At midnight on May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, the Jewish Agency chairman, David Ben-Gurion, proclaimed the founding of the first Jewish nation-state in nearly two thousand years. Barely ten minutes later, at 6:11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in Washington, DC, the White House issued a statement recognizing “the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel.” The proclamation followed on President Truman’s decision the previous November to instruct the US delegation to the United Nations to vote in favor of the partition of the British protectorate of Palestine into separate, independent Jewish and Arab states, joining in the 33–13 majority. Ten nations abstained, and six Arab nations walked out, refusing to take part in the vote.
The following day’s Washington Post carried the headline “Recognition of Israel Stuns U.N. Delegates” on its front page, but it shouldn’t have stunned anyone. Recognition was a long time coming. And however painfully arrived at, it was a decision that left Truman prouder than just about any other he had made as president. Truman took it seriously, if not literally, when Hebrew University president Eliahu Elath promised that his name would be “inscribed ‘in golden letters in the four thousand years’ history’ of the Jewish people.” “I am Cyrus, I am Cyrus,” the president proudly proclaimed, comparing himself to the Persian king who had liberated the Israelites from Babylonian exile, inviting them to return to Israel in the sixth century BCE. Truman claimed to have read the Bible cover to cover three times by the time he turned 14.1
Reality has a way of ruining a fantastic storyline. The return of the Jewish people to Palestine, the revival of the Hebrew language, and the creation of the modern economic and military powerhouse that is Israel is a story so unlikely that for over a thousand years—short of prayer for Divine intervention—nobody much even entertained the belief that anything like it might ever be possible. Palestine had been inhabited by Jews since the fall of the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, when the period of the Babylonian exile ended and the restrictions on a Jewish presence in the land then called “Judah” were lifted. Sovereignty over the land remained in flux under various rulers. The Roman general Pompey the Great conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE; the Romans ruled Palestine until 66 CE, when the Jews rebelled. Rome had reconquered the land by 70 CE, destroying the city’s Second Temple. The temple’s protective Western Wall, now the holiest site in the Jewish religion, was the only thing left standing. Many Jews fled, but many were also captured and enslaved or perished in the siege preceding the Roman victory. The Jews who remained, limited by their circumstances, left the question of state sovereignty to others. Most simply wanted to ensure a Jewish presence in their homeland, should the Messiah decide that it was time to make an appearance.
Different Jewish sects had wildly differing views on the question of whether humans had (or should have) any role to play in the timing of God’s decision about the Messiah’s appearance, especially given the prevailing theological belief that the Israelites had been exiled for their sins. Almost all the rabbis endorsed the view that “if the Jewish people repent they are redeemed, and if not they are not redeemed,” as stated in the Talmud, the multivolume text of rabbinical interpretation on how to live Jewish life. But just what this meant in terms of actual behavior remained in dispute, subject, as always, to the unfathomable intentions of God. Jews may have chanted “Next year in Jerusalem” each year at the close of their Passover seders. But it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that almost any Jew anywhere dared utter these words with the intention of bringing about a collective, purposeful objective for the Jewish people in their ancient city.2
The modern-day Zionist political movement began in Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897, when Theodor Herzl (born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl in Budapest), then thirty-seven years old, managed to assemble a group of like-minded Jews at the First Zionist Congress. In the 1880s, the Jewish population of Palestine, then under the gradually crumbling rule of the Ottoman Empire, had already begun to swell with emigration from the Russian “Pale of Settlement”—an area with strict borders subject to rules about where Jews were and were not allowed to live. During the “First Aliya”—from 1882 to 1903—the Jewish population of Palestine roughly doubled, rising from 25,000 to some 50,000. Those who arrived had many different backgrounds and motivations, however. Some were Marxists, anarchists, or other types of radicals; others were religious Jews; and quite a few embraced capitalism, purchasing land and hiring local Arab labor. Almost all were escaping a Russia in which pogroms, together with Jewish expulsions, sometimes of entire villages, had become an almost regular feature of daily life. As these attacks intensified, a “Second Aliya” would later bring another 35,000 to 40,000 Jews from the Pale in the years before the beginning of World War I. By 1914, their numbers had reached about 85,000 out of a total Palestinian population of roughly 700,000. At the time of the First Congress, Jews in Palestine were still considered to be an anomaly. Of the roughly 2,367,000 Jews who eventually left Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an estimated 2,022,000 chose America as their destination.3
Herzl himself was a nearly perfectly assimilated Jew. While he had been confirmed on his thirteenth birthday, he had never been Bar Mitzvahed, and once he said he wanted nothing so much as to have been born into the Prussian nobility. (Herzl’s own son converted to Christianity.) A prominent, well-traveled, and culturally sophisticated editor and former correspondent for Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press), a leading European newspaper, he was deeply affected by the spectacle of what would become France’s Dreyfus affair, which began in 1894 and was not resolved until 1906. In this incident, a French Jewish military officer had been repeatedly tried for allegedly betraying the nation to its enemies. The antisemitic fury unleashed at the innocent Captain Dreyfus disabused Herzl (and many Jews with him) of the belief that the 1791 political emancipation of France’s Jews would end their persecution.
Herzl published his now famous pamphlet calling for the creation of a modern Jewish homeland, with the subtitle Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question), in February 1896, just fourteen months after Dreyfus’s first trial and (later overturned) conviction. The first English translation appeared in May of the same year. His was not the first call for Jews to begin establishing a homeland, and Herzl was agnostic about its location. Sometimes he entertained the idea of Argentina, at other times what is now Kenya. But when it became clear that support could only be built for the Jews’ biblical homeland, he settled on Palestine. It is no exaggeration to say that Herzl saw himself as a modern-day Moses. “I shall do something for the Jews, but not with them,” he told the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch. With tireless dedication and a history-changing combination of chutzpah and charisma, he somehow succeeded in not only forging an extremely unlikely movement across multiple borders, but also earning the support of an impressive array of world leaders and influential thinkers and funders.4
Herzl’s success was, initially, almost entirely confined to Europe. In the United States, Jews were enjoying a historically unrivaled sense of physical security, legal protection, and future promise. The earliest American champions of Jewish resettlement in Palestine were almost all Christians, who believed it would hasten Christ’s return. William Eugene Blackstone, a real estate entrepreneur and best-selling author of religious texts, who adhered to the doctrine of “premillennial dispensationalism,” the idea that Christ will reign for a thousand years on the earth following his Second Coming, dedicated much of his life to promoting the notion that the US government should “restore [the Jews] to the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.” He managed to garner over four hundred signatures of prominent Americans, including those of Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and Melville W. Fuller, chief justice of the US Supreme Court, to an 1891 petition supporting the return of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land. Nothing came of it, however, and Blackstone would spend the rest of his life agitating, ineffectively, for the cause. He died in 1935, thirteen years before his dream came to fruition and about half a century before his views became a passionate enthusiasm for millions of American evangelical Christians.5
Zionism was a popular, if far-fetched and largely rhetorical, cause among American politicians in the interwar years. Among American Jews, however, it inspired little more than denunciation and denial. Until the early 1880s, most American Jews were either German immigrants, who had begun arriving in the 1830s, or their children. Their leaders were almost exclusively well-to-do members of Reform congregations, a liberalizing religious movement that had begun in Germany and reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment applied to traditional Jewish texts and teachings. The basic tenets of Reform Judaism could hardly have conflicted more sharply with those of Zionism had the latter been invented specifically for this purpose. Reform Judaism rejected any hint of Jewish nationalism or peoplehood. The first Reform temple in the United States, founded in Charleston, South Carolina, was dedicated in 1841 with the words, “This country is our Palestine. This city our Jerusalem.”6
To the Reform rabbis and lay leaders, the religion shared by Jews consisted exclusively of a set of theological beliefs and extremely lightly worn religious practices. Jews could be Jews anywhere and everywhere, without concerns about where their loyalties lay so long as they dedicated themselves to spreading the ideals of social justice and universal cooperation among all peoples. Their all but unchallenged religious leader in mid-nineteenth-century America was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of a series of cornerstone Reform institutions, including the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (later the Union for Reform Judaism), Hebrew Union College, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (of which he became president). In 1897, the same year Herzl and company met in Basel, Wise addressed a different conference. His message could hardly have been clearer: “We are perfectly satisfied with our political and social position.… We want freedom, equality, justice, and equity to reign and govern the community in which we live. This we possess in such fullness, that no State whatever could improve on it. That new Messianic movement over the ocean does not concern us at all.”7
The composition of American Jewry changed radically, however, in the final years of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth centuries. Thanks to war, revolution, and increasingly violent persecution, community life in the Pale of Settlement was becoming increasingly untenable for Jews, with persecution spreading to a geographical area that today would encompass Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova. The mass emigration that followed led to a dramatic increase from these nations in the number of Jews in the United States, from roughly 250,000 in 1880 to approximately 3.5 million in 1920. The population density on the largely Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan reached historic proportions, and many of these new immigrants were attached to radical ideologies such as socialism, communism, and anarchism that promised to deliver the Jews from their unhappy historical predicament. Many also remained faithful to their traditional Orthodox religious precepts. A significant number merely hoped to succeed economically and provide a better life for their children, without concern for politics. “Zionism” therefore became many zionisms, comprising myriad disparate groups with often conflicting ideologies.
The Orthodox Mizrachi Zionist Organization, for instance, sought to found a Jewish state with a legal system based on rabbinical interpretations of the Torah—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—and the Talmud. Still others shared the goal of Ahad Ha’am (born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg in 1856), a Russian Jewish scholar who first envisioned what we now term “cultural Zionism,” a movement that focused not on statehood or political power per se, but on Palestine as the home of a Jewish spiritual and cultural rejuvenation. The Poale Zion workers movement, in contrast, sought to meld socialism with support for Zionism. But most of the new immigrants were understandably more intent on going about their own daily lives, struggling for food, shelter, and their own futures, rather than concerning themselves with events in distant Palestine.8
Enter Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at Harvard Law School, Brandeis rose through the legal and political worlds faster and higher than any American Jew before him. In 1916, he became the first Jew to be appointed to the US Supreme Court. Ironically, Brandeis was not religious even by the lax standards of his fellow German Jews—he ignored almost all the traditional religious rituals, belonged to no temples, participated in no Jewish community activities, and celebrated Christmas at home. Speaking to the Century Club in New York in 1905, shortly before he turned forty, the man liberals called “the People’s Lawyer” declared, “There is no place for what President [Theodore] Roosevelt has called hyphenated Americans.… Habits of living or of thought which tend to keep alive difference of origin or to classify men according to their religious beliefs are inconsistent with the American ideal of brotherhood, and are disloyal.”9
The reasons for Brandeis’s conversion to Zionism are much contested among historians. The upshot is that he came to believe that Zionism—which he interpreted to mean support for Jews who, unlike American Jews, required a refuge from the political persecution so common elsewhere in the world—was consistent with both his philosophical beliefs and his commitment to fighting for the underdog (he had been a leading lawyer for Russian Jewish workers). Brandeis would explain that “the Zionist meanings came to me rather in terms of the American Idea than in terms of what I had learned of Torah at home or in cheder.”10
Brandeis agreed in 1912 to join America’s still tiny Federation of American Zionists (later renamed the Zionist Organization of America). Soon afterward, he agreed to chair the organization. Given the respect he had earned in progressive legal circles as well as his distance from the traditional model of Zionist agitator, the movement could not have created a more compelling champion if it had set out to do so under laboratory conditions. In a 1915 speech titled “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It,” delivered before the Conference of the Eastern Council of Reform Rabbis, Brandeis reversed the arguments that Isaac Mayer Wise had made seventeen years earlier by fusing his version of Zionism with American patriotism. Just as a man could be “a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city; for being loyal to his family, and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or his lodge,” so, too, “every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” Indeed, he continued, “loyalty to America demands… that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.”11
Brandeis risked much here. When Woodrow Wilson announced his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1916, the president’s predecessor, William Howard Taft, complained to a friend that Brandeis had “adopted Zionism, favors the new Jerusalem, and has metaphorically been re-circumcised,” and speculated as to whether “he would have grown a beard to convince those bearded Rabbis… that he was a Jew of Jews.” Such musings among many were no doubt what kept Brandeis’s confirmation vote relatively close, given the standards of the time, at 47–42 in favor.12
Brandeis’s leadership changed the face of American Zionism in the eyes of both Jews and gentiles. He rejected the idea of encouraging American Jews to make aliyah in favor of advocacy for helping persecuted Jews around the world to do so. This shift in focus helped to defang the arguments of those who might otherwise question the commitment of Jews in America to their own nation. If Zionism was understood, as originally intended, to inspire an “ingathering of exiles” to the land of the Bible, then its support in the United States became (and would remain) a matter of “Zionism for thee, but not for me.” Moreover, Brandeis had frequently represented Russian Jewish immigrants in their legal struggles as laborers to earn decent working conditions and other legal protections, thus gaining the respect of a broad swath of Jewish Americans. He seemed to be just the right man to elevate the Zionists’ status. He helped the movement to form a bridge between the German and Russian Jewish cultures that would fuse them together in decades to come. By 1919, the dues-paying membership of the Zionist Organization of America had increased to 176,000 from a mere 12,000 five years earlier.13
According to popular, though likely apocryphal, lore, after the 1897 First Zionist Congress, two Viennese rabbis sent two scouts on a fact-finding mission to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Reporting back on its suitability as a future Jewish homeland, they wrote, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” If true, the report dissuaded almost no one. The British Jewish author Israel Zangwill visited Palestine a year later and wrote that “Palestine has but a small population of Arabs and fellahin and wandering, lawless, blackmailing Bedouin tribes.” He proposed that the world should “restore the country without a people to the people without a country.” Zionists almost always demonstrated remarkable confidence that they would eventually outnumber the Arabs there. But following a half century of immigration, coupled with a frantic effort “to conquer the country, covertly, bit by bit,” via a strategy of “buy, buy, buy” (in the words of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, now known as the father of modern Hebrew), Jews still made up no more than about a third of Palestine’s population at the moment of Israel’s 1948 creation.14
One of the most important leaders of that community was the scholar and rabbi Judah Leon Magnes who had been leader of two of New York’s most prestigious Reform temples before emigrating to Palestine. A Zionist, a pacifist, an eminent scholar of Judaism, a champion of the Jewish working class, and son-in-law to the famed American constitutional scholar and German Jewish leader Louis Marshall, Magnes became the first chancellor of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in 1925. Ten years later, he became its president. He joined with the philosopher Martin Buber, the historian Gershom Scholem, and Henrietta Szold, the health-care pioneer and founder of the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, to establish the Ihud (Unity) movement in August 1943. Its members insisted that a Jewish homeland worthy of the name could only be successfully achieved with the peaceable cooperation of the local Arab population, expressed in a binational rather than a specifically Jewish state. “The Jews have more than a claim upon the world for justice,” Magnes explained. “But… I am not ready to try to achieve justice to the Jew through injustice to the Arab.”15
Ihud inspired political support immediately among German Jews in the United States following its founding. The Sulzberger family proved so enthusiastic about it that the newspaper they owned—the New York Times—hired an Ihud staff member to be its Jerusalem correspondent. The US State Department was similarly supportive. Its officials would frequently consult with Magnes on possible ways to head off the Zionist plans for statehood. What always eluded Ihud, however, was any hint of reciprocity among Arabs anywhere, much less those in Palestine. There was simply none to be found.
Zionists experienced a moment of elation when, as they were still fighting the Germans in November 1917, the British government issued its “Balfour Declaration” endorsing the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The British then accepted responsibility for Palestine governance under a League of Nations “mandate” amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, first in July 1920, following the Allied San Remo conference, and more formally in August 1922, following the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne. The Balfour Declaration became the official policy of the United Kingdom, and not long afterward, Brandeis succeeded in helping to convince President Wilson to endorse it as well. The president even predicted, albeit mistakenly, that “the Jewish Homeland was one of the two primary achievements that would come out of the war.”16
But in their euphoria, the Zionists ignored the declaration’s caveat that in the event of the creation of any such homeland, “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” had to be respected. This condition has remained impossible to achieve to this day. The inability of both Arabs and Jews to share Palestine became increasingly evident during the period of heavy, though legally restricted, Jewish immigration. Arab riots broke out in 1920 and 1929 and again in 1936, when an Arab general strike degenerated into an explosion of violence that resulted in the deaths of more than three hundred Jews, Arabs, and British soldiers. The scope of the violence gave lie to the oft-proclaimed Zionist contention, going back to Herzl, that peaceful Zionist colonization of Palestine was possible. Even those leaders who had still believed it now had to face reality.
In the wake of its legal mandate, the British came up with a number of plans for Palestine, none of which ever came to fruition. Led, or perhaps pressured, by Jerusalem’s grand mufti, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Arab leaders rarely, if ever, would agree to engage with any of Britain’s proposals, regardless of how favorable to the Arab side they might have been. Their first refusal came with British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel’s 1921 proposal for what he termed “a legislative council in which Arabs would constitute ten of twenty-three positions, with Jews occupying three positions and the British the remainder.” Next, in June 1922, Winston Churchill, then British secretary for the colonies, issued a white paper restricting Jewish immigration and legal land purchases in Palestine. Though it did not withdraw British support for the eventual creation of a Jewish homeland, the Churchill White Paper insisted that it only be done with the cooperation of its Arab inhabitants.17
In 1937, the British issued the Peel Commission Report, which admitted for the first time that their mandate had become unworkable, and so, too, had the idea of a unified Palestine shared by Arabs and Jews. According to its authors, “the continued impact of a highly intelligent and enterprising race, backed by large financial resources, on a comparatively poor indigenous community, on a different cultural level,” was no formula for peaceful coexistence. The result was “an irrepressible conflict.” In hopes of avoiding this, the commission therefore recommended a partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish enclaves. This first proposal of what would become known as the “two-state solution” rested yet again on the impossible dream of Arab agreement, however. It happened again when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a white paper in May 1939. The Chamberlain White Paper, which suggested sharply limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine as well as Jewish land purchases, became the basis for British policy—tragically, as it happened, given the horrific fate awaiting Europe’s Jews at the time. Even these immigration quotas, however, were never fulfilled. The white paper also called for a transition to majority, and therefore Arab, rule. But just as they would continue to do in the near future and to this day, as the historian John Judis has observed, “the Arabs turned down a plan that under the circumstances was very favorable to them.” Then as now, “the Palestinian Arabs suffered from a profound lack of national leadership.”18