History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Other Jewish leaders had different priorities. During the 1920s, the great political force emerging in Israel was David Ben Gurion. For him what mattered most was the political and economic nature of the Zionist society and the state it would create. He came from Plonsk in Russian Poland and, like many thousands of clever young Ostjuden, he believed that the ‘Jewish question’ could never be solved within a capitalist framework. The Jews themselves had to return to their collectivist roots. Most Jewish socialists in Russia went in a Marxist-internationalist direction, arguing that Jewishness was simply an outmoded consequence of a dying religion and a capitalist-bourgeois society, and would disappear along with them. Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924), an early socialist Zionist, insisted that the Jews were a separate people with their own destiny but argued it could only be achieved in a co-operative, collectivist state: therefore the national home must be socialist from the start. Ben Gurion took this side of the argument. His father, Avigdor Gruen, was a strong Zionist who had his son educated at a modernized Hebrew school and with private tutors who taught him secular subjects. Ben Gurion at various times called himself a Marxist but for him, as a result of his upbringing, the Bible, not Das Kapital, was the book of life—though he treated it as a secular history and guide. He too was a Jewish prodigy: but one whose tremendous will, passion and energy flowed into activism, not study. At fourteen he was running a Zionist youth group. At seventeen he was an active member of the Zionist workers’ organization, the Po’ale Zion. At the age of twenty he was a settler in Erez Israel, a member of the party’s central committee and a formulator of its first political platform in October 1906.

  As a young man, Ben Gurion moved around the international scene. He lived in the Jewish community in Salonika, in Istanbul and in Egypt. He spent much of the First World War in New York, organizing the He-Halutz bureau which steered potential settlers towards Palestine, though he also served in the Jewish Legion. Yet in all this activity three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land; ‘the settlement of the land is the only true Zionism, all else being self-deception, empty verbiage and merely a pastime’.47 Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework. Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society must be the Hebrew language.

  Ben Gurion never deviated from these three principles. But the political instruments with which he sought to implement them varied. This was to be a Zionist characteristic. Over the past century, Zionist political parties have undergone constant mutations, and no attempt will be made here to trace them in detail. Ben Gurion in particular was to be a notorious creator and divider of parties. In 1919 he opened the founding conference of Ahdut ha-Avudah. Ten years later (1930) he merged it, with the political wing of Po’ale Zion, into Mapai, the Zionist Labour Party. More solid and permanent was the Histadrut, the Zionist trade union movement, of which he became secretary-general in 1921. He turned it into something much more than a federation of trade unions. In accordance with his principles, he made it into an agent of settlement, an active promoter of agricultural and industrial projects, which it financed and owned, and thus in time a major land- and property-owner, a central pillar of the Zionist-socialist establishment. It was during the 1920s, indeed, that Ben Gurion created the essential institutional character of what was to become the Zionist state. But this took his time and energy, and though the object of all his efforts was ultimately to accelerate immigration, that was not the immediate consequence. The infrastructure was taking shape, but the people to inhabit it were slow to arrive.

  That was the overriding concern of Jabotinsky. His absolute priority was to get the maximum numbers of Jews into Palestine at the earliest possible moment, so that they could be organized politically and militarily to take over the state. Of course it was right, as Weizmann said, to push forward specific educational and economic projects. But numbers must come first. It was right too, as Ben Gurion urged, to settle the land. But numbers must come first. Jabotinsky treated with scorn the notion, held strongly by Weizmann and Ben Gurion, that they should distinguish between types of settlers. Ben Gurion wanted the chalutzim, the pioneers, willing to do the back-breaking manual work, to get away from any dependence on Arab labour. Both he and Weizmann were hostile to the religious wing of the Zionists, who founded the Mizrachi (‘spiritual centre’) Party in 1902, and who moved their operations to Palestine in 1920. The Mizrachi began to build up their own network of schools and institutions, in parallel with the secular Zionists, and to run their own immigration campaigns. In Weizmann’s view, Mizrachi was encouraging the wrong type of Jewish immigrant: Jews from the ghettos, especially from Poland, who did not want to work on the land but to settle in Tel Aviv, create capitalist concerns, and-if they were smart-engage in land speculation.

  In 1922 Churchill, who was always pro-Zionist, ended the ban on immigration. But his White Paper, published that year, insisted, for the first time, that immigration could be unrestricted but must reflect ‘the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals’. In practice, this meant Jews could get settlement visas if they could show $2,500, and it was Weizmann’s contention that, in consequence, the capitalist, Mizrachi-type of immigrant was predominating. Jabotinsky thought this of secondary importance. Numbers had to come first. He was not content to see Weizmann and the British government manage matters at their own pace, to ensure that Jewish Palestine was a nation of chalutzim even if it took hundreds of years to create it. He wanted rapid growth, and it must be said, in retrospect, that he had a stronger instinct for ugly realities than either of the other two.

  Jabotinsky was not prepared to accept British management of immigration at all. He wanted this to be the exclusive concern of Jewish policy-makers, who in his view should be moving towards setting up state institutions as a matter of urgency. On these grounds he left the Zionist executive in 1923 and two years later he founded the Union of Zionist-Revisionists to use the full resources of Jewish capitalism to bring to Palestine ‘the largest number of Jews within the shortest period of time’. He attracted an enormous following in eastern Europe, especially in Poland, where the Revisionist militant youth wing, Betar—of which the young Menachem Begin became the organizer—wore uniforms, drilled and learned to shoot. The object was to achieve the Jewish state in one sudden, irresistible act of will.

  In fact, all three Jewish leaders overestimated the actual willingness of Jews to emigrate to Palestine during the 1920s. After the turmoil of the immediate post-war years, especially the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine, the Jews like everyone else shared in the prosperity of the decade. The urge to take ships to Haifa abated. The riots in 1920 and 1921 were no encouragement. During the 1920s the Jewish population of Palestine did, indeed, double, to 160,000. So did the number of agricultural colonies. By the end of the decade there were 110 of them, employing 37,000 Jewish workers and farming 175,000 acres. But the total number of immigrants was only 100,000 of whom 25 per cent did not stay. So the net rate of immigration was a mere 8,000 a year. Indeed, in 1927, the peak year of twenties prosperity, only 2,713 came and more than 5,000 left. In 1929, the watershed year in the world economy, arrivals and departures just about balanced.

  Therein lay a great missed opportunity, and the makings of tragedy. During the calm years, when Palestine was relatively open, the Jews would not come. From 1929 their economic and political position, and still more their security, began to deteriorate all over Europe. But as their anxiety to go to Palestine increased, so did the obstacles to their entering it. There was another Arab pogrom in 1929, in which over 150 Jews were killed. The British response, as before, was to tighten immigration. The Labour Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, was unsympathetic: his White Paper of 1930 was the first, unmistakable sign of anti-Zionism in a British state paper. His wife, Beatrice Webb, told Weizmann: ‘I can’t understand why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed in
Palestine. As many are killed every week in London in traffic accidents and nobody pays any attention.’48 The British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was more sensitive. Thanks to him, immigration was resumed.

  Now there were hundreds of thousands of increasingly frightened Jews trying to get in. But with each wave of Jewish immigration, the wave of Arab reaction became more violent. Jabotinsky considered 30,000 a year as satisfactory. The target was passed in 1934, when 40,000 arrived. The following year it rose by more than 50 per cent to 62,000. Then, in April 1936, came a major Arab rising, and for the first time the British began to face the ugly truth that the mandate was breaking down. A commission under Lord Peel, reporting on 7 July 1937, recommended that Jewish immigration be reduced to 12,000 places a year, and restrictions be placed on land purchases too. But it also suggested a three-way partition. The coastal strip, Galilee and the Jezreel valley should be formed into a Jewish state. The Judaean Hills, the Negev and Ephraim should constitute an Arab state. The British would run a mandatory enclave from Jerusalem through Lydda and Ramleh to Jaffa. The Arabs rejected this with fury and staged another revolt in 1937. The next year the pan-Arab conference in Cairo adopted a policy whereby all Arab states and communities pledged themselves to take international action to prevent the further development of the Zionist state. The British dropped partition and, after the failure of the Tripartite Conference in London early in 1939, which the Arabs rendered hopeless from the start, the Balfour Declaration was quietly buried too. A new White Paper, published in May, stipulated that 75,000 more Jews should be admitted over five years, and thereafter none at all, except with Arab agreement. At the same time, Palestine should proceed to gradual independence. By now there were 500,000 Jews in Palestine. But the Arabs were in a large majority still. Hence if the British plan proceeded, the Arabs would control any state that emerged, and the existing Jews would be expelled.

  This tragic series of events brought corresponding strains within the Zionist movement as its various factions divided on how to respond to them. In 1931 Weizmann was driven from the presidency of the World Zionist Congress, at the instigation of the Mizrachi. The same year, in Palestine, elections to the Zionist Assembly of Delegates showed a three-way split, with Mapai taking thirty-one out of seventy-one seats, the Revisionists sixteen and Mizrachi five. The division spread to the military arm: the Revisionists and Mizrachi, and other non-socialist Zionists, broke away from the Haganah to form a competitive force, the Irgun.

  The fundamental breach, between Mapai on the one hand and the Revisionists on the other, which was to dominate the politics of the Zionist state from its inception, was envenomed by abuse. The Revisionists accused Mapai of collusion with the British and treason to the Jewish cause. The Revisionists were denounced as ‘fascists’. Ben Gurion called Jabotinsky ‘Vladimir Hitler’. On 16 June 1933 Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, which had been formed in 1929 to co-ordinate all Jewish efforts world-wide, was murdered on the sea front of Tel Aviv. He was a passionate Mapai Zionist, and Revisionist extremists were immediately suspected. Two of them, Abraham Stavsky and Zevi Rosenblatt, members of a Revisionist ultra group, Brit Habirionim, were arrested and charged with the murder. Abba Ahimeir, the group’s ideologist, was charged with complicity. Stavsky was convicted on the evidence of one witness, sentenced to hang, but acquitted on appeal, under an old Turkish law which said one witness was insufficient in a capital case. The crime was never solved and it continued to fester in the memories of both sides for half a century. To Mapai, the Revisionists would not stop at murder. To the Revisionists, the Mapai had stooped to the age-old device of gentile persecution, the blood libel.

  Behind the division was a genuine, agonizing dilemma about Jewish conduct. Some had thought the Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the end of Jewish problems. In the event it merely created an entirely new set of impossible choices. All over the world, Jewish idealists begged their leaders to come to terms with the Arabs. As late as 1938, Albert Einstein, the greatest living Jew, still saw the national home in Utopian terms: ‘I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state…my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will suffer—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.’49 Others feared this damage too. But they feared still more for Jews caught without a refuge-state to flee to. How could such a state be made with Arab consent? Jabotinsky argued that Jews must assume Arab nationalist emotions to be as strong and obdurate as their own. Hence:

  It is impossible to dream of a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs…. Not now, and not in the foreseeable future…. Every nation, civilized or primitive, sees its land as its national home, where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership. Every native-nation will fight the settlers as long as there is a hope of getting rid of them. Thus they behave, and thus will the [Palestine] Arabs behave, so long as there is the glimmer of hope in their hearts that they can prevent the transformation of Palestine into Erez Israel.

  Only an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’, he concluded, could force the Arabs to accept the inevitable.50

  Jabotinsky made this harsh statement in 1923. The next two decades were to give an ever-growing force to the logic of his argument that the Jews could not afford idealism. It was not just a matter of providing Jewish Palestine with its iron wall of bayonets to ensure its safety. It was a question of whether European Jewry could survive at all, in a world which was turning increasingly and almost universally hostile.

  For it was not just in Palestine that the Versailles peace brought bitter disappointment to the Jews. The 1914-18 war was the ‘war to end war’, which would abolish old-fashioned realpolitik and inaugurate an era of justice, sweeping away the old hereditary empires and giving all peoples their due share of self-government. The national home for Jews in Palestine was part of this idealistic pattern. But equally if not more important for most European Jews was the guarantee offered by the peace treaty that they would receive full rights of citizenship throughout the European diaspora. The major powers, under the impulse of Disraeli, had first attempted to ensure minimum rights for Jews at the Berlin Congress in 1878. But the provisions of the treaty had been evaded, notably in Rumania. A second, and much more thorough, attempt was made at Versailles. Jews in Russia had been accorded full rights by Kerensky’s provisional government. At Versailles, clauses were written into the treaty giving rights to scheduled minorities, including the Jews, in all the states created, enlarged or delimited by the peace settlement—Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In theory, then, and certainly in the minds of those, like President Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, who shaped the treaty, the Jews were one of its major beneficiaries: they got their national home in Palestine and, if they chose to remain in their adopted homes, they received full and guaranteed citizenship rights.

  As things turned out, the Versailles treaty was an important element in the greatest of all Jewish tragedies. For it was a covenant without a sword. It redrew the map of Europe, and imposed new solutions on ancient quarrels, without providing the physical means to enforce either. It thus introduced twenty years of growing instability, dominated by the ferocious hatreds its own provisions had engendered. In this atmosphere of discontent, intermittent violence, and uncertainty, the position of the Jews, far from improving, grew more insecure. It was not just that Jewish communities, as always happened in difficult times, tended to become the focus of any anxiety and antagonism which could be spared from specific and local objects of hatred. The Jews were used to that. But now there was an additional cause of hostility—the Jewish identification with Bolshevis
m.

  For this the Jews bore some responsibility; or rather, the particular type of political Jew which had emerged in radical politics during the second half of the nineteenth century: the Non-Jewish Jew, the Jew who denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all. This group were all socialists, and for a brief period they were of paramount importance in European and Jewish history. The most representative of them was Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). She came from Zamosc in Russian Poland and her historical background was impeccably Jewish. She was descended from rabbis going back to at least the twelfth century, and her mother, the daughter and sister of rabbis, quoted the Bible to her endlessly. Like Marx, and with far less excuse, she never showed the slightest interest in Judaism or in Yiddish culture (though she liked Yiddish jokes). As the historian of Jewish socialism, Robert Wistrich, has pointed out, her extraordinary passion for social justice and her fascination with dialectic argument seems to have been bred by generations of rabbinical scholarship.51 In all other respects, however, she was an ultra-maskil. She knew nothing about the Jewish masses. Her father was a rich timber merchant who sent her to an exclusive school in Warsaw, attended mainly by the children of Russian officials. At eighteen she was smuggled across the frontier and travelled to Zurich to complete her education. In 1898 she went through a form of marriage with a German printer in order to obtain German citizenship. Thereafter she devoted her entire life to revolutionary politics.

  The parallels with Marx are close in some ways. Like Marx she had a privileged background from which she continued to benefit financially. Like him she knew nothing of the working class, even of the Jewish working class, and like him she never sought to make good her ignorance. Like him, she led a life of middle-class political conspiracy, writing, platform oratory and café argument. But whereas Marx’s Jewish self-hatred took the form of crude anti-Semitism, she argued that the Jewish problem did not exist at all. Anti-Semitism, she insisted, was a function of capitalism, exploited in Germany by the Junkers and in Russia by the Tsarists. Marx had settled the matter; he had ‘removed the Jewish question from the religious and racial sphere and given it a social foundation, proving that what is usually described and persecuted as “Judaism” is nothing but the spirit of hucksterism and swindle, which appears in every society where exploitation reigns’.52 Actually, that was not what Marx said and her interpretation involved a deliberate distortion of Marx’s text. Moreover, her assertion was manifestly untrue. As another Jewish socialist, Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), pointed out, anti-Semitism had deep popular roots and could not simply be magicked away by Marxism. He much admired Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, for proudly telling public meetings in London’s East End, ‘I am a Jewess.’