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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: Polity Histories
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

How did a community of a few thousand Jewish refugees become, in little over a century, a modern nation-state and homeland of half the world's Jews? Has modern Israel fulfilled the Zionist vision of becoming "a nation like other nations," or is it still, in Biblical terns, "a people that dwells alone"? Alan Dowty distils over half a century of study as an inside/outside analyst of Israel in tracing this remarkable story. It begins in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when Jews fleeing Russian persecution established a renewed Jewish presence in their historic homeland. It continues through harsh struggle and in deep-rooted conflict with another people that sees Israel/Palestine equally as their homeland. Immensely successful by most standards, Israel today remains a center of contention and is still torn between its hard-earned role as a "normal" nation and the call of its particularistic, and unique, Jewish history.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Map

About the Author

Preface

Introduction: Old-New Israel

Jewish Life Before Zionism

Jewish Politics

Palestine Before Zionism

Russian Jews Before Zionism

Notes

1 The Zionist Revolution

The First Aliya

Arab-Jewish Relations

Herzl and the World Zionist Organization

The Second Aliya

Emerging Battle Lines

Notes

2 Building a Community

Wartime Diplomacy

The British Mandate

The Yishuv Under the Mandate

World War and Holocaust

Notes

3 Building a Nation-State

The War of Independence

Building a Nation

Building a State

In Search of Security

After the Six-Day War

Notes

4 The Reassertion of Tradition

After the Upheaval

Peace with Egypt

The Lebanese Tangle

A Decade of Stalemate

Palestinian Relations: Back to the Core

Notes

5 Oslo and the Ascendancy of the Right

The Oslo Breakthrough

Societal Change and Economic Revolution

Oslo Deadlock

Barak and Camp David

The Last Gasp: Taba

Notes

6 The New Century: Impasse and Consolidation

Impasse: The Fourth Stage of the Conflict

Consolidation: The Start-Up Nation?

The Netanyahu Era

The Impasse Continued

Jewish or Israeli?

Notes

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Map

About the Author

Preface

Introduction: Old-New Israel

Begin Reading

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Polity Histories series

Jeff Kingston, JapanDavid W. Lesch, SyriaDmitri Trenin, RussiaKerry Brown, ChinaEmile Chabal, France

Israel

Alan Dowty

polity

The right of Alan Dowty to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3691-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dowty, Alan, 1940- author.Title: Israel / Alan Dowty.Other titles: Polity histories.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: Polity histories series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Authoritative pocket history of Israel without polemic or bias”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020053326 (print) | LCCN 2020053327 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509536894 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509536900 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509536917 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Israel--History.Classification: LCC DS117 .D67 2021 (print) | LCC DS117 (ebook) | DDC 956.9405--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053326LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053327

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Map of Israel

About the Author

Alan Dowty is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is a graduate of Shimer College and the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1963. From 1963 to 1975 he was on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, during which time he served as Chair of the Department of International Relations. He is a Past President of the Association for Israel Studies, and in 2017 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies and the Israel Institute. Among his books are basic texts on Israeli society and politics (The Jewish State: A Century Later, University of California Press, 1998, 2001) and on the Arab-Israel conflict (Israel/Palestine, 4th edition, Polity 2017 and The Israel/Palestine Reader, Polity 2019). His most recent book is a study of the origins of the Arab-Israel conflict, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide (Indiana University Press, 2019).

Preface

Should a history of modern Israel focus on the narrative of those actually living this history, trying to understand their perspective? Or should it try to see the nation from an outside, presumably detached, vantage point? As it happens my own professional involvement with Israel has elements of both these perspectives. I often find myself trying to explain Israel, from the inside, to the broader world, and on the other hand trying to explain to Israelis how their country is perceived on the outside. For what it’s worth, this dual perspective has colored all my work on Israel, and not least of all this brief book that presumes to explain the extraordinary rise of the Jewish state in the course of the twentieth century. I have tried to convey both the internal debates that preoccupy Israelis and the international implications of Israel’s place in the world.

I am grateful to Polity Press, and to Louise Knight and Inès Boxman in particular, for the opportunity to distill a lifetime of involvement into this compressed account. I would also like to thank Dan Lawton, Phil Mikesell, Stuart Schupack, and Ruth Shorr for their reviews of all or parts of the manuscript.

Introduction: Old-New Israel

The modern state of Israel is a paradox. It is among the world’s newest national communities; as late as 1880, neither “Israel” nor “Palestine” appeared on any political map, there was little movement among Jews for a return to the Land of Israel, and there were only 20,000–25,000 Jews (about 5 percent of the total population of 462,465) in the three “Palestinian” districts of the Ottoman Empire.1 Yet today’s Israel is also among the world’s oldest national communities, one of the few instances of a people with the same basic language, ethnicity, and religion that had prevailed in the same space 2,000–3,000 years earlier.

This old-new paradox was not accidental. The Zionists who forged the new Israel had in mind the model of ancient Israel. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, used the title Altneuland (Old-New Land) for his utopian novel projecting the future state. As Zionists saw it, the Jewish state of antiquity had been a “normal” nation, connecting and clashing with other nations as an equal. But then the Jewish people had been forced into an abnormal existence, living as scattered communities of exiles (the Jewish Diaspora). Zionists condemned this interval of almost 2,000 years as dispersion and deformation, proclaiming a Negation of the Diaspora (shlilat hagolah). They projected scornful self-images of Jews and Judaism; the early Zionist Aaron David Gordon wrote, “We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil … We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either.”2

Both models of Jewish life have biblical roots. Ancient Israel was blessed by the prophet Balaam as “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9). (Sometimes this blessing is described as Balaam’s curse.) Yet the Israelites were also commanded to say “I will set a king over me, like as all the nations about me” (Deuteronomy 17:14). Early Zionists pursued this second model, to be a nation like other nations, but to find a historical embodiment they had to return to antiquity. This tension between a nation’s specific legacy, and what it shares with other nations, is not unique to Jews; all nations experience it to some degree. Jewish history, however, sharpened this clash in Israel.

But are Jews a “people” or “nation” as commonly understood? Some would deny the claim of ethnicity, asserting that “Jewishness” is only a religion. However, if we accept the definition of a people as a community with distinctive cultural, linguistic, and other attributes, then Jewish peoplehood has existed for most Jews, in most places, at most times. And as a modern nation-state, contemporary Israel does not differ essentially from other nation-states with dominant ethnic identities.

The Jewish population of today’s Israel – roughly 6.7 million of over nine million inhabitants in 2020 – surpasses the Jewish population of any other nation.3 In fact, within a decade or so, Israel will become home to a majority of the world’s Jews; it is already home to 47 percent of them.4 Its achievements as a nation-state have been notable; it recently ranked 22nd in the world on the UN Human Development Index, which measures social and economic well-being. It has been ranked eighth in the world in life expectancy, and third in the percentage of its population with university degrees.5

How did all this come about?

The story begins in Tsarist Russia, which in the late nineteenth century included the Baltic nations and most of Poland, making it home to half the world’s Jews. Russia itself – a “prison house of nations” – was in great turmoil and Jews became targets of a wave of violent antisemitism. In the course of four decades, an estimated four million Jewish refugees fled Russia.

In itself this was nothing new; it reproduced the essential rhythm of Jewish history over the centuries. The Jewish presence in Eastern Europe was itself a result of earlier flights from persecution in Western Europe. But massive flows of Jewish refugees in the past had not produced successful movements for a return to Zion. The Land of Israel, in most periods of history, was simply too inhospitable and unpromising, if entry was even possible. And, as those who chose Palestine would learn, it was also home to another people who would contest their claims.

Of the four million Jews who left Russia between 1880 and 1920, most followed the traditional pattern, fleeing to Western Europe and to the New World. But a small handful – perhaps 2 percent of the whole – decided, despite the obstacles, that the time had come to rebuild Jewish life in the historic homeland.

Jewish Life Before Zionism

The ancient roots of modern Israel go back 3,000 years in documented history, and other 1,000 years in biblical tradition. Jewish nationhood or peoplehood is, therefore, one of the oldest continuous national or ethnic identities in history. The survival of this identity is one of history’s puzzles, but clearly has something to do with the Jewish role in introducing monotheism to the world and with its subsequent relationship to Christianity and Islam, the universalistic faiths that grew out of this monotheistic tradition.

Jewish sovereignty ended with the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, though Jewish communities had existed outside Palestine since the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE. After the Roman conquest, the center of Jewish life passed first to Babylonia, where the dominant version of Jewish law – the Talmud – was produced. In the Middle Ages, it passed to Spain, where Jews shared in and contributed to the “Golden Age” of Islamic history there. Following the Christian reconquest of Spain and the expulsion of Jews there in 1492, Jews found haven in the Ottoman Empire and sometimes in Western Europe.

From the fifteenth century the center of Jewish life shifted to Eastern Europe. Persecutions and expulsions in Western Europe, beginning with the First Crusade in the late eleventh century, had forced many Jews to flee eastward where some rulers welcomed Jewish refugees for their commercial and artisanal skills. Beginning in the 1700s these communities experienced an astounding population growth – a “demographic miracle” – as the mortality rate dropped sharply with improved health and living conditions. The estimated world Jewish population in 1700 was about one million, which was about what it had been 1,200 years earlier (after peaking in the first century at about 4.5 million). Two centuries later, in 1900, there were an estimated 10.6 million Jews in the world, with Eastern Europe accounting for about 90 percent of this total.6 By this time, following the partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, about half of the world’s Jews were living in territory annexed by Tsarist Russia, a state that had traditionally tried to forbid Jewish residence on its soil.

Throughout Jewish history, and especially in turbulent times, the idea of a Return to Zion remained an important fixture in Jewish thought. The geography of Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel, Palestine – was interwoven in Jewish scripture, litany, ritual, and tradition throughout this odyssey. Jewish religious practices could be carried anywhere, but Eretz Yisrael remained the eternal spiritual center. Jews prayed three times a day for the return to Jerusalem, and when approaching life’s end often found their way to the Holy Land in order to be buried there.

The idea of a Return to Zion was often associated with messianism, the belief in the promised appearance of the messiah (the “anointed one”) who would not only lead Jews back to Zion (emblem of the Holy Land), but would also bring about the final redemption of Jews – and ultimately of all mankind. Though more a religious yearning than a political program, the vision of a collective return of Jews to Zion was never far from the surface, as evidenced in the excitement raised by a series of “false messiahs” who stirred the Jewish world over succeeding centuries: Solomon Molcho (sixteenth-century Italy), Shabbetai Zevi (seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire), and Jacob Frank (eighteenth-century Poland and Ukraine).

Jewish Politics

Living usually under autocratic rule (especially in Russia), it seems unlikely that Jews would gain political experience that would later guide them in founding their own state. But Jews actually had rich experience in self-government within their own communities, especially under regimes like Tsarist Russia where they sought to evade official oppression. The Encyclopedia Judaica lists over 120 cases of Jewish autonomy, in various forms, over the ages. Jewish communities reacted to uncertainty and threat by closing off from the outside world, building barriers to maintain separation and minimize outside intervention. The other side of closure was the forging of a strong sense of shared fate, and a remarkable cohesion, within Jewish communities.

The voluntary character of Jewish self-government was of decisive importance. Enforcement did not depend on formal sanctions as much as on the reputation of the rabbis issuing decrees, on public opinion and pressure, and on shared values and interests (such as the need to avoid creating pretexts for outside intervention). There was no obligatory final authority within the Jewish community; active participation and cooperation was highly dependent on the acquiescence of community members. Though not “democratic” by modern standards, it was nevertheless government by consent – explicit or implicit – of the governed.

Since it was voluntary, Jewish self-government also had to be inclusive. Disgruntled groups and individuals could opt out of active participation in the community. Given the need for unity against a hostile environment, there was a strong incentive to give all groups in the community a stake in the system. It was understood that benefits must be broadly shared, even when this meant overcoming deep social, ideological, and religious divisions. The principle of proportionality in the distribution of power and benefits was widely understood long before the term itself came into use; it was the only conceivable approach in a community lacking governmental powers.

Given its voluntaristic and inclusive nature, Jewish politics was inevitably pluralistic, with competing laws, jurisdictions, and authorities. Each community chose secular officials as well as a rabbinic leadership, and the lines of authority between the two were often unclear. Religious authorities and the wealthy tended to dominate, but essential unity was preserved through mutual recognition and accommodation. Early Zionists did not find competing centers of authority, nor voluntary cooperation among them, at all unusual.

All of this was moderated by a strong tradition of social justice. The care of the poor, the disabled, and the elderly was the duty of the entire community. Collectivist or cooperative models of social organization had very strong roots in Jewish tradition. The philanthropic and charitable endeavors, though essentially voluntary, were backed by a strong sense of obligation and by serious community pressure.

A final and crucial feature of traditional Jewish politics was that it seldom dealt with non-Jews within the community. Jewish law and Jewish politics within the community were understood to apply to Jews only. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were under the jurisdiction of the state; only within the community did Jewish law prevail. The essence of Jewish law toward non-Jews was humane treatment on an individual, not collective, level. Jewish communities never had under their jurisdiction non-Jewish populations with their own collective identity, and thus were singularly unequipped to deal with such groups.

In summary, Jewish history, especially in Eastern Europe but also elsewhere, embodied a certain kind of political experience. The main elements of this experience were struggle for survival on both community and individual levels in a hostile environment, self-regulation through well-developed legal and judicial institutions, processes for selecting the community’s own leadership, provision of a broad range of community services, and enforcement without recourse, in most cases, to coercive measures. This political tradition, with its emphasis on power-sharing and proportionality, was in many respects unique, in line with the image of Jews as “a people that dwells alone.” But it also has much in common with similar patterns of power-sharing, labeled as “consociationalism,” in many modern regimes. In these regimes, among which Israel might be included, power-sharing takes place in a democratic framework.

Palestine Before Zionism

The area that later became the British Mandate of Palestine was, under Ottoman rule, divided into three districts. The southern district around Jerusalem, because of its religious importance, functioned from 1873 as an independent district reporting directly to the Sultan in Constantinople. The two northern districts were part of a province ruled either from Damascus or, after 1888, from Beirut.

Western travelers in Ottoman Palestine during the late nineteenth century described what they saw as bleak desolation, rampant lawlessness, and breath-taking misery. Typical was the thirty-one-year-old Mark Twain, then known mainly for his short stories and travelogues, whose 1867 visit was immortalized in The Innocents Abroad. Like other visitors from verdant lands of Europe and America, he was struck by the rocky aridity of the region: “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields.”7

Such judgments lacked historical perspective. The Ottoman government had, beginning in 1839, enacted a series of far-reaching reforms (the Tanzimat) that had in many ways transformed areas it governed. In Palestine, by the time the early Jewish settlers arrived, the population had actually doubled since 1800. New industries, such as citrus fruit, had appeared, foreign trade had greatly increased, and contemporary testimony points to a broad improvement in basic law and order. Among the reforms was a sweeping land reform, in 1858, that turned swathes of what had been state land into, essentially, private holdings. Much of this land was farmed by tenants under traditional rights of usage, but now it could be sold, creating greater opportunities for foreign nationals – such as most Zionists – to acquire land.

The Tanzimat reforms did not, however, reverse the overall decline of an Ottoman Empire facing serious challenges from without and within. Over the previous two centuries, the Ottomans had lost half of their territory to a combination of European imperialism and nationalist revolts. France and Great Britain now controlled former Ottoman North African provinces, while Christian minorities in the Balkans were in the last stage of achieving independence from their Ottoman rulers. This hardly disposed the government in Constantinople to view European Jewish immigration to Palestine sympathetically, since it seemed to embody both threats. It was a European movement tied (in Ottoman eyes) to the European powers, and it sought to insert yet another Western-oriented non-Muslim minority into the heart of what remained of the Ottoman Empire.

Furthermore, the Ottoman regime was already resisting European penetration of this Palestinian heartland. Driven by religious impulses, the Christian nations of Europe were competing among themselves to expand their sectarian, cultural, and economic presence there. The Ottomans depended on some European states to defend them from others; for example, in the Crimean War (1853–56) Britain and France blocked Russian threats. For this reason, the Ottoman government was often forced to concede to the demands of its protectors, including allowing the first European diplomatic presence in Jerusalem since the Crusades. European states also had a powerful tool for intervening within the Ottoman Empire in the form of the “Capitulations,” treaties that gave them jurisdiction over their own citizens within the Empire. European states often extended this protection to include co-religionists as well, France claiming the right to protect all Catholics and Russia claiming all Orthodox Christians as protégés. Great Britain, having few Anglicans to protect, at one point took upon itself the protection of Jews in Palestine.

European and American visitors to Palestine also noted a deep hostility to Westerners among both Arabs and Turks. When European states were allowed to open consulates in Jerusalem, for example, initially the consuls had to move around with armed escorts.8 This hostility extended to Jews coming from Europe; in fact, European (Ashkenazi) Jews were not allowed to live in Jerusalem in the 1723–1815 period, and still suffered severe discrimination after that. Both the Ottoman government and Arab residents viewed alien “intruders” from Europe, Jewish or otherwise, with deep suspicion. A major influx from this source would inevitably create an enduring conflict between two peoples, though few at the time foresaw this.

Ironically the Ottoman Empire had traditionally been a haven for Jewish refugees, dating back to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. A majority of the Jews in Palestine at the beginning of the nineteenth century were Sephardi – Hebrew for Spanish – though the label was applied to all Middle Eastern Jews. What this community had in common was its assimilation to local (Arab) culture and its recognition by the Ottoman government. This recognition of the Jewish community was part of the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, under which minority religious communities governed themselves in such matters as marriage, divorce, and religious practices. This autonomy fit in well with Jewish traditions of self-governance. In the Jerusalem district these powers were vested in a recognized Sephardi Chief Rabbinate, an arrangement challenged by the growing community of European Jews.

In the course of the century Jews from Europe came to outnumber the Sephardim, and the Ottoman authorities were trying to stem the influx well before Zionism came on the scene. But the tradition of offering refuge was most sorely tested when Russian Jews fleeing persecution began arriving in numbers in 1881–82. The official response, initially, was to continue the tradition, but in anti-Zionist mode. Jews were to be allowed anywhere in the Ottoman Empire except Palestine, they could come only as individuals and not as a group, and they would have to become Ottoman citizens, giving up their foreign passports and protection under the Capitulations.

Russian Jews Before Zionism

In some ways it seems odd that the movement to establish a Jewish state should come at the end of the nineteenth century, a period regarded as the era of Jewish emancipation. Beginning in France in 1791, Jewish populations in Europe and the Americas had made huge strides toward full civic equality and freedom from persecution. The road forward seemed to lead to their assimilation as Jews in modern liberal democratic societies.

Even in Russia these Enlightenment ideals had an impact. Under the “Liberator Tsar,” Alexander II (1856–81), broad reforms were carried out: the end of serfdom and the broadening of rights for minorities. Jews were allowed to live outside the “Pale of Settlement” to which they had been restricted, gained more access to universities and closed occupations, and were encouraged to participate in the new order. In Western Europe the general “Enlightenment” had sparked the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskala, which sought to bring progressive liberal thinking into the Jewish world. By mid-century the Haskala had reached Russian Jews; over time it produced a significant corps of maskilim (followers of Haskala) devoted to integration as Jews into an enlightened Russian state and society. The ideal was expressed by the poet Yehuda Leib Gordon, a leading maskil:

This Land of Eden [Russia!] now opens its gates to you …

Become an enlightened people, speak their language …

Be a man abroad and a Jew in your tent,

A brother to your countrymen and a servant to your king.9

Jews would, in Gordon’s words, remain a “people that dwells alone” in their tents, that is, in their own communal life. But in the broader community they would become Russian, that is, a people like other people.

It was, therefore, a cruel turn of fate when this emerging new order, on which so many pinned their hopes, came crashing down. The triggering event was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 1, 1881, and the accession of his son Alexander III, who was dominated by reactionary advisors. Within weeks a wave of attacks, the worst in two centuries, devastated Jewish communities throughout southern Russia. It was these attacks that gave currency to the Russian word pogrom, meaning devastation. The role of the Russian government in instigating these attacks is debated among historians, but it did little to stop them, and it blamed the Jews themselves for having created the resentment of the mobs. It also rescinded many of the reforms from which Jews had benefited.

Those who had invested most in a liberalized Russia – the maskilim – not surprisingly became the most disillusioned. There is no surer recipe for revolution than to inspire hope and then snatch it away. Of course the disillusionment was broad and deep among Russian Jews, and over the next forty years some four million of them, fitting the modern accepted definition of refugees, left Russia. But in the choice between Palestine or America (or elsewhere in the West) as destination, the maskilim in particular chose Palestine. As they saw it, antisemitism would be prevalent everywhere except in the one place that Jews could call their own. Being a nation like other nations meant having a homeland just as other nations had a homeland, and therefore being equal to other nations.