History of the Jews (78 page)

The sombre achievement of the Grand Mufti was to open a chasm between the Jewish and Arab leadership which has never since been bridged. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, a year before he acquired his authority, the British mandate and the Balfour Declaration had been officially confirmed as part of the Versailles settlement, and the Arab and Jewish delegations shared a table together at the Royal Hotel to celebrate the event. By February 1939, when the Tripartite Conference met in London to try to resolve Arab-Jewish differences, the Arabs refused to sit with the Jews under any circumstances.
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This was the mufti’s doing, and in the long run it was the failure to negotiate directly with the Jews, forcing them into unilateral action, which lost the Arabs Palestine.

All the same, there was an inherent conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs which pointed not to a unitary state, in which both races had rights, but to partition in some form. If this fact had been recognized from the start, the chances of a rational solution would have been much greater. Unfortunately, the mandate was born in the Versailles ear, a time when it was widely assumed that universal ideals and the ties of human brotherhood could overcome the more ancient and primitive sources of discord. Why could not the Arabs and Jews develop harmoniously together, under the benign eye of Britain and the ultimate supervision of the League of Nations? But Arabs and Jews were not on a level of equivalence. The Arabs already constituted several states; soon there would be many. The Jews had none. It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule.

This was implicit in the Balfour Declaration, as explained to the
meeting of the Imperial Cabinet by Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, on 22 June 1921. Arthur Meighen, the Canadian Prime Minister, asked him: ‘How do you define our responsibilities in relation to Palestine under Mr Balfour’s pledge?’ Churchill: ‘To do our best to make an honest effort to give the Jews a chance to make a national home for themselves.’ Meighen: ‘And to give them control of the government?’ Churchill: ‘If in the course of many years they become a majority in the country, they naturally would take it over.’ Meighen: ‘Pro rata with the Arab?’ Churchill: ‘Pro rata with the Arab. We made an equal pledge that we would not turn the Arab off his land or invade his political and social rights.’
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That being so, the whole future of Palestine turned on the issue of Jewish immigration. It was another axiom of Zionism that all Jews should be free to return to the national home. The British government initially accepted this, or rather took it for granted. In all the early discussions over Palestine as a national home, the assumption was that not enough Jews would wish to go there, rather than too many. As Lloyd George put it, ‘The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing.’
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Nevertheless, immigration soon became the issue. It was the point on which Arab resistance increasingly concentrated. Nor was this surprising, since the Jews resisted the British desire to develop representative institutions as long as they were in a minority. As Jabotinsky put it, ‘We are afraid, and we don’t want to have a normal constitution here, since the Palestine situation is not normal. The majority of its “electors” have not yet returned to the country.’
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As it happened, this vulnerable argument was not put to the test, since the Arabs, for their own reasons, decided (August 1922) not to co-operate with British policy either. But they knew from the start that Jewish immigration was the key to ultimate Jewish political power and their agitation was designed to stop it. Samuel fell for this tactic. One of his gestures towards the Arabs, when he took up his post, had been to allow the reappearance of
Falastin
, an extremist Arab journal closed down by the Turks in 1914 for ‘incitement to race hatred’. This, the appointment of the Grand Mufti and similar acts led directly to the pogrom of May 1921, which was incited by the fear of Jews ‘taking over’. Samuel’s response to the riots was to suspend Jewish immigration completely for a time. Three boatloads of Jews fleeing from massacres in Poland and the Ukraine were sent back to Istanbul.
Samuel insisted that, as he put it, the ‘impossibility of mass immigration’ must be ‘definitely recognized’. He told David Edu that he would not have ‘a second Ireland’ and that ‘Zionist policy could not be driven through’.
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This led to many bitter Jewish reactions. Edu called Samuel ‘Judas’. Ruppin said he had become ‘a traitor to the Jewish cause in their eyes’. ‘The Jewish national home of the war promises’, Weizmann complained to Churchill in July 1921, ‘has now been transformed into an Arab national home.’
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This was hyperbole. The Jewish national home grew only slowly in the 1920s but British restrictions on immigration were not the main inhibiting factor. After the difficulties of his first year, Samuel emerged as a successful administrator. His successor, Lord Plumer (1925-8), was even better. Modern services were created, law and order imposed and Palestine, for the first time in many centuries, began to enjoy a modest prosperity. Yet the Jews failed to take advantage of this background to create the rapid build-up of the
Yishuv
which the 1917 Declaration had made possible. Why?

One reason was that the Jewish leaders were divided among themselves on both objects and methods. Weizmann was a patient man, who had always believed that the creation of the Zionist state would take a long time, and that the more solidly the infrastructure and foundations were built, the more likely it would be to survive and flourish. He was content to work within Britain’s lengthy time-span. What he wanted to see emerge in Palestine, in the first place, were social, cultural, educational and economic institutions which were excellent in themselves and would endure. As he put it, ‘Nahalal, Deganiah, the University, the Rutenberg electrical works, the Dead Sea concession, meant much more to me politically than all the promises of great governments and great political parties.’
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Other Jewish leaders had different priorities. During the 1920s, the great political force emerging in Israel was David Ben Gurion. For him what mattered most was the political and economic nature of the Zionist society and the state it would create. He came from Plonsk in Russian Poland and, like many thousands of clever young
Ostjuden
, he believed that the ‘Jewish question’ could never be solved within a capitalist framework. The Jews themselves had to return to their collectivist roots. Most Jewish socialists in Russia went in a Marxist-internationalist direction, arguing that Jewishness was simply an outmoded consequence of a dying religion and a capitalist-bourgeois society, and would disappear along with them. Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924), an early socialist Zionist, insisted that the Jews were a separate people with their own destiny but argued it could only be
achieved in a co-operative, collectivist state: therefore the national home must be socialist from the start. Ben Gurion took this side of the argument. His father, Avigdor Gruen, was a strong Zionist who had his son educated at a modernized Hebrew school and with private tutors who taught him secular subjects. Ben Gurion at various times called himself a Marxist but for him, as a result of his upbringing, the Bible, not
Das Kapital
, was the book of life—though he treated it as a secular history and guide. He too was a Jewish prodigy: but one whose tremendous will, passion and energy flowed into activism, not study. At fourteen he was running a Zionist youth group. At seventeen he was an active member of the Zionist workers’ organization, the Po’ale Zion. At the age of twenty he was a settler in Erez Israel, a member of the party’s central committee and a formulator of its first political platform in October 1906.

As a young man, Ben Gurion moved around the international scene. He lived in the Jewish community in Salonika, in Istanbul and in Egypt. He spent much of the First World War in New York, organizing the He-Halutz bureau which steered potential settlers towards Palestine, though he also served in the Jewish Legion. Yet in all this activity three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land; ‘the settlement of the land is the only true Zionism, all else being self-deception, empty verbiage and merely a pastime’.
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Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework. Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society must be the Hebrew language.

Ben Gurion never deviated from these three principles. But the political instruments with which he sought to implement them varied. This was to be a Zionist characteristic. Over the past century, Zionist political parties have undergone constant mutations, and no attempt will be made here to trace them in detail. Ben Gurion in particular was to be a notorious creator and divider of parties. In 1919 he opened the founding conference of Ahdut ha-Avudah. Ten years later (1930) he merged it, with the political wing of Po’ale Zion, into Mapai, the Zionist Labour Party. More solid and permanent was the Histadrut, the Zionist trade union movement, of which he became secretary-general in 1921. He turned it into something much more than a federation of trade unions. In accordance with his principles, he made it into an agent of settlement, an active promoter of agricultural and industrial projects, which it financed and owned, and thus in time a major land- and property-owner, a central pillar of the Zionist-socialist establishment. It was during the 1920s, indeed, that Ben
Gurion created the essential institutional character of what was to become the Zionist state. But this took his time and energy, and though the object of all his efforts was ultimately to accelerate immigration, that was not the immediate consequence. The infrastructure was taking shape, but the people to inhabit it were slow to arrive.

That was the overriding concern of Jabotinsky. His absolute priority was to get the maximum numbers of Jews into Palestine at the earliest possible moment, so that they could be organized politically and militarily to take over the state. Of course it was right, as Weizmann said, to push forward specific educational and economic projects. But numbers must come first. It was right too, as Ben Gurion urged, to settle the land. But numbers must come first. Jabotinsky treated with scorn the notion, held strongly by Weizmann and Ben Gurion, that they should distinguish between types of settlers. Ben Gurion wanted the
chalutzim
, the pioneers, willing to do the back-breaking manual work, to get away from any dependence on Arab labour. Both he and Weizmann were hostile to the religious wing of the Zionists, who founded the Mizrachi (‘spiritual centre’) Party in 1902, and who moved their operations to Palestine in 1920. The Mizrachi began to build up their own network of schools and institutions, in parallel with the secular Zionists, and to run their own immigration campaigns. In Weizmann’s view, Mizrachi was encouraging the wrong type of Jewish immigrant: Jews from the ghettos, especially from Poland, who did not want to work on the land but to settle in Tel Aviv, create capitalist concerns, and-if they were smart-engage in land speculation.

In 1922 Churchill, who was always pro-Zionist, ended the ban on immigration. But his White Paper, published that year, insisted, for the first time, that immigration could be unrestricted but must reflect ‘the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals’. In practice, this meant Jews could get settlement visas if they could show $2,500, and it was Weizmann’s contention that, in consequence, the capitalist, Mizrachi-type of immigrant was predominating. Jabotinsky thought this of secondary importance. Numbers had to come first. He was not content to see Weizmann and the British government manage matters at their own pace, to ensure that Jewish Palestine was a nation of
chalutzim
even if it took hundreds of years to create it. He wanted rapid growth, and it must be said, in retrospect, that he had a stronger instinct for ugly realities than either of the other two.

Jabotinsky was not prepared to accept British management of
immigration at all. He wanted this to be the exclusive concern of Jewish policy-makers, who in his view should be moving towards setting up state institutions as a matter of urgency. On these grounds he left the Zionist executive in 1923 and two years later he founded the Union of Zionist-Revisionists to use the full resources of Jewish capitalism to bring to Palestine ‘the largest number of Jews within the shortest period of time’. He attracted an enormous following in eastern Europe, especially in Poland, where the Revisionist militant youth wing, Betar—of which the young Menachem Begin became the organizer—wore uniforms, drilled and learned to shoot. The object was to achieve the Jewish state in one sudden, irresistible act of will.

In fact, all three Jewish leaders overestimated the actual willingness of Jews to emigrate to Palestine during the 1920s. After the turmoil of the immediate post-war years, especially the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine, the Jews like everyone else shared in the prosperity of the decade. The urge to take ships to Haifa abated. The riots in 1920 and 1921 were no encouragement. During the 1920s the Jewish population of Palestine did, indeed, double, to 160,000. So did the number of agricultural colonies. By the end of the decade there were 110 of them, employing 37,000 Jewish workers and farming 175,000 acres. But the total number of immigrants was only 100,000 of whom 25 per cent did not stay. So the net rate of immigration was a mere 8,000 a year. Indeed, in 1927, the peak year of twenties prosperity, only 2,713 came and more than 5,000 left. In 1929, the watershed year in the world economy, arrivals and departures just about balanced.