Zionist meeting for seven years it became almost automatically the battleground between the main contenders for leadership, American Zionism under Brandeis and the Europeans under Weizmann. As far as Brandeis was concerned it was not a contest for personal power, for, as a Supreme Court Justice of the United States, he was unwilling to accept any position other than that of honorary president.

It was a clash between two different concepts regarding the future of the Zionist movement, but there were also divergences in style and approach. The slogan of ‘Washington against Pinsk’ under which the battle was fought was a distortion of a highly complex situation, but there certainly was a grain of truth in it. The American Zionists, who had carried the major financial burden from the beginning of the war and who had played a central part in the political struggle before and after the Balfour Declaration, were extremely critical of the political leadership in London in which, incidentally, they were not represented. Brandeis believed that with the Balfour Declaration, or at the very latest with Samuel’s appointment as high commissioner, the main political tasks of the movement had been accomplished, and that from now on energies had to be devoted to the building of Palestine.