History of the Jews (79 page)

Therein lay a great missed opportunity, and the makings of tragedy. During the calm years, when Palestine was relatively open, the Jews would not come. From 1929 their economic and political position, and still more their security, began to deteriorate all over Europe. But as their anxiety to go to Palestine increased, so did the obstacles to their entering it. There was another Arab pogrom in 1929, in which over 150 Jews were killed. The British response, as before, was to tighten immigration. The Labour Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, was unsympathetic: his White Paper of 1930 was the first, unmistakable sign of anti-Zionism in a British state paper. His wife, Beatrice Webb, told Weizmann: ‘I can’t understand why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed in Palestine. As many are killed every week in London in traffic accidents and nobody pays any attention.’
⁴⁸
The British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was more sensitive. Thanks to him, immigration was resumed.

Now there were hundreds of thousands of increasingly frightened Jews trying to get in. But with each wave of Jewish immigration, the wave of Arab reaction became more violent. Jabotinsky considered 30,000 a year as satisfactory. The target was passed in 1934, when 40,000 arrived. The following year it rose by more than 50 per cent to 62,000. Then, in April 1936, came a major Arab rising, and for the first time the British began to face the ugly truth that the mandate was breaking down. A commission under Lord Peel, reporting on 7 July 1937, recommended that Jewish immigration be reduced to 12,000 places a year, and restrictions be placed on land purchases too. But it also suggested a three-way partition. The coastal strip, Galilee and the Jezreel valley should be formed into a Jewish state. The Judaean Hills, the Negev and Ephraim should constitute an Arab state. The British would run a mandatory enclave from Jerusalem through Lydda and Ramleh to Jaffa. The Arabs rejected this with fury and staged another revolt in 1937. The next year the pan-Arab conference in Cairo adopted a policy whereby all Arab states and communities pledged themselves to take international action to prevent the further development of the Zionist state. The British dropped partition and, after the failure of the Tripartite Conference in London early in 1939, which the Arabs rendered hopeless from the start, the Balfour Declaration was quietly buried too. A new White Paper, published in May, stipulated that 75,000 more Jews should be admitted over five years, and thereafter none at all, except with Arab agreement. At the same time, Palestine should proceed to gradual independence. By now there were 500,000 Jews in Palestine. But the Arabs were in a large majority still. Hence if the British plan proceeded, the Arabs would control any state that emerged, and the existing Jews would be expelled.

This tragic series of events brought corresponding strains within the Zionist movement as its various factions divided on how to respond to them. In 1931 Weizmann was driven from the presidency of the World Zionist Congress, at the instigation of the Mizrachi. The same year, in Palestine, elections to the Zionist Assembly of Delegates showed a three-way split, with Mapai taking thirty-one out of seventy-one seats, the Revisionists sixteen and Mizrachi five. The division spread to the military arm: the Revisionists and Mizrachi, and other non-socialist Zionists, broke away from the Haganah to form a competitive force, the Irgun.

The fundamental breach, between Mapai on the one hand and the Revisionists on the other, which was to dominate the politics of the Zionist state from its inception, was envenomed by abuse. The Revisionists accused Mapai of collusion with the British and treason
to the Jewish cause. The Revisionists were denounced as ‘fascists’. Ben Gurion called Jabotinsky ‘Vladimir Hitler’. On 16 June 1933 Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, which had been formed in 1929 to co-ordinate all Jewish efforts world-wide, was murdered on the sea front of Tel Aviv. He was a passionate Mapai Zionist, and Revisionist extremists were immediately suspected. Two of them, Abraham Stavsky and Zevi Rosenblatt, members of a Revisionist ultra group, Brit Habirionim, were arrested and charged with the murder. Abba Ahimeir, the group’s ideologist, was charged with complicity. Stavsky was convicted on the evidence of one witness, sentenced to hang, but acquitted on appeal, under an old Turkish law which said one witness was insufficient in a capital case. The crime was never solved and it continued to fester in the memories of both sides for half a century. To Mapai, the Revisionists would not stop at murder. To the Revisionists, the Mapai had stooped to the age-old device of gentile persecution, the blood libel.

Behind the division was a genuine, agonizing dilemma about Jewish conduct. Some had thought the Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the end of Jewish problems. In the event it merely created an entirely new set of impossible choices. All over the world, Jewish idealists begged their leaders to come to terms with the Arabs. As late as 1938, Albert Einstein, the greatest living Jew, still saw the national home in Utopian terms: ‘I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state…my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will suffer—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.’
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Others feared this damage too. But they feared still more for Jews caught without a refuge-state to flee to. How could such a state be made with Arab consent? Jabotinsky argued that Jews must assume Arab nationalist emotions to be as strong and obdurate as their own. Hence:

 

It is impossible to dream of a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs…. Not now, and not in the foreseeable future…. Every nation, civilized or primitive, sees its land as its national home, where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership. Every native-nation will fight the settlers as long as there is a hope of getting rid of them. Thus they behave, and thus will the [Palestine] Arabs behave, so long as there is the glimmer of hope in their hearts that they can prevent the transformation of Palestine into Erez Israel.

 

Only an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’, he concluded, could force the Arabs to accept the inevitable.
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Jabotinsky made this harsh statement in 1923. The next two decades were to give an ever-growing force to the logic of his argument that the Jews could not afford idealism. It was not just a matter of providing Jewish Palestine with its iron wall of bayonets to ensure its safety. It was a question of whether European Jewry could survive at all, in a world which was turning increasingly and almost universally hostile.

For it was not just in Palestine that the Versailles peace brought bitter disappointment to the Jews. The 1914-18 war was the ‘war to end war’, which would abolish old-fashioned
realpolitik
and inaugurate an era of justice, sweeping away the old hereditary empires and giving all peoples their due share of self-government. The national home for Jews in Palestine was part of this idealistic pattern. But equally if not more important for most European Jews was the guarantee offered by the peace treaty that they would receive full rights of citizenship throughout the European diaspora. The major powers, under the impulse of Disraeli, had first attempted to ensure minimum rights for Jews at the Berlin Congress in 1878. But the provisions of the treaty had been evaded, notably in Rumania. A second, and much more thorough, attempt was made at Versailles. Jews in Russia had been accorded full rights by Kerensky’s provisional government. At Versailles, clauses were written into the treaty giving rights to scheduled minorities, including the Jews, in all the states created, enlarged or delimited by the peace settlement—Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In theory, then, and certainly in the minds of those, like President Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, who shaped the treaty, the Jews were one of its major beneficiaries: they got their national home in Palestine and, if they chose to remain in their adopted homes, they received full and guaranteed citizenship rights.

As things turned out, the Versailles treaty was an important element in the greatest of all Jewish tragedies. For it was a covenant without a sword. It redrew the map of Europe, and imposed new solutions on ancient quarrels, without providing the physical means to enforce either. It thus introduced twenty years of growing instability, dominated by the ferocious hatreds its own provisions had engendered. In this atmosphere of discontent, intermittent violence, and uncertainty, the position of the Jews, far from improving, grew more insecure. It was not just that Jewish communities, as always happened
in difficult times, tended to become the focus of any anxiety and antagonism which could be spared from specific and local objects of hatred. The Jews were used to that. But now there was an additional cause of hostility—the Jewish identification with Bolshevism.

For this the Jews bore some responsibility; or rather, the particular type of political Jew which had emerged in radical politics during the second half of the nineteenth century: the Non-Jewish Jew, the Jew who denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all. This group were all socialists, and for a brief period they were of paramount importance in European and Jewish history. The most representative of them was Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). She came from Zamosc in Russian Poland and her historical background was impeccably Jewish. She was descended from rabbis going back to at least the twelfth century, and her mother, the daughter and sister of rabbis, quoted the Bible to her endlessly. Like Marx, and with far less excuse, she never showed the slightest interest in Judaism or in Yiddish culture (though she liked Yiddish jokes). As the historian of Jewish socialism, Robert Wistrich, has pointed out, her extraordinary passion for social justice and her fascination with dialectic argument seems to have been bred by generations of rabbinical scholarship.
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In all other respects, however, she was an ultra-
maskil
. She knew nothing about the Jewish masses. Her father was a rich timber merchant who sent her to an exclusive school in Warsaw, attended mainly by the children of Russian officials. At eighteen she was smuggled across the frontier and travelled to Zurich to complete her education. In 1898 she went through a form of marriage with a German printer in order to obtain German citizenship. Thereafter she devoted her entire life to revolutionary politics.

The parallels with Marx are close in some ways. Like Marx she had a privileged background from which she continued to benefit financially. Like him she knew nothing of the working class, even of the Jewish working class, and like him she never sought to make good her ignorance. Like him, she led a life of middle-class political conspiracy, writing, platform oratory and café argument. But whereas Marx’s Jewish self-hatred took the form of crude anti-Semitism, she argued that the Jewish problem did not exist at all. Anti-Semitism, she insisted, was a function of capitalism, exploited in Germany by the Junkers and in Russia by the Tsarists. Marx had settled the matter; he had ‘removed the Jewish question from the religious and racial sphere and given it a
social
foundation, proving that what is usually described and persecuted as “Judaism” is nothing but
the spirit of hucksterism and swindle
, which appears in
every
society where
exploitation
reigns’.
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Actually, that was not what Marx said and her interpretation involved a deliberate distortion of Marx’s text. Moreover, her assertion was manifestly untrue. As another Jewish socialist, Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), pointed out, anti-Semitism had deep popular roots and could not simply be magicked away by Marxism. He much admired Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, for proudly telling public meetings in London’s East End, ‘I am a Jewess.’

By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg never referred to her Jewishness, if she could possibly help it. She tried to ignore anti-Semitic attacks on her, and this was often difficult for the most odious caricatures of her appeared in the German press. Moreover, there was a strong anti-Semitic tinge to the attacks on her by German trade unionists and socialists with working class backgrounds. They disliked her tone of intellectual superiority and her confident assertions of what ‘the workers’ wanted. She brushed this aside. ‘For the followers of Marx,’ she wrote, ‘as for the working class, the
Jewish question
as such does not exist.’ Attacks on the Jews, in her view, were confined to ‘small, remote villages in southern Russia and Bessarabia—namely, where the revolutionary movement is weak or non-existent’. She hardened her heart to those who claimed her sympathy for atrocities against Jews. ‘Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?’ she wrote. ‘I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims in Putumayo, the negroes in Africa…. I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.’
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Rosa Luxemburg’s moral and emotional distortions were characteristic of an intellectual trying to force people into a structure of ideas, rather than allowing ideas to evolve from the way people actually behaved. The Jews of eastern Europe were not an artificial creation of the capitalist system. They were a real people, with their own language, religion and culture. Their sorrows were real enough too, and persecutions were inflicted on them because they were Jews and for no other reason. They even had their own socialist party, the Bund (abbreviation of General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), created in 1897. The Bund campaigned vigorously for full civil rights for Jews. But Bundists were divided on whether Jews should be accorded an autonomous state when the ‘Workers’ Republic’ came into existence. They were confused, too, about Zionism, and their ranks were constantly depleted by emigration. Hence they tended to close their ranks around a defence of Yiddish national culture.