History of the Jews (96 page)

There was some bullying, especially over names. Of course since Abraham’s time Jews had been inured to name changing, in order to make religious, patriotic or cultural points. Ben Yehuda began the new Hebrew practice, changing his own name from Perelman. Many of the settlers in the first three Aliyahs followed suit at the same time as they began to learn Hebrew. Thus David Gruen, or Green, became David Ben Gurion. Later an element of compulsion was added. There were poignant ironies in this. In the nineteenth century German- and Austrian-ruled Jews had been forced to Teutonize their names. Hitler reversed the process. In 1938 German Jews were forbidden to change their family names and forced to resume Jewish ones. For given names, Jews were limited to ‘official Jewish names’, 185 for men, 91 for women. These excluded certain Biblical names fancied by German non-Jews, such as Ruth, Miriam, Joseph and David. Jews with forbidden names had to assume in addition the name Israel if male, Sarah if female. The Vichy regime in France and the Quisling regime in Norway passed similar laws. But none of this deterred Ben Gurion, whose vigorous, indeed belligerent, support for Hebrew was one of the factors that ensured its success. Hearing that a visit to South Africa had been paid by an Israeli ship commanded by a Captain Vishnievsky, he laid it down that from then on ‘no officer will be sent abroad in a representative capacity unless he bears a Hebrew family name’.
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The Israeli ruling establishment followed Ben Gurion’s lead. Moshe Sharett changed his name from Shertok, Eliahu Elath from Epstein, Levi Eshkol from Shkolnic. A Commission for Hebrew Nomenclature was set up and produced lists of Hebrew names, together with rules for changing, for instance, Portnoy into Porat, Teitelbaum into Agosi, Jung into Elem, Novick into Hadash and Wolfson into Ben Zev. The iniquities of malevolent Austrian bureaucrats were expunged by changing Inkdiger (lame) into Adir (strong) and Lügner (liar) into Amiti (truth-teller). Given names were Hebraized also. Pearl became Margalit, for instance. Jews proved less willing to change their given than their surnames. Goldie Myerson, in accordance with Israeli Foreign Office practice, changed her surname to Meir when she became Foreign Minister in 1959, but she refused to switch to Zehavah, simply turning Goldie into Golda. The need for Hebrew
given names led to a scouring of the Bible for novelties. Thus Yigal, Yariv, Yael, Avner, Avital and Hagit came into fashion, and even Omri and Zerubavel. There were also invented names: Balfura after Balfour, Herzlia after Herzl. According to Rabbi Benziob Kaganoff, the leading expert on Jewish names, the Biblical revival led to deliberate defiance of many Judaic taboos, especially the ban on Biblical names before Abraham. Israelis broke this by calling their children Yuval, Ada, Peleg and, above all, Nimrod, referred to in the Talmud as one of the five wickedest men in the entire history of mankind. Other ‘wicked’ names which became fashionable were Reuma, Deliah, Ataliah and Tzipor. Begin himself was called after Menachem, of whom the Bible said: ‘And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.’

Hebrew was not just a binding force. It prevented Israel from developing a language problem, the curse of so many nations, especially new ones. This was fortunate, for Israel had many other fundamental fissures. The fact that, in the Warsaw ghetto in late 1942, the Jewish political parties could argue bitterly on how they were to resist the Nazis gave some indication of the depth of the ideological divisions, all of which (and more) were endemic in Israel too. The basic division between the Labour Party (sometimes called Mapai), with its Histadrut trade union wing and its Haganah military arm, and the Revisionists, who in other incarnations were called Herut, Gahal and finally Likud, had been envenomed (as we have noted on page 446) by the Arlosoroff murder in 1933 and its aftermath. They worsened still further as a result of a shocking episode during the War of Independence. Ben Gurion had feared all along that Begin, who rejected the
UN
partition frontiers, would fight to enlarge them if the Irgun was allowed to operate as a separate force. Begin agreed to merge Irgun with the national army on 1 June 1948 but he maintained his own arms supply. When, during the first truce, the Irgun arms-ship
Altalena
arrived off Tel Aviv, the government denied him its contents. Ben Gurion told the cabinet: ‘There are not going to be two states and there are not going to be two armies…. We must decide whether to hand over power to Begin or tell him to cease his separatist activities. If he does not give in we shall open fire.’
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The cabinet instructed the Defence Minister to enforce the law of the land. Fighting broke out on the beach and Begin scrambled aboard to protect his arms. Yigal Allon, commander in chief of the Haganah’s full-time force, the Palmach, and his deputy Yitzhak Rabin, directing operations from the Ritz Hotel, decided to shell the ship and sink it. Begin was forced to swim ashore, fourteen Irgun men were killed, and it was the effective
end of the organization. Begin called the Labour coalition ‘a government of criminals, tyrants, traitors and fratricides’.
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Ben Gurion called Begin simply ‘Hitler’.

Thereafter the Labour Party and its allies ruled Israel until 1977. With the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, the Haganah and their dominance within the Jewish Agency, they had formed the establishment under the mandate. After Independence they continued to form the establishment, controlling the armed forces, the civil service and, through the trade union holdings, Israeli industry. Israel inherited from the mandate many British political, constitutional and legal institutions. But in one respect it was quite unlike Britain. It drew from the socialist parties of eastern Europe the notion of the party becoming the state. In this respect it was more like the Soviet Union. The distinction between professional politicians and professional civil servants, so salient to the British style of parliamentary democracy, scarcely existed in Israel. Allon went from the Palmach command to become a minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Rabin was Chief of Staff of the
IDF
and later Prime Minister. Two other
IDF
chiefs, Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar, also came up through the Labour movement. Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated of all the
IDF
commanders, rose through the Mapai youth movement, or Zeirim, as did Shimon Peres, who ran the Defence Ministry bureaucracy under Ben Gurion and in time became Prime Minister himself. A man might be in turn a member of the Knesset, a general, a cabinet minister, an ambassador and head of the state radio. Israel was a party state though never a one-party state. The most important decisions were not necessarily taken inside the cabinet. Civil service appointments were based, as a rule, on a party spoils system which distributed them according to electoral strength. Each party tended to decide who served and who did what and who was promoted in the ministries it controlled. The Labour movement as a whole formed an agricultural-industrial settlement complex embracing much of the arms industry, housing, health insurance and distribution. It dominated, through its own machinery, huge areas of what would normally be government functions: labour relations, education, public health and immigration. Much of this arose through the way the land was settled under the mandate.
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In its post-Independence structure Israel had some of the weaknesses of a typical Third World ex-colony which came into being through resistance, a dominant nationalist movement, even terrorism, and then transformed itself into a regime.

The multi-party structure preserved democracy. But parties were in constant osmosis, splitting, regrouping, renaming themselves, form
ing
ad hoc
coalitions. Between 1947 and 1977 Mapai-Labour never fell below 32.5 per cent of the vote but never rose over 40 per cent. The result was a high degree of instability within the general structure of Labour movement dominance, with difficult coalition bargaining after each election and often between elections. Ben Gurion was Prime Minister 1948-63, except for a brief period 1953-5 when he made way for Moshe Sharett. Many of his most arbitrary dismissals or appointments—of generals, for instance—were in reaction to internal political manoeuvres. His long vendetta against Pinhas Lavon, a Defence Minister whom Ben Gurion held responsible for a costly intelligence fiasco in Egypt, was prompted as much by internal party as by public factors. Parties were interests as well as ideological entities. They recruited accordingly, especially among the immigrants. This went back to the inter-war period when land settlement was largely a party function. In the early 1930s there was an inter-party agreement for the division of scarce land. After Independence there was really enough land for all with agricultural leanings, so the party officials toured the transit camps to get people. There were unofficial carve-ups on an ethnic-religious basis. The Rumanians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, for instance, went to the secular parties (chiefly Mapai), the North Africans to the religious group, Mizrachi, which formed part of the coalition. Thanks to the skill of Mapai’s Yemeni agents, the party established a virtual monopoly over Yemeni immigrants, though after a Mizrachi protest its share was reduced to 60-65 per cent. Mapai and Mizrachi also did a deal over 100,000 Moroccan immigrants, Mapai organizing the emigration from the South Atlas area, Mizrachi from the North Atlas. A revolt of some of the Moroccans, who resented being owned and indoctrinated, brought this arrangement into the open in 1955.
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Weizmann hated all this aspect of Zionist politics. When the state was formed he became its first president but lost the battle to secure presidential powers on American lines. Hence he was not in a position to uphold the state-public interest against the party. The job was left to Ben Gurion and, to do him justice, he tried to fight the party system. He had been a professional party activist all his life and he remained, to the last, an aggressive political bruiser. But as Prime Minister he did his best to effect a separation between party and state, to rescue the state from the party grip, to fight the Labour movement machine (most of which he had created himself) over policy, appointments, and not least the investigation of abuses. He wrenched the Prime Minister’s office, the Defence Ministry, the army and the schools out of the party’s possession. But he failed with the health system, which the
Histadrut in effect retained. In the end he grew disgusted with his political colleagues, created a new party of his own (1965) and, when it failed, retired to an angry internal exile at his kibbutz of Sedeh Boker.
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Unlike Herzl, Weizmann and even Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion did not see himself as a European but as a Jewish Middle Easterner. He placed his trust in the
sabras
, the Israeli-born natives of pioneer stock, who would transform Israel from a European colony into a genuine Asian state, albeit one which was unique. He was a Moses with a grim message, offering his people blood and tears, toil and sweat. ‘This is not a nation, not yet,’ he said in 1969 at the end of his life.

 

It is an exiled people still in the desert longing for the flesh-pots of Egypt. It cannot be considered a nation until the Negev and Galilee are settled, until millions of Jews emigrate to Israel and until moral standards necessary to the ethical practice of politics and the high values of Zionism are sustained. This is neither a mob nor a nation. It is a people still chained to their Exilic past—redeemed but not fulfilled.
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Yet the animating spirit of the Labour movement remained European socialism. It was a party of city intellectuals whose kibbutzim were their weekend cottages. It was university-educated, culturally middle class. To the workers, especially to the Afro-Asian Sephardi immigrants, it turned a face of well-meaning condescension, patiently explaining what was good for them, rather as Rosa Luxemburg had once tried to lecture the German proletariat. They were the natural aristocrats of the new state, or perhaps one should call them a secular cathedocracy. Gradually an illuminating sartorial distinction appeared between the government and the opposition. Labour statesmen affected a rustic informality of open-necked shirts. Begin’s Likud sported smart suits and ties. It was the difference between a socialist intelligentsia and instinctive populists.

After Ben Gurion’s retirement the Labour movement’s dependence on European-stock support, a diminishing asset, became more pronounced. By contrast the new arrivals from the Arab territories drifted towards the opposition. This dated back to the inter-war period. Jabotinsky had always drawn a following from the Sephardis of the Levant. He learned to speak Ladino. He stuck up for the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew. Begin fell effortlessly into this tradition. As a Polish Jew, one of a tiny remnant, he had a natural affinity of circumstances with Jews who had been brutally expelled from Arab lands. Like them, he felt no need to apologize for being in Israel. He shared their hatred of the Arabs. He too put Jewish interests before
any other consideration, by the moral right of suffering. Like the oriental Jews, he regarded the notion that the Arabs had the choice of granting or withholding Israel’s right to exist as an insult to the dead. ‘We were granted the right to exist by the God of our fathers,’ he insisted, ‘at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization nearly 4,000 years ago. For that right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of the nations.’
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In strict contrast to the Labour establishment, he and the oriental Jews had a common and precious characteristic: a complete absence of any feelings of guilt.

Labour’s grip on the regime was immensely strong and only slowly loosened. Begin must have been the only party leader in history to lose eight elections in a row and retain his post. But under successive Prime Ministers, Levi Eshkol (1963-9), Golda Meir (1969-74), Yitzhak Rabin (1974-7), Labour’s electoral support gradually declined. Towards the end of its long rule, and not surprisingly, granted its refusal to heed Ben Gurion’s warning and separate party from state, there were several major scandals. Hence at the May 1977 elections Labour at last lost its paramountcy. It dropped 15 per cent of its vote and emerged with only thirty-two seats. Begin’s Likud had forty-three and he had no real difficulty in forming a coalition government. He won the following election too in June 1981. After his retirement Likud fought the Labour movement to a draw in 1984, leading to an arrangement in which a Labour-Likud coalition, with alternating premiers, governed the country. Thus Israel eventually acquired a two-party system of a kind and the dangers of a permanent one-party regime were avoided.