by Seth Lipsky
As the ship was not anchored far offshore, I could see the crowd of relatives and the Jews who had come to welcome their dear ones. A huge iron gate separates Jaffa port from the city.… A few [relatives] climbed on the roofs of the low office buildings while others jostled around the gate. Almost everyone was dressed in white because it is still hot here, like New York in July, although the air is better and it is even quite cool in the shade.…
The sea was a lovely azure color, like the sky. Tel Aviv could be seen, far off, with its low white buildings and before it a strip of yellow ground separating it from the sea. The cluster of old grey houses on the seashore is Jaffa, which is, so to speak, the forepart of Tel Aviv. A great British warship stood in the port, and eight other ships were anchored alongside each other. The harbor lighters, rowed by Arabs, plied incessantly between the ships and the shore.
At the time of Cahan’s visit, there were in Palestine about 122,000 Jews, who represented 16 percent of the total population of 757,000. His arrival coincided with the peak of the immigration wave known as the Fourth Aliyah, which began in 1924 and ended in 1928. This wave brought some 80,000 Jews to Palestine, mostly from the middle class, mostly small business owners escaping eastern European anti-Semitism. They were very different from the idealistic Labor Zionist agricultural workers whom Cahan had encountered at his way station in Brody more than forty years earlier. When an economic crisis rocked the Jewish community in Palestine in 1926–27, some 23,000 Jews left. But the ones who stayed established important small businesses and light industries. They were most definitely not socialists of any kind. The battle lines were beginning to be drawn over the political character of the Jewish community in Palestine.
Five days before Cahan’s arrival, Davar had carried an interview with him by a leader of the World Union of Poale Zion, a Marxist Zionist organization, who had buttonholed Cahan at the Labor Socialist International meeting in Marseilles, in an effort to smoke out his politics. Cahan told the leader: “I treat Zionism in an entirely non-partisan way. I do not believe in it, but there is no hatred for it in my heart.” He said he “can appreciate the idealism of many Zionists, who interest me individually. But Zionism is one thing and migration to Palestine is something else; the migration is an undeniable fact.”
If Cahan seemed to be weighing his words, the fact is that his trip to Palestine had stirred up quite a debate among the members of the Forward’s editorial board. Three opposed the journey entirely. “They feared that my journey would be interpreted as acquiescence to the Zionists,” Cahan recalled. “If you are genuine socialists,” he retorted, “why are you afraid of Zionism?” Three others favored the trip, two of them talking “like full-fledged Zionists,” and one admitting that “for forty years he had been a Zionist at heart.” Cahan considered himself part of a group of “practical men” who “expressed the view that it was ridiculous to object to the journey” because of how it might be seen. But Goldstein believes that “the dissenters seem to have been correct in seeing Cahan’s journey as a public act, with all that this signified, and not the private affair of some journalist, as Cahan liked to present it.”
From the moment he arrived in Palestine and began filing his stories, Cahan asserted that he was operating without preconceptions and that he would report the truth back to the readers of the Forward. “I came to Palestine with that single-minded resolution to describe all shades of life and each and every corner honestly,” he wrote. “I wish to find out everything so as to get deep down into the problems and understand the situation correctly.” He insisted that he had not been among the socialist haters of Zionism and that he “had migrated to America before the Bund was founded” and so had “played no part in its battles against Zionism.” He added that “the hatred by Bund members for Zionism” was “strange” to him and “was certainly not relevant to the American reality.” Cahan was certainly not being two-faced about it, but he was glossing over the Forward’s long-established condescension to Zionism. Nor was he shy about admitting his lack of knowledge about Palestine. He was unfamiliar with the work of Yosef Haim Brenner, for example, the Hebrew author and Zionist who had been killed by Arab rioters in Jaffa in 1921. And the names Joseph Trumpeldor‡ and Tel Hai meant little to him.
As he journeyed through Palestine, Cahan positively kvelled over the agricultural settlements and other achievements of the labor and socialist movements. On a four-day journey through “the Jewish settlements of the new kind,” he took evening and morning meals with members of kibbutzim and devoted “many hours to observation, to reflection, to discussion, and to debate.” His tour included five kibbutzim and also a few moshavim (collective communities in which farms or plots are privately held). One moshav was operated by Hasidim from Yablonka, in Belarus, and Cahan met with the Yablonka Rebbe. It was important, Cahan reported, “to clarify to the American reader that when one speaks of the ‘communist settlements’ these are not to be identified with the Bolshevik communists.” A “handful” of Bolsheviks had tried to “split the Histadrut” but had “failed abysmally.”
A reception was held for Cahan at Ein Harod, a six-year-old kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. Cahan called it beautiful. “I always found it difficult to tear my gaze away from the scenery,” he wrote, “the fields, the mountains, the flocks of sheep pasturing on the land, the camels moving slowly with their cautious and graceful gait.”
At the Ein Harod reception, Cahan said, “I’ll tell you the truth. This evening is one of the happiest evenings I have spent in all my sixty-five years. For this alone my journey would have been worthwhile. You are bringing true the best of my dreams and the dreams of my friends of forty years ago. I feel that I am surrounded by saints and pure people. I respect you. I embrace and kiss each one of you; with all my heart I am with you.”
Cahan was not yet, he told his readers, in a position to finalize his views on what chance for success the Jewish National Home in Palestine had, or on what the character of this home was to be, but he had to admit “to the existence of the elevation of spirit.… The enthusiasm present in most people far outstrips anything I read or imagined.”
Cahan sent back nearly two dozen dispatches from Palestine. He gave readers a glimpse of the range of people he was seeing (“factory owners, businessmen, and bankers … I was asking questions and hearing answers from one of the biggest silk industrialists in Tel Aviv”). And he displayed a keen insight into the conflicts among the various factions who were struggling to create, for the first time in almost two thousand years, a Jewish infrastructure in Palestine:
Generally it may be said that a quiet struggle is taking place here between two trends. One represents the finest idealism and the loftiest goals of the workers and of progressive nationalism. The other is material in nature. This is a conflict between the pragmatic-economic world on the one hand and numerous workers’ and Zionist factors on the other. The idealistic-ideological aspirations have taken on the character of a sort of new Jewish religion.
The future of Palestine lies in industry, with attempts being made to establish it in Tel Aviv, and in the cooperative agricultural settlements, which, I was told, are developing extraordinarily in the Jezreel Valley and the Haifa area. Perhaps in the future a way will be found to merge the two tendencies into a single firm trend.
Cahan also reported that he met criticism from some Jews in Palestine over the Forward’s support for Jewish settlement projects in the Soviet Crimean and Ukrainian republics. In the early 1920s, more than 150,000 Jews were resettled in hundreds of agricultural colonies in Crimea and Southern Ukraine, funded in part by the American Joint Distribution Committee. Cahan quoted one man who attacked the JDC “because it raised millions for the Crimea settlement instead of Palestine.” Others in the conversation silenced the man, but Cahan ended his dispatch by quoting a woman who said that in Russia, “apart from the oppression and despotism, it is impossible to bear the constant fear of the Cheka.§ You’re afraid of your own shadow and you can go mad w
ith this endless terror.”
Cahan sent a dispatch on Jews and Arabs at the Tel Aviv Market, another on industry and the future of Palestine, and one that he called “All Kinds of People and Parties in Palestine.” In the latter he wrote that “Zionist chauvinism is so strong that it has become something like a superstition” and noted that “free thinking has no meaning here, and revolutionary aims are denied everywhere.” He wrote that “the fire of Zionist nationalism has melted all the class and ideological conflicts” and rhetorically asked, “In such a situation, what meaning can there be to declarations on principles, or class struggle, or social revolution?”
Cahan admitted to being slightly disappointed in the socialist comrades he encountered. “When you tell a revolutionary in Palestine that you are going to write about the greed of the property owners in Tel Aviv, for example, or about the depressed economic condition of the workers in Palestine, he finds himself in a quandary. As a socialist he has to insist that you do write about these matters, but as a Zionist he is afraid that to do so may harm the endeavor in Palestine.” The author of The Rise of David Levinsky, who had “exposed” the Jewish businessman and yet muted his exposé with Jewish sympathy and a sense of peoplehood, no doubt understood the divided impulse. “In the end,” Cahan concluded, referring to the bemused revolutionary, “he is first of all a Zionist, and all the other ‘isms’ come only afterwards.”
Cahan made a point of reporting that he found many dissenters from the official Zionist party line, people who came to him privately after official meetings. Some of them were clearly just cranks or troublemakers, but others he felt were making important points. The majority of Jews in Palestine, he insisted in several articles, were actually indifferent to Zionism and were simply seeking economic opportunity and freedom from persecution. Some of his criticisms have a contemporary ring. New arrivals were “kissing the sand dunes of Tel Aviv” only to begin, a few weeks later, to joke about their “initial enthusiasm” and to attack the Histadrut labor exchange, “claiming favoritism in giving out jobs” while they were “forced to tramp the streets searching for work until their feet were swollen.” But his experiences in the Jewish homeland were obviously affecting him deeply; he saw “many dedicated youngsters who withstood this ordeal. I saw some who had gone hungry for weeks, and they suffered like martyrs. Their idealism, their loyalty to Zion, gives them strength.” In one early dispatch he wrote, “I can’t help it … I must marvel at the heroic fire that burns in them.”
One individual who burned with such fire was David Ben-Gurion. The thirty-nine-year-old general secretary of the Histadrut worked hard to win over the American editor, spending hours with him, answering his questions about kibbutzim and the Histadrut and following his daily travels with great attentiveness. Ben-Gurion was well aware of the Forward’s influence. “The great public draws its ideas mainly from the Forward,” Ben-Gurion had written in his diary back in 1920. After reading Cahan’s first dispatch from Palestine, Ben-Gurion wrote, with evident pleasure and relief, that “even these few words will have a great impact in America.” Cahan was clearly dazzled by Ben-Gurion and described him for Forward readers as “a genuine labor leader and not one of the dime-store variety (three for a groschen) … a man of strong character.” This last phrase Ben-Gurion proudly recorded in Hebrew in his diary, underlining it for good measure.
After his return to New York in November, Cahan continued to publish articles about his visit. In “Flowering of Palestine Depends on the Welfare of the Arabs,” he noted that “the Arab question is closely connected with the economic problem of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.” The problem could be solved, he said, by “providing a living for the Muslim population. Wider economic opportunities and higher wages for farmers and workers, as well as more business for merchants, with the Jews playing a leading role in the improvement of conditions—this will shatter the anti-Semitic propaganda.” While he was in Palestine, he had made a point of meeting with the secretary of what he called the “anti-Jewish Committee of the Effendis.” He described their anti-Semitic propaganda as “obviously a constant hazard.” But following the lead of the still strongly pro-British Labor Zionist leadership, he wrote that “as long as Great Britain retains the so-called Mandate I believe that there is no cause for concern. The leaders of the anti-Jewish propaganda, from their viewpoint, are very serious, more than I credited them. But on the other hand, my stay in Palestine eradicated any belief I had in the virtues of their cause from a moral perspective.”
Cahan also weighed in on the ideological differences between the Labor Zionists and the Revisionist Zionists. He called the latter “extremist chauvinists.” The Jews deserve a home in Palestine, he wrote, “not because this was once their home, but principally because of their splendid work and self-sacrifice, by means of which they are seeking to turn barren tracts into fertile land, and the miserable, decayed, and primitive existence that characterizes the country into a land where life is in keeping with modern civilization.” The future of the Jews in Palestine, he argued, depended on their success, and rather presciently, he predicted that if they succeed in realizing the major part of their program, “then their sense of self-reliance will not be damaged even if Britain leaves Palestine to its fate.”
In 1923, two years before Cahan made his trip to Palestine, Vladimir Jabotinsky—a Russian Jewish journalist, soldier, novelist, and poet and the most controversial of the Zionist visionaries—published in Berlin, in the Russian-language journal Rassvyet, an essay about the Zionist enterprise, “The Iron Wall.”‖ Both Jabotinsky and Cahan were literary men touched by history, and both were caught between political and literary careers. But the difference in their political worldviews was striking. Cahan’s was the worldview of socialism, labor activism, and anti-Communism, while Jabotinsky’s was Zionism and the fate of the Jews of Europe. Although the issue pulled Jabotinsky away from his literary career, he used his skills as a writer and orator to marshal a movement.
“The Iron Wall” would become his most enduring essay about the Zionist enterprise. Many considered him an enemy of the Arabs, but he denied it at the outset, saying that his emotional relationship to Arabs was, as it was to all other peoples, “polite indifference.” The expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine was “utterly impossible,” he wrote. “There will always be two nations in Palestine.” He identified with the idea—endorsed at the Third All-Russian Zionist Convention, held in 1906 in Helsinki—that bringing Jews to Palestine was not the purpose of the Jewish state but the precondition for establishing it.
Jabotinsky ridiculed the idea that there could be a “voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future.” History showed no example of a country being settled “with the consent of the native population.” The inhabitants “have always stubbornly resisted … whether the colonists behaved decently or not.” He rejected the assessement, made by some, that “the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine, in return for cultural and economic advantages.” On the contrary, “we may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling prairies. To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion.”
This “Arabophile” view reflected, he said, “a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.” Some individual Arabs might “take bribes,” he suggested, bu
t “every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” An Arab editor had said he believed that “Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab.” But a Jewish majority and a Jewish state would become inevitable, the editor went on to say, “and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews.… Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.”
So, Jabotinsky concluded, there was “no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached” with the Arabs. Hence “those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say ‘non’ and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” He denied that an agreement with Arabs is impossible—only that “what is impossible is a voluntary agreement.” And then he wrote the famous words: “As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders whose watchword is ‘Never!’ And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity.”
