A History of Zionism (44 page)

The Zionists dismissed these arguments as of no substance or consequence. It is a moot point whether there was any direct connection between Jewish immigration and settlement and the situation of the Arabs. Between 1924 and 1926 almost fifty thousand new immigrants entered the country, yet these were peaceful years in Arab Jewish relations, whereas the riots of 1929 followed a period during which the number of Jewish emigrants from Palestine had actually exceeded the number of new immigrants. But 1925-6 had been years of prosperity which were followed by the slump and the widespread unemployment of 1927-8. Arab wages were twice or three times as high in Palestine as in Syria or Iraq, but Arab workers were likely to compare their income and standard of living not with those of their compatriots in other countries, but with the considerably higher wages paid to Jewish workers. ‘Together we shall rise, or go under’, Ben Gurion declared in 1924, drawing attention to the discrepancy in wages and working hours between Arab and Jewish workers. The Arabs were working ten to twelve hours a day and earned fifteen piasters; Jewish workers had won the eight-hour working day and a daily wage of thirty piasters.
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Admittedly it was a complex situation. If Jewish orange grove owners refused to employ Arabs they were bound to be charged with chauvinism, but if they employed Arabs they were accused of exploiting cheap labour. When the Histadrut, the federation of Jewish trade unions, attempted to organise Arab labour it was attacked for interfering in Arab politics. When it refrained from doing so it was charged with wilfully neglecting the interests of the Arab worker. When the Histadrut Arab-language newspaper called on the Arab workers to make common cause with the Jews against western imperialism, against gunboat policy and economic exploitation, it was denounced by Arabs to the mandatory government for Communist incitement.
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If it refrained from attacking imperialism this was interpreted as a sign that the Zionists were utterly dependent on British bayonets.

The ‘Communist peril’ was frequently invoked by Arab spokesmen in the 1920s and 1930s. Arab opposition to Zionism was said to have been aroused largely by the ‘Bolshevik principles’ of the Zionist immigrants. The official Palestine Arab delegation which went to London in 1922 to demand the abrogation of the Balfour declaration protested specifically against the influx of alien Jews, ‘many of them of a Bolshevik revolutionary type’. M.M.M. Togannam wrote: ‘The Arabs were irritated … by the Bolshevik principles which the new arrivals bring with them … this has produced an effect on the population not by the success of its propaganda but by the genuine uneasiness which it inspired among the Arabs, especially the poorer classes’.
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Jamal Hussaini, secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, declared in his testimony before the royal commission in 1937: ‘As to the Communistic principles and ideas of Jewish immigrants, most repugnant to the religion, customs and ethical principles of this country, which are imported and disseminated, I need not dwell upon them as these ideas are well known to have been imported by the Jewish community’.
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The argument that Arab opposition to Zionism is caused by the right-wing, reactionary and imperialist character of the movement is of comparatively recent date, appearing first in the late 1950s.

The basic Arab fears were, of course, political in character. Hence their insistent demand for representative government. But on this the Zionist movement was quite unwilling to compromise, for it would have resulted in the cessation of immigration and settlement. According to the official Zionist formula developed in the 1920s, Palestine belonged on the one hand to the Arabs living there, and on the other to the whole Jewish people, not just to that part of it resident in Palestine. Even left-wing Zionists such as Kaplanski maintained that the Arabs had not the sole right of possession. From the Socialist point of view, he wrote, the Jews also had a very good claim – the right of the only landless people of the earth, the right of the dispossessed masses.
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Kaplanski and other left-wing Zionists regarded the conflict as largely artificial, for in their view the labouring Arab masses could only benefit from Jewish colonisation. Inasmuch as the Arab national movement was anti-Zionist it was simply misguided, Kaplanski maintained. The struggle of the Arab ruling class for national independence was a convenient cloak behind which they exploited the toiling Arab masses. There was no basic difference between this approach and the official view of Mapai as developed by such ideologists as Berl Katznelson: the Arab national movement was not truly anti-imperialist, it lacked deep social roots, it was basically xenophobic in inspiration, and it was rooted in the desire of the native middle class and intelligentsia to take the place of the foreigners who monopolised the leading positions in government, national economy, and society in general.

This raises an issue of wider significance: the almost constant misjudgment of the Arab national movement by most Zionist leaders. They were firmly convinced that the broad masses of the Arab population had no real interest in politics, that their main concern was to improve their standard of living. In view of their backwardness and ignorance these masses were not able to form a judgment of their own and were therefore easy prey for ambitious politicians. The Zionist leaders were forever seeing a hidden hand behind the anti-Zionist movement. French and British agents were blamed in the early 1920s, Italian and German fascism in the 1930s. The riots of 1921 and 1929 were explained in terms of religious fanaticism in the usual antisemitic tradition: was it a coincidence that the old yishuv was among the main victims of the 1929 attacks, men and women from Hebron and Safed born and brought up side by side with the Arabs and on friendly terms with them? Even the more sophisticated Zionist ideologists were usually inclined to deny that the Arabs had been able to develop a national consciousness. Arab attacks were described as mere acts of theft and murder carried out by criminal elements among the Arab population or by a mob incited by agitators devoid of moral scruples.
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History was in a way repeating itself: European Zionism had criticised the ‘assimilationists’, not without justice, for their inability to analyse antisemitism objectively, referring instead to the evil character and base personal motives of its advocates. And just as the assimilationist Jews were inherently incapable of making an objective assessment of antisemitism as a political and social phenomenon, so the Zionists were unable to understand and explain Arab nationalism realistically and unemotionally. It was not uncommon for Zionist extremists to describe the Arab rioters as ‘the scum from Hebron, pederasts from Nablus, bastards, hooligans and gangsters from Jaffa. The Mosque of Omar where they congregated was transformed into a murderer’s den.’
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There was admittedly a great deal of provocation: Palestinian Arab newspapers at the time fairly regularly reprinted the standard propaganda material from European antisemitic newspapers.
Miraat ash Shark
(to give but one example) reported that Jews were distributing poisoned sweets, chocolates and dried figs in the Arab markets to kill Arab children.
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Among the very few Zionists who kept a relatively calm and detached outlook on the Arab national movement were A.A. Aordon, the apostle of Tolstoyan Socialism, and David Ben Gurion. Gordon saw nothing surprising in the fact that the Arab movement was headed by effendis, bourgeois and intelligentsia. These social groups had, after all, provided the leadership of national movements during their early phases almost everywhere. But did this imply that the Arab national movement lacked legitimacy? Only doctrinaire Socialists could expect that the Arab working class would eventually join Labour Zionism in the struggle against the effendis.
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In Ben Gurion’s view the one decisive criterion was whether a national movement could enlist mass support. The Arab national movement did have such support and that was all that mattered.
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Ben Gurion had for a long time given much thought to the Arab question. Mention has been made of his opposition to the concept of a population transfer: such a course he saw as reactionary and Utopian, quite apart from the fact that it was morally reprehensible.
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Paraphrasing Dostoievsky, he said that Zionism did not have the moral right to harm one single Arab child even if it could realise all its aspirations at that price.
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Ben Gurion maintained that there could be no common language with the effendis, in whose eyes Labour Zionists were both the national and the class enemy. He implicitly criticised Weizmann and the Zionist leadership for having tried the ‘short and easy way’ to reach agreement with the effendis and the dictators. Jewish Socialists had to choose the longer and more difficult road which would lead them to the Arab workers.
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But even Ben Gurion’s attitude towards the Arab national movement lacked consistency. He acknowledged that it was a real political force even though it lacked a positive social content; each people has the national movement it deserves, he observed on one occasion.

Ben Gurion, then, thought that political agreement with its present leaders was impossible. But did he believe that an understanding would have been possible with leaders who really represented the desires and interests of the masses? Would a more progressive Arab leadership have been better disposed towards Zionism? Ben Gurion was on the whole more optimistic than most of his colleagues with regard to the prospects of an understanding with the Arabs, and his attitude did not basically change during the 1930s. When Moshe Shertok claimed in 1936 that the attempts to reach an agreement with the Arabs should continue, but that there was room for scepticism, Ben Gurion replied: ‘We must not be sceptical. We ought to believe that tomorrow there will be an agreement with the Arabs – and to act accordingly.’
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The very same month (June 1936) Ben Gurion wrote in a private letter that there was perhaps only one chance in ten of reaching agreement with the Arabs; even the views of an optimist like Ben Gurion were subject to sudden and violent change. It was the official policy of the Zionist executive throughout the 1920s not to enter into political discussions with the Arabs, but as Colonel Kisch noted in his diary in 1923, to ‘get a strong Arab party to work with us on the basis of economic cooperation, leaving the question of the political régime out of account’.
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Such an Arab party did not exist, nor was it likely to emerge in the given circumstances. Most Zionists underrated the political awareness of the Arab population. The Shaw commission was more realistic in this respect, noting that the Arab villagers and fellaheen were probably more politically minded than many of the people of Europe, and that their interest was real and personal. There were at the time no fewer than fourteen Arab newspapers, and there was someone in every village to read from the papers to the gatherings of those who were illiterate: ‘During the long seasons of the year when the soil cannot be tilled, the villagers, having no alternative occupation, discuss politics, and it is not unusual for part of the address in the mosques on Friday to be devoted to political affairs.’
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The Zionists were mistaken in belittling the degree of political consciousness of the Arab national movement and its political effectiveness. Their background was European and they were accustomed to measure national movements by the standards of the
risorgimento
and Masaryk, or at the very least, Pilsudski. But there was no reason to assume that national movements in backward countries would be liberal and democratic in their political orientation. Religious fanaticism and reactionary ideologies were likely to shape their character. For all that, a movement such as the Arab Palestinian awakening and its resistance to Zionism was national in character. There were conflicting class interests between effendis and fellaheen but there was also a feeling of national solidarity which Zionism tended always to underrate.

The Zionist movement did not make great efforts throughout the 1920s to influence the Arab community. Only with much delay was an Arab department established in the Jewish Agency: the publication of Arab language leaflets was left for a long time to the Communists. But it is difficult to see, even with the benefit of hindsight, that greater efforts to enlighten the Arab public about Zionism would have done much good. There was no misunderstanding between Jews and Arabs, as Weizmann and others so often claimed. Nor was it true, as many asserted, that the tension between the two peoples was mainly the fault of the Turks, and later the British in their pursuit of a policy of
divide et impera.
The Turks and the British can be criticised on many counts, but neither their sins of commission nor those of omission were of decisive importance. Having underrated Arab resistance to the Balfour Declaration, the British authorities would have only welcomed any Zionist initiative towards integration into the Arab world.
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Brit Shalom

The members of the
Brit Shalom
were among those most concerned about the Arab problem and its potential repercussions. This group, which had supporters outside Palestine as well, came into being in Jerusalem in late 1925, and its beginnings can be traced even further back. Among the first to sound the tocsin was Judah Magnes, the American Reform rabbi who became the first president of the Hebrew university. He had been unhappy about the Balfour Declaration from the outset. The peace conference, he said at a meeting in New York in 1919, had no right to give any land to any people. He feared that the Zionists would be regarded from now on as interlopers and invaders, and that the support they received from an imperialist power would in time be a heavy burden.
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