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The
Birth of Israel, 1945-1949:
Ben-Gurion and His Critics
By Joseph Heller Joseph Heller tells the story of the complex and often conflicting political calculations that led directly to the founding of the independent Jewish state of Israel in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Peruse the table of contents and read an excerpt from the Introduction. |
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In this book I examine the decision-making
process in the struggle for independence waged, on the one hand, by the national
institutions of the Zionist movement—the Jewish Agency Executive, the Small
Zionist Actions Committee, and the Zionist Congress—and, on the other, by the
Yishuv’s political parties, such as the Mapai Center. The external aspect is
considered first: their attitude toward the great powers—the United States and
the Soviet Union—and toward the Arab question. This leads to an extensive
discussion of the internal ideological debate over the most effective, or,
alternatively, the least harmful, methods by which to obtain independence from
Britain: Was a political struggle sufficient, or did it have to be combined
with, or supplanted by, violence? Moreover, what political solution should
Zionism adopt: a partitioned state within borders economically and strategically
viable, within a regional federation, or borders reflecting historical and
ideological propensities? Or was a binational state preferable—and if so, what
would be the most compatible political regime: a federation of national
autonomies or functional rather than territorial binationalism?
These questions had to be answered if the
Zionist movement was to survive. More often than not, its interests had
benefited from cooperation with the British. But after 1945, the onset of the
Cold War and the preponderant weight of the Arabs in the Middle East pushed them
apart. Zionism now had to integrate itself into the interests of other powers,
and such interests certainly existed. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the
Holocaust, there was no alternative to a Jewish state, certainly not when the
broad range of Zionist forces had become convinced that the existence of a
Jewish state before the war could have prevented the Holocaust. In retrospect,
many felt that the deliberations over the establishment of a Jewish state in
1937–38 had been a historic opportunity missed. In this postwar period, the
leadership was scattered across three continents in three centers: Jerusalem,
London, and New York. Decisions, however, were made exclusively in Jerusalem.
Thus the disagreements that arose in discussions held by the leadership in
London or New York are not considered here, since the participants there were
only the adjuncts of the Jerusalem leadership under Ben-Gurion. Personalities
such as Chaim Weizmann and Abba Hillel Silver had to accept decisions even if
they objected to them. Within a short span of time, and particularly after the
proclamation of the state, the concentration of the decision-making process in
the hands of one personality, a kind of charismatic mediator, became critical
because of the weight of the decisions involved and the impossibility of
deferring them; hence the dramatic character of the struggle for independence.
The idea of a Jewish state had its origins
during the waning years of the Ottoman period, antedating the First World War.
However, the prospects of obtaining a colonization charter were poor, despite
Herzl’s endeavors with the Turkish sultan and the German emperor, since the
sultan viewed Zionism as one more European attempt to subvert the Ottoman
Empire. An initiative by the British government to grant the Zionist movement a
colonization charter also failed, due to internal discord within the Zionist
movement and London’s withdrawal of the plan. The possibility of Jewish
settlement under international auspices appeared on the international agenda
only within the framework of the postwar new world order that emerged following
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the redistribution of its territories at
the peace conferences of Sèvres and Lausanne. In the meantime, the seeds of the
new order, and England’s plight in the war, had engendered the Balfour
Declaration, which received legal validation when the League of Nations made
Britain the Mandatory for Palestine in 1922. The Mandate, which was temporary,
charged the British government with the task of preparing the local inhabitants
for self-rule.
More specifically, the Mandate’s pro-Zionist
articles ensured clear-cut British support for the creation of a Jewish
“National Home” by encouraging immigration and dense settlement. Until its
termination in 1948, then, the Mandate was of crucial importance, as it
constituted a kind of promissory note enabling the Zionist movement to
accumulate power toward the creation of a state, even though in 1917 the Arabs
of Palestine outnumbered the Jews by nearly ten to one. Such, in any event, was
the situation at the level of principle; in practice, of course, the Mandate was
subject to the vagaries of international developments, which could affect
England’s ability to realize its commitments not only in Palestine but
globally. The upshot was that British policy was caught between the
government’s undertaking to assist the Jewish national home and its obligation
to encourage the entire population of Palestine, made up largely of Arabs, to
advance toward self-rule. Britain’s decision in the direction of gradual
decolonization enabled the national home to be built at an accelerated pace
until the late 1930s, when the pressures of Arab nationalism, exerted against
the background of the rise of Italian fascism and Hitler’s accession to power,
reduced England’s ability to pursue its de facto Palestine policy. Still, the
narrow crack that remained after the onset of accelerated decolonization (1939)
enabled Zionism to go on accumulating power, albeit less intensively, and
generated struggles that led Zionism to solicit support from alternative power
centers—though these, in the form of the Soviet Union and the United States,
would become accessible only after the Second World War.
The process of accumulating and consolidating
power—in the form of demographic growth, economic infrastructure, security,
and settlement—became the Zionist code of action, to provide the basic
infrastructure for a state. The test of the entire Zionist leadership lay in its
ability to advance this process in the knowledge that time was running out and
that it was essential to exploit to the maximum England’s readiness to accept
the emergence of the “state-in-the-making” as a process that would promote
Palestine’s economic independence. However, even though the Zionist movement
invested prodigious efforts to raise funds, step up immigration, purchase land,
and build a progressive Jewish society based on Western democratic criteria,
Weizmann, the architect of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, was
prevented by a dearth of resources, especially manpower and financing, from
bringing into being a substantive infrastructure that would reach the level of
critical mass in the first decade of the Mandate. Paradoxically, this missed
opportunity served to slow down national resistance by the Arabs and delayed the
more severe British restrictions on the Jews. Faced with the bloody events of
1921 and the accompanying political resistance by the Arabs, London still
favored a pro-Zionist Mandate, since basically the Arabs were isolated and weak
in terms of political power. The Jews, in contrast, were considered
entrepreneurs with future potential for the region. The events of 1921 brought
about the White Paper of 1922, which referred to a national home in Palestine,
rather than to Palestine as the national home, and also severed Transjordan from
the Mandate’s applicability.
The second decade was more conducive to
Zionism, in the wake of Jewish distress in Eastern and Central Europe. However,
from the beginning (1929) strong Arab resistance flared up, marked by massacres
of Jews in Safed and Hebron. That the Yishuv had good reason to fear the
political repercussions of these events and their consequences for the
government’s interpretation of the Mandate became evident in the White Paper
of 1930. However, the threat to immigration and settlement posed by that
document (authored by Lord Passfield, the colonial secretary) proved to be only
temporary: Zionist pressure and its own weakness led the British government to
retract the new policy in the “MacDonald Letter”—but not the pledge to
grant self-rule to Palestine’s inhabitants. Prime Minister MacDonald’s
letter was a blow to the Arabs (who referred to it as the “black letter”).
Arab terrorism mounted until it reached its peak in the sweeping revolt of 1936.
At the same time, the Zionist leadership was
increasingly apprehensive that its ability to accumulate sufficient power to
build the national home would be jeopardized. True, between 1922 and 1931 the
Jewish population grew from 83,790, or 11 percent of the total population, to
174,606, or 18 percent. However, this increase was not meaningful in terms of
creating an economic and political infrastructure. Chaim Arlosoroff, the
director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, gave expression to the
mounting concern. As the second decade of the Mandate opened, Arlosoroff was
extremely skeptical about Zionism’s prospects of building a state by
evolutionary means. Regional and international pressures, he argued, would
dissuade Britain from continuing to help the Jews build up their strength.
Following the granting of independence to Iraq, which was a mandate of the same
class as Palestine, Arlosoroff believed the entire mandate system was doomed. He
feared moves toward unity in the Arab world, the eruption of a world war against
the Soviet Union, and the disintegration of the Zionist idea. It is instructive
that Arlosoroff thought that the weakness of the Jewish settlement movement
ruled out partition as a viable solution to the conflict between the two
peoples. Thus the realization of Zionism, he concluded, required, as a sine qua
non, a transition period during which the Jewish minority would rule with an
“organized revolutionary government”; he could envisage no other way by
which the Jews could achieve a majority or even strike a balance with the Arabs.
History proved Arlosoroff unduly pessimistic
(from the Jewish point of view, that is). In practice, Zionism enjoyed three
more years in which it could continue to accumulate power to build the national
home and achieve an irreversible critical mass. The population leaped from
192,137 at the end of 1932 to 355,157 three years later (the Jewish Agency has
slightly higher figures: from 199,600 to 375,400). The turning point was the
eruption of the Arab Revolt in 1936, which radically disrupted Zionism’s plans
and sharply altered the development of the Palestine question. The government
was forced to choose between Jews and Arabs. Until then, the British had
deliberately deferred a decision and not given in to the Arabs’ demand for
self-rule, as this would have sparked a conflict with the Jews. The British
Parliament’s defeat of the motion to establish a Legislative Council in
Palestine was the straw that broke the camel’s back where the Arabs were
concerned, for it ruled out the possibility that they could veto the development
of the national home. More important than this defeat was the Arabs’ fear that
they would become a minority under the impact of Jewish immigration. As British
and French prestige in the region declined, due to Italian aggression in
Ethiopia (nearly a quarter of a million Italian soldiers passed through the Suez
Canal without interference) and the advance of Syria and Lebanon toward
independence, the Palestine Arabs’ pent-up national frustration erupted into a
general strike and a full-scale revolt against British rule in the country.
How did the Zionist leadership react to this
extreme turn of events? Although in practice they were working toward a state,
tactical reasons grounded in a sense of caution kept their official policy from
raising that demand publicly: such a Zionist initiative would be rejected by the
Arabs and would fail to get a sympathetic hearing from the government. Official
Zionist policy, then, advocated “parity” between Jews and Arabs in
governance and in the meantime enabled the continued accumulation of power.
Obviously, parity was not a viable long-term policy, since it implied the
creation of a binational state.
Although parity did not receive government
legitimization, in the short term Zionism secured government support because the
Arab Revolt was directed primarily against British rule. The result was the
emergence of an ad hoc partnership, temporary and pragmatic, between Zionism and
the government, although already looming on the horizon was the possibility that
the British authorities would restrict aliyah
(Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel) and would prevent Jews from purchasing
Arab land.
The government’s support did not affect the
shaping of Zionist policy. However, the parity formula was inadequate in the
face of the Arab Revolt. A long-term solution was now called for, without resort
to tactics of various sorts. Unexpectedly, the situation was saved, from the
Zionists’ point of view, by the appointment of the Peel Royal Commission. In
its historically important report, the commission maintained that the mandate
had failed and that Palestine should be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab
state, the latter to be linked to Transjordan. In the event that partition were
to be rejected, the commission adduced an alternative proposal: a political
maximum for Jewish immigration. Unlike the partition idea, the alternative
portended the White Paper of 1939.
Virtually overnight, the policy of the top
Zionist leadership did a turnabout: from a tactical advocacy of parity in
government between Jews and Arabs to overt support for partition, which had its
genesis in the initiative of the Peel Commission. Ben-Gurion, the central figure
in the Jewish Agency Executive, the major decision-making body in the Zionist
movement, immediately sat down to draft a partition plan of his own, comprising
10.9 million dunams (4 dunams = 1 acre) for the Jews, 12.5 million dunams for the
Arabs, and 1.9 million dunams set aside for an autonomous Arab area that would
also be open to Jewish settlement (the Acre and Gaza districts). Never losing
sight of the need to secure international support, Ben-Gurion thought it would
be possible to call on the United States and France in this connection—the
latter, indeed, had created an ostensible precedent by severing the Alexandretta
District from Syria and annexing it to Turkey.
However, what threatened the integrity of the
Zionist movement was not Ben-Gurion’s plan, which would make do with about
half of western Palestine, without Jerusalem, but the Peel Commission’s
partition plan, which allocated the Jewish state about a fifth of the area. The
leadership was inclined to accept the plan, with certain modifications, such as
the addition of the New City of Jerusalem, the potash and electricity plants,
the Jordan Valley, and perhaps also the Negev as far as Eilat. The acerbic
ideological debate that ensued in the Yishuv was not necessarily conducted
between right and left; it cut across parties and generated the “Greater
Israel” dispute, which rages to this day. A split in the movement was averted
thanks to a compromise put forward by Berl Katzenelson and approved by the 22nd
Zionist Congress by a vote of 299–160. It empowered the Jewish Agency
Executive to conduct negotiations on the establishment of a Jewish state while
rejecting the concrete proposal of the Peel Commission.
The debate over partition ended when the
British government withdrew its support for that solution at the end of 1937 as
the Arab Revolt flared up anew. The crucial lesson that had been learned, by
Ben-Gurion especially, was to avoid the emergence of a dispute that bore the
potential to split the movement and perhaps even to spark civil war. Ensuring
the broadest possible consensus was a major factor in the success of the Zionist
movement. In fact, an ideological schism was averted twice: in 1931, when the
General Zionists and Hamizrachi made a decision against entering into an
alliance with Ze’ev Jabotinsky at the 17th Zionist Congress; and in 1935, with
the secession of the Revisionists—who in the past had threatened to drag in
their wake the conservative faction of the right-wing General Zionists and
Hamizrachi—a historic decision that effectively placed control of the Zionist
movement and the Yishuv in the hands of Mapai under Ben-Gurion.
Already in 1933 Mapai had become the largest
party in the world Zionist movement, with 44 percent support of the overall
Zionist vote, while the weight of the General Zionists declined steadily. Mapai
was created in 1930 in a merger between two parties, Achdut Ha’avodah, which
defined itself as moderate socialist, and the nonsocialist Hapoel Hatza’ir.
Mapai did not suffer a significant decrease in support until 1946, when it fell
to 37.5 percent due to the separate appearance of two labor parties that had
broken with it: the Le’achdut Ha’avodah movement and Hashomer Hatza’ir.
The former advocated Zionist maximalism and political activism, the latter
displaying political moderation vis-a-vis the Arabs and a Soviet and Communist
orientation externally; both drew their support primarily from kibbutz
movements: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, respectively.
Nevertheless, already in 1935 Ben-Gurion had formed his coalition in the Jewish
Agency with his permanent partners: the General Zionists, who declined from 36.3
percent in 1937 to 31.9 percent in 1946, and Hamizrachi, which maintained a
constant strength of about 12 percent. The social and political ideology of
these two parties was more amenable to shaping a pragmatic foreign policy. No
domestic opposition seriously threatened the massive majority Ben-Gurion enjoyed
thanks to this coalition. Mapai could not prevent the departure of labor’s
radical wing, but that would occur only toward the end of the Second World War.
The lesson of the 1937 partition controversy
was that a strong Zionist consensus was necessary, whatever the cost. Hence the
use of the state slogan without an attempt to demarcate its borders, at least
for public consumption. This was accepted by the coalition parties—moderate
left, conservative right, and nonideological religious center—whose
partnership enabled the accumulation of power to continue in the difficult
period following the termination of the partnership between Zionism and Britain,
which until 1936 had been based on the Yishuv’s economic ability to absorb
Jewish immigration. With the collapse of the Peel plan, the British government
adopted the commission’s alternative scheme: the ability to absorb immigration
according to political criteria. Within three years, that policy, which
critically slowed the growth of the national home, was formally grounded in the
1939 White Paper. The new policy might have impelled Zionism to launch a revolt
against the government, albeit not while the war on Nazism was being fought, but
that scenario was averted in any event because the government permitted the
immigration of another 75,000 Jews during the next five years and because the
military exploited Zionism’s support in the war, which Zionists believed
helped to consolidate their power. Between 1939 and 1945 the Jewish population
in Palestine increased from 474,000 to 525,000, the number of Jewish settlements
rose from 218 to 262, and 40,433 new immigrants arrived, the majority legally,
as part of the White Paper quota.
The Arab Revolt made it perfectly clear to the
Zionist leadership that the time available for accumulating power was rapidly
running out. Ben-Gurion warned his confidants that the Yishuv faced the danger
of annihilation—not only disturbances by the Palestine Arabs but a future war
involving Arab states such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The conclusion was that the accumulation of
power was the critical test for military capability. True, on the eve of the
world war the Haganah—the unofficial army of the Yishuv under the command of
the Jewish Agency—had expanded from a local to a national force, but it was
hardly a modern army. A General Staff had been created, and by the end of the
war the Haganah numbered 25,000 men and women, but only 4,609 belonged to the
Field Force (acronym Hish) and another 1,488 to the Palmach (acronym for shock
troops), forces which were basically paramilitary in character. A larger force,
of about 30,000, was assured through enlistment by Yishuv residents in the
British Army, and it was the existence of that force, not the Haganah, that
persuaded Ben-Gurion that the Yishuv had military potential. In any event, the
Haganah had still not become a modern army by the time the Second World War
ended; only Israel’s War of Independence, in 1948, would bring about the
emergence of a true army, with the absorption of the Yishuv’s British Army
veterans.
The situation was compounded by the fact that
the Haganah’s strategic planning was based wholly on static defense and, until
September 1945, on cooperation with the British authorities. Indeed, until June
1946 the adoption of an active defense against enemy attacks was not even
contemplated.
One of the central questions addressed in this
book involves the internal political polarization and its interaction with the
Yishuv’s external policy. The rift itself had begun to appear in the second
half of the 1920s, with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s creation of the Revisionist
Movement, which was blatantly hostile to labor. The Revisionist Movement evolved
into a radical-right political party after failing to incorporate the
conservative and religious right within its ranks, and being unable to jettison
the maximalist right, which pushed it toward extremism. In its first years, the
new party leaned toward the middle class and displayed more of a British
orientation than any other party. Its program meant that Britain was to be
entrusted with the creation of the Jewish national home. Hence another of its
catch phrases, the “Iron Wall,” meaning that Arab resistance was accepted as
self-evident but that it must be crushed by a Jewish defense force under British
command. Throughout the mandatory period, the Revisionists ignored the
decolonization processes that had begun to play a part in British policy toward
Zionism—they were under the sway of a conceptual dogmatism holding that the
Balfour Declaration and the Mandate constituted a sacred and unbreakable
moral-legal and political contract.
Jabotinsky’s expectation that Britain would
bring into being the Jewish state at any price, and on both sides of the Jordan,
if only Zionism would demand this by means of unrelenting pressure, naturally
caused great dismay in the Zionist movement, since in practice this was not a
realistic option, as Weizmann and Ben-Gurion realized. The upshot was an
upheaval within the Revisionist Movement itself, when three maximalist
intellectuals joined forces: Uri Zvi Greenberg, Abba Achimeir, and Yehoshua H.
Yeivin. Influenced by the rise of fascism in Europe, a development with which
the latter two, in particular, identified, they led Revisionism in an
anti-British direction and counter to the Zionist establishment, which in their
eyes was betraying the Zionist idea. Their rift with Jabotinsky, who was seeking
a third way between democracy and fascism, reached its crescendo on the eve of
Arlosoroff’s murder. Only the murder prevented a schism within Revisionism, as
it was condemned en bloc by the labor movement for the assassination. Internal
and external pressure forced Jabotinsky to resign from the World Zionist
Organization. A situation of possible civil war was averted only by an agreement
between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky that put an end to the mutual political
violence and addressed the issues of compulsory arbitration in labor disputes
and aliyah. The agreement failed to
win the necessary endorsements, but it made the two leaders acutely aware that
internecine hatred and violence constituted a danger to the very existence of
the national home and that deterioration must be prevented even without a formal
agreement.
In practice, the scope of the right vs. left
confrontation was reduced to a conflict between the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai
Leumi (IZL, or Irgun), the National Military Organization; the latter was
founded in 1931 as a nonpolitical underground organization by Avraham Tehomi,
who accused the Haganah of having failed to protect the Yishuv against the Arab
rioters in 1929. In 1937, the Irgun itself underwent a split, some members
returning to the Haganah and the remainder forming a Revisionist underground
movement under the command of Jabotinsky himself. However, a crisis ensued
because of Jabotinsky’s refusal to adopt a policy of indiscriminate reprisal
against Arabs, a policy which assumed an anti-British character and brought
about a split in the Irgun and the establishment of the Lohamei Herut Israel (Lehi),
the Israel Freedom Fighters or “Stern Gang.” Stern tried to lead his
splinter group into an alliance with Italy and Nazi Germany, in the mistaken
belief that an anti-British front could be established with the enemies of the
Jewish people. Despite his failure, the organization continued to exist as an
anti-British underground which resorted to terrorist activities. Indeed, it was
revivified on the basis of a new, Soviet orientation and a futile attempt to
link up with the Le’Achdut Ha’avodah movement in the Yishuv.
The split in the Irgun paralyzed the
organization for four years, until it was reestablished by Menachem Begin in
1944, this time as an anti-British underground determined to fight the White
Paper regime that prevented—deliberately, in the Irgun’s view—the rescue
of Jews from Hitler’s clutches. The Irgun’s reorganization and its
declaration of a “revolt” again nearly ignited a civil war in the Yishuv.
Ben-Gurion and the leadership declared war on the Irgun. Their fear was that
Begin, by proclaiming a revolt against the British in the midst of the Second
World War, was jeopardizing the process of accumulating power, which would soon
reach a successful conclusion upon the war’s termination, as Churchill had
promised Weizmann. The internal conflict was aggravated after Lehi activists
assassinated the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne. Lehi,
though, was not the target—it agreed to call off its anti-British terror—but
rather the Irgun, the larger underground group. The decision to hand over Irgun
personnel to the British Police (the so-called “hunting season”) caused a
temporary rift within the leadership: the representatives of the General
Zionists and Hamizrachi resigned in protest. However, the impact of Ben-Gurion’s
charismatic personality, against the background of the Holocaust, ruled out any
other leadership alternative. The rhetoric of the Irgun, the sole rival for the
leadership, lacked a solid foundation. No potential alternative coalition
existed that was ready to take over from the elected official leadership.
Certainly there was no alternative program, apart from the Biltmore Plan
(addressed later), that called for the establishment of a Jewish state in
western Palestine. The Revisionist Movement tacitly admitted its failure by
rejoining the World Zionist Organization after the war, though neither it nor
its offshoots, the Irgun and Lehi, abandoned their uncompromising demand for a
Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.
The threat from the right was offset by the
radical left’s readiness to support Ben-Gurion’s efforts to eradicate the
Irgun politically, in part (Hashomer Hatza’ir) by cooperating with the
British, and in part (Le’achdut Ha’avodah movement) by taking independent
action. Ben-Gurion would not forgive the Irgun its secession, which jeopardized
the drive to accumulate power, until the organization’s absolute suppression
in the wake of the Altalena incident (see chapter 12).
Mapai disagreed deeply with the radical left
over the Yishuv’s external orientation and the solution to the Palestine
question, but these disputes surfaced only at the height of the Second World
War, and in any event the radical left represented a minority view. Since 1927,
Hashomer Hatza’ir had embraced the Marxist worldview and supported the Soviet
Revolution, though rejecting Communism’s negative attitude toward Zionism.
Mapai’s suspicions regarding Hashomer Hatza’ir intensified during the 1930s
following Stalin’s “great purges” and his ambivalent approach in the
period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov accord. That mistrust would metamorphose into a
principled dispute with Hashomer Hatza’ir (from 1948 a constituent part of the
new Mapam movement—Mifleget Hapoalim Hameuchedet) during the Cold War.
Hashomer Hatza’ir’s binationalism elicited less suspicion than its
pro-Communism, since it was geared toward the indeterminate future and advocated
a Jewish majority; the idea was that a binational regime would come into being
only after the Arabs forsook feudalism and adopted a progressive approach.
The Le’achdut Ha’avodah movement, on the
other hand, did not develop a binational theory; on the contrary, its slogan was
a socialist state in the undivided Land of Israel. Opposed to partition, the
movement rejected the idea of establishing a state immediately in favor of
international supervision over the Mandate. The Le’achdut Ha’avodah movement
also displayed considerable sympathy for the Soviet Union and Communism,
although not taking this as far as did Hashomer Hatza’ir. However, these
differences with the leadership did not generate a total confrontation with the
Jewish Agency coalition led by Ben-Gurion, such as existed with the radical
right. The reason was that the moderate left and the radical left were partners
in the process of consolidating power, as was most evident in the Histadrut
Federation of Labor, the Haganah, and the Va’ad Leumi (the Yishuv’s supreme
body for internal affairs). In the final analysis, the very existence of the
left would have been impossible without the absolute dependence of its kibbutz
movements, Hakibbutz Ha’artzi and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, on the budgets of the
Yishuv and the Zionist establishment. The fact that its base of support was in
the kibbutz movements only underscored that dependence. Resources to meet
existential needs—capital, labor, settlement, and aliyah—were
allocated only in return for “national discipline.”
Thus, the national consensus was strengthened
by a dual process: the left’s dependence on the national institutions—that
is, the Jewish Agency Executive, the Va’ad Leumi, and the Histadrut; and the
ongoing enfeeblement of the right, which was deprived of crucial resources. Nor
was it only the radical right—the Revisionist Movement, the Irgun, and Lehi—that
was weakened but the conservative right as well: the General Zionists split
between 1931 and 1946 into a moderate faction, the Association of General
Zionists, espousing views close to Weizmann’s, and a more rightist faction,
the Alliance of General Zionists, led by Emil Schmorak and Peretz Bernstein,
which opposed Weizmann and Yitzhak Gruenbaum, claiming Gruenbaum was not subject
to party discipline. Similarly, the absence of a strong liberal center, apart
from Aliyah Hadashah, whose leaders were Felix Rosenblueth and Georg Landauer,
also helped produce a potent national consensus. The historic alliance between
the conservative right and the labor movement, which had its genesis in the
period of Weizmann’s dominance in the leadership (1921–31), was accepted
even more emphatically in the period of Ben-Gurion’s dominance. It was Ben-Gurion
who coined the phrase “from a class to a nation” (mima’amad
le’am), setting it forth as the primary operative code to temper the
conflict between “class” and “nation” by affirming that an objective
identity of interests, bearing a constructive goal, existed between their needs:
building the land by the working class. This policy obligated controlled
activism in all spheres —diplomacy, security, settlement, immigration—by
means of a constant quest for a balance between prospects and risks.
However, polarization at home and the need to
dull its edge as much as possible was only one aspect of the thrust to
accumulate power at any price. The second aspect was Zionism’s international
struggle. At the outset of the war, Zionism exploited the window of opportunity
of extensive enlistment by Yishuv residents in the British Army, but it also had
to contend with the White Paper, particularly where aliyah
was concerned. The clashes with the authorities over this issue threatened to
torpedo the intelligence and military cooperation with the government. The
confrontations reached a dangerous head following the promulgation of the land
laws, which prohibited the purchase of land by Jews in most of Palestine; the
searches for illegal weapons in the Yishuv’s possession; and in particular the
scuttling of the Patria with its 256
illegal immigrants toward the end of 1940, the expulsion of 1,645 survivors, and
the sinking of the Struma in early
1942, which claimed the lives of 769 illegal immigrants. Only the cessation of
the illegal immigration campaign, because of constraints caused by the war,
averted a dangerous escalation between England and the Zionist movement.
The growing difficulties faced by Zionism in
its efforts to establish the national home in the wake of the White
Paper—before reports of the Holocaust reached the Yishuv—induced the Zionist
leadership under Ben-Gurion to try to unite the Jewish people at the height of
the war around the Biltmore Plan as the opening move in an international
struggle for a state. The Biltmore Plan was three-tiered: opening the gates of
Palestine to Jewish immigration; placing control of immigration and settlement
in the hands of the Jewish Agency during the transition period; and establishing
a Jewish state in Palestine. The only objectors to this plan were the radical
left and Ichud, an association of nonparty intellectuals founded by J. L. Magnes,
the president of the Hebrew University (the forerunner of Ichud, Brit Shalom,
which espoused binationalism, had disbanded in 1933). The left demanded a
binational regime and the immigration of two million in a ten-year period, in
the formulation of Hashomer Hatza’ir, whereas Ichud called for a binational
regime with numerical parity. In fact, there was another objector as well: Chaim
Weizmann, who saw Biltmore as a foundation for renewed cooperation with Britain,
in contrast to Ben-Gurion, who had despaired of Britain and considered Biltmore
a point of departure for cooperation with the United States. The dispute between
the two was not ideological but practical: how to conduct the external political
game. Ben-Gurion remained faithful to his messianic notion of a one-time
transfer operation after the war, in which millions of Jews would be brought to
Palestine and would fundamentally alter the demographic balance between Jews and
Arabs in the country. Weizmann, though, advocated a slower influx of Jews, based
on his pro-British orientation, which would be rendered irrelevant if Ben-Gurion’s
revolutionary ideas were implemented. This was effectively a theoretical
dispute, since the question of orientations could not be decided while the war
raged. At another level, though, the dispute was over the optimal method in the
anti-British struggle; Weizmann, in contrast to Ben-Gurion, took a dim view of
the mounting, Haganah-inspired activism in the Yishuv.
In Ben-Gurion’s eyes, the disagreement over
Zionist tactics boiled down to the question of the leadership. Already at the
time of the presentation of evidence to the Peel Commission, Ben-Gurion said
that it would be best if Weizmann were kept away from the political
negotiations, as he was liable to begin with a plan for a state but conclude by
obtaining land reserves. To Ben-Gurion, Weizmann’s willingness to put a
temporary stop to aliyah even before the arrival of the Peel Commission could mean
only one thing: the “utter ruin” of Weizmann’s standing in the Zionist
movement. Weizmann was not the only one who was distanced from the
decision-making center in the late 1930s; the same fate befell the “Group of
Five” led by Dr. Magnes, who opposed unlimited aliyah and a partitioned state
for fear that it would result in unceasing bloodshed because of the irredentist
impulses of both sides in the conflict. The Magnes group’s alternative was a
Jewish minority of 40 percent. Ichud was formed in 1942, in response to the
Biltmore Plan, after the bloody disturbances of 1936–39 had seemed to refute
the ideas of its predecessor, Brit Shalom. Besides trying to inculcate the idea
of a binational regime within a federative regional framework, Ichud also
objected to the anti-British activism being manifested by the opposition parties
and by others as well. Regional federation convinced Magnes to agree to
numerical parity. This federation would alleviate Arab fears of Jewish
domination. If in the late 1930s this group was considered a threat to the idea
of a Jewish state, in the 1940s its support for immigration (though only of half
a million) and settlement neutralized its opposition to a state. In retrospect,
the harm it did to the Zionist consensus was minuscule, as emerges from its
denunciation by Albert Hourani, the representative of the Arab national
movement, before the Anglo-American Committee (1946) and from the United Nations
Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) decision on partition.
Also in the camp of Ichud was Aliyah Hadashah,
the party of the German immigrants. They took an anti-activist stance as well,
but the question of the constitutional solution to the Palestine question split
them into advocates of three viewpoints: binationalism, a cantonal federation,
and partition. In short, not only the radical right, out of absolute opposition,
and the radical left, out of partial opposition, but also Weizmann, Ichud, and
Aliyah Hadashah sought to challenge Ben-Gurion’s conception of controlled
activism and partition by supporting Britain and decrying violent activism.
Their weakness derived from the impracticability of a British orientation in the
light of the decolonization processes.
At the end of the war, as the decisive
campaign for the establishment of a state loomed, and following the death of
Berl Katzenelson and Eliahu Golomb (the unofficial leader of Haganah), only
Moshe Shertok and Moshe Sneh remained at Ben-Gurion’s side. Shertok would not
be neutralized by Ben-Gurion until the 1950s but in any event represented no
more than a corrective to Ben-Gurion’s policy, while Sneh neutralized himself
by September 1946. Decision making in the period under discussion was thus Ben-Gurion’s
exclusive prerogative. He should not be thought of as a solitary or isolated
statesman but as a charismatic leader who, even before the time for decision
arrived, demonstrated to his colleagues in Mapai, the Jewish Agency Executive,
and the Histadrut that there was only one decision maker who took calculated
risks and reaped successes, based on a belief in Zionist realpolitik and the
accumulation of power.
Treatment of the Arab question was another
test for the leadership’s ability to coordinate between internal and external
factors without affecting the consolidation of power. Here, caution had to be
exercised in order not to escalate relations with Britain prematurely by
agitating the Arabs. A decision on the Arab question was tantamount to a
decision on the political solution—which would only be possible after the war,
in the context of a new world order. The Palestinians were still licking the
wounds they had sustained in the Arab Revolt, while the Arab states were
preoccupied with the question of Arab unity. Hence the conviction that there was
no need for an initiative on the Arab front, apart from propaganda. In any
event, the total conflict between the Jews and Arabs shifted Zionist diplomatic
energy toward the Western powers, the United States in particular (and later the
Soviet Union as well). Nor was there any point in repeating the well-known
slogans about full cooperation and equality of rights or a friendship pact with
the Arab states. These would be voiced after the war, and for propaganda
purposes only. Dealing with the Arab question, propaganda, and the collection of
information was left in the hands of the bureaucracy. This was not a
manifestation of realpolitik but a systemic paralysis, owing to the fact that
Jewish-Arab relations bore the status of a zero-sum game at both the regional
and local levels.
Zionist realpolitik was the product of the
intersection of the internal debate in the Yishuv over partition and the use of
force with the external pressures to which the Yishuv was subjected. At its core
were the following rules of the game: the constant accumulation of power in
terms of creating the infrastructure for a state; avoiding the use of
nonessential force against the British or the Arabs; and unrelenting efforts to
persuade the great powers of the positive contribution of a future Jewish state
to regional and international stability, together with the moral argument of
Zionism’s ultimate justification following the Holocaust. This fusion of
restraint, demographic growth, and diplomacy proved its effectiveness, if not
toward Britain then toward the United States and the Soviet Union, in the
critical years between 1945 and 1949. Its concrete expressions were immigration,
settlement, agricultural and industrial expansion, Haganah restraint in the face
of Arab terrorism, diplomacy that emphasized the necessity of a Jewish state to
effect an international solution of the Jewish problem, and the state’s
expected contribution to developing and raising the living standard of the
region’s Arab population. True, Britain no longer supported the idea of the
national home, but the Yishuv core that had been created by 1945 was for the
most part ready to struggle for a state despite the opposition of the Mandatory
power if a diplomatic solution were not forthcoming. The question was whether it
would have the strength to fight alone. Leaders of the Zionist movement never
thought it could triumph without external support, still less in the event of
hostile intervention by the Arab states. © 2002 University Press of Florida. All Rights Reserved. | |
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