History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Hebrew was not just a binding force. It prevented Israel from developing a language problem, the curse of so many nations, especially new ones. This was fortunate, for Israel had many other fundamental fissures. The fact that, in the Warsaw ghetto in late 1942, the Jewish political parties could argue bitterly on how they were to resist the Nazis gave some indication of the depth of the ideological divisions, all of which (and more) were endemic in Israel too. The basic division between the Labour Party (sometimes called Mapai), with its Histadrut trade union wing and its Haganah military arm, and the Revisionists, who in other incarnations were called Herut, Gahal and finally Likud, had been envenomed (as we have noted on page 446) by the Arlosoroff murder in 1933 and its aftermath. They worsened still further as a result of a shocking episode during the War of Independence. Ben Gurion had feared all along that Begin, who rejected the UN partition frontiers, would fight to enlarge them if the Irgun was allowed to operate as a separate force. Begin agreed to merge Irgun with the national army on 1 June 1948 but he maintained his own arms supply. When, during the first truce, the Irgun arms-ship Altalena arrived off Tel Aviv, the government denied him its contents. Ben Gurion told the cabinet: ‘There are not going to be two states and there are not going to be two armies…. We must decide whether to hand over power to Begin or tell him to cease his separatist activities. If he does not give in we shall open fire.’41 The cabinet instructed the Defence Minister to enforce the law of the land. Fighting broke out on the beach and Begin scrambled aboard to protect his arms. Yigal Allon, commander in chief of the Haganah’s full-time force, the Palmach, and his deputy Yitzhak Rabin, directing operations from the Ritz Hotel, decided to shell the ship and sink it. Begin was forced to swim ashore, fourteen Irgun men were killed, and it was the effective end of the organization. Begin called the Labour coalition ‘a government of criminals, tyrants, traitors and fratricides’.42 Ben Gurion called Begin simply ‘Hitler’.

  Thereafter the Labour Party and its allies ruled Israel until 1977. With the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, the Haganah and their dominance within the Jewish Agency, they had formed the establishment under the mandate. After Independence they continued to form the establishment, controlling the armed forces, the civil service and, through the trade union holdings, Israeli industry. Israel inherited from the mandate many British political, constitutional and legal institutions. But in one respect it was quite unlike Britain. It drew from the socialist parties of eastern Europe the notion of the party becoming the state. In this respect it was more like the Soviet Union. The distinction between professional politicians and professional civil servants, so salient to the British style of parliamentary democracy, scarcely existed in Israel. Allon went from the Palmach command to become a minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Rabin was Chief of Staff of the IDF and later Prime Minister. Two other IDF chiefs, Haim Bar-Lev and David Elazar, also came up through the Labour movement. Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated of all the IDF commanders, rose through the Mapai youth movement, or Zeirim, as did Shimon Peres, who ran the Defence Ministry bureaucracy under Ben Gurion and in time became Prime Minister himself. A man might be in turn a member of the Knesset, a general, a cabinet minister, an ambassador and head of the state radio. Israel was a party state though never a one-party state. The most important decisions were not necessarily taken inside the cabinet. Civil service appointments were based, as a rule, on a party spoils system which distributed them according to electoral strength. Each party tended to decide who served and who did what and who was promoted in the ministries it controlled. The Labour movement as a whole formed an agricultural-industrial settlement complex embracing much of the arms industry, housing, health insurance and distribution. It dominated, through its own machinery, huge areas of what would normally be government functions: labour relations, education, public health and immigration. Much of this arose through the way the land was settled under the mandate.43 In its post-Independence structure Israel had some of the weaknesses of a typical Third World ex-colony which came into being through resistance, a dominant nationalist movement, even terrorism, and then transformed itself into a regime.

  The multi-party structure preserved democracy. But parties were in constant osmosis, splitting, regrouping, renaming themselves, forming ad hoc coalitions. Between 1947 and 1977 Mapai-Labour never fell below 32.5 per cent of the vote but never rose over 40 per cent. The result was a high degree of instability within the general structure of Labour movement dominance, with difficult coalition bargaining after each election and often between elections. Ben Gurion was Prime Minister 1948-63, except for a brief period 1953-5 when he made way for Moshe Sharett. Many of his most arbitrary dismissals or appointments—of generals, for instance—were in reaction to internal political manoeuvres. His long vendetta against Pinhas Lavon, a Defence Minister whom Ben Gurion held responsible for a costly intelligence fiasco in Egypt, was prompted as much by internal party as by public factors. Parties were interests as well as ideological entities. They recruited accordingly, especially among the immigrants. This went back to the inter-war period when land settlement was largely a party function. In the early 1930s there was an inter-party agreement for the division of scarce land. After Independence there was really enough land for all with agricultural leanings, so the party officials toured the transit camps to get people. There were unofficial carve-ups on an ethnic-religious basis. The Rumanians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, for instance, went to the secular parties (chiefly Mapai), the North Africans to the religious group, Mizrachi, which formed part of the coalition. Thanks to the skill of Mapai’s Yemeni agents, the party established a virtual monopoly over Yemeni immigrants, though after a Mizrachi protest its share was reduced to 60-65 per cent. Mapai and Mizrachi also did a deal over 100,000 Moroccan immigrants, Mapai organizing the emigration from the South Atlas area, Mizrachi from the North Atlas. A revolt of some of the Moroccans, who resented being owned and indoctrinated, brought this arrangement into the open in 1955.44

  Weizmann hated all this aspect of Zionist politics. When the state was formed he became its first president but lost the battle to secure presidential powers on American lines. Hence he was not in a position to uphold the state-public interest against the party. The job was left to Ben Gurion and, to do him justice, he tried to fight the party system. He had been a professional party activist all his life and he remained, to the last, an aggressive political bruiser. But as Prime Minister he did his best to effect a separation between party and state, to rescue the state from the party grip, to fight the Labour movement machine (most of which he had created himself) over policy, appointments, and not least the investigation of abuses. He wrenched the Prime Minister’s office, the Defence Ministry, the army and the schools out of the party’s possession. But he failed with the health system, which the Histadrut in effect retained. In the end he grew disgusted with his political colleagues, created a new party of his own (1965) and, when it failed, retired to an angry internal exile at his kibbutz of Sedeh Boker.45

  Unlike Herzl, Weizmann and even Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion did not see himself as a European but as a Jewish Middle Easterner. He placed his trust in the sabras, the Israeli-born natives of pioneer stock, who would transform Israel from a European colony into a genuine Asian state, albeit one which was unique. He was a Moses with a grim message, offering his people blood and tears, toil and sweat. ‘This is not a nation, not yet,’ he said in 1969 at the end of his life.

  It is an exiled people still in the desert longing for the flesh-pots of Egypt. It cannot be considered a nation until the Negev and Galilee are settled, until millions of Jews emigrate to Israel and until moral standards necessary to the ethical practice of politics and the high values of Zionism are sustained. This is neither a mob nor a nation. It is a people still chained to their Exilic past—redeemed but not fulfilled.46

  Yet the animating spirit of the Labour movement remained European socialism. It was a party of city intellectuals whose kibbutzim were their weekend cottages
. It was university-educated, culturally middle class. To the workers, especially to the Afro-Asian Sephardi immigrants, it turned a face of well-meaning condescension, patiently explaining what was good for them, rather as Rosa Luxemburg had once tried to lecture the German proletariat. They were the natural aristocrats of the new state, or perhaps one should call them a secular cathedocracy. Gradually an illuminating sartorial distinction appeared between the government and the opposition. Labour statesmen affected a rustic informality of open-necked shirts. Begin’s Likud sported smart suits and ties. It was the difference between a socialist intelligentsia and instinctive populists.

  After Ben Gurion’s retirement the Labour movement’s dependence on European-stock support, a diminishing asset, became more pronounced. By contrast the new arrivals from the Arab territories drifted towards the opposition. This dated back to the inter-war period. Jabotinsky had always drawn a following from the Sephardis of the Levant. He learned to speak Ladino. He stuck up for the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew. Begin fell effortlessly into this tradition. As a Polish Jew, one of a tiny remnant, he had a natural affinity of circumstances with Jews who had been brutally expelled from Arab lands. Like them, he felt no need to apologize for being in Israel. He shared their hatred of the Arabs. He too put Jewish interests before any other consideration, by the moral right of suffering. Like the oriental Jews, he regarded the notion that the Arabs had the choice of granting or withholding Israel’s right to exist as an insult to the dead. ‘We were granted the right to exist by the God of our fathers,’ he insisted, ‘at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization nearly 4,000 years ago. For that right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of the nations.’47 In strict contrast to the Labour establishment, he and the oriental Jews had a common and precious characteristic: a complete absence of any feelings of guilt.

  Labour’s grip on the regime was immensely strong and only slowly loosened. Begin must have been the only party leader in history to lose eight elections in a row and retain his post. But under successive Prime Ministers, Levi Eshkol (1963-9), Golda Meir (1969-74), Yitzhak Rabin (1974-7), Labour’s electoral support gradually declined. Towards the end of its long rule, and not surprisingly, granted its refusal to heed Ben Gurion’s warning and separate party from state, there were several major scandals. Hence at the May 1977 elections Labour at last lost its paramountcy. It dropped 15 per cent of its vote and emerged with only thirty-two seats. Begin’s Likud had forty-three and he had no real difficulty in forming a coalition government. He won the following election too in June 1981. After his retirement Likud fought the Labour movement to a draw in 1984, leading to an arrangement in which a Labour-Likud coalition, with alternating premiers, governed the country. Thus Israel eventually acquired a two-party system of a kind and the dangers of a permanent one-party regime were avoided.

  At bottom, however, the differences between Israel’s political parties, however deep and poisoned by violent historical events, concerned secular matters and thus in the end always yielded to pragmatic compromises. More serious was the chasm between the secularity of the Zionist state and the religiosity of Judaism itself. The problem was not new. The demands of the Law and the demands of the world produced tensions in any Jewish society. They broke to the surface in open conflict immediately Jews were given charge of their own affairs. That was why many pious Jews believed it was preferable for Jews to live under gentile sovereignty. But this left them at the mercy of gentile goodwill. The experience of modern times showed that it could not be relied upon. The new Zion had been conceived in response to nineteenth-century anti-Semitism and born in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. It was not a blueprint for a Jewish theocracy but a political and military instrument for Jewish survival. In short the situation was fundamentally the same as in the prophet Samuel’s day. Then the Israelites were in danger of extermination by the Philistines and had turned to monarchy to stay alive. Samuel had accepted the change with sorrow and misgivings because he saw clearly that the monarchy, or as we would say the state, was in irreconcilable conflict with rule by the Law. In the end he was proved right. The Law was defied, God angered, and the Babylonian Exile followed. The Second Commonwealth ran into exactly the same difficulties and likewise perished. Thus the Jews went into the diaspora. It was the essence of Judaism that the exile would be ended by a metaphysical event, in God’s good time, not by a political solution devised by man. The Zionist state was simply a new Saul. To suggest it was a modern form of the Messiah was not only wrong but blasphemous. As the great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem warned, it could only produce another false Messiah: ‘The Zionist ideal is one thing and the messianic ideal another, and the two do not touch except in pompous phraseology at mass rallies, which often infuse into our youth a spirit of new Shabbateanism which must fail.’48 It is true that the Zionists, who were mostly non-religious or even anti-religious, invoked the aid of Judaism. They had no alternative. Without Judaism, without the idea of the Jews as a people united by faith, Zionism was nothing, just a cranky sect. They invoked the Bible too. They drew from it all kinds of political morals, campaign rhetoric and idealistic appeals to youth. Ben Gurion used it as a guide to military strategy. But that was merely an eastern European form of the Jewish enlightenment. Zionism had no place for God as such. For Zionists, Judaism was just a convenient source of national energy and culture, the Bible no more than a State Book. That was why from the start most religious Jews regarded Zionism with suspicion or outright hostility and some (as we have noted) believed it was the work of Satan.

  But just as Samuel agreed to anoint Saul, so religious Jews had to recognize the existence of Zionism and take up attitudes towards it. There were several streams of thought, each modified over time. All were Orthodox. Reform Judaism played no part in the settlement of Palestine and the creation of Israel. The first Reform synagogue was not built in Jerusalem until 1958. But Orthodoxy varied in the degree to which it acknowledged Zionism. Just as Zionists used Judaism to create their state, so some pious Jews believed the Zionist national spirit could be exploited to bring Jews back to Judaism. Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), appointed European Chief Rabbi with Zionist support, took the view that Torah observance could be fuelled by the new patriotic spirit among Jews provided observant Jews organized themselves. So after the 10th Zionist congress (1911) decided in favour of secular as opposed to Torah schools, the first religious political party, the Mizrachi, came into being to fight for the Torah within Zionism. Hence it worked with the Zionists throughout the mandate and was a partner in government from the inception of the state. It was instrumental in avoiding a complete breach between secular and religious Jews in Israel but it tended to be more of an intermediary between the two camps than a religious force in itself.

  In response to the ‘treason’ of Mizrachi, the Orthodox sages founded the Agudist movement in 1912. It did not become organized and active until the British took over Palestine. Under Turkish rule the old system of delegating power to minorities through their religious leaders had been maintained, and this naturally favoured the Orthodox. But under Article 4 of the 1922 mandate, the British handed the political representation of all Jews to the Zionists. Their National Council was firmly in secular hands, and it simply syphoned off the religious aspects of its work to the Mizrachi. In response the Agudists formed in 1923 a mass movement, run by a ‘Council of Great Men of the Torah’, whose branches trained observant Jews to exercise their votes in favour of its nominees. So a second religious party developed. In eastern Europe it was extremely powerful, with its own press and lobbies, and remained strongly anti-Zionist. But in Palestine it was forced to compromise after the rise of Hitler set up a panic demand for immigrant visas. These all went through the Zionist Jewish Agency, which also controlled the central funds to finance new settlement. The truth is, like the Israelites faced with the Philistines, Agudah did not know how to maintain its principle
s in the face of Hitlerism. Might not the Balfour Declaration be a divinely ordained mode of escape? In 1937 one of its leaders, Issac Breuer, a grandson of the famous Rabbi Hirsch, asked the Council of Great Men a formal question: did the Balfour Declaration impose a divinely ordained task on the Jews to build a state, or was it a ‘satanic contrivance’? They could not agree on an answer so he worked one out for himself, against the background of the Holocaust, which produced still more compelling reasons for coming to terms with Zionism. Breuer’s eventual argument, that the state was Heaven’s gift to martyred Israel and could be ‘the beginning of the Redemption’ provided it was developed under guidance from the Torah, became the basis of Agudah’s ideology.49