A History of Zionism (95 page)

Winston Churchill, one of these survivors, certainly did not approve of the turn in British policy: ‘I cannot understand why this course has been taken’, he said in his speech in the parliamentary debate (23 May 1939) on the White Paper. ‘I search around for the answer. … Is our condition so parlous and our state so poor that we must, in our weakness, make this sacrifice of our declared purpose? Can we strengthen ourselves by repudiation? Never was the need for fidelity and firmness more urgent than now.’ He turned to the government front bench and said: ‘By committing ourselves to this lamentable act of default, we will cast our country, and all it stands for, one more step downwards in its fortunes. It is twenty years now that my Rt Honourable friend [Neville Chamberlain] used these stirring words: “A great responsibility will rest on the Zionists, who before long will be proceeding with joy in their hearts to the ancient seat of their people. Theirs will be the task of building up a new prosperity and a new civilisation in old Palestine, so long neglected and misruled.” Well,’ Churchill continued, ‘they have answered the call. They have followed his hopes. How can we find it in our heart to strike them this mortal blow?’ These were strong words, but they did not entail political action. Churchill was a back bencher at the time, in opposition to government policy. One year later he was back in power but did little to reverse British policy in Palestine. The international constellation could not have been worse for the Zionists. Never had the movement counted for less.

The Palestinian scene 1933-7

The years of prosperity in Palestine (1933-5) were politically uneventful. The Jewish Agency executive did not receive much help from the British government but it had, within limits, freedom of action. Weizmann, Ben Gurion and Shertok conferred from time to time with the colonial secretary and with the high commissioner, but these meetings had a routine character. There were occasional protests against searches and arrests of illegal immigrants by the police, but on the whole the Agency executive had little reason to complain. At a session of the Action Committee in March 1934 in Jerusalem, Ussishkin, as so often before, complained that not enough was being done to buy land. Forty thousand new immigrants had arrived but only sixteen thousand dunam had been bought. The occasion was memorable mainly because the proceedings were for the first time conducted in Hebrew.

There were no major surprises at the 1935 Zionist congress. Over the years a certain routine had developed: long reports were delivered by members of the executive on political developments, organisational problems, and the economic situation. These were followed by a general debate opened by the spokesmen of the various parties, with the second and third rankers filling in after them. The time at the disposal of the speakers was allocated according to an elaborate system and the main task of the chairman was to keep them within the allotted schedule. At the end of the meeting resolutions on many topics were read out and voted upon. The system was highly unsatisfactory, and since much of the important work was in any case done in committee, it was proposed to do away with the ‘general debate’. It seemed altogether pointless to try to cover all the important subjects in a parliament which met for a fortnight every other year. But the system, however defective, had grown roots. An entire generation of Zionist politicians had come to accept it and attempts to change it encountered strong resistance.

In his opening address at the congress Sokolow said that the movement had advanced all along the line. This claim was not altogether unjustified for, quite apart from the progress made in Palestine, Zionism had won many new adherents. Almost one million Jews had bought the shekel that year and thus acquired the right to vote. This despite the revisionist secession and the establishment of the New Zionist Organisation by Jabotinsky’s followers. Even so, Zionists were only a minority within world Jewry. Their most dangerous enemy, as Ben Gurion pointed out at the time, was the indifference of the Jewish communities.
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In Palestine about one-third of the community had acquired the shekel, and in Lithuania, West Galicia, and Latvia the Zionist position was also relatively strong, with between 20 and 30 per cent of the local community adhering. More had expressed sympathy without taking the trouble to register. But the situation in the two largest communities was much less rosy: in Poland only one Jew out of ten had brought the shekel, and in the United States only one out of thirty.

To return to the proceedings of the Lucerne congress: Weizmann was elected president, Ben Gurion, in his keynote speech (given in Yiddish), said that while the present generation could not complete the work of Zionism it had an urgent and easily definable task: to settle one million families in Palestine.
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Ruppin, surveying twenty-five years of colonising work, defended the collective settlements against their detractors and said that agriculture was still lagging behind the general development of the country. Grossman, who with a few friends had split away from Jabotinsky, accused Mapai of strangling private initiative in Palestine and condemned the transfer agreement with Germany. The general debate was mainly between Mapai and the General Zionists. Mizrahi boycotted it since their demand to give the movement (and, above all, life in Palestine) a greater religious content had not been accepted. They were somewhat mollified when one of their leaders, Rabbi Fishmann, was elected to the new executive, the other members being Weizmann (Sokolow became honorary president of the world organisation), Ben Gurion, Brodetsky, Gruenbaum, Kaplan, Rottenstreich and Shertok - a coalition representing all the main trends in the movement.

Weizmann’s return after four years in the wilderness was the most important event. He wrote later that he was a little reluctant to accept the call because there had been no real change of heart in the movement. Many had simply reached the conclusion ‘that they had nobody who could do much better’. The American Zionists who had voted against him on past occasions now became his strongest supporters. The world situation had deteriorated and inside the movement there was growing impatience and less and less desire to face realities: ‘This impatience, that lack of faith, was constantly pulling the movement towards the abyss.’ Weizmann who, unlike the leaders of Mapai, lacked an organised power base inside the movement, had to rely on the alliance (the ‘unwritten covenant’) between a small group of faithful supporters among the General Zionist group and the ‘great mass of workers in the settlements and factories in Palestine which formed the core of the Zionist movement. This was the guarantee of our political sanity.’
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Less than a year after the nineteenth congress Zionism found itself in a mortal struggle against overwhelming pressure on three different fronts: the wave of antisemitism in Europe, the Arab attacks on Jewish settlements, and the decision of the British that Zionist work had to be suspended.

The riots began with armed attacks on individual Jews, probably uncorrelated. Unrest quickly spread and within a few days there was a whole series of murderous assaults. As the Arab Higher Committee, under the leadership of the mufti, declared a six months’ general strike, armed bands took up guerrilla warfare in various parts of Palestine. The evidence points to a secret understanding between the Arab political leadership and Fawzi Kaukji, who headed the largest private army, and that there was some coordination with other bands.
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The Zionists were inclined to belittle the whole affair, to accuse the government of lack of firmness, and to regard it as the work of a few professional demagogues who had mobilised the flotsam and jetsam of Arab society. But such explanations presented only part of the picture: true, the mandatory government appeared indecisive, and there certainly was a criminal element in the uprising; more Arabs than Jews were killed by the insurgents, either because they refused to collaborate or because they resisted the extortionists. But all the same it was a national movement with a broad popular basis in both the towns and the countryside. Moreover, it had not only the sympathy but the active assistance of other Arab countries, which in the past had shown no direct concern about the future of Palestine.

The high commissioner asked for reinforcements, and when some twenty thousand British troops were finally concentrated in Palestine, the Arab Higher Committee felt the need for a breathing space. In October 1936 it followed the recommendation of the heads of the Arab states to rely on the good intentions of the British and to end the general strike, but refused to give evidence before the royal commission, whose appointment had just been announced in London, so long as there was no total stoppage of Jewish immigration. The commission was headed by Lord Peel, a grandson of Robert Peel, a lawyer by training and an experienced colonial administrator. Unknown to most, he was already very ill at the time and died shortly after of cancer. His deputy was Horace Rumbold, who as ambassador to Berlin had seen Nazism at first hand, and was familiar with its ideas, practices and aims. The commission arrived in Palestine on 11 November 1936 and stayed for two months, in the course of which it held sixty-six meetings. Towards the end of its stay the Arabs changed their mind and decided to give evidence. The commission also held meetings in London and some of its members met Emir Abdulla in Amman.

It was the most high-powered of the various commissions of enquiry which had visited Palestine, and its report, published in July 1937, was a model of insight, precision and lucidity.
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Seldom, if ever, has an intricate political problem been so clearly and comprehensively presented and analysed by men who had little previous knowledge of the issues. The Zionist position, as outlined in the memorandum submitted to the commission as well as in the oral evidence given by Weizmann and Ben Gurion, was that notwithstanding the riots, Jews and Arabs could reach a
modus vivendi.
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It reiterated the basic principle that, regardless of numerical strength, neither of the two peoples should dominate or be dominated by the other. Weizmann repeated that the Zionist movement was perfectly willing to accept the principle of parity: if a legislative council was established, the Jews would never claim more than an equal number, whatever the future ratio between the Arab and Jewish population.
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Ben Gurion in his evidence also emphasised that it was not the Zionist aim to make Palestine a Jewish state. Palestine was not an empty country. There were other inhabitants and these did not want to be at the mercy of the Jews just as the Jews did not want to be at their mercy: ‘It may be the Jews would behave better, but they are not bound to believe in our goodwill. A state may imply … domination of others, the domination by the Jewish majority of the minority, but that is not our aim. It was not our aim at that time [of the Balfour Declaration] and it is not our aim now.’
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The position of the mufti, who appeared as the main Arab spokesman, was that the experiment of a Jewish national home should be discontinued, and immigration and land sales stopped. Hebrew should no longer be recognised as an official language, and Palestine should become an independent Arab state. There were some antisemitic undertones: Auni Abdul Hadi, a leader of the left-of-centre Istiqlal, said that the Jews were a more usurious people than any other, and if sixty million Germans, who were cultured and civilised, could not bear the presence of six hundred thousand Jews, how could the Arabs be expected to put up with the presence of four hundred thousand in a much smaller country? When the mufti was asked whether Palestine could digest and assimilate the four hundred thousand already there, he said flatly ‘No’.
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Were these Jews to be expelled or ‘somehow to be removed’? ‘We must all leave this to the future,’ said the mufti. ‘That is not a question which can be decided here,’ said Auni Abdul Hadi.

Weizmann gave a masterly presentation of the Jewish case on 25 November. It was one of the highlights of his career. He later described his feelings as he made his way to the speaker’s table between the rows of spectators in the dining-room of the Palace Hotel in Jerusalem:

I felt that I not only carried the burden of these well-wishers, and of countless others in other lands, but that I would be speaking for generations long since dead, for those who lay buried in the ancient and thickly populated cemeteries on Mount Scopus, and those whose last resting places were scattered all over the world. And I knew that any mis-step of mine, any error however involuntary, would be not mine alone, but would rebound to the discredit of my people. I was aware, as on few occasions before or since, of a crushing sense of responsibility.
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Weizmann surveyed Jewish history in modern times, and the development of Zionism as an answer to Jewish homelessness. He spoke of the spread of antisemitism all over Europe and how one by one all the gates had been closed to them. There were six million Jews in east and central Europe, ‘doomed to be pent up in places where they are not wanted and for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places into which they cannot enter’. Seven years earlier Lord Passfield had told him that there was no room to swing a cat in Palestine, but many a cat had been swung since then; the Jewish population had in fact doubled. At the end of his speech he said the commission had come at a time when the Jewish position ‘has never been darker than it is now, and I pray it may be given to you to find a way out’.

In early January Weizmann appeared again before the commission, this time in closed session. Having listened to the spokesmen of the two sides, its members were inclining towards the idea of cantonisation. The Arabs were uncompromising, totally ruling out any idea of further Jewish immigration. One member of the commission, Professor Coupland of Oxford, a veteran student of Indian history, eventually reached the conclusion that cantonisation did not go far enough and that a more radical approach was needed. It appeared unlikely that harmony between Jews and Arabs could be restored in the near future. If so there was no other way to peace than the termination of the mandate by agreement. This meant the splitting of Palestine into two, and consequently the emergence of an independent Jewish and an Arab state.