A History of Zionism (43 page)

In January 1919 an all-Arab Palestine conference asked for the repudiation of the promise that had been given to the Jews to establish a national home in Palestine, a demand which figured prominently in the traditional Nebi Mussa celebrations in Jerusalem in 1919 and 1920. Mussa Kassem, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, marched at the head of an anti-Zionist demonstration in February 1920. The issue was kept alive in the deliberations and resolutions of four more Arab congresses between July 1919 and May 1921, out of which the Arab higher executive emerged. This body served up to the end of the British mandate as the supreme representative of the Arabs. An Arab delegation headed by Mussa Kassem went to London in 1921 and protested to Mr Churchill, then colonial secretary, against the ‘flood of alien Jewish immigration’, against the recognition of Hebrew as an official language, against the ‘Zionist leanings’ of Sir Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner, against a concession given to Pinhas Rutenberg to establish an electricity company, and against a great many other alleged injustices.

Arab resistance did not come as a total surprise to the architects of the Jewish national home. Balfour wrote in 1919 that he did not think Zionism would hurt the Arabs, but that of course they would never say they wanted it. The Balfour Declaration had been imprecise in wording but the general assumption at the time was that at some future date a Jewish state would emerge in Palestine. Churchill reckoned that it would have three to four million inhabitants. The general consensus was that Syria and Arabia were to be given to the Arabs, and Palestine to the Jews, and the Palestinian Arabs would have to accept this. As Balfour noted, ‘Zionism right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions and in present needs and future hopes of far profounder import than the desires of 700,000 Arabs’. But those who were to carry out these policy directives in Cairo and Jerusalem were not at all in sympathy with such views. Local officials tried hard, and not without success, to whittle down the Balfour Declaration. In 1922 it was first decided that Jewish immigration should never exceed the economic capacity of the country to absorb new arrivals,
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and in the 1930s it became axiomatic in British policy in Palestine that the building of a Jewish national home was predicated on Arab consent, which if carried to its logical conclusion would amount to the repudiation of the Balfour Declaration.

These were the disappointments of later years. During the early period Zionists were generally optimistic about relations with the Arabs, reckoning that they would calm down after the first flush of excitement and accept the Jewish national home. One of the few exceptions was Ahad Ha’am, forever playing Cassandra. He gave warning against the premature blowing of messianic trumpets to announce the redemption. According to the prophet of cultural Zionism, the Jews in Palestine should not press on too quickly because the conditions for success were not yet ripe. They should not forget that for the Arabs, too, Palestine was a national home.
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More acute were the views of Ruppin, a realist, fully aware of the abyss dividing the new immigrants and the Arabs.
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But Ruppin saw no necessary clash of interests between the two peoples: ten million dunam of unused land were still available, twice as much as the Zionists would need for their colonisation within the next thirty years. Ruppin expected the immigration of one to two million Jews within that span of time; Weizmann thought sixty to seventy thousand would come each year; Motzkin mentioned a figure of one hundred thousand; and Sokolow, the one least involved in practical work, spoke of ‘five million in twenty-five years’. In fact no more than thirty thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine during the first five years after the end of the war.

Ruppin thought that Zionism would be able to play a major part in building up the union of Arab states. He envisaged, for instance, a currency union between the new Arab countries and Palestine. With the improvement of the Arab educational system they would perhaps reach the Jewish cultural level within the next generation, which, for all one knew, would be the prelude to cultural assimilation.
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David Eder, an Anglo-Jewish psychoanalyst who had been enlisted by Weizmann to serve as the first diplomatic representative of the Zionist executive in Jerusalem, was equally optimistic and foresaw an era of close cooperation leading towards the integration of the Jewish national home with the federated states of the Middle East. He formulated Zionist policy under a number of heads: Jews must not segregate themselves from the Arabs; Tel Aviv must not become a symbol of Jewish exclusiveness; Jews should deal with the Arab world as a whole and show the same respect for Arab national aspirations as they demanded for their own; and as an oriental people, they should abandon their pretensions to be Europeans.
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The riots of 1920-1 shocked the yishuv, causing a hardening of attitudes in some circles and rethinking in others. No one was willing to forgive the murder of Brenner, the noted Jewish Socialist writer, and of Trumpeldor, the hero of generations of halutzim. Appearing before the royal commission enquiring into the causes of the disturbances, Eder declared that there could be only one national home in Palestine, no equality in partnership but only Jewish predominance as soon as their numbers had increased sufficiently. Jabotinsky suggested the immediate establishment of a Jewish armed force to cope with any future emergency. But there was also greater readiness to reconsider what had gone wrong in relations with the neighbouring people. This emerged most clearly perhaps in the reports from Palestine of Chaim Arlosoroff, at the early age of twenty-two already a respected Zionist leader. Writing from Jaffa in late May 1921, he criticised those of his colleagues who put the entire blame on the British high commissioner, and who thought that a ‘strong hand’ was all that was needed.
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They had not realised that the Arab national movement was an important force which should not be belittled even if it did not exactly conform to European criteria of what a national movement should be. Arlosoroff saw a great danger in pursuing an ostrich-like policy. There was only one way out of the dilemma – a policy of peace and reconciliation, even though it seemed not at all easy to accept such advice while passions were still running high. Robert Weltsch, a close confidant of Weizmann and editor of the
Jüdische Rundschau
, was even more outspoken in his warnings to his fellow Zionists: if the views on the Arab question held by many of them (especially Palestinians) were to prevail, then the two nations would never meet and this would mark the burial of the movement. It had been one of the dreadful consequences of the First World War that so many people had drawn the wrong conclusions from the events of recent years, namely that one could assert oneself in the world only by violence. In the short run this was the easier way out, but it was bound to lead Zionism into an impasse.
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Weltsch and a few of his friends provoked the first postwar Zionist congress by asking point blank: did the Zionist movement want war with the Arabs or not?

His criticism was rejected with indignation by the Zionist leadership. The Karlsbad congress solemnly proclaimed the desire of the Jewish people to ‘live with the Arab people in friendship and mutual respect, and together with them to develop the homeland common to both into a flourishing community which would ensure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development’.
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The formula was not as sweeping as the one proposed by Buber, but in the mood prevailing after the riots of 1921 not much more could be expected. Buber had criticised Weizmann for not doing enough, for negotiating only with Faisal. The president of the Zionist Organisation replied that Faisal was the symbol of Arab independence. It would be ideal if the movement had offices in all important Arab centres to maintain contact with Arab leaders. But he knew in advance that his colleagues on the finance committee would never make the necessary allocations. So far its Arab policy had cost the Zionist movement £8,000 and it had got what it could reasonably expect for the money. (Weizmann was replying to a Dutch delegate, Nehemia de Lieme, who had asked, ‘As a businessman I want to know – how much does it – the Arab policy – cost us?’) At the same congress Sokolow talked in cultural-philosophical terms about the traditions and historical recollections common to Arabs and Jews and stressed how popular friendship with the Arabs was in Zionist circles.
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The next congress (Karlsbad, 1923) reiterated the resolution adopted two years earlier, adding that the awakening of the orient was one of the most important factors in world politics, and that the Jewish people would integrate itself into this process.
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Meanwhile the situation in Palestine had become much calmer. Two years later still, at the fourteenth congress in Vienna, Weizmann announced that relations with the Arabs had improved and that Palestine was now the quietest part of the Middle East. Sokolow foresaw the day when Zionists and Arabs would sit down together at one common Palestinian congress. Meanwhile, the executive would refrain from doing anything which would make cooperation between Jews and Arabs impossible (Brodetsky). Ben Gurion thought that as an oriental people the Jews ought to follow with deep sympathy the national revival of other oriental peoples. Weizmann said that the Near East should be opened to Jewish initiative, that they should be able to make their contribution to the development of the area in real friendship and collaboration with the Arabs. There was not the slightest doubt among the Zionist leaders that what they were doing in Palestine was right, fully in accordance with the Jewish sense of justice – ‘otherwise we would never have undertaken it’ (Sokolow).
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There were discordant notes. Most official speakers at Zionist congresses stressed the high moral and intellectual qualities of the Arabs (‘moderation, diligence, purity of family life’ – Ruppin), and reiterated time and time again their desire for Arab-Jewish friendship. But these statements committed no one in particular; they were declamatory and had no practical implications. The elected representatives of Palestinian Jewry, the Temporary Council, certainly showed little initiative in this respect: a contemporary observer wrote that it did nothing to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding, which would have demonstrated the political maturity of the Jewish community.
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The Palestinian Jewish leadership was weak and ineffectual and it would no doubt have failed to achieve this aim even if it had been given far higher priority. But not all Palestinians were optimistic. Some agreed with Jabotinsky that one day perhaps the Arabs would reconcile themselves to the existence of a great and growing yishuv but there was no good reason to assume that this would happen in the near future. The Palestinians’ view was expressed by Glickson when he criticised Weizmann in 1923 for having declared that the mass of the fellaheen were friendly towards the Jews: ‘We long for that day to come – but at present these are just phrases and harmful illusions.’ Even Berl Katznelson, the much respected labour leader, was much more uncompromising in this matter than the European Zionist leaders, who, far from Palestine and its cruel realities, elaborated well-meaning schemes. Many of the Palestinians felt instinctively that there was a basic clash of interests between them and the Arabs. This is not to say that they altogether despaired of living in peace with the Arabs or expected to be in a state of perpetual war with their neighbours. But they were more likely than European Zionists to believe in a policy of force, of
faits accomplis
. In their eyes the Arabs were highly volatile, easily excitable people, but once the yishuv had grown stronger and more numerous, the Arabs would gradually accept them.

Arab Grievances

Events between 1921 and 1929 seemed to justify these assumptions: the Arabs were relatively quiet, and there were regular political and social contacts between Zionist and Arab leaders in Jerusalem, Amman, Cairo and elsewhere. According to Colonel Kisch there was abundant evidence not only of persistent efforts by the Zionist executive to reach an understanding with the Arabs, but also of the existence of a large body of moderate Arab opinion ready to follow a lead from the mandatory government.
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Kisch was a British officer with a distinguished war record, sober, unemotional, less given to outbursts than his east European colleagues, less likely to accuse the mandatory government of betrayal and bad faith at the slightest provocation. His criticism of British policy, therefore, carried a great deal of conviction: ‘I have no doubt whatever’, he wrote, ‘that had it not been for the mufti’s abuse of his immense powers and the toleration of that abuse by the government over a period of fifteen years, an Arab-Jewish understanding within the framework of the mandate would long since have been reached.’
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Kisch was referring to Haj Amin el Hussaini, scion of one of Palestine’s leading families, who had been made mufti by Sir Herbert Samuel in 1921 despite the fact that he had been prominently involved in the first wave of anti-Jewish riots. Haj Amin remained till 1937 the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs, and during most of the time had the blessing of the mandatory government, despite his extremist political activities. He bears much of the responsibility for the riots in 1929 and the civil war in 1936-9. But it is unduly optimistic to assume that but for the appointment of Haj Amin and his activities, Arab-Jewish relations would have followed a very different course. Sooner or later the extremist element would have prevailed in the Arab leadership, with or without the support of the British high commissioner.

The Arab list of grievances was a long one: Palestine was a small country, a sheikh from Beer Sheva told a British enquiry commission in 1929, it could not possibly hold the number of Jews brought into the country.
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‘There remains nothing for the Arabs in this country except to die or leave the country.’ Such alarmist declarations were not altogether novel. Similar fears had been voiced occasionally even before 1914. So long as the Turks ruled Palestine, such fears were probably not widespread or deeply rooted, but by the 1920s the situation had changed and there was general concern about the effects of Zionist settlement. There were complaints that the Zionists displaced Arab workers at the ports of Jaffa and Haifa, and from the orange groves, that the Jewish trade unions consistently followed a policy of Jewish labour only (‘Conquest of Labour’). Arab spokesmen pointed to the fact that according to the constitution of the Jewish National Fund, land once acquired could never be resold to Arabs, nor could Arabs be employed on such land. The Arab had benefited neither from the import of Jewish capital nor from the extension of social services or education.