A History of Zionism (41 page)

During the early years of Zionist settlement the Jewish land buyers showed no more concern than the Arab effendis for the fate of the fellaheen who were evicted. Only gradually did it dawn on them that, moral considerations quite apart, they were facing a potentially explosive political issue. Later on, greater care was taken to pay compensation or to find alternative employment for those who lost their land. But the effects of Jewish settlement on the Arab economy were minimal, as a statistical comparison shows: urbanisation in Palestine did not proceed at a faster rate than in the neighbouring Arab countries; Arab immigration into Palestine exceeded emigration from that country; and the birth rate rose more quickly than in the neighbouring countries, as did the living standards of the Arabs in the neighbourhood of the new Jewish settlements. These facts have frequently been quoted by Zionist authors, and they are irrefutable, as far as they go, both for the prewar period and the 1920s. If some Arabs suffered as a result of Jewish settlement, the number of those who benefited directly or indirectly was certainly greater. True, if Arab living standards improved, the Jewish settlers were still much better off, and the emergence of prosperous colonies must have caused considerable envy.

From a purely economic point of view, Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and settlement was inexplicable and unjustified. But then the economic aspect of the conflict was hardly ever of decisive importance. For that reason the Zionist hope, shared by Marxists and non-Marxists alike, that economic collaboration would act as a powerful stimulus towards political reconciliation, was quite unrealistic. The conflict was, of course, basically political in character, a clash between two national movements. The Arabs objected to Jewish immigration not so much because they feared proletarisation, as because they anticipated that the Jews intended one day to become masters of the country and that as a result they would be reduced to the status of a minority.

Only a handful of Zionists dreamed at the time of a Jewish state. The Turks had not the slightest intention of granting even a modest measure of independence to any part of the Ottoman empire. But it is quite immaterial in this context whether Zionism at the time really had plans for conquest – perhaps the Arabs were better judges of the capacity of the Jews and their ambitions than the Zionists themselves. The idea of a Jewish state had had a few protagonists from the very beginning. Zeev Dubnow, for instance, one of the early Bilu settlers, in 1882 wrote to his more famous brother, the historian, that the final aim was to restore one day the independence of Eretz Israel. To this end settlements were to be established, the land and industry were to pass into Jewish hands, and the rising generation was to be taught the use of arms.
*
Michael Halpern, also, one of the early
shomrim
, used to talk occasionally about the conquest of the country by legions of Jewish soldiers. But these were flights of fancy indulged in by a few individuals, and no one took them seriously at the time.

At the other extreme, and equally unrepresentative, there were a few advocates of cultural assimilation; with their return to the east the Jews were to shed their European influences and reacquire eastern customs and mental habits. The idea of the common Semitic origin of Jews and Arabs as a basis for close collaboration between the two peoples appeared early in the history of the Zionist movement. It figures in the writings of Epstein and of R. Renyamin (who worked in Ruppin’s office in Jaffa). Sokolow, in an interview with the Cairo newspaper
Al Ahram
in 1914, said that he hoped the Jews would draw near to Arab culture in every respect, to build up together a great Palestinian civilisation.
†
After the First World War, when the wisdom of the east was enjoying a fashionable success in Europe, M. Men Gavriel (Eugen Hoeflich), a Viennese writer who settled in Jerusalem, propagated this same idea in a series of books and articles.
‡
Even a radical Socialist such as Fritz Sternberg, who subsequently became better known as a Marxist theoretician, attributed decisive importance to the common Semitic origins of the two peoples and to the spiritual affinity felt by the Jews for the Arabs: ‘The east European Jews are still almost orientals’, he wrote.
*
Even after the Second World War the concept of a Semitic federation in the Middle East still had some enthusiastic supporters in Israel.

It was not readily obvious what these ideologists were trying to prove, for even if a common racial or ethnic origin could have been demonstrated, they were over-optimistic in suggesting that it would have a strong political impact. Consanguinity is not necessarily a synonym for friendship, and the bitterest quarrels are traditionally those between members of one family. Most Zionist leaders of the day subscribed to the idea of Arab-Jewish brotherhood, or at any rate paid lip service to it, but they did so more often than not, it would appear, because of their inability to find any other ideological justification or a more tangible practical approach to improve relations with the Arabs. One of the dissidents was Richard Lichtheim, a leading German Zionist, who together with Jacobson represented the Zionist executive in Constantinople. In his reports to his superiors he agreed that it was vital to make every effort to win the goodwill of the Arabs, and to organise Jewish settlement in such a way as to serve Arab interests as well. But he had no illusions about the outcome of such a policy:

The Arabs are and will remain our natural opponents. They do not care a straw for the ‘joint semitic spirit’. I can only warn urgently against a historical or cultural chimera. They want orderly government, just taxes and political independence. The east of today aspires to no marvels other than American machinery and the Paris toilet. Of course the Arabs want to preserve their nation and cultivate their culture. What they need for this, however, is specifically European: money, organization, machinery. The Jew for them is a competitor who threatens their predominance in Palestine….
†

Writing many years later, Lichtheim stated that it had been clear to him even before 1914 that the national aspirations of the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs were irreconcilable.
‡

Ruppin, on the other hand, continued to believe in a bi-national state. He would despair of the possibility of ever realising the Zionist idea, he still declared at the Zionist congress in Vienna in 1925, if there were no possibility of doing justice to the national interests of both Jews and Arabs. But soon after doubts set in. He realised that all Palestinian Arabs were opposed to Zionism, and if any solution of the Palestinian problem were made contingent on the agreement of the Arabs it would imply the cessation of immigration and of Jewish economic development. In December 1931 he sadly wrote to Victor Jacobson, his old friend from the Constantinople days: ‘What we can get today from the Arabs – we don’t need. What we need – we can’t get. What the Arabs are willing to give us is at most minority rights as in eastern Europe. But we have already had enough experience of the situation in eastern Europe …’.
*

Politics apart, relations between Jews and Arabs were not too bad in pre-1914 Palestine, considering the great cultural and social differences between the communities. They were neighbours, and as among neighbours all over the world there was cooperation as well as conflict. Among the old residents, notably the Sefardi community, Arabic was for many the native language. Children grew up in the same street, Jews were in business together with Arabs, some wrote poems in Arabic or articles for the Arab press. There were even, at a limited level, social contacts. Among the new immigrants, too, there was considerable interest in things Arab. The Jewish watchmen, the
shomrim
, often adopted the Arab headgear (
kefiya
), and went out of their way to make friends in the neighbouring villages. Arab colloquialisms entered the Hebrew language, though not usually on the highest literary level. With Moshe Smilansky’s
Hawadja Musa
, the Arab theme entered Hebrew literature well before the First World War. His short stories about the fellaheen and their world, written with great feeling and sympathy, often idealised their way of life. The Zionists respected the Arabs as human beings, regarding them as distant, if rather backward and ineffectual cousins. There was certainly no hatred on their part. But being totally absorbed in their own national movement, they did not recognize that their cousins, too, were undergoing a national revival, and they sometimes seemed to deny them the right to do so.

In the deliberations of the Zionist executive various aspects of the Arab question were discussed from time to time. Ruppin, in his report to the eleventh Zionist congress, noted that the Zionists had to make up for a great deal they had neglected, and to correct the errors they had committed. ‘It is of course quite useless to content ourselves with merely assuring the Arabs that we are coming into the country as their friends. We must prove this by our deeds.’
*
At the previous congress, Shlomo Kaplanski, one of the leaders of the Labour Zionists, had stressed the necessity of a
rapprochement
with the Arabs. He did not believe in a lasting conflict between the Zionists and the fellaheen and was confident that an understanding with the democratic forces in the Arab world – though not perhaps with the effendis – could be reached.
†

But Ruppin had no recipe for making friends among the Arabs and had to resort to the old arguments: Zionist colonisation had brought great material benefits to the Arabs, they had learned modern agricultural methods from the Jews, Jewish doctors had helped to stamp out epidemics among them. Ruppin was aware that the utmost tact and caution had to be used when buying Arab land so that no harsh results would follow. At one stage, in May 1911, he suggested in a memorandum to the Zionist executive a limited population transfer. The Zionists would buy land near Aleppo and Homs in northern Syria for the resettlement of the Arab peasants who had been dispossessed in Palestine. But this was vetoed because it was bound to increase Arab suspicions about Zionist intentions.
‡

Although Dr Ruppin’s scheme was rejected, the idea of a population transfer preoccupied other members of the Zionist executive. In 1912 Leo Motzkin, dissenting from the views of Ahad Ha’am (who had by that time reached deeply pessimistic conclusions about the Arab attitude, based on the belief that they would never accept a Jewish majority), suggested that the Arab-Jewish problem should be considered in a wider framework: there were extensive uncultivated lands around Palestine belonging to Arabs; perhaps they would be willing to settle there with the money realised from selling their land to the Zionists?
§
Again in 1914 Motzkin and Sokolow seem to have played with the idea of a population transfer. Its most consistent advocate was Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish writer, who in a series of speeches and articles during and after the First World War criticised the Zionists (with whom he had parted company at the time of the Uganda conflict) for ignoring the fact that Palestine was not empty. The concept of an ‘Arab trek’ to their own Arabian state played a central part in his scheme. Of course, the Arabs would not be compelled to do so, it would all be agreed upon in a friendly and amicable spirit. Zangwill pointed to many such migrations which had taken place in history, including the migration of the Boers to the Transvaal: why should not the Arabs realise that it was in their best interests? They would be fully compensated by the Zionists. Zangwill later explained to a friend that he expected that in the postwar world, reconstituted on a basis of love and reason, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, for whose kinsmen, after years of oppression, a new state would be set up in Arabia, would naturally sympathise with the ideal of the still more unfortunate nation of Israel and would be magnanimous enough to leave these few thousand square miles to the race which had preserved its dream of them for two thousand years. Zangwill foresaw two states rising side by side; ‘Otherwise, he did not see that a Jewish state could arise at all, but only a state of friction.’
*

But the idea of a population transfer was never official Zionist policy. Ben Gurion emphatically rejected it, saying that even if the Jews were given the right to evict the Arabs they would not make use of it.
†
Most thought at that time that there would be sufficient room in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs following the industrialisation of the country and the introduction of intensive methods of agriculture. Since no one before 1914 expected the disintegration of the Turkish empire in the foreseeable future, the question of political autonomy did not figure in their thoughts. They were genuinely aggrieved that the Arabs were not more grateful for the economic benefits they had come to enjoy as the result of Jewish immigration and settlement. They thought that the growth of Arab nationalism and anti-Zionist attacks were the result of the activities of individual villains, the effendis (who were annoyed because the Jews had spoiled the fellaheen by paying them higher wages), and the Christian Arabs (who had to demonstrate that they were as good patriots as their Muslim fellow citizens).

When an Arab national movement developed in Palestine after 1908, the Zionists did not at first attach much importance to it because it consisted of very few people who, moreover, were divided into several factions and parties. It is not difficult to draw up a substantial list of Zionist sins of omission and commission before 1914. They should have devoted far more attention to the Arab question, and been more cautious in land purchases. Many more should have learned Arabic and the customs of their neighbours, and they should have taken greater care not to offend their feelings. They should have accepted Ottoman citizenship and have tried to make friends with Arabs on a personal level, following the example of Kalvarisky. There were possibilities of influencing Arab public opinion, of explaining that the Jews were not coming to dominate the Arabs. But the means put at the disposal of Dr Ruppin and his colleagues in Jaffa for this purpose were woefully insufficient. Much more publicity should have been given, for instance, to Wolffsohn’s statement at the eleventh Zionist congress that the Jews were not looking for a state of their own in Palestine but merely for a
Heimstaette.
Whether this would have dispelled Arab fears is less certain, for they worried not so much about the Zionist presence as about their future plans. In this respect Arab apprehension was not unfounded. The Zionists, on the other hand, did not foresee that as a result of growing prosperity the number of Palestinian Arabs would rapidly grow. They did not face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs belonged to a people of many millions which was by no means indifferent to the future of the Holy Land.