On 9 November 1914, in a speech at London’s Guildhall, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, announced dramatically: ‘The Turkish empire has committed suicide.’ Germany’s wooing of Turkey, which had led the Kaiser to abandon his active support of Zionism, had finally succeeded. The sultan had committed himself to a German victory and was about to launch a jihad against Britain. Asquith wished to prevent the 100 million Moslem subjects of Britain’s own empire from joining it. Hence his speech, committing Britain to breaking up the Ottoman empire at last, and giving freedom to its peoples.1 But, in making it, he was unconsciously adding another crucial piece to the jigsaw of the Zionist state. For if Turkish rule were removed from Palestine, among other places, there might be nothing to prevent a Jewish national home from moving into the vacuum.
The notion that Jews would benefit from a German defeat in the fearful conflict now beginning would have struck most of them, at the time, as absurd. The mortal enemy of the Jews was Tsarist Russia, which the German army was now trying to tear to pieces. In London’s East End, Jews were reluctant to volunteer to fight the Germans for this very reason. Everyone associated Jewish cultural leadership with Germany. Except for the pacifists of the far left, all the leading German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, led by Max Liebermann, signed a petition supporting Germany’s war aims–Einstein was almost the only one who refused.
When the German troops, having defeated the Russian army at Tannenberg, pushed into Russian Poland, the Jews hailed them as saviours. One who did so was Ze’ev Dov Begin, father of a future Prime Minister of Israel. In addition to Hebrew and Yiddish he spoke German, in preference to Polish which he called ‘the language of anti-Semitism’. He told the young Begin and his sister (later Mrs Halperin): ‘You see, the Germans will come, it is a different culture, it is not Russia.’ The Russian army, withdrawing, rounded up entire Jewish communities and drove them, under the lash, to Siberia–a sinister adumbration of Stalin’s minorities policy. The Begins watched the Cossacks burn down Jewish villages. When the Germans arrived, Mrs Halperin later recalled, they ‘treated the Jews marvellously…. They gave each child sweets and biscuits. They were different Germans, a different period.’2
Even in the Jewish settlements in Palestine, German tended to be the lingua franca. Many of the settlers wanted German, rather than Hebrew, to be the language of instruction in Jewish schools. It was accepted, without debate, as the official language of Zionist congresses. The Zionist office in Berlin saw itself as the headquarters of the world movement, and its members were calling for a German protectorate over the Jews, as well as over Islam. Many believed it was the big Jewish community of Salonika which had helped to push Turkey into the war on Germany’s side.3
Nevertheless, the more perceptive realized the immense significance of the British decision to carve up the Ottoman rump. One was Chaim Weizmann, who since Herzl’s death had become the most effective proponent of Zionism in the West. ‘The time has now come’, he wrote with satisfaction after Asquith’s speech, ‘to speak openly–to point out to the world the attitude of the Jews to Palestine.’ Weizmann was one of the noblest and most important figures in Jewish history. As a Zionist leader he was just as skilful as Herzl in handling world statesmen but in addition he could speak for the Ostjuden rank and file–he was one. The atmosphere of his home, in the Pripet Marsh town of Motol, was entirely traditional. His father, who cut timber and floated it down to the Baltic, knew Caro’s Code by heart and his favourite book was the Guide of the Perplexed. It is true that, on the walls of their home, next to Maimonides, was the portrait of Baron Hirsch, but ‘the Return’ was seen as religious: the local rabbi told Weizmann: ‘One has to do much, learn much, know much and suffer much before one is worthy of that.’4
Certainly, Weizmann had to suffer much just to acquire a modern education. There were no newspapers in his home. His schoolmaster, a secret maskil, had to smuggle in a Hebrew textbook on the natural sciences under cover of teaching the Prophets. Then there was the Tsarist state, whose numerous clausus rules allocated a maximum 10 per cent of the grammar-school places to Jews even in towns where they were over 50 per cent of the population. Everything was done to prevent Jews getting to university. Weizmann later wrote: ‘as one read, year after year, the complicated ukases which poured from St Petersburg, one obtained the impression that the whole cumbersome machinery of the vast Russian empire was created for the sole purpose of inventing and amplifying rules and regulations for the hedging in of the existence of its Jewish subjects’. So education involved ‘ceaseless chicanery, deception and humiliation’.5 Weizmann acquired monumental patience and persistence, as well as industry, and managed to get to the Berlin Polytechnic, one of the three best science schools in Europe, and later to Switzerland, where he obtained his doctorate in chemistry at Freiburg (1899).
But it was in England, where he came to teach biochemistry at Manchester University, that Weizmann found his life-task: to exploit the existence of the British empire, and the goodwill of its ruling class, to bring the Jewish national home into existence. Weizmann, who became a British subject in 1910, always accepted the British at their own valuation, as tolerant and fair-minded, loving freedom and justice. He banked all his emotional coin in their hearts and on the whole drew a decent dividend. In the years before 1914 he set about cultivating them. He met C. P. Scott, the powerful editor of the Liberal Manchester Guardian, and through him such Lancashire MPS as Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservatives, and Winston Churchill. Scott also introduced him to his closest political friend, Lloyd George. All these men became staunch supporters of Zionism.
Weizmann found an unexpected ally in the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel. He was a member of the Jewish establishment at a time when it was overwhelmingly, sometimes venomously, anti-Zionist. His father had founded the immensely successful banking firm of Samuel Montagu, and his first cousin in the firm, Edwin Montagu, was also in politics and a leading anti-Zionist. Samuel had been to Balliol, that nest of atheism, and was forced to confess to his mother that he lost his faith there. But he conformed outwardly, continued to pay his synagogue dues, and proudly called himself a Jew. So when he got into the cabinet in 1909 he was the first Jew to serve there. He had also done political work in Jewish Whitechapel, and the appalling scenes of poverty and degradation he witnessed there made him a Zionist. This was confirmed by his marginal involvement in the 1911 Marconi case, where he experienced for himself the cruelty of anti-Semitism, even in tolerant Britain.
Samuel was chilly, silent, reserved; he kept his views to himself. Not even Weizmann knew he was a Zionist. But he had privately conceived a plan to exploit the Turkish intervention, and on the day Asquith made his speech Samuel called on Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, at the Foreign Office and held a critical conversation there. What about a national home for the Jews? Grey said ‘the idea had always had a strong sentimental attachment to him…[and he] would be prepared to work for it if the opportunity arose’. They discussed details. Samuel warned that the area of the national home could not include ‘Beirut and Damascus since they contained a large, non-Jewish population which could not be assimilated’. Hence, he added, ‘it would be a great advantage if the remainder of Syria were annexed by France, as it would be far better for the state to have a European power as neighbour than the Turk’. The idea took shape for an Anglo-French carve-up, the British getting Palestine, the French Syria-Lebanon, on the lines later drawn in the Sykes-Picot secret agreement, implemented at Versailles. But that did not yet mean the Jews would get their home. Later the same day Samuel strolled across to the Treasury to enlist the help of Lloyd George, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. He ‘said to me he was very keen to see a Jewish state established there’.6
So Weizmann and Samuel set the campaign in motion. The Fabian New Statesman, in a plea for a British protectorate enshrining a Jewish national home, argued: ‘The hopes of the Zionists have suddenly passed from an ideal into a matter of practical politics.’7 In fact there was a long way to go. Asquith, a drawing-room anti-Semite, looked on in disdainful amusement when Samuel put his plan to the cabinet and it was hotly resisted by his anti-Zionist cousin Montagu. The Prime Minister relayed their encounters in his daily letters to his girlfriend Venetia Stanley. ‘[Samuel] thinks’, he wrote (28 January 1915),
we might plant in this not very promising territory about 3 or 4 million Jews, and that this would have a good effect on those (including I suppose himself) who were left behind…. It reads almost like a new edition of Tancred brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities. But it is a curious illustration of Dizzie’s favourite dictum that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.8
Again, on 13 March 1915 he referred to Samuel’s ‘almost dithyrambic memorandum’ on Palestine, ‘into which the scattered Jews could in time swarm back from all quarters of the globe and in due course obtain Home Rule (what an attractive community!). Curiously enough the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, who I need not say does not care a damn for the Jews’–merely wishing to keep the ‘agnostic, atheist French’ out of the ‘Holy Places’. Four days later, the Prime Minister told Miss Stanley that ‘Cousin Montagu’, or ‘the Assyrian’ as he called him, had hit back with a ‘racy memorandum’ in which he accused ‘Cousin Herbert’ of being incapable of translating into Hebrew a single phrase of his plan, which was ‘a rather presumptuous and almost blasphemous (!) attempt to forestall Divine Agency in the collection of the Jews’. Asquith confessed that the language used by his quarrelling Jewish colleagues ‘rather amazes me’.9 His doubts were confirmed when the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, the only minister who had ever been there, said, ‘Palestine would be of no value to us whatsoever.’
However, events moved steadily in the Zionists’ favour. Kitchener was forced to relinquish the munitions portfolio to Lloyd George, which brought him into direct professional contact with Weizmann, now working on the war effort. Then Kitchener was drowned on a trip to Russia and Lloyd George took over the War Office completely. This marked the beginning of a transfer of resources to the eastern Mediterranean, making a British conquest of Palestine more likely. Weizmann found it easier to get to see senior members of the government. At the Foreign Office on 18 August 1916 he made a conquest of Lord Robert Cecil, who recorded:
He said with great truth that even in this country a Jew always had to give an explanation of his existence and he was neither quite an Englishman nor quite a Jew, and that the same thing was equally true with much more serious results in other countries…. Perhaps a phrase he used may convey something of the impression which he made. He said: ‘I am not romantic except that Jews must always be romantic, for to them reality is too terrible.’
Cecil declared himself struck by ‘the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude, which made one forget his rather repellent and even sordid exterior’.10 Four months later, Asquith was hounded out of office, Lloyd George became Prime Minister and he made Balfour his Foreign Secretary.
This was decisive. Asquith was quite wrong about Lloyd George. He was both a philosemite and a Zionist. Having denounced the Rothschilds in his wilder days, he was impressed by the 1st Lord Rothschild, whom he summoned, along with other financiers, to the Treasury at the outbreak of the war. ‘Lord Rothschild,’ he began, ‘we have had some political unpleasantness.’ ‘Mr Lloyd George, this is no time to recall those things. What can I do to help?’ Afterwards, Lloyd George said, ‘Only the old Jew made sense.’11 Weizmann found that he and Lloyd George ‘sympathized on the common ground of the small nationality’. The new premier was a passionate Welsh patriot, and Samuel, when pushing his plan, always made the point that Palestine was ‘a country the size of Wales’. Lloyd George was also a Bible-thumper, another point in the Zionists’ favour. He noted: ‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place-names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.’12
Balfour was an equally important ally because behind a diffident manner lurked a steely will, much needed in overcoming the hesitations of Foreign Office officials and colleagues. Once convinced of a case, Balfour was a hard man to deflect, and he was Weizmann’s most important convert. The two men first talked at length during the 1906 election, when Balfour upbraided Weizmann for rejecting Uganda. ‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ ‘But, Dr Weizmann, we have London.’ ‘That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’13 They had a further and decisive talk on 12 December 1914, worth recalling because it illustrates Weizmann’s skills as a persuader. After Weizmann had put the Zionist case for action, Balfour told him that, in his view, the Jewish question ‘would remain insoluble until either the Jews here became entirely assimilated or there was a normal Jewish community in Palestine’. He added, as a tease, that he had discussed this with the notorious anti-Semite Cosima Wagner in 1912, and she agreed! ‘Yes,’ replied Weizmann, ‘and let me tell you exactly what she said–that the Jews were taking over German culture, science and industry. But’, he added,
the essential point which most non-Jews overlook and which forms the very crux of the Jewish tragedy, is that those Jews who are giving their energies and their brains to the Germans are doing it in their capacities as Germans and are enriching Germany and not Jewry, which they are abandoning…. They must hide their Judaism in order to be allowed to place their brains and abilities at the disposal of the Germans. They are to no little extent responsible for German greatness. The tragedy of it all is that whereas we do not recognize them as Jews Madame Wagner does not recognize them as Germans, and so we stand there as the most exploited and misunderstood of people.
Balfour was moved to tears, shook Weizmann’s hand and said that ‘the road followed by a great and suffering nation had been illuminated for him’.14
Balfour thus became a staunch Zionist ally and at the Foreign Office moved towards a definite and public British commitment. Events favoured it. In January 1917 British troops began the conquest of Palestine. The same month the Tsar’s regime collapsed, thus removing the biggest single obstacle to wholehearted, world-wide Jewish support for the Allied cause. The provisional Prime Minister, Kerensky, ended Russia’s anti-Semitic code. And at the end of the month Germany began unrestricted U-boat warfare, making American intervention on the Allied side inevitable. The US government almost automatically became a strong supporter of the Jewish national home in Palestine. There were obstacles. The French hated the idea of the Jews, and still more the Protestant British, instead of Catholic (and atheist) France in Jerusalem. According to Sir Mark Sykes, who was negotiating the secret protectorate treaty, his opposite number, Georges Picot, ‘spoke of progroms in Paris’–the memory of Dreyfus was still vivid–and seemed ‘hardly normal on this subject’. There were also stirrings of opposition from Arab interests, or those government departments which represented them. But the Arabs had been slow to get moving, had contributed nothing of substance to the war effort, and their ‘Arab Revolt’ had been unimpressive; moreover, the man in charge of it, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, favoured the British protectorate and Jewish national home plan. The most formidable opposition came from anti-Zionist Jews, especially Montagu, now in the important and relevant post of India Secretary. This was to have important consequences.
The form the commitment took was to be a letter from Balfour, as Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, as head of the English Jewish community, with the two sides agreeing on the text beforehand. Walter, 2nd Lord Rothschild, unlike his great father, who had died early in 1915, was a curious choice to take part in one of the most decisive events in Jewish history. It is true that, unlike his father, he had become more or less a Zionist. But he had a speech defect and many other inhibitions, and all his energies had gone, not on public and community affairs, but on the silent amassing of the greatest man-made collection ever assembled. At his Wren house in Tring, once the gift of Charles II to Nell Gwynn, he had accumulated 2,250,000 moths and butterflies, 300,000 bird-skins, 200,000 bird’s eggs, and–among many other species–144 live giant tortoises, including the largest in the world, 150 years old. He had published over 1,200 scientific papers (and books), discovered 5,000 new species, 250 of which had been named after him, including a giraffe, an elephant, a porcupine, a rockwallaby, a bird of paradise, a grackle, a fly with eyes on stalks and an intestinal worm. Unknown to anyone, even his few intimates, he was also being steadily stripped of his fortune by an unscrupulous peeress and her husband, who blackmailed him for over forty years.15
However, Rothschild was well advised by Weizmann and others, and his original draft of the British promise, handed to Balfour on 18 July 1917, contained three important elements. The first was the reconstitution of Palestine as a whole as the national home of the Jews. The second was unrestricted right of Jewish immigration. The third was Jewish internal autonomy. These gave the Zionists everything they could reasonably have wished. Weizmann believed to his dying day that, without Montagu’s opposition, they would have got all three: ‘there cannot be the slightest doubt that, without outside interference–entirely from Jews!–the draft would have been accepted [by the war cabinet] early in August, substantially as we submitted it’.16 As it was, the letter was not approved by the cabinet until 31 October, and it had undergone substantial changes.17 It no longer equated Palestine with the national home, it had no reference to unrestricted Jewish immigration or internal rule, and it safeguarded the rights of the Arabs. It was dated 2 November 1917 and the essential paragraph read: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ Sykes came out of the decisive cabinet with the text and said: ‘Dr Weizmann, it’s a boy.’ Scrutinizing it, Weizmann commented: ‘I did not like the boy at first. It was not the one I expected.’18
All the same, the Balfour Declaration was the key piece in the jigsaw, for without it the Jewish state could never have come into existence. Thanks to Herzl and Weizmann, the Jews got in just in time. All over the world, nationalism and irredentism were winning the day. The Allies were besieged by subject peoples demanding that the coming victory and peace should guarantee them territorial rights on the basis of strict numerical head-counting, whether ethnic, linguistic or racial. The Jews had a romantic and historical claim to Palestine, but it was a very old one, and by the criteria applied at the Versailles settlement they had virtually none at all. At the time the Declaration was published, there were between 85,000 and 100,000 Jews living in Palestine, out of a total population of 600,000. Almost all the rest were Arabs. If the Arabs as a whole had been properly organized diplomatically during the war–if the Palestine Arabs had been organized at all–there is not the slightest doubt that the Declaration would never have been issued. Even twelve months later it would not have been possible. As it was, Weizmann pulled the Zionists through a brief window of opportunity, fated never to open again. Thanks to Tancred and Daniel Deronda he successfully appealed to the romantic instincts of the British ruling class, and thus received perhaps the last ex gratia gift of a great power, which went clean against the arithmetical spirit of the age.
In London, Lloyd George and Balfour thought they had taken advantage of the most odious war in human history at least to produce some benefit: to give the Jews a home. When Weizmann lunched with the Prime Minister on Armistice Day he found him reading the Psalms, in tears. Lloyd George often used to say afterwards that, to him, Palestine was ‘the one interesting part of the war’.19 But it was one thing for the enlightened despots in London to make promises; quite another for those on the spot, in Palestine, to deliver them. General Allenby had taken Jerusalem just a month after the Declaration was published and had entered the Holy City, in noble humility, on foot. When Weizmann went to see him in 1918, he found the general friendly but overwhelmed by military and administrative problems. ‘But nothing can be done at present. We have to be extremely careful not to hurt the susceptibilities of the population.’ Most of the senior British officers knew nothing of the Declaration. One or two were pro-Jewish. Some were anti-Semitic. Some were pro-Arab and expected them to rise up in due course and massacre the Jews. They regarded the local Jewish population as rubbish from Russia, probable Bolsheviks. General Sir Wyndham Deedes handed Weizmann some typewritten sheets: ‘You had better read all of it with care. It is going to cause you a great deal of trouble in the future.’ It was a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The document had been brought back by the British Military Mission serving with the Tsarist Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus. All the British officers in Palestine seemed to have it.20
Nevertheless, Britain went ahead and secured the Palestine mandate at the peace negotiations.21 The work of creating the Jewish national home proceeded. The position when the British took over Palestine was as follows. The Jews were of two main types. There were the religious communities of scholars and sages, who had always existed, though their numbers grew steadily in the nineteenth century. In Jerusalem they inhabited the Jewish ghetto quarter. They lived on charitable funds collected from Jews all over the world. Their world did not comprehend the Balfour Declaration. But they were always full of complaints and demands. When Weizmann went to see them, they asked him to persuade Allenby to send a ship to Trieste, where the best myrtles were found, so that they could celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles properly.22 He was exasperated, but they had their priorities just as he had his, and the Torah–without which a national home was meaningless–was essentially about exact observance; it has been truly observed that ‘ritualism’ is never a term of abuse in Judaism.
Then there were the agricultural settlers, established with the help of such philanthropists as Montefiore. Some, like those founded and subsidized by Edmund de Rothschild, were almost proprietory colonies. When the 1881 pogroms in Russia provoked the first substantial migration of Jews to Palestine, an event known as the First Aliyah (‘ascent’), Rothschild took the new arrivals under his wing. He provided administration, schools and doctors for the new settlements and villages, known as moshavot. They included Ekron, Gederah, Rishon le-Zion and Petah Tikva (a revival) in Judaea, Rosh Pinha and Yesud ha-Ma’ala in Galilee, and Zikhron Yacov in Samaria. In 1896 Rothschild added Metullah and the Russian Zionists Be’er Toviyyah. At this stage, of the £1,700,000 so far provided to fund the settlements, all but £100,000 had come from Rothschild’s own pocket. He had no time for Herzl, whom he thought of as a political agitator, or Russians like Weizmann, who were, to him, schlimihls (simpletons). He told a delegation of Zionists, including Nordau, ‘These are my colonies and I shall do what I like with them.’23 However, he handed the lot over to the new Jewish Colonization Association in 1900, thought he continued to provide funds. From the 1890s date such settlement-villages as Rehovot and Hadera, and just after the turn of the century Kefar Tavor, Yavne’el, Menahemya and Kinneret. Not all the colonies were agricultural. Factories were started. New Jewish quarters were added to Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem itself.
Then from 1904, in the wake of yet more horrific pogroms in Russia, came the Second, and much larger, Aliyah. This brought over 40,000 immigrants, some of whom set up (1909) the new garden suburb of Jaffa which was to become the great city of Tel Aviv. The same year, the new settlers, who were mostly young, founded the first kibbutz (‘collective’) at Deganya, to end what they considered the scandal of farms run by Jewish overseers with Arab hired labour doing the actual work. Under the direction of Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), appointed by Wolffsohn to run the Palestine office of the Zionist movement, the Zionists began systematic settlement work. The kibbutzim, which were voluntary collective farms, were the main type sponsored and funded by the Zionists, and eventually numbered over 200. But there were also Moshav Ovedim, agricultural villages whose members possessed individual proprietory holdings but co-operated to buy equipment, and Moshav Shittifi, where members owned only their own houses and worked the land as a collective. Ruppin was by origin a Prussian Jew, a sociologist, economist and statistician by training, and he brought this sombre but necessary combination of qualities, plus huge industry, persistence and a grim understanding of Jewish failings, to the business of turning the Zionist idea into a practical reality. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the nuts and bolts, the bread and butter, of the new home.
There was also the problem of protecting the new colonies from marauders. The young men of the Second Aliyah, who had taken part in Jewish self-defence groups to resist pogroms in Russia, set up the society of Shomerin, or Watchmen, in 1909. Photographs taken at the time show them slung with bandoliers and carbines, wearing Russian boots and Arab headdresses, looking like university-educated Cossack sheikhs. Something more was required, and a man emerged to provide it: Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Like Herzl, he was a writer and a drama-lover, and he came from that most romantic of Jewish cities, Odessa. This wealthy grain-exporting port on the Black Sea had a special place in Jewish history. It was, to be sure, in Russia, but it had a strongly cosmopolitan, almost Mediterranean flavour, a breath of the warm south. Jabotinsky, characteristically, spoke Russian, German, English, French and Yiddish, as well as Hebrew. Like most Odessan Jews–Trotsky was another example–he was a tremendous orator. By the 1900s there were about 170,000 Jews in Odessa, a third of the city’s population, and it was therefore a centre both of anti-Semitism of the most brutal kind and of Jewish culture. But the culture was secular. Odessa’s was the first Jewish community to be run by the maskils. The Orthodox rabbis hated it and warned pious Jews not to set foot in the place, which they said attracted the sweepings of the Pale and had become another Sodom. It was said: ‘The fire of Hell burns around Odessa up to a distance of ten parasangs.’ It produced many of the first Zionists, such as Leon Pinsker, author of Autoemancipation, and Ahad Ha’Am, the leading philosopher of the early Zionist movement. It had a powerful and strident Jewish press, in which Jabotinsky soon distinguished himself as a militant, aggressive Zionist. He was also an active member of the Odessa self-defence force.
When the First World War broke out, Jabotinsky was appointed a roving correspondent of a Moscow paper and travelled to the Middle East. The Turks were treating the Palestine Jews as potential traitors and their terrorism had reduced a population of over 85,000 to less than 60,000. In Alexandria there were 10,000 Jewish refugees, living in squalor but riven by internal disputes. The Ashkenazis and the Sephardis insisted on separate soup-kitchens. The students from the new Herzl Gymnasium in Tel Aviv would not co-operate at all unless spoken to in Hebrew. Jabotinsky, who is best described as a poetic activist–rather like D’Annunzio–decided that an army was needed both to weld the Jews together and to raise them from their supine acceptance of ill-treatment. He found a fellow spirit in Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920), a one-armed conscript-hero of the Russo-Japanese war. Together these two determined men, against much official British resistance, succeeded in creating a specifically Jewish military contribution to the war: first the Zion Mule Corps, then three battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, the 38th (London East End), the 39th (American volunteers) and the 40th, recruited from the Yishuv itself.24 Jabotinsky served in the 38th battalion and led the crossing of the Jordan. But to his dismay and alarm, the Zionist authorities in Palestine showed no particular zeal to keep what had become the Jewish Legion in existence and the British promptly disbanded it. So he formed a covert self-defence organization which was to become the Haganah, embryo of a mighty army.25
Jabotinsky’s disquiet was prompted by the evident and growing hostility felt by the local Arabs to the Jewish national home project. The Zionists, led by Herzl himself, had tended all along to underestimate the Arabs. On his first visit to London, Herzl had believed Holman Hunt, who knew Palestine well, when he prophesied: ‘The Arabs are nothing more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. They don’t even have to be dispossessed, for they would render the Jews very useful services.’26 In fact the Arabs were developing a nationalist spirit just like the Jews. The chief difference was that they started to organize themselves two decades later. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, was part of the European nationalist movement, which was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The Arabs, by contrast, were part of the Afro-Asian nationalism of the twentieth century. Their nationalist movement began, effectively, in 1911 when a secret body called Al-Fatah, the Young Arabs, was started in Paris. It was modelled on the Young Turks, and like them was strongly anti-Zionist from the start. After the war the French, who–as we have seen–hated the British mandate from the start and, behind the scenes, fought it inch by inch during the Versailles negotiations, allowed Al-Fatah to set up its base in Damascus, as a centre of anti-British and anti-Zionist activity.27
A few Zionists had foreseen that to use Palestine to settle ‘the Jewish problem’ might, in turn, create ‘the Arab problem’. Ahad Ha’Am, who had visited Erez Israel, had written an article ‘The Truth from Palestine’, in 1891, six years before Herzl launched his movement. He issued a warning. It was a great mistake, he said, for Zionists to dismiss the Arabs as stupid savages who did not realize what was happening. In fact,
the Arab, like all semites, possesses a sharp intelligence and great cunning…. [The Arabs] see through our activity in the country and its purpose but they keep silent, since for the time being they do not fear any danger for their future. When however the life of our people in Palestine develops to the point when the indigenous people feel threatened, they will not easily give way any longer. How careful must we be in dealing with an alien people in whose midst we want to settle! How essential it is to practise kindness and esteem towards them!…If ever the Arab judges the action of his rivals to be oppression or the robbing of his rights, then even if he is silent and waits for his time, the rage will stay alive in his heart.28
This warning was largely ignored. The scale of the settlement pushed up the price of land, and Jewish settlers and agencies found the Arabs hard bargainers: ‘every dunam of land needed for our colonization work [had] to be bought in the open market’, complained Weizmann, ‘at fantastic prices which rose ever higher as our work developed. Every improvement we made raised the value of the remaining land in that particular area, and the Arab landowners lost no time in cashing in. We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold.’29 Hence the Jews tended to see the Arabs as grasping proprietors–or, indeed, as simple labourers. They eased their consciences by the thought that in this, and many other ways, the Arabs were benefiting from Zionism. But as a rule they ignored them, as merely part of the human scenery. Ahad Ha’Am noted as late as 1920: ‘Since the beginning of the Palestinian colonization we have always considered the Arab people as non-existent.’
Arab nationalism at last became dynamic during the war, when Arab troops fought on both sides and were bid for by both sides. The Allies, for their part, issued during the war a lot of post-dated cheques to countless nationalities whose support they needed. When the peace came some of the cheques bounced and the Arabs, in particular, found they had been handed a stumer. Instead of the great Arab state, they got French protectorates in Syria and Lebanon, and British protectorates in Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. In the dealing and fighting that marked the ‘peace’, the only Arab clan to emerge triumphant were the Saudis in Arabia. The Emir Feisal, head of the Hashemites, whom Britain had backed, had to be content with Transjordan. He was well disposed towards Jewish settlement, believing it would raise Arab living standards. ‘We Arabs,’ he wrote to Felix Frankfurter, 3 March 1919, ‘especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement…. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.’30
But Feisal overestimated both the numbers and the courage of Arab moderates prepared to work with the Jews. The British had in fact been warned during the war that if the rumours of the Jewish home proved true, they must expect trouble: ‘Politically’, wrote one of Sykes’ best Arab informants, ‘a Jewish state in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.’31 The British establishment in charge, Allenby, General Bols, the Chief of Staff, and Sir Ronald Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem, knew this very well and tried to play down the national home idea. The Balfour Declaration, ran the order, ‘is to be treated as extremely confidential and is on no account for any kind of publication’. At one stage they even proposed that Feisal should be made King of Palestine.32 But the fact that the British authorities tried hard to calm the Arabs-and so were promptly accused of anti-Semitism by some of the Jews–made no difference. The post-war return of Jewish refugees from Egypt to Palestine, and the arrival of more, fleeing pogroms by the White Russians in the Ukraine, marked the point at which the Arabs, in Ha’Am’s words, began to feel threatened. Early in March 1920 there was a series of Arab attacks on Jewish settlements in the Galilee, during one of which Trumpeldor was killed; and they were followed by Arab riots in Jerusalem. Jabotinsky, bringing his self-defence force into action for the first time, was arrested, together with other members of the Haganah, tried by a military court and given fifteen years’ hard labour. Arab rioters were convicted and imprisoned too, among them Haji Amin al-Husaini, who fled the country and was sentenced to ten years in absentia.
In the uproar that followed the riots, Lloyd George made a fatal error. Seeking to appease the Jews, who claimed that British troops had done little to protect Jewish lives and property, he sent out Samuel as high commissioner. The Jews rejoiced, claimed victory, and the moment Samuel arrived overwhelmed him with complaints and demands. Weizmann was furious. ‘Mr Samuel will be utterly disgusted,’ he wrote to Dr Edu at the Zionist office in Palestine, ‘and will turn his back on the Jewish community, just as the others did, and our best chance will have gone.’33 In fact that was not the real problem. Samuel did not mind Jewish importuning. What he minded was Arab accusations of unfairness because he was a Jew. Samuel always tried to have things both ways. He wanted to be a Jew without joining any Zionist organization. Now he wanted to promote a Jewish national home without offending the Arabs. The thing could not be done. It was inherent in the entire Zionist concept that the Palestine Arabs could not expect full rights within the main area of Jewish settlement. But the Balfour Declaration specifically safeguarded the civil and religious rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ and Samuel took this to mean that the Arabs must have equal rights and opportunities. Indeed, he regarded this phrase as the axiom of his mission. ‘The Zionism that is practical’, he wrote, ‘is the Zionism that fulfils this essential condition.’34 Samuel believed he could square this particular circle. Not believing in Yahweh, his Bible was Lord Morley’s disastrous book, On Compromise.
Hence as the Jews quickly discovered, he came not to appease but to lecture. Even before he arrived as high commissioner, he defined ‘the Arab problem’ as the ‘main consideration’. He criticized the Zionists for not having recognized ‘the force and value of the Arab nationalist movement’, which was ‘very real and no bluff’. If anyone had to be appeased, it was the Arabs: ‘The only alternative is a policy of coercion which is wrong in principle and likely to prove unsuccessful in practice.’ The Jews must make ‘considerable sacrifices’. ‘Unless there is very careful steering,’ he wrote to Weizmann, 10 August 1921, ‘it is upon the Arab rock that the Zionist ship may be wrecked.’ He told the Palestine Jewish leaders: ‘You yourselves are inviting a massacre which will come as long as you disregard the Arabs. You pass over them in silence…. You have done nothing to come to an understanding. You know only how to protest against the government…. Zionism has not yet done a thing to obtain the consent of the inhabitants, and without this consent immigration will not be possible.’35
In a way this was very good advice. The difficulty for the Zionists was that, in the troubled days of the early 1920s, they were finding it very difficult to sustain the effort of settlement at all and had little energy and resources for gestures towards the Arabs. In any case, while giving them such advice Samuel’s other actions ruled out the possibility of taking it. He believed in equivalence, in being even-handed. He did not grasp that, just as there was no place for equivalence as between a Jew and an anti-Semite, so you could not be even-handed between Jewish settlers and those Arabs who did not want them there at all. His first act was to amnesty the 1920 rioters. The object was to release Jabotinsky. But equivalence meant a pardon for the Arab extremists who had started the riots in the first place.
Then Samuel, in turn, made a fatal mistake. One difficulty the British experienced in dealing with the Arabs was that they had no official leader, King Feisal’s writ running no further than the Jordan. So they invented the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In March 1921 its existing holder, head of an important local family, died. His younger brother was the notorious rioter Haji Amin al-Husaini, now pardoned and back on the political scene. The procedure for creating a new mufti was for a local electoral college of pious Arab Moslems to choose three candidates and for government to confirm one of them. Haji Amin, then in his mid-twenties, was qualified neither by age nor by learning for the post. He had been passionately anti-British ever since the Balfour Declaration. He had a violent, lifelong hatred for Jews. In addition to his ten-year sentence he was down on the police files as a dangerous agitator. The electoral college was mainly moderate and, not surprisingly, Haji Amin came bottom of the poll, getting only eight votes. A moderate and learned man, Sheikh Hisam al-Din, was chosen and Samuel was glad to confirm him. Then the al Husaini family and the nationalist extreme wing–those who had led the 1920 riots–began a vicious campaign of denigration. They plastered Jerusalem with posters attacking the electoral college: ‘The accursed traitors, whom you all know, have combined with the Jews to have one of their party appointed mufti.’36
Unfortunately the British staff contained a former architect and assistant to Sir Ronald Storrs called Ernest T. Richmond, who acted as adviser to the high commissioner on Moslem affairs. He was a passionate anti-Zionist, whom the chief secretary, Sir Gilbert Claydon, termed ‘the counterpart of the Zionist organization’. ‘He is a declared enemy of the Zionist policy and almost as frankly declared an enemy of the Jewish policy of HM Government,’ ran a Colonial Office secret minute; ‘government…would gain very greatly by excluding from its secretariat so very partisan a figure as Mr Richmond.’37 It was Richmond who persuaded the moderate sheikh to stand down and then convinced Samuel that, in the light of the agitation, it would be a friendly gesture towards the Arabs to let Haji Amin become Grand Mufti. Samuel saw the young man on 11 April 1921 and accepted ‘assurances that the influence of his family and himself would be devoted to tranquillity’. Three weeks later there were riots in Jaffa and elsewhere in which forty-three Jews were murdered.38
This appointment to what was regarded as a minor post in an unimportant British protectorate turned into one of the most tragic and decisive errors of the century. It is not clear whether a Jewish-Arab agreement to work together in Palestine would have been feasible even under sensible Arab leadership. But it became absolutely impossible once Haji Amin became Grand Mufti. Samuel compounded his initial misjudgment by promoting the formation of a Supreme Moslem Council, which the mufti and his associates promptly captured and turned into a tyrannical instrument of terror. Still worse, he encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to make contact with their neighbours and promote pan-Arabism. Hence the mufti was able to infect the pan-Arab movement with his violent anti-Zionism. He was a soft-spoken killer and organizer of killers. The great majority of his victims were fellow Arabs. His prime purpose was to silence moderation in Arab Palestine, and he succeeded completely. He became Britain’s outstanding opponent in the Middle East, and in due course he made common cause with the Nazis and strongly supported Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. But the principal victims of his unbalanced personality were the ordinary people of Arab Palestine. As the historian Elie Kedourie has well observed, ‘It was the Husainis who directed the political strategy of the Palestinians until 1947 and they led them to utter ruin.’39
The sombre achievement of the Grand Mufti was to open a chasm between the Jewish and Arab leadership which has never since been bridged. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, a year before he acquired his authority, the British mandate and the Balfour Declaration had been officially confirmed as part of the Versailles settlement, and the Arab and Jewish delegations shared a table together at the Royal Hotel to celebrate the event. By February 1939, when the Tripartite Conference met in London to try to resolve Arab-Jewish differences, the Arabs refused to sit with the Jews under any circumstances.40 This was the mufti’s doing, and in the long run it was the failure to negotiate directly with the Jews, forcing them into unilateral action, which lost the Arabs Palestine.
All the same, there was an inherent conflict of interest between Jews and Arabs which pointed not to a unitary state, in which both races had rights, but to partition in some form. If this fact had been recognized from the start, the chances of a rational solution would have been much greater. Unfortunately, the mandate was born in the Versailles ear, a time when it was widely assumed that universal ideals and the ties of human brotherhood could overcome the more ancient and primitive sources of discord. Why could not the Arabs and Jews develop harmoniously together, under the benign eye of Britain and the ultimate supervision of the League of Nations? But Arabs and Jews were not on a level of equivalence. The Arabs already constituted several states; soon there would be many. The Jews had none. It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule.
This was implicit in the Balfour Declaration, as explained to the meeting of the Imperial Cabinet by Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, on 22 June 1921. Arthur Meighen, the Canadian Prime Minister, asked him: ‘How do you define our responsibilities in relation to Palestine under Mr Balfour’s pledge?’ Churchill: ‘To do our best to make an honest effort to give the Jews a chance to make a national home for themselves.’ Meighen: ‘And to give them control of the government?’ Churchill: ‘If in the course of many years they become a majority in the country, they naturally would take it over.’ Meighen: ‘Pro rata with the Arab?’ Churchill: ‘Pro rata with the Arab. We made an equal pledge that we would not turn the Arab off his land or invade his political and social rights.’41
That being so, the whole future of Palestine turned on the issue of Jewish immigration. It was another axiom of Zionism that all Jews should be free to return to the national home. The British government initially accepted this, or rather took it for granted. In all the early discussions over Palestine as a national home, the assumption was that not enough Jews would wish to go there, rather than too many. As Lloyd George put it, ‘The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing.’42
Nevertheless, immigration soon became the issue. It was the point on which Arab resistance increasingly concentrated. Nor was this surprising, since the Jews resisted the British desire to develop representative institutions as long as they were in a minority. As Jabotinsky put it, ‘We are afraid, and we don’t want to have a normal constitution here, since the Palestine situation is not normal. The majority of its “electors” have not yet returned to the country.’43 As it happened, this vulnerable argument was not put to the test, since the Arabs, for their own reasons, decided (August 1922) not to co-operate with British policy either. But they knew from the start that Jewish immigration was the key to ultimate Jewish political power and their agitation was designed to stop it. Samuel fell for this tactic. One of his gestures towards the Arabs, when he took up his post, had been to allow the reappearance of Falastin, an extremist Arab journal closed down by the Turks in 1914 for ‘incitement to race hatred’. This, the appointment of the Grand Mufti and similar acts led directly to the pogrom of May 1921, which was incited by the fear of Jews ‘taking over’. Samuel’s response to the riots was to suspend Jewish immigration completely for a time. Three boatloads of Jews fleeing from massacres in Poland and the Ukraine were sent back to Istanbul. Samuel insisted that, as he put it, the ‘impossibility of mass immigration’ must be ‘definitely recognized’. He told David Edu that he would not have ‘a second Ireland’ and that ‘Zionist policy could not be driven through’.44 This led to many bitter Jewish reactions. Edu called Samuel ‘Judas’. Ruppin said he had become ‘a traitor to the Jewish cause in their eyes’. ‘The Jewish national home of the war promises’, Weizmann complained to Churchill in July 1921, ‘has now been transformed into an Arab national home.’45
This was hyperbole. The Jewish national home grew only slowly in the 1920s but British restrictions on immigration were not the main inhibiting factor. After the difficulties of his first year, Samuel emerged as a successful administrator. His successor, Lord Plumer (1925-8), was even better. Modern services were created, law and order imposed and Palestine, for the first time in many centuries, began to enjoy a modest prosperity. Yet the Jews failed to take advantage of this background to create the rapid build-up of the Yishuv which the 1917 Declaration had made possible. Why?
One reason was that the Jewish leaders were divided among themselves on both objects and methods. Weizmann was a patient man, who had always believed that the creation of the Zionist state would take a long time, and that the more solidly the infrastructure and foundations were built, the more likely it would be to survive and flourish. He was content to work within Britain’s lengthy time-span. What he wanted to see emerge in Palestine, in the first place, were social, cultural, educational and economic institutions which were excellent in themselves and would endure. As he put it, ‘Nahalal, Deganiah, the University, the Rutenberg electrical works, the Dead Sea concession, meant much more to me politically than all the promises of great governments and great political parties.’46
Other Jewish leaders had different priorities. During the 1920s, the great political force emerging in Israel was David Ben Gurion. For him what mattered most was the political and economic nature of the Zionist society and the state it would create. He came from Plonsk in Russian Poland and, like many thousands of clever young Ostjuden, he believed that the ‘Jewish question’ could never be solved within a capitalist framework. The Jews themselves had to return to their collectivist roots. Most Jewish socialists in Russia went in a Marxist-internationalist direction, arguing that Jewishness was simply an outmoded consequence of a dying religion and a capitalist-bourgeois society, and would disappear along with them. Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924), an early socialist Zionist, insisted that the Jews were a separate people with their own destiny but argued it could only be achieved in a co-operative, collectivist state: therefore the national home must be socialist from the start. Ben Gurion took this side of the argument. His father, Avigdor Gruen, was a strong Zionist who had his son educated at a modernized Hebrew school and with private tutors who taught him secular subjects. Ben Gurion at various times called himself a Marxist but for him, as a result of his upbringing, the Bible, not Das Kapital, was the book of life–though he treated it as a secular history and guide. He too was a Jewish prodigy: but one whose tremendous will, passion and energy flowed into activism, not study. At fourteen he was running a Zionist youth group. At seventeen he was an active member of the Zionist workers’ organization, the Po’ale Zion. At the age of twenty he was a settler in Erez Israel, a member of the party’s central committee and a formulator of its first political platform in October 1906.
As a young man, Ben Gurion moved around the international scene. He lived in the Jewish community in Salonika, in Istanbul and in Egypt. He spent much of the First World War in New York, organizing the He-Halutz bureau which steered potential settlers towards Palestine, though he also served in the Jewish Legion. Yet in all this activity three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land; ‘the settlement of the land is the only true Zionism, all else being self-deception, empty verbiage and merely a pastime’.47 Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework. Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society must be the Hebrew language.
Ben Gurion never deviated from these three principles. But the political instruments with which he sought to implement them varied. This was to be a Zionist characteristic. Over the past century, Zionist political parties have undergone constant mutations, and no attempt will be made here to trace them in detail. Ben Gurion in particular was to be a notorious creator and divider of parties. In 1919 he opened the founding conference of Ahdut ha-Avudah. Ten years later (1930) he merged it, with the political wing of Po’ale Zion, into Mapai, the Zionist Labour Party. More solid and permanent was the Histadrut, the Zionist trade union movement, of which he became secretary-general in 1921. He turned it into something much more than a federation of trade unions. In accordance with his principles, he made it into an agent of settlement, an active promoter of agricultural and industrial projects, which it financed and owned, and thus in time a major land- and property-owner, a central pillar of the Zionist-socialist establishment. It was during the 1920s, indeed, that Ben Gurion created the essential institutional character of what was to become the Zionist state. But this took his time and energy, and though the object of all his efforts was ultimately to accelerate immigration, that was not the immediate consequence. The infrastructure was taking shape, but the people to inhabit it were slow to arrive.
That was the overriding concern of Jabotinsky. His absolute priority was to get the maximum numbers of Jews into Palestine at the earliest possible moment, so that they could be organized politically and militarily to take over the state. Of course it was right, as Weizmann said, to push forward specific educational and economic projects. But numbers must come first. It was right too, as Ben Gurion urged, to settle the land. But numbers must come first. Jabotinsky treated with scorn the notion, held strongly by Weizmann and Ben Gurion, that they should distinguish between types of settlers. Ben Gurion wanted the chalutzim, the pioneers, willing to do the back-breaking manual work, to get away from any dependence on Arab labour. Both he and Weizmann were hostile to the religious wing of the Zionists, who founded the Mizrachi (‘spiritual centre’) Party in 1902, and who moved their operations to Palestine in 1920. The Mizrachi began to build up their own network of schools and institutions, in parallel with the secular Zionists, and to run their own immigration campaigns. In Weizmann’s view, Mizrachi was encouraging the wrong type of Jewish immigrant: Jews from the ghettos, especially from Poland, who did not want to work on the land but to settle in Tel Aviv, create capitalist concerns, and-if they were smart-engage in land speculation.
In 1922 Churchill, who was always pro-Zionist, ended the ban on immigration. But his White Paper, published that year, insisted, for the first time, that immigration could be unrestricted but must reflect ‘the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals’. In practice, this meant Jews could get settlement visas if they could show $2,500, and it was Weizmann’s contention that, in consequence, the capitalist, Mizrachi-type of immigrant was predominating. Jabotinsky thought this of secondary importance. Numbers had to come first. He was not content to see Weizmann and the British government manage matters at their own pace, to ensure that Jewish Palestine was a nation of chalutzim even if it took hundreds of years to create it. He wanted rapid growth, and it must be said, in retrospect, that he had a stronger instinct for ugly realities than either of the other two.
Jabotinsky was not prepared to accept British management of immigration at all. He wanted this to be the exclusive concern of Jewish policy-makers, who in his view should be moving towards setting up state institutions as a matter of urgency. On these grounds he left the Zionist executive in 1923 and two years later he founded the Union of Zionist-Revisionists to use the full resources of Jewish capitalism to bring to Palestine ‘the largest number of Jews within the shortest period of time’. He attracted an enormous following in eastern Europe, especially in Poland, where the Revisionist militant youth wing, Betar–of which the young Menachem Begin became the organizer–wore uniforms, drilled and learned to shoot. The object was to achieve the Jewish state in one sudden, irresistible act of will.
In fact, all three Jewish leaders overestimated the actual willingness of Jews to emigrate to Palestine during the 1920s. After the turmoil of the immediate post-war years, especially the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine, the Jews like everyone else shared in the prosperity of the decade. The urge to take ships to Haifa abated. The riots in 1920 and 1921 were no encouragement. During the 1920s the Jewish population of Palestine did, indeed, double, to 160,000. So did the number of agricultural colonies. By the end of the decade there were 110 of them, employing 37,000 Jewish workers and farming 175,000 acres. But the total number of immigrants was only 100,000 of whom 25 per cent did not stay. So the net rate of immigration was a mere 8,000 a year. Indeed, in 1927, the peak year of twenties prosperity, only 2,713 came and more than 5,000 left. In 1929, the watershed year in the world economy, arrivals and departures just about balanced.
Therein lay a great missed opportunity, and the makings of tragedy. During the calm years, when Palestine was relatively open, the Jews would not come. From 1929 their economic and political position, and still more their security, began to deteriorate all over Europe. But as their anxiety to go to Palestine increased, so did the obstacles to their entering it. There was another Arab pogrom in 1929, in which over 150 Jews were killed. The British response, as before, was to tighten immigration. The Labour Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, was unsympathetic: his White Paper of 1930 was the first, unmistakable sign of anti-Zionism in a British state paper. His wife, Beatrice Webb, told Weizmann: ‘I can’t understand why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed in Palestine. As many are killed every week in London in traffic accidents and nobody pays any attention.’48 The British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was more sensitive. Thanks to him, immigration was resumed.
Now there were hundreds of thousands of increasingly frightened Jews trying to get in. But with each wave of Jewish immigration, the wave of Arab reaction became more violent. Jabotinsky considered 30,000 a year as satisfactory. The target was passed in 1934, when 40,000 arrived. The following year it rose by more than 50 per cent to 62,000. Then, in April 1936, came a major Arab rising, and for the first time the British began to face the ugly truth that the mandate was breaking down. A commission under Lord Peel, reporting on 7 July 1937, recommended that Jewish immigration be reduced to 12,000 places a year, and restrictions be placed on land purchases too. But it also suggested a three-way partition. The coastal strip, Galilee and the Jezreel valley should be formed into a Jewish state. The Judaean Hills, the Negev and Ephraim should constitute an Arab state. The British would run a mandatory enclave from Jerusalem through Lydda and Ramleh to Jaffa. The Arabs rejected this with fury and staged another revolt in 1937. The next year the pan-Arab conference in Cairo adopted a policy whereby all Arab states and communities pledged themselves to take international action to prevent the further development of the Zionist state. The British dropped partition and, after the failure of the Tripartite Conference in London early in 1939, which the Arabs rendered hopeless from the start, the Balfour Declaration was quietly buried too. A new White Paper, published in May, stipulated that 75,000 more Jews should be admitted over five years, and thereafter none at all, except with Arab agreement. At the same time, Palestine should proceed to gradual independence. By now there were 500,000 Jews in Palestine. But the Arabs were in a large majority still. Hence if the British plan proceeded, the Arabs would control any state that emerged, and the existing Jews would be expelled.
This tragic series of events brought corresponding strains within the Zionist movement as its various factions divided on how to respond to them. In 1931 Weizmann was driven from the presidency of the World Zionist Congress, at the instigation of the Mizrachi. The same year, in Palestine, elections to the Zionist Assembly of Delegates showed a three-way split, with Mapai taking thirty-one out of seventy-one seats, the Revisionists sixteen and Mizrachi five. The division spread to the military arm: the Revisionists and Mizrachi, and other non-socialist Zionists, broke away from the Haganah to form a competitive force, the Irgun.
The fundamental breach, between Mapai on the one hand and the Revisionists on the other, which was to dominate the politics of the Zionist state from its inception, was envenomed by abuse. The Revisionists accused Mapai of collusion with the British and treason to the Jewish cause. The Revisionists were denounced as ‘fascists’. Ben Gurion called Jabotinsky ‘Vladimir Hitler’. On 16 June 1933 Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, which had been formed in 1929 to co-ordinate all Jewish efforts world-wide, was murdered on the sea front of Tel Aviv. He was a passionate Mapai Zionist, and Revisionist extremists were immediately suspected. Two of them, Abraham Stavsky and Zevi Rosenblatt, members of a Revisionist ultra group, Brit Habirionim, were arrested and charged with the murder. Abba Ahimeir, the group’s ideologist, was charged with complicity. Stavsky was convicted on the evidence of one witness, sentenced to hang, but acquitted on appeal, under an old Turkish law which said one witness was insufficient in a capital case. The crime was never solved and it continued to fester in the memories of both sides for half a century. To Mapai, the Revisionists would not stop at murder. To the Revisionists, the Mapai had stooped to the age-old device of gentile persecution, the blood libel.
Behind the division was a genuine, agonizing dilemma about Jewish conduct. Some had thought the Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the end of Jewish problems. In the event it merely created an entirely new set of impossible choices. All over the world, Jewish idealists begged their leaders to come to terms with the Arabs. As late as 1938, Albert Einstein, the greatest living Jew, still saw the national home in Utopian terms: ‘I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state…my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will suffer–especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.’49 Others feared this damage too. But they feared still more for Jews caught without a refuge-state to flee to. How could such a state be made with Arab consent? Jabotinsky argued that Jews must assume Arab nationalist emotions to be as strong and obdurate as their own. Hence:
It is impossible to dream of a voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs…. Not now, and not in the foreseeable future…. Every nation, civilized or primitive, sees its land as its national home, where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership. Every native-nation will fight the settlers as long as there is a hope of getting rid of them. Thus they behave, and thus will the [Palestine] Arabs behave, so long as there is the glimmer of hope in their hearts that they can prevent the transformation of Palestine into Erez Israel.