Legacy of Empire E-Book

Gardner Thompson

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 586

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

It is now more than seventy years since the creation of the state of Israel, yet its origins and the British Empire's historic responsibility for Palestine remain little known. Confusion persists too as to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In Legacy of Empire, Gardner Thompson offers a clear-eyed review of political Zionism and Britain's role in shaping the history of Palestine and Israel. Thompson explores why the British government adopted Zionism in the early twentieth century, issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then retaining it as the cornerstone of their rule in Palestine after the First World War. Despite evidence and warnings, over the next two decades Britain would facilitate the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants, ultimately leading to a conflict which it could not contain. Britain's response was to propose the partition of an ungovernable land: a 'two-state solution' which - though endorsed by the United Nations after the Second World War - has so far brought into being neither two states nor a solution. A highly readable and compelling account of Britain's rule in Palestine, Legacy of Empire is essential for those wishing to better understand the roots of this enduring conflict.

Leseprobe

LEGACY OF EMPIRE

GARDNER THOMPSON

LEGACYOF EMPIRE

Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel

To Elizabeth and Ed

Saqi Books 26 Westbourne Grove London W2 5RHwww.saqibooks.com

Published 2019 by Saqi Books Copyright © Gardner Thompson 2019

Gardner Thompson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Illustration of Sir John Robert Chancellor by Hugh Cecil (Hugh Cecil Saunders) cream-toned matte bromide print on cream mount, 1930s © reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 0 86356 361 4 eISBN 978 0 86356 386 7

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

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Maps

Illustrations

Selective Timeline

Introduction

1. The Birth and Emergence of Zionism, 1897–1914

2. Zionism in 1914

3. The British Adoption of Zionism, 1914–1917

4. The British Commitment to Zionism in Palestine, 1918–1922

5. Palestine in 1922

6. Zionism and Britain in Palestine, 1922–1939

7. The Second World War and After, 1940–1947

8. The Legacy

9. Has It Been Colonialism?

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

MAPS

Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1914

The League of Nations Mandates for the Arabic-speaking Ottoman provinces

The 1937 Peel Commission Partition Proposal

The UN Partition of Palestine, November 1947, and the 1949 Armistice Lines

Israel and Palestine Today Showing the Occupied Territories

ILLUSTRATIONS

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904)

David Lloyd George (1863–1945)

Sir Herbert Samuel (1870–1963)

Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952)

Arthur Balfour (1848–1930)

Edwin Montagu (1879–1924)

Faisal Hussein (1885–1933)

Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940)

Amin al-Husayni (1893–1974)

Raghib al-Nashashibi (1881–1951)

Sir John Chancellor (1870–1952)

Palestine Arab Executive Delegation to London, 1929–1930

The Arab Higher Committee, 1936

The Arab Revolt: British Troops Round Up Arabs in Jerusalem, 1938

The Arab Revolt: British Retribution in Jenin, 1938

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973)

SELECTIVE TIMELINE

1896

Publication of The Jewish State, by Theodor Herzl

1897

First Zionist Congress, Basel. Basel Programme

1914

First World War begins

1917

August: The Montagu Memorandum

1917

November: The Balfour Declaration

1918

First World War ends

1919

Report of the King-Crane Commission

1920

Disturbances

1921

Disturbances

1922

Churchill’s White Paper. League of Nations Mandate for Britain to administer Palestine

1923

Jabotinsky writes The Iron Wall

1929

Major disturbances: ‘Year Zero’

1930

Passfield’s White Paper (followed by MacDonald’s Black Letter, 1931)

1933

Hitler and Nazis come to power in Germany

1936

Arab Revolt v increasing Jewish immigration and settlement (and British administration)

1937

Peel Commission Report. Resumption of Arab Revolt

1938

Conference on Political Refugees, Evian, France

1939

MacDonald’s White Paper

1939

Second World War begins Holocaust/‘Final Solution’

1942

Biltmore Programme

1945

Second World War ends

1947

Britain announces it will abandon Palestine. UNSCOP Report UN votes for partition

1948

State of Israel is declared: First Arab-Israeli War

INTRODUCTION

‘The two great evils which menace society in general and a society of nations in particular … are hatred and ignorance.’ Chaim Herzog1

The Arab-Israeli conflict continues. At the time of writing, there is no peace process and no sign of resolution. We are repeatedly reminded of this. The May 2018 celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel was marked by renewed Palestinian resistance, and bloodshed, in Gaza. Confusion persists, too. The British Labour Party has struggled to distinguish anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

On the shelves of booksellers there is no shortage of works on this subject. But much ignorance remains: of the origins of the modern state of Israel, and of the inter-communal antagonism that marked its birth. There is little knowledge of modern political Zionism, little awareness of the British Empire’s historic responsibility for Palestine, and little appreciation of the legacy for Israel.

The modern state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War. Many assume a direct link between the two events, and of course there was one. Jewish survivors of the horror of Nazi-occupied Europe wanted to start new lives ‘in the only place likely to welcome them’, and Palestine presented itself as just that.2 Tens of thousands of Jews made their way there. But Israel’s origins are properly sought in the period of the First World War, not the Second.

It is sometimes argued that it is impossible to consider the political affairs of the Jewish people before the Second World War, except in the shadow of our knowledge of what occurred then. But the reverse is also true. We cannot properly consider post-war developments without a secure grasp of what went before: above all, the worsening conflict between indigenous Palestinians and the increasingly militant Zionist movement. This eventually led the British – who from 1922 had administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate – to admit failure: provisionally before the war, in 1937; formally after it, in 1947.

It was the British who in 1917 committed themselves, owing to wartime exigency, to the Zionist project. In the 1920s and 1930s, despite evidence, argument and warnings, they oversaw the colonisation of Arab Palestine by Jewish immigrants: a trickle in the 1920s, a flood in the 1930s. There arose, as a result of Britain’s policy, outright hostility between the peoples, which its administration could not reverse. The British abdicated in 1947 – but the conflict was inherited by Israel, after the United Nations awarded 55 per cent of the land of Palestine to a Jewish state in 1947 (to this extent fulfilling the Zionist dream). At heart it is this dispute that continues.

This is not a story of the inevitable. The British might not have done what they did in 1917 and the 1920s, especially under a prime minister other than David Lloyd George. A solution to the Jewish Question – how should Jews respond to anti-Semitism generally, though especially in Poland and Russia? – might have been found in a continuing welcome for Jewish refugees in Britain and the USA, for example, rather than in the colonisation of an Arab territory of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The initial British endorsement of Zionism was not inevitable; but its consequences flowed with ‘a certainty like fate’.3

Britain’s critical role began with the Balfour Declaration. In November 1917, the British government of Lloyd George pledged to ‘facilitate’ the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, while stressing that ‘nothing shall be done’ to prejudice the rights of existing communities living there. In making these two contradictory promises, the Declaration – enshrined in a League of Nations mandate in 1922 – committed the British administration to a policy that was seen to fail before the Second World War and led to the ignominy of abdication shortly after it.

Balfour’s Declaration was not the pure expression of sympathy with the aspirations of persecuted Jews that it is still widely held to have been. Far from it. In fact, the only Jewish member of the British Cabinet, Edwin Montagu, condemned his government’s attitude to Palestine and Zionism in 1917 as anti-Semitic. The fantastic assumption that lay behind this commitment to Zionism – that ‘world Jewry’ was an agency so powerful that it could not be ignored – was itself indicative of an anti-Semitism well established in Central Europe. And this was the same Arthur Balfour who, as Prime Minister, had introduced the Aliens Act in 1905: primarily to prevent Jews who were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe from entering Britain.

In the period 1917–1922, sympathy among British decision-makers for the persecuted Jews of Central and Eastern Europe was constrained within geographical limits. They conceded that the Jews had a problem, but they insisted that the location for its solution lay … somewhere else. Zionists, who helped to formulate the Declaration in 1917, conveniently insisted that faraway Palestine should be the location for a Jewish National Home – even though its resident population was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim (or, as the Declaration put it, ‘non-Jewish’) and known to be anti-Zionist (though not anti-Semitic). The Balfour Declaration was a landmark expression of nimbyism. Though Palestine, for most Jews, remained a far less attractive prospect than Britain or America, the Declaration became a template for other countries to adopt. As we shall see later, they too – including, crucially, the USA from 1924 – welcomed Zionism as an alternative to keeping their own doors open for any Jews fleeing persecution. They could go to Palestine instead. This approach did something to protect Britain and other states from politically unpopular Jewish immigration; it did nothing to recognise the rights of Palestinians in their homeland.

British Prime Minister from 1908–1916 Herbert Asquith had scant interest in Palestine, and none in Zionism. If Palestine was of little or no strategic value, the case for adopting Zionism was, from the British imperial point of view, thin indeed. However, Lloyd George made his commitments, not only to Palestine but also to Zionism, many years before the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. There was already a Jewish Question but there were, at that time, other answers to the worsening plight of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. And Zionists conceded that a Jewish national home in Palestine could not accommodate all the world’s Jews. For the time being, the USA, the choice of so many Jewish emigrants from Europe around the turn of the century, remained open.

Especially remarkable is the uncharacteristic ineptitude of decisionmakers in the British government in the aftermath of the First World War: in respect to Palestine (their knowledge of which was largely biblical), and in respect to Zionism, too (their knowledge of which was minimal). Policy initiatives were not thought through. In some respects, the imperial attitude to Palestine was unexceptional. Here, as for other overseas British possessions at the time, it was claimed that colonies (repackaged now as mandates) benefited from imperial governance; that strategic purposes further justified them; that they were valuable as potential markets and sources of raw materials; that they must be developed as far as was practicable (to keep down metropolitan costs); that settlers, as in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, would contribute, by making better use of land than natives could; and, lastly, that there was plenty of time available in which to bestow the blessings of Western civilisation. For the most part, previous British imperial decision-making along such lines had been shrewd and realistic: pragmatic, even at times reluctant. And not all colonialism caused trauma among the colonised.

But there was caprice in Lloyd George’s adoption of Zionism, along with a dogged refusal to grasp that it could not work. Zionists were a tiny minority among the world’s Jews before the period of the First World War. Zionism – an ideology and movement committed to the colonisation of Palestine – was only one, eccentric, answer to the Jewish Question of the late nineteenth century. In sponsoring the Zionist project for its own ends, Lloyd George’s British imperial government adopted a unique, hybrid colonialism in Palestine: they ‘administered’, while Jewish immigrants ‘settled’. They were thus responsible for creating, as prophesied, a problem in Palestine that before long grew to be beyond their capacity to solve.

By the late 1930s, ‘Israel’ was not only conceptualised but already had an embryonic existence. The events of the following decade are horribly familiar. Less widely known is the fact that the Peel Commission’s proposal in 1937 of a ‘two-state solution’ – before the Second World War and the genocide – closely foreshadowed that of the United Nations in 1947, which led to the birth of Israel the following year.

The legacy of thirty years of controversy and crisis in mandated Palestine was to be ineradicable. The new Israel was – and remains – scarred by an inter-communal conflict provoked by Zionist colonisation fostered by the British during an ill-judged administration of Palestine tied to the Balfour Declaration. The two-state solution advocated in response, first by the British and later by the UN, has so far produced neither two states nor a solution.

The Balfour Declaration and its consequences continue to be widely seen in a far rosier light than they merit. The centenary of the issuing of the Declaration was marked in July 2017 by a debate in the British House of Lords in which more than two dozen members chose to speak.4 The prevailing tone (there was a discordant minority of just two or three) was one of uncritical pride, and prejudice. There were many expressions of loyalty to, and praise of, Israel. There was an understated anti-Arab sentiment (though for the most part the Palestinians’ experience was ignored). There was a good sprinkling of muddled thinking, too. The following extracts, each from a different contributor, give a representative indication of what was said.

Pride and prejudice: ‘Let us choose this centenary to rededicate ourselves to the aspiration of this document.’ ‘Britain can rightly be proud of the Balfour Declaration, which well deserves a happy and dignified celebration of its 100th anniversary.’ ‘It is important that we, as Britons, feel immense pride in the Balfour Declaration and its consequences.’ ‘It was a hopelessly optimistic idea, and, at the time, little thought was given to how one group, the Jews, were supposed to protect the rights of another group, the Arabs, who were immediately trying to kill them off.’

Muddle: ‘We are inspired by the pioneering spirit of those who wrote those sixty-seven words into history and in doing so saved the lives of millions.’ ‘We regret that Israel was not established ten years earlier, which would have largely prevented the Holocaust.’ ‘The Balfour Declaration … was a momentous reversal of imperialism.’ ‘There had to be somewhere in the world where Jews would always be welcome and feel safe.’ (Though another lord observed that ‘suicide bombings, knifings and missiles are daily occurrences for the citizens of Israel who live in a constant state of siege’.)

One speaker asked – albeit a century after its attempted implementation began – ‘How does she [the Minister Chair] think that the second part of the Balfour Declaration can be brought about, so that the rights of both Jewish and non-Jewish communities are on a truly equal footing?’

An all-but solitary critic stated: ‘The Balfour Declaration has created endless misery for generations of Palestinians … The Declaration and its aftermath are among the most shameful in our history.’

In her summing up, the Minister, Baroness Goldie, unconvincingly described what she had heard as ‘powerful, eloquent, informed and helpful’.

The level of ignorance, partiality and confusion revealed in the Lords debate of 2017 is disturbing as well as astonishing. As long as members of the British political establishment do not know or understand the turbulent history of Palestine (and Britain’s leading role in it) before the Second World War – yet speak and act as if they do – they remain illequipped to pursue Arab-Israeli reconciliation now.

There could be no more eloquent illustration than this lop-sided debate of the need for a fresh, evidence-based corrective review of what happened when the British were responsible for Palestine.

EUROPE AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN IN 1914

1

THE BIRTH AND EMERGENCE OF ZIONISM, 1897–1914

‘Will those who are dispossessed remain silent and accept what is being done to them?’ Yitzhak Epstein1

The beginning

Modern political Zionism was born in Basel. On 29 August 1897, around two hundred people gathered to discuss the predicament of the Jews in Europe. They had intended to meet in Munich, but the Jewish community there, fearing an anti-Semitic reaction, did not welcome them. The congress opened instead across the border in Switzerland. Proceedings began with a celebratory prayer: ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive and brought us to witness this day.’ The assembly agreed that the oppressed Jews of Europe needed a homeland of their own. But at least one prominent contemporary Jewish intellectual wondered if this occasion might represent the last sigh of a dying people.2

The man behind the meeting was Theodor Herzl, a thirty-sevenyear-old, Hungarian-born playwright and journalist. Eighteen months earlier, a booklet of his had been published by a Viennese bookseller. It was called Judenstaat (‘The Jewish State’). Herzl wrote: ‘Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation.’ This, he argued, was the solution to the Jewish Question, ‘after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering’.3 There was no alternative: this was a matter, he later wrote in his diary, ‘which only blockheads cannot find crystal clear’.4 But the book’s reception was not encouraging. Herzl had expected to be ridiculed as a mad visionary, and his expectations were fulfilled. The Basel Programme did not elicit widespread approval among the Jews of Europe. Zionism did not have a promising start.5

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) Founder of modern political Zionism.

How different it looks in retrospect. These two somewhat obscure events – in Vienna and in Basel – marked the emergence of modern Zionism: unwavering ideological and practical commitment to the creation, for the Jews, of a homeland of their own. In his publication and at his congress, and by his exceptionally energetic advocacy thereafter, Herzl shaped and inspired an extraordinary political movement which not only endured but flourished.6 In time, Zionism was to have a profound impact on world history in the twentieth century and beyond.

In this light, the Basel Programme deserves to be as widely known as the Balfour Declaration from twenty years later.7 Here is the full text:

The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.

The Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end:

1. The promotion, on suitable lines, of the colonisation of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers

2. The organisation and binding together of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international in accordance with the laws of each country

3. The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness

4. Preparatory steps towards obtaining government consent, where necessary, to the attainment of the aim of Zionism.

The Jewish Question

Zionism was one late-nineteenth century response, among many, to the Jewish Question in Europe.8 Wherever Jews lived in perceptible numbers, Herzl wrote, ‘they are more or less persecuted’, and ‘the nations in whose midst Jews live are all either covertly or openly anti-Semitic’. Hence the Jewish Question:

Are we to get out now, and where to; or may we yet remain, and [for] how long?9

Herzl’s generalisation – that throughout Europe Jewish lives were becoming ‘daily more intolerable’ – blurred, deliberately, significant differences of Jewish experience across the continent. Jews in Western, even Central, Europe had benefited from the legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Emancipated now, they might assume that they were secure, in the modern, relatively liberal, state. In Eastern Europe, however, the situation was quite different. Jewish communities, especially in Russia, suffered acute hardship. What was to become of them?

In two senses, this was the largest question of all. First, Jews in Russia suffered increasingly from punitive imperial edicts and, especially following the assassination in 1881 of Tsar Alexander II, violent pogroms. Second, there were far more Jews in Russia than anywhere else – that is, in the Pale of Settlement, designated by Catherine the Great of Russia, after the partitions of Poland, as a vast area where Jews were permitted to live. It included the cities of Warsaw, Minsk and Kiev and much of today’s Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland and Ukraine.

It is estimated that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 7 million of the 11 million-or-so Jews in the world lived in Eastern Europe, with only 2 million elsewhere on the continent.10 For the most part, Russian Jews stayed and lived wherever they were born, through force of inertia or fear of change. Some, however, saw emigration as a solution to their own ‘Jewish Question’; and some of these went to Palestine. By 1885, Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) societies in Russia had settled between two and three thousand emigrants there. In the Russian context – and for Palestine at this time, too – these were tiny numbers; but Hovevei Zion was a forerunner of the modern Zionist movement.

For Jewish observers such as Herzl, the case of Russian Jews was exemplary rather than exceptional: their experience was different from that of the Jews of Western Europe in degree only. European Jewry as a whole was deemed to have reached a critical point. To the West there was more to this crisis than the prevalence and occasional intensity of anti-Semitism – though it was the Dreyfus Affair which convinced Herzl, already himself a victim of anti-Semitism in Vienna, that Jews even in France would never be fully free.11 There were, also, existential ‘Jewish questions’, two in particular. The first concerned identity: in the wake of major shifts within Judaism itself, what did it mean, now, to be a Jew? The second was about assimilation: was it possible; was it even desirable?

In an increasingly secular age, the faith itself was threatened. The Jewish Reform Movement and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) were responses, within Judaism, to ‘the sad truth … that it had become meaningless for many people’.12 In the context of post-Enlightenment Europe there could be only one outcome in the clash between secularism on the one hand, and on the other hidebound religion-based prohibitions and customs dating from the distant past. The Jewish Reform Movement brought radical changes to Judaism, shedding much of its inherited religious content. The movement re-defined the religion of the Jews as an ethical creed. Henceforth it was the Jews’ mission to steer all mankind towards justice and righteousness. At the same time, Haskalah led many Jews away from Judaism. While it saw a revival of Hebrew literature, it advocated secular education for personal fulfilment. This Jewish adaptation of the Enlightenment, arising in the age of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Beethoven, was an exercise in rationalism. These two movements within Judaism overlapped, in both content and significance. Alongside the external force of anti-Semitism, they contributed to the assimilation of innumerable Jews into gentile society.

Notwithstanding these internal shifts towards secularism, in the latter half of the nineteenth century the contextual questions for Europe’s Jews were real and urgent. What did they have to do to be fully accepted into gentile societies? If Jews adopted external conformity, ‘accepting’ at least the public aspects of the dominant gentile culture (or if they went further, and steeped themselves in it), would gentile society in turn ‘accept’ these erstwhile strangers? Would they be safe from discrimination and persecution? Would Jews be allowed to remain Jewish – in culture and community, if not in religious commitment? In short what, if any, was the price for being left alone in peace?

For some, the answer lay in intermarriage and/or conversion. The ‘melting-pot’ metaphor was first adopted in late-nineteenth-century America, to which a great number of Jews, among other millions, migrated from Europe. For many in the USA, the full melting into homogeneity – the shedding of all sense of separate identity, and the reduction in due course of physical traces of distinct ethnicity – was to follow, then and later, through intermarriage. Conversion was comparably significant in its implications for Jewry and Judaism. There are no reliable statistics, but it is recognised that large numbers of Jews remaining in Europe converted to Christianity, from early in the nineteenth century. They may have been predominantly from among the intellectual elite and social establishment, but cases were numerous in Russia as well as in England and in Germany. In some communities, almost all the leading families converted; where parents hesitated, they had their children baptised.

Karl Marx’s father provides an interesting example of recourse to conversion. Heinrich Marx had benefited from the emancipation of the Jews after the French entered the Rhineland in 1792. He was able to study law and to qualify as an attorney. But when the Prussians replaced the French in 1814, they prevented him from practising. So he chose to be baptised (opting, it is said, for Lutheranism rather than Roman Catholicism on the grounds that it required less attendance at church). Shortly afterwards, Karl, born in 1818, was duly baptised, not circumcised – ‘and brought up with nothing of an authentically Jewish nature being taught to him’. David Vital, author and former member of the Israeli government, concludes that Heinrich’s case illustrates ‘ambition in its gross form’.13 But this seems a harsh and unsympathetic judgement on a man who, having little respect for religion of any kind, merely wanted the best for himself and his family. His story paints a persuasive picture of a faith in crisis.

In sum, alongside the external pressure of ubiquitous anti-Semitism in all its forms, there was an internal stimulus, too, in what was happening to the religion itself. In the event, countless Jews across Europe chose some kind of assimilation positively, to pursue their own personal wishes and ambitions. It has been said of Jews even in 1930s Germany that ‘for a majority, their Judaism was an innocent hobby that bordered and shaped their identity’.14 Meanwhile, countless others sought to assimilate for more negative reasons: to merge, to shed what made them recognisable and vulnerable as strangers and become invisible.

Zionism and assimilation

But assimilation was anathema to Zionists. They passionately rejected assimilation in all its forms, from the mild to the extreme. For them, the aspiration to be accepted by gentile society was unrealistic; a readiness to melt into it was both degrading for the individual and unacceptable to the community. Their answer to the Jewish Question was a homeland which the Jews could migrate to, settle, and call their own.

Zionists believed that assimilation could never be relied upon. Their starting point was a conviction that anti-Semitism would always exist and would always present a threat. So, for example, in reaction to the Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker, founder of Hovevei Zion, gloomily observed that anti-Semitism was no mere hangover from the medieval past, but a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It was thus a delusion to hope for better days in Russia, or wherever else Jews were under serious attack. There was only one workable solution, he wrote, fifteen years before Herzl’s pamphlet was published: the Jews must find a country of their own. For Pinsker, writing in Odessa in the midst of pogroms, the priority was to remove Jews from a nightmare that was not only immediate but recurring and inevitable.15 While the majority of Jews in Western Europe at this time might be inclined towards assimilation, for Jews in Eastern Europe assimilation did not appear to be an option.

Herzl, albeit from a Central/Western European perspective, was as trenchant a critic as Pinsker of assimilation, attacking it as delusory. In his introduction to The Jewish State, he wrote: ‘We have honestly endeavoured everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities’ but ‘we are not permitted to do so… In vain are we loyal patriots… In countries where we have lived for centuries, we are still cried down as strangers.’ Jews did not ask for much: ‘If we could only be left in peace,’ he added despairingly. But there was no escape from anti-Semitism. ‘We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country and will remain so.’16

For Chaim Weizmann too, seeking to assimilate was futile. He argued that the emancipated and assimilated Jew ‘is felt by the outside world still to be something different, still an alien’. In fact, he went on, ‘the phenomena of assimilation and of anti-Semitism go on side by side – and the position of the emancipated Jew, though he does not realise it himself, is even more tragic than that of his oppressed brother’.17 Zionists did not deny the possibility of assimilation itself, for some Jews in some places and at some times. The evidence was too strong to the contrary, especially among better-educated and more prosperous Jews in Western Europe. Rather, Zionists stressed that, whatever they did to be accepted, and however apparently complete the mutual acceptance, Jews continued to be perceived as aliens and therefore to be at risk. So assimilation was possible; but it could not be the answer to the Jewish Question.

Second, Zionists believed that assimilation was degrading for the individual. Their opposition to it was both reasoned and passionate. Assimilation required Jews to abandon their heritage and identity. The French Revolution had brought emancipation, but for Jews this could be a trap. To be sure, there was the promise of freedom and equality for all – but how were Jews to safeguard their distinct and separate existence? Weizmann posed the question in 1918: ‘The Jew sets the modern world the problem of finding for him a place in its social structure which shall enable him to live as a human being without demanding that he cease to be a Jew’.18

When Weizmann first left Russia and came across assimilated German Jews, he described their condition as ‘demeaning, degrading, humiliating’. Weizmann preferred the world he had left, with all its persecution and poverty. Though confined within ghettoes, or the Pale, Jews had been left alone, and so could continue to be Jewish. In July 1904, Weizmann wrote: ‘There arises in me a terrible hatred towards “Jews” who turn away from Jewry. I perceive them as animals, unworthy of the name homo sapiens.’ These chilling words were written to his wife Vera, who was herself an object of Weizmann’s uncompromising ambition: ‘I always wanted … to cleanse you, my joy, of all assimilation, to lead you into the movement.’19

Third, Zionists believed that assimilation was disastrous for the Jews as a people. The individual might choose assimilation as a free agent, but for preservers of the community this was quite unacceptable. There was something ruthless in this standpoint. In their attitude to, for example, full assimilation through intermarriage and miscegenation, Zionists did not acknowledge the right of individual Jews, in all their diversity, to do whatever they wanted; instead, they stressed that assimilation (insofar as it was possible) led to the eclipse of the community. From this perspective, the grovelling required of Jews to be accepted in gentile society was more than repulsive: it amounted to a kind of treason. A degree of ruthlessness was to be seen, also, in the great controversy over whether to accept the British government’s offer in 1903 of a refuge in East Africa for Russian Jewish victims of renewed pogroms. In rejecting the offer, the Zionist leadership showed that it was committed more to the cause of Jewry/Judaism as a whole than to the immediate rescue of individual, persecuted, Jews.

The fate of Jewry hung in the balance. In a period of increasingly assertive secular nationalisms, a number of Jews saw themselves as a people with no space and nowhere to go. This is colourfully recalled by the Israeli novelist and academic Amos Oz, describing his mid-1940s childhood in Jerusalem. ‘In those days all the Poles were drunk on Polishness, the Ukrainians were drunk on Ukrainianness, not to mention the Germans, the Czechs, all of them, even the Slovaks, the Lithuanians and the Latvians: and there was no place for us in that carnival… Small wonder that we too wanted to be a nation, like the rest of them.’20 Zionists could not be indifferent towards Jews who chose to be integrated into gentile society. Here they would lose their identity as Jews, and thereby undermine Jewry as a whole. Ari Shavit offers another sympathetic insight into the Jews’ predicament and the uncompromising logic of the Zionist response. At stake, he writes, was nothing less than survival. In the hundred years before 1897, ‘God drifted away and the ghetto walls collapsed. Secularisation and emancipation … eroded the old formula of Jewish survival. There was nothing to maintain the Jewish people as a people living among others… If it was to survive, the Jewish people had to be transformed from a people of the Diaspora to a people of sovereignty.’21

A homeland: Palestine

It took a while before Palestine was adopted as the sole location for a Jewish national home. It is perhaps an indication of the perceived urgency of the situation that Herzl did not begin by insisting on Palestine. As noted above he specified no place, writing in The Jewish State: ‘Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation.’

This concise appeal was loaded with significance. Let ‘sovereignty’ be granted: this was to be more than a homeland, it was to be an independent state. Yet sovereignty must be ‘granted’ and recognised by one or more contemporary Great Power. Therefore, focused diplomacy would have to be undertaken, alongside emigration and settlement. In seeking recognition of ‘the rightful requirements of a nation’, Herzl was presenting the Jews no longer as a religious community but as a nation comparable with other, also emergent, nations of his time.22 He argued that, as in other cases, nationhood and homeland were inseparable. There was some ambiguity regarding ‘large enough’. Was the homeland to accommodate all Jews? Probably not. Rather, it had to be large enough to allow a regenerated Jewish community to emerge. This – undiluted, unhindered and unthreatened – would foster Jewishness and inspire Jews throughout the diaspora.

Some years elapsed before the Zionist movement finally ruled out any alternative to Palestine. ‘Shall we choose Palestine or Argentina?’, Herzl was asking in 1897. And later, in his celebrated pamphlet, he again acknowledged that for him ‘the Jewish state is conceived as a peculiarly modern structure on unspecified territory’.23

Approached by Herzl at the turn of the twentieth century, the British government responded with two alternatives to Palestine. The first was close to the Holy Land: El Arish, in Sinai. This, however, was effectively withdrawn when the British authorities in Egypt opposed it. They were worried that a Jewish colony in the region would have to draw off too much Nile water for irrigation. Then, in late August 1903, Herzl announced to the 600 delegates of the Sixth World Zionist Congress meeting in Basel a second British offer: of part of their recently acquired colonial territory in East Africa. To his dismay, Herzl’s recommendation that the movement accept this offer provoked Zionism’s gravest internal discord to date.

Zionists of Herzl’s generation regarded Jews as the latter-day successors of an ancient people who, according to the Hebrew Bible, were descended from a common ancestor, Jacob (renamed ‘Israel’: Genesis 32: 28). With God’s blessing they had settled in the land of Canaan, roughly ‘Palestine’, between the Eastern Mediterranean shore and the river Jordan. Herzl was certainly not questioning Palestine as the preferred long-term goal. Rather, he was arguing that a refuge had to be found at once for victims of anti-Semitism in Russia. The Kishinev pogrom of April that year had left around fifty dead, hundreds injured and Jewish property looted or destroyed. Nonetheless, his proposal caused uproar and deep division. Herzl himself was denounced as a traitor – by delegates from Russia. In the event, however, it was again British rather than Jewish resistance that killed off the notional scheme. Both a former high commissioner for Uganda and the first white settlers in Kenya expressed opposition that proved decisive.

Even after the formal rejection of the East Africa scheme, by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, there remained within the movement some eminent figures who did not recognise any essential link between Zionism and Palestine. Israel Zangwill, teacher, writer and playwright, was one. Born in London in 1864 of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, and subsequently a graduate of London University, he supported the idea of a national home in Palestine until he learned that, far from being a land without a people, Palestine had a sizeable indigenous population. He favoured ‘territorialism’, the project for repopulating Jews in a territory better suited to the purpose and without the prospect of local resistance. His preference was for the United States. America, he wrote, ‘has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her fifty states could absorb them’; and the American Constitution ‘would practically guarantee them against future persecution’.24

Zangwill defies simple categorisation as a Zionist. His inferences from the persecution of Jews in Russia at that time were given literary form in his play The Melting Pot, first staged in 1908. The central character, David, who loses all his family in the Kishinev pogrom, chooses to emigrate not to Palestine but to America. He rejects exclusiveness and celebrates assimilation.

Meanwhile, in London in 1905, Zangwill and some Anglo-Jewish friends had founded the Jewish Territorial Organisation (JTO). Denying the by-now official Zionist line – that the vital interests of the Jewish people lay in Palestine – they continued to look at possibilities elsewhere. It was thought sensible to search, once more, for land within the British Empire. So, regions of Australia and Canada were considered (as well as locations as diverse as Cyrenaica, Mesopotamia and even Angola). But nothing came of any of these enquiries. Foreshadowing a commonplace of later times, no country was disposed to offer any of its own territory for a Jewish homeland. The JTO remained in existence until 1925, a year before Zangwill’s death. In the previous year, 1924, the USA introduced such strict controls over immigration that his vision of America as a realistic alternative to the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine – hitherto so attractive to so many Jews leaving Europe – was effectively destroyed.

Long before Weizmann wrote his What is Zionism? in 1918, the matter was closed. Zionists agreed that nowhere but Palestine offered the Jews an acceptable location for a homeland. Weizmann put the case so clearly and strongly in this pamphlet that it is worth quoting at some length.

As to the land that is to be the Jewish land, there can be no question. Palestine alone, of all the countries in which the Jew has set foot throughout his long history, has an abiding place in his national tradition… The memory and the hope of Palestine have been bound up with the national consciousness of the Jewish people through all the centuries of exile and have been among the most powerful forces making for the preservation of Jewry and Judaism. The task of Zionism, then, is to create a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, to make it possible for large numbers of Jews to settle there and live under conditions in which they can produce a type of life corresponding to the character and ideals of the Jewish people.

This is Zionism at a glance. Most of the main themes are encapsulated here: Palestine; the nation; the exile; Jewry and Judaism; settlement; regeneration. Meanwhile, the sickness and possible collapse of the Ottoman Empire was widely discussed by the Great Powers of Europe. And ‘one sign of disintegration was that the Zionists took an interest in Palestine’.25 Moses Hess, mid-century advocate of a Jewish state in Palestine, contemplated bribery as a tool, asking: ‘What European power would oppose a plan for the Jews … to buy back their ancient fatherland? Who would object if they flung a handful of gold to decrepit old Turkey and said, “Give us back our old home and use this money to consolidate the other parts of your tottering old empire”?’26

Many Zionisms

Zionism was, for Jews of turn-of-the-century Europe, a broad church. Emigration – or ‘return’ – to Palestine, or Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel), would answer the Jewish Question, once and for all time. This would be a homeland of their own, where Jews would be free from the anti-Semitism that would forever haunt all attempts at assimilation; where they would be free, too, to nurture their distinctive culture, and flourish as never before as a people. On so much, Zionists agreed. But there was plenty of scope for disagreement too, regarding not only the means of achieving this goal but also the character of the newly established Jewish state itself. We will look shortly at the views, alongside Herzl’s, of Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), and Yitzhak Epstein.

First, in order better to understand Zionism as intellectual history, rather than as a practical project of colonisation, we turn to Arthur Hertzberg. Rabbi, scholar, and editor of the 1959 classic The Zionist Idea, Hertzberg observes, perhaps surprisingly, that ‘from the Jewish perspective, messianism, and not nationalism, is the primary element in Zionism’; that ‘Zionism is Jewish messianism in process of realising itself through this-worldly means’; and that ‘the great virtue of this estimate of Zionism is that it seems to succeed in providing the modern movement with a long history of which it is the heir’.27

The inherited view of Jewish destiny was (to approximate) that of a religious community, chosen by God, looking towards His grace for redemption, and awaiting the Messiah who would gather the Jews in the Holy Land and usher in an era of peace in God’s Kingdom. As Hertzberg puts it, ‘the Jew conceived of himself as part of a holy community, a divine priesthood and the elected of God, in an attitude of waiting for the Messiah’.28 But in the nineteenth century this perception came to be challenged; the era of Emancipation brought a radical break. Both the ghetto and inherited tradition evaporated. It was against this background that Zionists adapted the religious Jewish narrative to one they presented as something secular.

For Zionists, the Jews were a nation, bound by history and experience, culture and principle; and a nation in pursuit of self-determination and regeneration. In defiance of general and long-established religious assumptions within Judaism, their Jewish Kingdom was to be a kingdom of this world: man-made, and as soon as possible. Convinced of the rightness of their cause, Jews were now to step out of the past, abandon the defensiveness of an inward-turning spirituality, and adopt a radical, new, modern role among the (other) nations of the world. In short, Zionists sought a redefinition of Jewish identity and purpose. Theirs was a unique mission: to re-establish themselves in their historic homeland, Palestine; bring civilisation to the Middle East, the crossroads of continents; and act as a moral beacon for the world. This was Zionism as new messianism: one distinctive and extraordinary product of profound mid-nineteenth-century Jewish soul-searching.

However, stresses were concealed in this composite picture of Zionism. From the early days, there was tension between evolutionary and revolutionary ingredients (and perhaps personal temperaments). This is well illustrated by contrasting the positions of Herzl and of the essayist and activist Ahad Ha’am.

The two men were contemporaries – the one born in Hungary in 1860, the other near Kiev in 1856 – who after the First Zionist Congress of 1897 became locked in debate about the proper purposes of Zionism. Herzl’s views, expressed at that meeting and in his publication of the previous year, have been rehearsed above. He may be seen as representing Political Zionism – optimistic and revolutionary. He preached, like Leo Pinsker before him, ‘the total evacuation of the land of the gentiles’. This required intervention not from God but from a sympathetic gentile Great Power. This was messianism, in the sense that Herzl proclaimed ‘the historical inevitability of a Jewish state in a world of peaceful nations’.29

If Herzl’s focus was the Jews, by contrast Ahad Ha’am’s was Judaism. He represented Spiritual (or Cultural) Zionism; and his approach was cautious and evolutionary. For Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, the ‘chosen-ness’ of the Jews lay in the uniqueness of their values and moral authority. Unlike Herzl, he did not detect any historical inevitability; rather defensively, he advocated careful, step-by-step, colonisation in Palestine, and he was unenthusiastic towards statehood. Being cautious, he was wary of that core political aspiration. He warned that it would be both wrong and dangerous for incoming Jewish settlers to treat the Arabs with contempt. He warned, too, that even a total concentration of Jewry in Palestine (to which he was opposed) could not answer the Jewish Question. He feared that the geographical position of Palestine, and its global religious importance, would deny it for ever the status of a normal, small state; it would always be a football in the game of interests played by the others. He believed that only a small-scale community, of no political importance, could hope to be left alone by the Great Powers of the world.

Ahad Ha’am’s vision was in fact quite different from Herzl’s. He advocated settlement, not by as many Jews as possible but by a select group. He looked forward not so much to a Jewish state as to a time when a Jewish community in Palestine would represent a moral priesthood for all mankind. For him, as for Herzl, the Jews were a nation; but they were quite unlike all other nations. He rejected, as impracticable, ‘the return’ or the ‘ingathering’ of the Jewish people as a whole to Palestine. Nor did Ahad Ha’am trust gentiles to assist, as Herzl did: having grown up in a ghetto, he regarded the surrounding world as the enemy.

Here were two quite distinct visions, among many. Each was close to the heart of the Zionist movement. Such disagreements hint at the multi-layered complexity of an emergent ideology. They were of no interest and little significance for the Palestinians among whom early Zionists settled. But it was of great significance that a trenchant form of Herzl’s Zionism – rather than Ahad Ha’am’s – eventually triumphed. Most immigrants of the second aliyah (wave of immigration) adhered to Herzl’s line.30 Thereafter, Zionism in Palestine was clearly a political, not a spiritual, movement.

Rabbi and scholar Yitzhak Epstein offered a third vision. He favoured the Zionist project; but he raised so many objections, albeit ethical and practical rather than spiritual or religious, that he might have been criticising from the outside rather than from within. His misgivings regarding the project were humane. He chose, strikingly, to focus the attention of the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905 on the impact of Zionist colonisation on the colonised.31

He began his address: ‘Among the difficult issues regarding the rebirth of our people in its homeland, one issue outweighs them all: our relations with the Arabs.’ He emphasised not only the ignorance of Zionists regarding Palestine’s existing population, but also their blindness (which in part explained it). The issue had gone ‘completely unnoticed’. The resident people had been ‘overlooked’. Epstein here could have been describing Herbert Bentwich, who arrived in Palestine in 1897. His great grandson Ari Shavi later wrote: ‘Bentwich sees … the promise [but] he does not see the land as it really is.’ Shavit goes on to ask, ‘How is it possible that my great-grandfather does not see … that the land is taken … that there is another people now occupying the land of his ancestors?’ Shavit’s answer is persuasive: ‘My great grandfather does not see, because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back.’32 Zionists preferred the fiction of a land without a people.

Epstein’s primary concern was that none of the competing visions for a Jewish homeland in Palestine took account of reality on the ground: ‘We are absolutely ignorant of everything regarding Arabs… There exists an entire people who have held [Palestine] for centuries and to whom it would never occur to leave… We are forgetting that the people who live there now also have a sensitive heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like any man, has a strong bond with his homeland.’

This, he continues, is ‘the irresponsibility of our movement’; and ‘it would be folly not to consider with whom we are dealing’. Dangerous, too. He went on to ask ‘the hidden question’: ‘Will those who are dispossessed remain silent and accept what is being done to them?’

‘In the end,’ he answered, ‘they will wake up… Powerful is the passion of those who have been uprooted from their land… Let us not tease a sleeping lion.’ In retrospect, Epstein’s words seem remarkably prophetic. Palestinian Arab resistance to Zionism was evident before the First World War, and it was to be a perennial reality of the British mandate years thereafter.

The answer, he advised his fellow Zionists, lay in Jewish values: the Jewish commitment to ‘justice and the law, egalitarianism and the brotherhood of man’. So ‘we sin against our nation and our future if we facilely cast aside our choicest weapon: the justice and purity of our cause’. Epstein’s prescription may appear to us now as naïve, though he insisted at the time that it was not a dream. He maintained that Jewish settlement ‘requires the agreement of the other side’. If this were cultivated, the future could lie in consent and partnership: in cooperation, that is, between settlers and settled. There was, he argued, a possibility that the Arabs ‘will not curse the day the Jews came to settle their land but will remember it as a day of redemption and salvation’. As if he needed to dispel doubts among his listeners, he concluded his address with a passionate commitment to Zionism: ‘Heaven forbid that we should digress even momentarily from our act of creation.’

In this way, and a dozen years before Arthur Balfour’s Declaration, Epstein stood up and confronted the culture clash and the contradiction; but contradiction it remained. In the eyes of the Palestinian Arabs, there was to be no recognition of the ‘purity’ of the Zionist cause, no sense of Zionist ‘justice’, and not much ‘brotherhood of man’. Reading his speech now, it is not certain that Epstein had actually convinced himself. The response to Epstein’s address was part scepticism – the Jews simply did not have the resources to build the new Zionist-Arab society that Epstein envisaged – and part scorn. Narrower-minded Zionists than Epstein were driven by a competing priority: settlement, not justice. For them it was time at last for the Jews to concern themselves with their own existence, survival and destiny. The debate provoked by Epstein contained, in essence, the main on-going argument among Zionists on the Arab question: on the one hand, Epstein’s demand that Jewish settlement should be based on the highest moral principles, and proceed only in agreement with the Arabs; on the other, the self-centred nationalism urged by the Zionist vanguard.

Zionists tended to underestimate the problem of a resident Arab population in Palestine. After Epstein, they had no excuse to do so.

Jewish alternatives and opposition to Zionism

From the outset, there was considerable Jewish opposition to Zionism. Far from uniting Jewry in a nationalist mission, Zionism divided it. It was a small, minority movement among late-nineteenth-century Jews. In the literal sense of movement, few emigrated to (and remained in) Palestine. In the ideological sense, few subscribed to the project of a nation state acquired by human endeavour. On the contrary, Zionism provoked a range of opposition and alternative analyses wider than can be marshalled here. There was, first, the wholehearted opposition of Orthodox (or Ultra-Orthodox) Jews. Representing the traditional religious case – and in doing so lending some credibility to Zionism’s claim to be secular – they ‘resolutely opposed any manifestation of Jewish nationalism as sacrilege, an unnatural tampering with the work of God… Jewish redemption would come with the Messiah or not at all.’33 Of Zionism’s numerous other contemporary critics, we will look at one scholar, and two communities.

Contemporary Jewish critics of political Zionism could be fierce. A good example is Isaac Breuer. Hungarian-born, and still a teenager when Herzl published The Jewish State, in adulthood he was an assimilated German, having studied in German universities and then entered the legal profession. A neo-Orthodox rabbi, he fended off both the Reform Movement and Haskalah, insisting that the Jews remain a religious community, inspired by a unique divine mission. But his real enemy was Zionism, in both its ‘political’ and ‘spiritual’ forms. He accepted that the Jews were a nation; he approved of the Zionists’ arousal of national consciousness. He went further and acknowledged the crippling effect of separation from the ancient homeland. But, he insisted, the Jews were exceptional as a nation, not merely one among many. Others might shape their own laws, but the Jews were shaped by the Torah. It was this God-given law that defined them and served as their constitution. It was inappropriate for Jews to be working out their own ideas; they should be seeking not a secular political state but redemption. Regarding the Zionist emphasis on the colonisation of Palestine, Breuer did not hold back. The Zionist movement, Breuer judged, was ‘the most terrible enemy that has ever risen against the Jewish nation’.34

‘Our hardest struggle everywhere is against the Bund,’ wrote Weizmann in 1903.35 The origins of the Bund – that is, the All-Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia – lay in the Pale. In the course of the nineteenth century, the population of Jews in Russia multiplied. For the most part they were employed in industry and crafts, or they were merchants, shopkeepers and petty traders. Most Jews lived in small towns and villages, where segregation, and the prevalence of local anti-Semitism, meant that assimilation was not a realistic option. The political context became threatening. The Jews were increasingly demonised, and they became a convenient scapegoat for an increasingly authoritarian and incompetent regime.

The Bund sought to meet the needs of what became a sizeable Jewish urban industrial working class. Though it had origins in the 1880s, this labour union had its founding congress in Vilna (Vilnius), in September 1897 – just a month after Herzl’s First Zionist Congress in Basel. The Bund demanded nationality status for the Jews (to this extent, imitating Zionism); but they sought national-cultural autonomy, with a protected Yiddish-based secular Jewish culture, not in an imagined ancient home, but within a federated Russian state.36 In the meantime, the Bund engaged in class struggle, boasting the largest mass following of any socialdemocratic grouping in Russia at that time. The radical views of the Bund alarmed Western European Jewish assimilationists, who did not want to be associated with revolutionaries. Among Zionists, Weizmann considered the Bund’s revolutionary doctrine ‘facile’; and he belittled it further by branding it ‘assimilationist’.37 For their part, the Bund leadership labelled Zionism ‘a counter-revolutionary fantasy’. The situation changed after 1917. It was the Zionists now, and no longer the Bund, who had the most potent ideology among the Jews of the empire. But their achievements were limited. As the distinguished scholar of Jewish history John D. Klier somewhat scathingly concludes, ‘what the Zionist movement did not produce was widespread emigration to Palestine’.38

The opposition of another, less sizeable but still substantial, group of Jews is revealing and poignant: the Jews who were already living in Palestine, before the onset of Zionism. These were Jews for whom Palestine provided homes – not a homeland. Most of the Jews living in Palestine before the first Zionist settlers arrived were Mizrahim or Sephardi: Jews from the Islamic world of North Africa (and in an earlier age, Spain). They had been drawn to the Holy Land for a combination of religious, economic and personal reasons, before the emergence of Zionism. They wanted to live in it as Jews. This, however, did not preclude degrees of assimilation. Indeed, in some cases, so marked was their identification with local communities (they were especially numerous in Jaffa, for example) that they were termed ‘Arab Jews’. They lived in mixed neighbourhoods and spoke Arabic; and their women dressed modestly. They enjoyed relations of mutual respect with the Arabs. These were Jews who, like innumerable fellow Jews across Europe, wanted to be left in peace. But their tranquillity was to be disturbed – not by gentile anti-Semitism, but by the arrival of second aliyah Zionists, predominantly Ashkenazi from Russia.

The newcomers, unlike the Jews already established, posed a threat to the Arabs. This was on a number of levels, not just land acquisition. In places like Jaffa, disputes could arise, for example, over the behaviour of women. When Ashkenazi Jewish women and girls dressed immodestly, their appearance provoked and angered the Arabs. Jaffa’s resident Jews were also shocked: the flouting of moral customs that had been accepted for generations was jarring for both resident communities. Fights broke out between Arab and Jewish youths over the honour of immigrant Jewish women. Meanwhile, new arrivals from Russia provoked Arab fears that the Jews in general were trying to take over the country and marginalise them. In short, Zionism was destroying the trust that had existed in Palestine between Jews and their Arab neighbours. Another area of disagreement between resident Sephardi and immigrant Ashkenazi was the economy. The former chose to employ Arab – that is, relatively cheap – labour. By contrast, the latter aspired to the ‘conquest of labour’, insisting that Jewish enterprises employ Jews and exclude Arabs. In due course, the eviction of Palestinian fellahin (labourers) following Zionist land purchases prompted attacks on Jewish settlements of all kinds.

In this context the ‘Arab Jews’ came under stress. Sephardi Jews sought to distance themselves from Zionist activity. In the early years of the twentieth century, non-Zionist Jewish and Arab leaders sought, on the basis of existing good neighbourliness, to find a shared, peaceful modus vivendi for the future of their communities, even a common front against the Ottoman Turks; it is a sad irony on a historic scale that it was the growing influence of Zionists that prevented it. Political Zionism rendered Arab-Jewish rapprochement in Palestine impossible. Later, Arabs in revolt against Britain’s ‘facilitation’ of Zionism in Palestine did not discriminate between one group of Jews and another. Most Jews thus found themselves, if only for reasons of self-defence, identifying more closely with the Zionist cause.

We may conclude that Zionism was a marginal, unrepresentative form of late-nineteenth-century Judaism. Insofar as it was known at all, to many contemporary Jews it was not merely eccentric but fantastic, divisive, even dangerous. It is worth stressing that, in these first decades, Zionism’s critics were Jews, not gentiles. There could have been no clearer distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Emigration, settlement, regeneration

The Zionist colonial project was part ideology, part movement. In its first three decades or so, the actual Zionist colonisation of Palestine was slight: the mass migration of Jews out of Europe went elsewhere. Nonetheless, by 1914 it was unwelcome enough for the resident Arab population – largely Muslim, but also Christian – to resist it and to inspire an incipient Palestinian national consciousness.

The early 1880s had seen the first wave of Jewish emigrants. For the most part they were escaping from the upsurge of violent anti-Semitism in Russia. This first aliyah comprised around 25,000, most of whom settled in the towns, though a few established agricultural settlements. Among them were ideologues such as Ze’ev Dubnow, who led a group of emigrants from Odessa. He wrote: ‘The ultimate aim is to build up this land of Israel and restore to the Jews the political independence that has been taken from them… The Jews, with weapons in their hands if necessary, will announce with a loud voice that they are masters of their ancient homeland.’39

There is no mention here of indigenous inhabitants, Arab or otherwise; but there is no mistaking the colonial aspiration of conquest, by force if needed. Dubnow’s dramatic prophecy dates from 1882. However, only after Herzl founded the Zionist Organisation in 1897 did the prospect of a Jewish majority, through mass immigration, begin to be seriously envisaged. But not easily accomplished. Between 1882 and 1914 around 100,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine (where 20–30,000 Jews already dwelt). Over half of these, however, did not actually settle but left again.40 Jewish immigrants of the first and second aliyahs struggled, dependent on financial support from abroad. Meanwhile, most of the former, mainly Sephardi, Jewish community – still a majority of all the Jews in Palestine – lived in Jerusalem, indifferent towards Zionism.