A History of Zionism (109 page)

7. The Jewish state came into being at the very time when Zionism had lost its erstwhile
raison d’être
: to provide an answer to the plight of east European Jewry. The United Nations decision of November 1947 was in all probability the last opportunity for the Zionist movement to achieve a breakthrough. Public opinion in many countries felt uneasy about the Jewish tragedy and, above all, about the fact that not more had been done to rescue Jews. The United States and Russia, the former with great reservations, reached the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only workable solution. One or two years later the world situation would no longer have been conducive to a resolution giving the Zionists what they wanted. The British government would probably have pulled out of Palestine anyway, and a civil war would have ensued. The Jewish state might nevertheless have come into existence – but without United Nations sanction and international recognition and, generally speaking, under very inauspicious circumstances.

8. Up to the 1930s the Zionist movement had no clear idea about its final aim. Herzl proclaimed that a Jewish state was a world necessity. But later he and his successors mentioned the state only infrequently, partly for tactical reasons, mainly because they had no clear concept as to how a state would come into being. Two generations of Zionist leaders, from Herzl to Weizmann, believed that Palestine would at some fairly distant date become Jewish without the use of violence or guile, as the result of steady immigration and settlement, of quiet and patient work. The idea that a state was the normal form of existence for a people and that it was an immediate necessity was preached by Jabotinsky in the 1930s. But he was at the time almost alone in voicing this demand. It took the advent of Nazism, the holocaust and total Arab rejection of the national home to convert the Zionist movement to the belief in statehood. The bi-national solution (parity), advocated by the Zionist movement in a half-hearted way in the 1920s and, with more enthusiasm, by some minority groups, would have been in every respect a better solution for the Palestine problem. It would have been a guarantee for the peaceful development of the country. But it was based on the unrealistic assumption that Arab agreement could be obtained. Bi-nationalism and parity were utterly rejected by the Arabs, who saw no good reason for any compromise as far as the Arab character of Palestine was concerned. They were not willing to accept the yishuv as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s, let alone permit more Jewish immigration and settlement. They feared that a further influx of Jews would eventually reduce the Arabs to minority status in Palestine.

9. The Arab-Jewish conflict was inevitable, given the fact that Zionism wanted to build more than a cultural centre in Palestine. Nor is it certain that a cultural centre would not have encountered Arab resistance. Zionism, the transplantation of hundreds of thousands of Jews, was bound to effect a radical change in Palestine, as a result of which the Palestinian Arabs were bound to suffer. It was not the Arabs’ fault that the Jews were persecuted in Europe, that they had awakened to the fact that they wanted again to be a nation and therefore needed a state in the country in which they had lived two thousand years before.

The effects of Zionism on the Arabs should not be belittled. The fact that they derived economic and other benefits from Jewish immigration is immaterial in this context. This is not to say that Zionism was bound to result in the evacuation or expulsion of many Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Had the Arabs accepted the Peel Plan in 1937, the Jewish state would have been restricted to the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Had they not rejected the UN partition of 1947, most of Palestine would still have remained in their hands. The Arab thesis of inevitable Zionist expansion is a case of self-fulfilling prophecy: the Arabs did everything in their power to make their prophecy come true, by choosing the road of armed resistance – and losing. The Zionist movement and the yishuv matured in the struggle against the Arab national movement. Eventually it reached the conclusion that it was pointless to seek Arab agreement and that it could achieve its aims only against the Arabs.

Arab intransigence was the natural reaction of a people unwilling to share its country with another. For European Jewry the issue was not an abstract one of preserving a historical connection, religious and national ties. With the rise of Hitler it became a question of life or death, and they felt no pangs of conscience: the danger facing the Jews was physical extinction. The worst fate that could befall the Arabs was the partition of Palestine and minority status for some Arabs in the Jewish state. Zionism is guilty no doubt of many sins of commission and omission in its policy on the Arab question. But whichever way one looks at it, the conflict on immigration and settlement could not have been evaded since the basis for a compromise did not exist. Zionism could and should have paid more attention to Arab grievances and aspirations. But despite all concessions in the cultural or economic field, the Arabs would still have opposed immigration with an eye to the inevitable consequences of mass immigration.

10. Seen from the Arab point of view, Zionism was an aggressive movement, Jewish immigration an invasion. Zionists are guilty of having behaved like other peoples - only with some delay due to historical circumstances. Throughout history nation-states have not come into existence as the result of peaceful development and legal contracts. They developed from invasions, colonisation, violence and armed struggle. It was the historical tragedy of Zionism that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map. Wherever the Jews would have chosen to settle, they would have sooner or later come into conflict with the native population. The creation of nation-states meant the perpetration of acts of injustice. The native population was either absorbed and assimilated or it was decimated or expelled. The expulsion of ten million Germans from eastern Europe was almost immediately accepted as an established fact by the outside world and those unwilling to put up with it were denounced as revanchists and war-mongers. Given the realities of Soviet power, it was clear that the new order in eastern Europe could not be challenged except through a new world war. But Zionism was not in a position of such strength, nor was there a danger of world war. Hence the fact that the territorial changes in eastern Europe have been accepted as irreversible, while those in the Middle East continue to be challenged by many.

Zionism has been challenged on the level of abstract justice: it has been argued that the Jews had no right to a state of their own, because they staked their claim too late and because it was bound to affect the fate of another people. It has been maintained that in these circumstances the Jews had no right to survive as a group. But arguments concerning the
raison d’être
of nations and states are double-edged, quite apart from the fact that the Jews faced extermination not only as a group but as individuals. Equally, on the level of abstract justice, the fact that a nation or a state has existed for a long time is not by itself a valid argument for its continued survival, unless it has made a substantial contribution to the advance of mankind. Few nations and states can make such claims. If a case can be made for a just distribution of property among individuals, the same applies (again on the level of abstract justice) to peoples and nations.

11. Arab opposition apart, Zionism has been rejected from various angles. The opposition of the ultra-orthodox Jews is based on a totally different system of beliefs and values, and there is no room for any debate between them and Zionists. The non-religious critique of Zionism appears in different variants, but it is based in the last resort on the same ideological assumptions. The critiques of the extreme Left and the liberal-assimilationist doctrine rest on the argument that Zionism is an anachronistic movement, that assimilation is an inevitable historical process and that it has proceeded too far to be undone. Hence the conclusion that the desire of the Jews to survive as a national group runs against the course of world history. Since social and economic developments cause the gradual disappearance of national peculiarities, any effort to reverse this process is bound to be reactionary in character. While nation-states have played a progressive role in earlier ages, nationalism has turned into an obstacle on the road to further progress. The Jews were the first to be denationalised, but the other nations will gradually follow. Instead of reverting to the nation-state, the Jews should try to fulfil the role into which they were cast by history: that of an
avant-garde
of a new world order. According to the liberals, anti-semitism is bound to disappear as civilisation and enlightenment spread. According to the radical Left, it will wither away with the overthrow of capitalism.

To a large extent the early Zionist leaders shared this belief in human progress. But they did not expect that the new world order would soon come into being, and they feared that meanwhile persecution and oppression would continue. The course of world history has not confirmed the predictions of the optimists. If civilisation has made progress, it is agonisingly slow. National movements and nation-states are nowhere on the decline. International working-class solidarity is invoked less and less – even as a slogan. Antisemitism has antedated capitalism and still exists in post-capitalist societies. As Communism has moved from proletarian internationalism to a nationalist brand of Socialism the position of Jews under these régimes and in Communist movements will remain precarious for a long time; the demand for internationalists is strictly limited. On the contrary, the conspicuous participication of Jews in radical political movements has resulted in an upsurge of antisemitism, regardless of whether these movements attained power or not. The non-Jewish Jew is thus acting indirectly as an agent of resurgent Jewish nationalism.

12. The main source of Zionist weakness has been the fact that conditions for the realisation of the Zionist dream were never favourable. It never quite overcame the inertia of the Jews, it always lacked resources. The establishment of a national home in one of the world’s main danger zones, against the opposition of the Arabs and without any powerful allies, meant that the future of the state would inevitably remain uncertain for a long time to come. From the very beginning the smallness of the territory limited its absorptive capacity: it has served as a national home for less than one-fifth of world Jewry. Even of those in sympathy with Zionism only a few went to Palestine. Only an infinitesimal portion of American, British, French or German (before 1933) Jewry has settled in the Jewish national home. There is no ‘objective’ socio-economic Jewish question in these countries, even though the concentration of Jews in certain professions may still create tensions and occasionally even constitute a political problem. But the process of assimilation interrupted by Nazism has gathered fresh momentum. The percentage of mixed marriages has increased substantially. In these circumstances political and economic motives are unlikely to be decisive in making individual Jews opt for Zionism. They are more likely to be attracted by the Israeli way of life, idealism and the extent to which Israel is spared some of the afflictions occurring elsewhere in the western world.

13. The basic aim of Zionism was twofold: to regain Jewish self-respect and dignity in the eyes of non-Jews; and to rebuild a Jewish national home, for Jews to ‘live as free men on their own soil, to die peacefully in their own homes’ (Herzl). The Zionist movement has certainly succeeded in carrying out part of its assignment. The establishment of the Jewish state has been the greatest turning point in two thousand years of Jewish history and has had a profound effect on Jewish life all over the world. But whereas the national home has attracted much sympathy, its potential as a cultural centre is limited. As normalisation proceeds, the more fanciful claims (Zion as a new spiritual lodestar, a model for the redemption of mankind, a centre of humanity) are receding into the background. While esteem for Jewish determination and prowess has increased as the result of the creation of the state, the position of Jews – contrary to widespread hopes – has not become more secure. If there has been a certain decline in antisemitism in the diaspora, a reaction to the horrors of Hitlerism as much as a consequence of the birth of Israel, hostility towards the new state on the part of its neighbours has increased. The state created by Zionism thus faces an uphill struggle in its endeavour to make its neighbours recognise its right of existence. While this struggle continues, the existence of the state and its independence is no more assured than that of other small countries whose geopolitical location exposes them to the expansive designs of a superpower.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are many thousands of books and pamphlets on Zionism. The most useful annotated bibliographies are
Bibliografia Zionit
(ed. A. Aewinson), Jerusalem, and the appendices (by Kressel and Klausner) to Y. Yruenbaum’s
Hatnua hazionit behitpatchuta
(4 vols). The most important general works are Nahum Sokolow’s
History of Zionism (1600-1918)
(2 vols), London, 1919, and Adolf Böhm’s
Die zionistische Bewegung
(2 vols), Berlin, 1937. The stenographic reports of the Zionist congresses are an invaluable source, as are Herzl’s diaries, Alex Bein’s Herzl biography, Leonard Stein’s study of the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann’s autobiography, and Schechtman’s biography of Jabotinsky – to mention only some of the most important primary and secondary sources. Of the periodicals published by the Zionist movement,
Die Welt
(Vienna),
Ha’olam, Jüdische Rundschau
(Berlin), and
New Judaea
(London) are among the most important. The Central Zionist Archives were founded in Berlin in 1919; its collections were transferred to Jerusalem in 1933-4. Other important archives are those of the labour movement in Tel Aviv, the revisionist party (Mezudat Ze’ev) also in Tel Aviv, the Zionist Archives in New York, and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.