A History of Zionism (99 page)

Relations between the Jewish community and the mandatory authorities did not improve. The high commissioner and his assistants continued to carry out the White Paper policy, showing no willingness to adjust it in the light of the tragic fate of European Jewry. During the first six months after the outbreak of war, when immigration became a matter of greater urgency than ever, no permits at all were granted. The Land Transfer regulation of 1940 virtually confined the Jews to a new pale of settlement, 5 per cent of the total area of western Palestine. Not even land officially classified as ‘uncultivable’ was exempt from these prohibitions. It was a clear case of discrimination on grounds of race and religion, the Jewish Agency claimed, ‘such discrimination being explicitly forbidden by the mandate’.
*

Violent anti-government demonstrations took place throughout Palestine and the tension was further exacerbated by the government’s unrelenting struggle against illegal immigration. Little ships packed with refugees succeeded in making their way to the shores of Palestine even after the outbreak of war in Europe. Thus in November 1940, 1,770 Jews arrived in Haifa on two vessels, but whereas British policy in the past had been to detain illegal immigrants in Palestine, it was now decided to deport these new arrivals to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There were bloody clashes and eventually Hagana decided to carry out an act of sabotage on the
Patria
, which was to take the refugees to Mauritius. Because of an error in calculating the amount of explosive used, and an insufficient number of lifeboats aboard, more than 250 immigrants were killed.
*
The British government intervened at this stage and announced that those saved from the
Patria
would be permitted to stay after all, but the refugees from the
Atlantic
, about seventeen hundred in number, who had arrived at the same time, were to be exiled, ‘never be allowed to return to Palestine’.

This was not the last in this chain of tragedies. The
Salvador
sank in early 1941 in the Sea of Marmora with a loss of two hundred lives. There was the tragic case of the
Struma
, which left the Black Sea port of Constanza in October 1941 and reached Istanbul in December. But since the British authorities announced that the 769 passengers would not be permitted to land in Palestine, the Turkish government decided to turn the ship back. It was torpedoed in the Black Sea and sunk with the loss of all but one or two of its passengers. Such was the unwillingness of the mandatory authority to admit any further immigrants that when the transitional period specified by the White Paper ended in 1944, only about two-thirds of the 75,000 permits which had been set aside had been utilised. Nor was any encouragement given to the Jewish war effort, even though 136,000 young Jews had volunteered shortly after the outbreak of war to place their services at the disposal of the British military authorities. On the other hand, Hagana, the Jewish defence organisation, came under attack. In late 1939, forty-three officers were arrested (among them Moshe Dayan) and given long prison sentences. Searches and arrests were carried out in agricultural settlements, including Ben Shemen, the children’s village. All arms found were seized, despite protests that they were needed for self-defence. The searches and arrests continued, albeit with interruptions, throughout the war. In July 1943 Saharov, who had acted as Weizmann’s bodyguard, received a seven-year sentence for illegal possession of two rifle bullets. In November of that year a member of Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh was killed during a search at the settlement.

The mandatory government claimed that it was dangerous to permit aliens from Nazi-occupied Europe to land, for how could they be certain that there were no spies and saboteurs among them? (The same argument, incidentally, was used in the United States by those who opposed the admission of Jewish refugees, such as Breckinridge Long.)
*
As for the searches and arrests in the Jewish settlements, the authorities argued that the Jewish Agency was arrogating to itself the powers of an independent government, thus openly defying the government. This argument was unanswerable, unless the desire of the Jewish community to defend itself in the event of a German invasion was regarded as legitimate, overriding laws that had not provided for such an emergency. The mental response of the mandatory government, in the words of a British historian, was dull and flat-footed, turning people who had no other wish but to serve the allied war effort into enemies.
†
Such resentment, which gradually turned into hatred, found little open expression while the war was in its critical phase, but it provided the background to the anti-British terror in the later stages of the war.

Zionism during the war

The subject of the present study is the history of the Zionist movement, not of Palestine, and it is to the activities of its leaders that we have to turn next. Weizmann, who had been re-elected president, was also in charge of the London office and, together with Professor Selig Brodetsky, headed its political department. David Ben Gurion was head of the Jerusalem office of the Jewish Agency, and with Moshe Shertok shared the responsibility for the political department there. Isaac Gruenbaum directed the labour department, Rabbi Fishman the department for artisans and small traders, and Emil Schmorak the section for commerce and industry. Ussishkin and Ruppin, both of whom died during the war, were attached to the Jerusalem executive in an advisory capacity, while Lipsky, later joined by Nahum Goldmann, represented the Jewish Agency in America with a seat on the executive, also in an advisory capacity. On the Jewish Agency there were also four representatives of non-Zionist bodies (Senator, Hexter, Karpf and Rose Jacobs), but three of them lived in New York and none played a leading part in wartime policies.

The 1939 Zionist congress had elected a General Council of seventy-two members, of whom twenty died or were killed during the war. This council met for the first and only time the day after the congress ended, on 25 August 1939. It elected (‘for the purpose of carrying out special and urgent tasks’) an inner council of twenty-eight, not counting the chairman of the general council and two representatives of the Va’ad Leumi (Ben Zvi and E. Eerligne), the central organisation of Palestinian Jewry. Thirteen of its members belonged to Mapai, eleven to the General Zionists, the rest to the smaller parties. The inner council met more than fifty times during the war and, together with the executive, became the central decision-making body of the movement. It discussed and voted on all important political issues, carried out legislative duties, engaged in various organisational activities, and confirmed the budgets of the Jewish Agency. It should be noted in passing that the budget of the Agency rose almost tenfold during the war, from £P 720,000 in 1939–40 to £P 6,500,000 in 1945–6. The two largest items of expenditure were immigration and agricultural settlement, accounting for 53 per cent over the period. The share of the political department was only 20 per cent, and this despite the fact that it included provisions for such special purposes as recruitment and soldiers welfare.
*

Early in the war the centre of activities shifted from London to Jerusalem. In December 1939 Churchill had told Weizmann that he agreed with his view that after the war a Jewish state should be built with three or four million inhabitants.
†
But Weizmann had few illusions: while the war was still undecided neither the British government nor public opinion was prepared to consider questions of major policy or to re-open negotiations on the future of Palestine.
‡

Communication between New York, London and Jerusalem was difficult and hazardous, but the Zionist leaders continued to travel a good deal between these main centres of activity. Weizmann went to America in 1940 and again in March 1942, when he stayed for more than a year. On both occasions he met President Roosevelt. In 1940 Ben Gurion went to London and on to America, where he stayed till the early summer of 1941. He also spent most of 1942 in the United States. There was growing tension between the leading members of the executive, which cannot be explained entirely by reference to the difficulties in communication. Weizmann complained on many occasions that Ben Gurion did not keep him informed of important political moves and developments in Palestine and elsewhere. Ben Gurion took issue no less bitterly with the style of work of the president of the world movement. Weizmann had never been accustomed to take anyone into his confidence except for his closest colleagues in London, and he was not among Ben Gurion’s admirers. It is perhaps significant that the first time the name of the leader of Palestinian labour appears in his autobiography is toward the end of the book, when at the 1946 congress Ben Gurion demanded his resignation. Weizmann was moody, given to sudden changes of temper, to feverish activity followed by periods of indolence. As he grew older and suffered personal bereavement (his elder son was killed in action while serving in the
RAF
) he was certainly not an easy man to deal with.

The distrust between the two leaders was mutual. Ben Gurion’s style of work was no less idiosyncratic. If his moods changed less often, his political assessment of the situation was by no means consistent. Before 1939 he had had little experience of international affairs, and lacked Weizmann’s finesse in dealing with non-Jews. He was to show in later years the qualities of a statesman, but in 1941 he was still a beginner on the world scene, growing in stature, but unaccustomed to sharing power and responsibility and ill at ease on committees. He had one decisive advantage over Weizmann, a power base in Palestine. The longer Weizmann stayed away from Jerusalem (his first visit after the outbreak of the war was in 1944), the weaker his position became. Weizmann no doubt had Ben Gurion in mind when he complained in a letter to Stephen Wise of the constant heckling and badgering he had to endure from some of his colleagues in other lands, who thought that a ‘mere affirmation of our aims constituted an action towards the achievement of our objective’.
*
He had once made similar charges of ‘maximalist demagogy’, not without justice, against Ussishkin and Gruenbaum, and Ben Gurion, in his single-mindedness, must have reminded him of past quarrels in the movement. When Weizmann returned to Palestine after the war he noted certain phenomena which caused him grave concern: a relaxation of the old, traditional Zionist purity of ethics, a touch of militarisation, and a weakness for its trappings, a ‘tragic, futile, un-Jewish resort to terrorism’ and, worst of all, in certain circles, a readiness to play politics with terrorism.
†
He must have sensed even earlier that he was losing touch with the yishuv, and may well have made Ben Gurion responsible for this estrangement.

Ben Gurion’s quarrels with Weizmann and some of his other colleagues led twice to his resignation, in February 1940 and again in October 1943. But each time Ben Gurion returned to office, the second time only after five months. The quarrels are not easy to retrace, for the issues were by no means clearcut. It is not that the two held at all times diametrically opposed views. In May 1940, for instance, Ben Gurion wrote from London that ‘the distance between us is far smaller than that between myself and some of the Zionists in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’.
*
It is not the case, as was once widely believed, that Ben Gurion early reached the conclusion that the Zionist movement had to strive for a Jewish state whereas Weizmann continued to believe in other solutions. On the contrary, early in the war Weizmann began to refer more and more frequently to the pressing need for a Jewish state in western Palestine which would have involved the resettlement of at least part of the Arabs elsewhere. Ben Gurion at the time considered both partition and bi-nationalism, with complete equality for Jews and Arabs, as possible solutions. Even in July 1940 he doubted whether the time was right for making final plans. The differences between the two leaders were not unbridgeable, but they seldom reached similar conclusions at one and the same time.

During the early months of the war they failed to reach agreement on Zionist policy
vis-à-vis
Britain. Despite all disappointments and frustrations, Weizmann continued to believe that all hope was not lost, whereas Ben Gurion was pessimistic. He wanted the struggle against the White Paper to take precedence over everything else, envisaging ‘activism’ leading up to serious and protracted unrest. Several meetings of the executive between February and May 1940 were devoted to a consideration of proposals for intensifying resistance to the White Paper, but Ben Gurion, supported only by Ussishkin and Rabbi Fishman, was outvoted. This was the period of the ‘phony war’. The Nazi invasion of Holland and Belgium, the defeat of France, and the battle of Britain put an end to these schemes. The appointment of Churchill as prime minister was a source of encouragement to Weizmann, and Ben Gurion, too, became for a while more optimistic. He reported from London that three of the five members of the new war cabinet were friendly to the Zionist cause. In a letter to Lord Lloyd (‘a known pro-Arab but nevertheless an honest and sympathetic man’) he wrote that he was a convinced believer in the spiritual mission of the British empire, that it stood for something much greater than itself, for a cause wider than its own frontiers. But this interlude did not last. Two years later Ben Gurion bitterly attacked Weizmann for his one-sided pro-British stand which, he claimed, disqualified him from being the leader of the Zionist movement.

Ben Gurion’s growing disappointment was no doubt connected with the failure to obtain British support for the formation of a Jewish fighting force in the framework of the British army. The negotiations were protracted, with frequent ups and downs. General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote to Weizmann in late December 1939 that he agreed in principle to the raising of a Jewish division, but there was no further progress until after Churchill had become prime minister, when Weizmann was told by Lord Lloyd that Jewish units would be established in the British army. ‘A great day,’ Mrs Blanche Dugdale, Balfour’s niece and an ardent Zionist, wrote in her diary. ‘The walls of Jericho have fallen. Chaim just back from this interview elated and solemn.’ He said: ‘It is almost as great a day as the Balfour Declaration.’