O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  A series of pogroms in Russia just after the turn of the century sent a new wave of immigrants to Palestine. They represented the fruit of the first decade of Herzl's movement. Practical idealists, those immigrants were Zionism's first pioneers, and from their ranks would come half a century of leadership for the movement. They were men like Reuven Shari, a lawyer from the Crimea; his wife was a concert pianist. "I took my law degree and went out and dug ditches," he would recall, "and my wife took the hands that had been trained to play the concerts of Brahms and Mozart and used them to milk cows, because that was the way we could develop this land."

  Among them was a nineteen-year-old lawyer's son named David Green from Plonsk, a small Polish factory town thirty-eight miles northwest of Warsaw. He had absorbed his Zionism eavesdropping at the door of his father's study, the favorite meeting place of Plonsk's Lovers of Zion. Unlike the men who debated in his father's study, however, David Green wanted to live Zionism, not talk it.

  He lived it hard. Like so many others of his generation in Palestine, he learned at first hand the pains of hunger, malaria and exhausting physical labor struggling to reclaim the soil of the land he had sworn to develop.

  A year after he had arrived in Palestine, he made a two-and-a-half-day hike from Jaffa through the gorge of Bab el Wad to discover for himself the symbol of the cause to which he committed his life, the walls of Jerusalem. What he discovered was a Tower of Babel. At the spiritual center of Judaism the shocked young man found Jews "speaking to each other in forty different languages, half of them unable to communicate with the other half."

  Without the bond of a common language, the diverse communities of Jewry, he was persuaded, could never hope to found a modern nation. Shortly afterward, he returned to Jerusalem as an editor of a Zionist trade-union paper committed to a revival of the Hebrew language. As he finished his first editorial he stared at his own signature at the bottom of the page. There was little that was Hebrew about "Green." He thought for a moment, then he scratched out his last name and replaced it with a new one in Hebrew, the name he would carry for the rest of his life. It meant "son of a lion cub." It was Ben-Gurion.

  Partly out of a sincere sympathy for Zionism, partly in an effort to rally Jewish support for the Allies in World War I, Great Britain offered David Ben-Gurion and his fellow Zionists the first concrete opportunity to realize their dream. In a 117-word note to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the British branch of the great Jewish banking family, Arthur Balfour, Lloyd George's Foreign Secretary, promised, "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The promise, soon known as the Balfour Declaration, contained one condition: that the development of a Jewish national home did not prejudice "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The promise was of grave importance: Great Britain was, at the moment it was issued, in the process of seizing Palestine from Germany's wartime allies, the Turks. Balfour's solemn pledge was incorporated into the terms of the League of Nations mandate assigned to Britain in Palestine after World War I ended.

  Slowly at first, the national home in Palestine promised to the Jews grew. Immigration, disappointing to the Zionists in the first decade after the Balfour Declaration, leapt up with the rise of persecution in Poland and Nazi Germany, reaching a peak of sixty thousand in 1935–36. Jewish investment went along with it. In the first fifteen years of Britain's mandate, it totaled eighty million pounds sterling, almost double the British budget for the period.

  Beyond the ties of history, the promise of Britain and the beginnings of a Palestine national home, however, a ghastly tragedy had driven the Jews to demand of the United Nations a state of their own in the autumn of 1947. The end of the war had brought the Jewish people face to face with a reality so overwhelming in its horror that not even a history which seemed a catalogue of the cruelties man was capable of imposing on man had prepared them for it. It was the systematic slaughter of six million of their kind in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. One central preoccupation obsessed the Jews at the United Nations: to gather the survivors of the catastrophe into Palestine as swiftly as possible, and to construct there a society so strong and self-reliant that a similar disaster would never again menace the Jewish people. The United Nations' recognition of their right to such a state seemed to the Jews no more than just reparation for the sufferings the world had inflicted on them.

  For the Arabs, and above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.

  In Arab eyes, the Balfour Declaration had been an act of pure imperialism, a mortgaging by Britain of the future of a land to which she had no rightful claim, without any effort to consult the wishes or the desires of the Arabs who had constituted ninety-two percent of Palestine's population when the declaration was issued. For the Arabs, the Palestine conflict was the outgrowth of an era supposedly laid to rest in World War II, an era whose excesses now had to be righted: that period in which the colonial powers of Europe had felt free to dispose of the destinies of the nonwhite peoples of the Afro-Asian world.

  Like so many of those peoples, the Arabs had their claim to lay before the nations which had so long dominated their affairs. Less than a year after David Ben-Gurion had signed his first editorial in Jerusalem on the eve of World War I, seven young Arabs, two of them Palestinians, had met in Damascus to found a secret society. They gave it the seductive name Al Fatat—"Young Girl."* Its aim was the liberation of the Arab world from Turkey's Ottoman Empire. More important, it represented the first manifestation of a renascent Arab nationalism that disputed Jewish claims to Palestine for half a century.

  The Arabs too had their Balfour Declaration. Anxious to foment an Arab uprising against Germany's Turkish allies, Great Britain pledged her support to Arab claims to a vast independent state in return for an Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey. The pledge was contained in an exchange of eight letters between Britain's Resident in Egypt, Sir Henry MacMahon, and the dominant spiritual leader of the Arab world, the Sherif of Mecca.

  Remarkable for the diplomatic imprecision of their language, MacMahon's letters failed to mention the word "Palestine," but their tone left the Arabs persuaded that it was included in the area promised them for their state. In 1916, spurred by T. E. Lawrence, they launched their famous revolt.

  As they did, Britain, in secret negotiations with France, was in the process of substantially diluting the promises her Resident in Egypt had made to the Arabs. If the Ottoman Empire was to be dismembered after World War I, the French insisted on their share of the spoils. A secret treaty known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for the two men who signed it, Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and Jacques Georges-Picot for France, finally awarded to the French, without the Arabs' knowledge or consent, a "sphere of influence" in much of the area in which Britain had promised to support an independent Arab state.

  Feeling themselves betrayed by the British and the French, their claim to Palestine thwarted by the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs lived a rude awakening in the aftermath of World War I. As was perhaps inevitable, the focal point of their fury became the Zionist return to a land the Arabs felt had bee
n promised to them.

  For their part, the Jews coming to Palestine to build the national home promised them by the British tended to imagine the country in terms not unlike their Biblical image of the land. That it was already settled by an alien people prepared to dispute their claims to it often came as shock. Officially, the Arab presence and claim to the land were not recognized by the Zionist leadership for years. Herzl never mentioned the Arabs in any of his speeches to the World Zionist congresses, and he dismissed the Arab problem as unimportant in his writings.

  It was not until 1925, eight years after the Balfour Declaration, that Chaim Weizmann warned: "Palestine is not Rhodesia and 600,000 Arabs live there who . . . have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home."

  Influenced by the first prophets of Marxism, with whom they had shared the scourge of Czarist persecution, Zionism's early pioneers longed to build a state that would marry Jewish tradition and social democracy. They had transformed Zionism into something far more substantial than a religious movement and had imbued its followers with a sense of social discipline and communal responsibility vital to its later success.

  One of their fundamental concepts was the idea of a kind of redemption of the Jewish race through a return to manual labor, a flushing out of the mentality of the ghetto in the sweat of tasks long unperformed by Jews. Ditch-diggers were as important to their idea of a Jewish state as were philosophers. Determined to build a Jewish working class with a wide variety of skills, they called for Jewish labor for Jewish enterprises. The Histadrut, the Jewish trade-union organization, compelled Jewish firms to limit their hiring to Jewish workers. As the Zionists acquired land, much of it from absentee Arab landlords in Beirut, they evicted the Arab tenant farmers living on it, to make way for Jewish settlers. Those peasants displaced by one Zionist policy drifted to the cities, where they found that another Zionist policy, Histadrut's, prevented them from working in the predominantly Jewish-owned commerce and industry.

  Anxious to promote a Hebrew language and cultural revival, the Jews maintained their own highly effective school system. Through the Jewish Agency for Palestine, they managed their own political affairs independent of the Arabs. There was a tendency of the Jewish community in Palestine to act as a separate entity and, with its higher standard of living and education, to regard the Arabs as inferior.

  For the Arabs, those cultural institutions of which the Jews were so proud seemed an alien intrusion in their land. Zionist labor policies inevitably led to the creation of a new class of dislocated urban poor. The Jewish tendency to live within the framework of their own social systems, their tendency to patronize the Arabs, stirred Arab bitterness and suspicion, and helped widen the gap between the two communities.

  Half a century behind their Zionist neighbors in the development of their own nationalist aspirations, industrially and socially underdeveloped, having just emerged from centuries of repressive colonial rule, the Arabs responded to the situation simply and unsophisticatedly. They consistently refused every compromise offered them, insisting that since the Jewish claim to Palestine was invalid in the first place, any discussion of the subject would merely give it a validity it did not have. Repeatedly, their attitude, made unbending by the fanaticism of their leaders, lost them opportunities to set a limit on Jewish growth in Palestine and to define with precision their own rights there. Instead, Arab resentment periodically erupted in outbursts of violence, in 1920, in 1929, in an outright revolt against British rule in 1935–36.

  Now, bitterly opposed to the partitioning of Palestine into two separate states, the Arabs had advanced a proposal whose lack of reality reflected the stance they had adopted for three decades. It was the creation of a single, Arab state in which, they declared, the Jews would be allowed to live as a minority. To head it, they proposed a fanatic Arab political leader who had participated in Nazi Germany's slaughter of six million Jews.

  For Britain, the nation that had ruled Palestine for thirty years, the debate offered an end, however inglorious, to what had become a nightmare. Palestine, on that November afternoon two years after the end of the Second World War, was the only place on the globe where British soldiers were still dying in combat.

  Britain had been caught in Palestine between the contradictory promises she had made to Jew and Arab to ease her coming in the first place. Since the war, her persistent refusal, out of concern for Arab reaction, to allow the survivors of the Nazi holocaust to immigrate to Palestine in substantial numbers had brought her into open conflict with the Jews. So grave had the conflict become that 100,000 British soldiers, one for every six Jews, were now required to maintain a precarious order in Palestine. Unable to resolve the problem herself, she had finally cast it into the lap of the United Nations.

  None of the nations supporting partition as a solution to the Palestine dilemma had been as forceful in its advocacy of the plan at Flushing Meadow as the United States. Feeling the intense pressures of the most numerous and most influential Jewish community in the world, America's lawmakers had let burst a flood tide of petitions, declarations and statements in favor of partition and the unrestricted immigration of displaced Jews into Palestine. It was an ironic comment, however, on the hypocritical aspects of America's Palestine policy that while the General Assembly's debate was evoking the misery of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, the United States Congress was refusing to allow its own refugee relief bill out of committee, and that during the first eight months of 1946 the same American legislators who were so freely urging a quarter of a million Jewish immigrants on Palestine's 1.2 million Arabs had allowed exactly 4,767 refugees, barely the number aboard the illegal Palestine immigrant ship the Exodus, onto America's promised shores.

  By direct order of the White House, the United States had exerted every form of pressure available to it on those nations in the United Nations opposed to partition or hesitant in their support of it. President Truman had personally warned the United States delegate to the United Nations, Herschel Johnson, to "damn well deliver the partition vote or there will be hell to pay." His adviser Bernard Baruch had shocked France's United Nations delegate Alexandre Parodi with a blunt threat to cut United States aid if France opposed partition.

  Despite those efforts, the supporters of partition were faced with the prospect of defeat on the day originally set for the General Assembly vote, Wednesday, November 26, 1947. A two-thirds majority was required to pass the resolution. To offset the votes of the Arab-Moslem nations alone, the leaders of the Jewish Agency, representing the Zionist movement, needed twenty-two votes, more than a third of the General Assembly. For each additional vote against partition, they needed two in favor. Calculating the probable votes of the Assembly's fifty-seven member nations that Wednesday morning, Moshe Sharett,* the Agency's "Foreign Minister," warned his followers, "It's too dangerous. We must stall."

  After waiting two thousand years for a state, the Jewish people had now to find a way to wait a little longer, to find the additional time needed to secure the votes which would assure partition's passage. The tactic that Sharett chose was a filibuster which finally forced an adjournment of the Wednesday session before the vote could be called. The respite they won gave the Jewish Agency leadership not only an extra night but a Thanksgiving recess as well in which to muster their missing votes.

  During that crucial interlude, four nations opposed to partition, Greece, Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines, were subjected to a deluge of diplomatic pressures and menaces. The United States, again acting on the instigation of the White House, threw the full impact of its tremendous prestige behind the Jewish cause. Two justices of the United States Supreme Court personally cabled Philippine President Carlos Rojas warning that "the Philippines will isolate millions and millions of American friends and supporters if they continue in their efforts to vote against partition." Twenty-six senators cabled Rojas and urged him to change his nation's vote. The Philippine ambassador was summoned to a blunt
but intensive briefing at the White House. Finally Rojas ordered his delegation "in the higher national interest" to switch its vote from against to for partition.

  Threatened with a Jewish boycott of his firm's products, Harvey Firestone of the Firestone Rubber Company intervened personally with William Tubman, President of Liberia. If Liberia didn't change her vote, Tubman was told, the company would have to reconsider plans to expand its rubber acreage there. Senior statesman Adolf A. Berle's help was enlisted in bringing pressure to bear on the government of Haiti. The Greeks were torn between pressures from an ally on whose aid Greece was increasingly dependent in prosecuting a civil war and fears of reprisals on the large Greek colonies scattered through the Arab countries.

  Still, as the first delegates began to file into their improvised assembly hall for the final vote Saturday afternoon, November 29, the issue remained in doubt. Long before the first black limousines drew up in front of the massive old skating rink, the singing, chanting crowds had built up in the streets outside, waving Zionist banners and billboards.

  Slowly, the three hundred seats reserved for the delegates began to fill up. The stately figure of Emir Faisal ibn Abd al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia, moving with solemn grace in his black-and-gold abayah, led the Arab delegations to their places. So crowded was the assembly hall that several members of the Jewish Agency delegation had been forced to squeeze into the press gallery to watch the proceedings. Missing from their ranks was the patrician scientist who was their leader, Dr. Chaim Weizmann. The elder statesman of Zionism for a quarter of a century, Weizmann had been the principal artisan of the negotiations which had led Britain to the Balfour Declaration. His whole life had been a voyage to this moment. Yet when three young colleagues had called for him at his hotel suite, he had been too overwhelmed with emotion to leave. Clasping the door for support, Dr. Chaim Weizmann had begun to weep.