A History of Zionism (38 page)

‡
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 138.

§
Sykes,
Two Studies in Virtue
, p. 190.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 157.

†
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, pp. 144-5.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 127.

§
H. Samuel,
Memoirs
, London, 1945, p. 143.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 113.

†
Ibid.
, p. 166
et seq;
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 156
et seq.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 157.

†
Quoted in Sykes,
Two Studies in Virtue
, pp. 213, 216.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 222.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 150.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 144.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 150.

‡
D.D. Gillon, ‘The Antecedents of the Balfour Declaration’,
Middle Eastern Studies
, May 1969, pp. 132–3; see also, Aaron S. Klieman, ‘Britain’s War Aims in the Middle East in 1915’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, July 1968, p. 237
et seq.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 111.

†
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 152.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 157.

*
Sykes,
Two Studies in Virtue
, p. 193; Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 158.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 178.

*
The debate is analysed in I. Friedman, ‘The McMahon-Hussain Correspondence and the Question of Palestine’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, April 1970. See also Arnold Toynbee’s reply,
ibid.
, October 1970.

†
On the making of the Sykes-Picot agreement, see E. Kedourie,
England and the Middle East
, London, 1956, pp. 29–66.

‡
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 276.

*
Gillon, ‘The Antecedents of the Balfour Declaration’, p. 133; see also B. Balpern,
The Idea of the Jewish State
, Cambridge, 1961, p. 276.

†
Kedourie,
England and the Middle East
, p. 86.

‡
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 331.

*
N. Gelber,
Hazharat Balfour vetoldoteha
, Jerusalem, 1939, pp. 59–61.

†
N. Sokolow,
Geschichte des Zionismus
, Berlin, 1921, vol. 2, p. 386.

‡
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 399.

§
Sykes,
Two Studies in Virtue
, p. 202; see also Gelber,
Hazharat Balfour vetoldoteha
p. 85
et seq.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, pp. 391-2.

†
D. Lloyd George,
War Memoirs
, London, 1936, vol. 4, p. 1835.

*
The Times
, 24 May 1917.

†
Sokolow,
Geschichte des Zionismus
, vol. 2, pp. 391-8.

‡
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, pp. 446-8.

*
Ibid.
, p. 441.

*
Ibid.
, p. 466.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 204.

*
War cabinet meeting, 4 October 1917: PRO London, cab. 23-4, 245. Quoted in Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
…, p. 407.

†
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 206.

‡
PRO, 25 October 1917, cab. 23-4. Quoted in Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
…, p. 409.

*
D. Lloyd George,
The Truth about the Peace Treaties
, London, 1938, vol. 2, p. 1123
et seq.

†
N. Sokolow,
History of Zionism
, London, 1919, vol. 1, p. xxv.

‡
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, pp. 207-8.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, pp. 560-2.

†
Jüdische Rundschau
, 16 November 1917.

‡
Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
…, p. 420.

§
Jüdische Rundschau
, 30 November 1917.

‖
Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
…, p. 422.

*
Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 590.

†
Ibid.
, p. 593.

*
Ibid.
, p. 284.

†
Ibid.
, p. 554.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 554.

*
Quoted in Gillon, ‘The Antecedents of the Balfour Declaration,’ p. 147.

*
Jon Kimche,
The Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour Declaration
, London, 1968, p. 45.

†
Quoted in Stein,
The Balfour Declaration
, p. 552.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 160.

§
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 152.

*
Sykes,
Two Studies in Virtue
, pp. 233-4.

†
Sokolow,
History of Zionism
, vol. 2, p. 84.

*
Observer
, quoted in Sokolow,
ibid.
, p. 86.

PART TWO

5
THE UNSEEN QUESTION

Zionism and the Arab Problem

Among the Jewish workers who demonstrated in Tel Aviv on 1 May 1921, the day of international working-class solidarity, there was a small group of Communists who distributed leaflets in Arabic calling the downtrodden and exploited masses to rise against British imperialism. Expelled from the ranks of the parade, they were last seen disappearing with their leaflets into the small streets between Tel Aviv and Jaffa. A few hours later a wave of Arab attacks on Jews in Jaffa started, triggered off, the Arabs claimed, by the provocation of the godless Bolsheviks, whose propaganda had aroused great indignation among the local population. In the course of these riots and of the subsequent military operations, 95 persons were killed and 219 seriously wounded.

The disturbances of May 1921, following the riots in Jerusalem and the attacks in Galilee the previous year, shocked and confused the Zionists.
*
Many of them became aware for the first time of the danger of a major conflict between the two peoples. It was asserted that Zionist ignorance and ineptitude were to blame, for at the time of the Balfour Declaration the Muslims had been well disposed towards the Jews, but had not found among them understanding and a willingness to compromise. Consequently they had made common cause with the Christian Arab leaders against the ‘Zionist peril’. Whatever the cause of the 1921 riots, whatever the explanations offered and accepted, from then on the Arab question began to figure increasingly in the discussions at Zionist congresses, in internal controversies, and of course in Zionist diplomacy.

Yet fifteen years later, when the Arab question had become the most important issue in Zionist politics, critics were once again to argue in almost identical terms that the movement was now paying the price for having so long ignored the existence of the Arabs, their interests and their national aspirations. It was also said that but for this neglect a conflict between the peoples could have been prevented. The Zionists, the critics claimed, had acted as though Palestine was an empty country: ‘Herzl visits Palestine but seems to find nobody there but his fellow Jews; Arabs apparently vanish before him as in their own Arabian nights.’
*
‘If you look at prewar Zionist literature’, Dr Weizmann said in a speech in 1931, ‘you will find hardly a word about the Arabs.’
†
This implied that the Zionist leaders had been half aware of the existence of the Arabs but for reasons of their own had acted as if they did not exist. Or had it been a case of real, if astonishing blindness?

The issue was in fact considerably more complex. The Zionists certainly paid little attention to the first stirrings of the Arab national movement and few envisaged the possibility of a clash of national interests. But they did of course know that several hundred thousand Arabs lived in Palestine and that these constituted the majority of the local population. Even the pre-Herzlian Zionists were aware of the fact that Palestine was not quite empty. Rabbi Kalischer, who had never been anywhere near the Holy Land, wrote in 1862 about the danger of Arab banditry, anticipating the question whether Jewish settlers would be safe in such a country. The Russian Zionists in their writings in the early 1880s expressed confidence that Jews and Arabs could live together in peace. Lilienblum noted the existence of an Arab population, but said that it was small and backward, and that if a hundred thousand Jewish families were to settle over a period of twenty years, the Jews would no longer be strangers to the Arabs. Levanda argued that both Arabs and Jews would profit from Jewish settlement. When Ahad Ha’am went to Palestine in 1891 he reported that the country was not empty, that the Arabs, and above all the town dwellers among them, were quite aware of Jewish activities and desires, but pretended not to notice them so long as they seemed to constitute no real danger. But if one day the Jews were to become stronger and threaten Arab predominance, they would hardly take this quietly.
‡

In Herzl’s mind the Arabs certainly did not figure prominently, though he did not ignore them altogether. He met individual Arabs and corresponded with a few of them. He was aware of the rising national movement in Egypt and on various occasions stressed the close relationship between Jews and Muslims. In
Altneuland
, his Zionist Utopia, Reshid Bey, personifying the Arabs, says that Jewish immigration had brought tremendous benefits to the Arabs: the export of oranges had increased tenfold. When asked by a non-Jewish visitor whether Jewish immigration had not ruined the Arabs and forced them to leave, he replies: ‘What a question! It was a blessing for all of us’, adding however that the landowners benefited more than others because they had sold land to the Jews at a great profit.
*
Herzl’s vision seemed to Ahad Ha’am too good to be true. How could millions of Jews live in a country which barely provided a poor living for a few hundred thousand Arabs? Max Nordau replied that he and Herzl were thinking in terms of modern methods of cultivation which would make mass settlement possible without any need for the Arabs to leave. They envisaged the spread of European civilisation and the growth of an open European society in which there would be room for everyone. They were opposed, he said, counter-attacking his east European critics, to a narrow, introspective, religious nationalism concerned primarily with rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem.
†
Nordau, however, was not always so optimistic about the future of Arab-Jewish relations. On at least one occasion he considered the possibility of a Turkish-Zionist alliance against the danger of an Arab separatist movement.
‡
Or perhaps this was only a political move to remind the Arabs, who were then anxious to enlist Turkish assistance against Jewish immigration, that the Zionists too had some bargaining power.

From the early days of Jewish immigration there were in fact clashes, often bloody, between the new settlers and their Arab neighbours. The annals of the settlements are full of stories of theft, robbery and even murder. In a report on his trip to Palestine in 1898 Leo Motzkin stated that in recent years there had been ‘countless fights between Jews and Arabs who had been incited against them’.
§
But such accounts have to be viewed in the context of time and place. Clashes like these were not uncommon in other parts of the world. They occurred not only between Arabs and Jews, but equally between one Arab village and another.

Moreover, the state of security in the outlying districts of the Ottoman empire was not up to the standards of western Europe.
‖
On the other hand it cannot be maintained that these incidents totally lacked political undertones, that, in other words, Jews and Arabs were living peacefully together before political Zionism appeared on the scene, and, more specifically, before the Balfour Declaration confronted the Palestinian Arabs with the danger of losing their country.
*

As early as 1891 a group of Arab notables from Jerusalem sent a petition to Constantinople signed by five hundred supporters complaining that the Jews were depriving the Arabs of all lands, were taking over their trade and were bringing arms to the country.
†
Anti-Jewish feeling was spread by the Churches in Palestine. Eliyahu Sapir wrote in 1899 that the main blame was with the Catholic Church, and in particular the Jesuits, but he also mentioned the impact of the French antisemitic publicist Drumont on certain Arab newspapers.
‡
It was commonly accepted at the time that the poor Muslim sections of the population who had benefited from Jewish settlement were on the whole well disposed towards the Jews whereas the Christian Arabs were hostile. This appraisal was correct to the extent that many Arab nationalist newspapers published before the First World War were in Christian hands and that, generally speaking, the percentage of Christian Arabs among the intelligentsia, and thus among the founders of the Arab national movement in Syria and Palestine, was disproportionately high. But the attitude of the Muslim upper and middle classes was not basically different, whereas early Zionist emissaries encountered outside Palestine much more sympathy among Christian Arabs fearful of Muslim domination. Sami Hochberg, the Jewish editor of a Constantinople newspaper, was told by Lebanese Christians in 1913 that they hoped the Jews would soon become the majority in Palestine and achieve autonomous status to counterbalance Muslim power.
§
The idea that the Christian Arabs were fundamentally anti-Zionist, while the Muslims were potential friends, lingered on nevertheless for a long time after the First World War, despite the fact that Ruppin and other members of the Zionist executive in Palestine frequently tried to explain to their colleagues that the real state of affairs was vastly more complicated.
‖

The total population of Palestine before the outbreak of the First World War was almost 700,000. The number of Jews had risen from 23,000 in 1882 to about 85,000 in 1914. More than one hundred thousand Jews had entered Palestine during the years between, but approximately half of them did not stay. Many moved on to America; one of these wanderers between several worlds was the author of
Hatiqva
, the Zionist national anthem.

Jaffa around 1905 was a city of about thirty thousand inhabitants, of whom two-thirds were Muslim Arabs. Haifa, with its twelve thousand residents, was hardly bigger than neighbouring Acre. Jerusalem was by far the biggest city in the country. Of its population of sixty thousand, forty thousand were Jews and the rest Muslim and Christian Arabs. A contemporary guide book reports that the situation of the Jews had somewhat improved in recent years. They were no longer concentrated in the dirty Jewish quarter in the old city, many having moved to the residential quarters outside the city wall. On the Sabbath the market was almost empty and public transport came more or less to a standstill.
*
The majority of the Jews still belonged to the old pre-immigration community, either taking no interest in Zionism or actively opposed to it. These were pious men and women, dependent on alms given by their co-religionists abroad. They lived in a ghetto viewed with shame and horror by the new immigrants, the very existence of which reminded them of a milieu from which they had just escaped. The living conditions of the Sefardi Jews, most of them Arabic-speaking, were quite different, as there were many merchants as well as professional men and artisans among them.

The Zionist immigrants, as distinct from the established Jewish community, numbered no more than 35,000-40,000 in 1914, of whom only one-third lived in agricultural settlements. While Arab spokesmen protested against Jewish immigration, Jewish observers noted with concern that the annual natural increase of the Arab population was about as big as the total number of Jews who had settled with so much effort and sacrifice on the land over a period of forty years. Leading Zionists used to say: ‘Unless we hurry, others will take Palestine.’ A German Zionist physician who had settled in Haifa around the turn of the century noted dryly: ‘No one will take it, the Arabs have it and they will stay the leading force by a great margin.’
†
Twenty years later, Dr Auerbach wrote that it had been the most fateful mistake of Zionist policy to pay insufficient attention to the Arabs in the early days. But he was not at all certain that more attention would have solved the problem, for ‘the Arabs are hostile and will always be hostile’, even if the Jews were paragons of modesty and self-denial.
*

Relations between the Jewish settlers and their Arab neighbours were, then, from the very beginning not untroubled. The land of the early Jewish settlements had formerly belonged to Arab villagers in the neighbourhood who had been heavily in debt and had been forced to sell. There was bitterness against the newcomers, and sporadic armed attacks, and the situation was aggravated by the refusal of the Jewish settlers to share the pasture land with the Arabs as had been the custom before.
†
In Galilee the problem was even more acute because the Arab peasants were poorer than in southern Palestine, as were the Jewish colonies, which could not offer employment to the Arabs who had lost their land. The Jewish settlers tried to assist the nearby Arab villages by lending out on occasion agricultural machinery, while Jewish physicians were treating Arab patients often free of charge. But not all the new settlers were willing to accept the local customs, nor was it to be expected that those who had lost their land would not feel anger and resentment against the new owners.
‡

A short note in a Hebrew journal published in 1909 tells the story of an Arab woman working at Wadi Chanin, a stretch of land recently acquired by the Jews. Suddenly she started weeping, and when asked by those working with her why she was crying she answered that she had recalled that only a few years earlier this very plot had belonged to her family.
§

Before the fall of Abdul Hamid in 1908 the Arab nationalist mood had found no organised political expression, since no political activity was permitted within the Ottoman empire. The sultan’s representatives ruled with an iron hand, and no one dared openly to express sympathy with the ideas of Arab nationalism. A sudden and dramatic change came when the Young Turks overthrew the sultan and announced that the Ottoman empire would in future be ruled constitutionally. New Arab newspapers were founded, voicing radical demands in a language unheard before. Elections were held for the new parliament and the atmosphere was charged with political tension. With this national upsurge the struggle against Zionism became almost overnight one of the central issues in Palestinian Arab policy. Leaflets were widely distributed calling on the Arabs not to sell any more land to the Jews, and demanding that the authorities should stop Jewish immigration altogether. The Haifa newspaper
Al Karmel
was established with the express purpose of combating Zionism. Even before, in 1905, Neguib Azoury, a Christian Arab and previously an assistant to the Turkish pasha of Jerusalem, had written that it was the fate of the Arab and the Jewish national movements to fight until one or the other prevailed.
*
There was a sharp increase in armed attacks on Jewish settlements and on individual Jews. The newspaper campaign, as a contemporary observer noted, reached even the fellaheen in their mud huts and the Beduin in their tents.